Wait, so if your fighters are in a single group and a ship rams them, they will all continuously run into the big ship until it slows down or something? So the realistic and efficient thing to do is make all the fighters individual units and separate them? Is that easy?
I want you to sit back and reread this.
And no, that's just because they're all in the same TG (and thus in the same location, moving at the same velocity, &c.). The same would happen with any other group of ships in a TG. If the ramming ship is fast enough to catch the TG, it'll keep initiating ramming attacks against ships in it until it is destroyed, all of the ships are destroyed, or it breaks off for some reason.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this went. The way I see it, is that the game treats all the ships in a task group as being one "thing". So when one fighter gets rammed, all the other fighters need to run into the ship as well. Hence the 160 damage in one interval.
This does not happen for ships. I've never seen any sort of documentation or comment from Steve which would suggest that TGs or squadrons of fighters are counted as single entities for the purpose of targeting. The fact that missiles and beams target fighters individually supports this.
Which seems more likely, that there's a single exception which somehow allows groups of fighters to be treated as a single target solely for ramming attacks but no other types of attacks which does not affect any other ships despite there being effectively no difference save for the ability to be added to squadrons and mount certain modules, or that it was something else?
And if it
was what you're suggesting, would it really be worth the absolute pain-in-the-ass effort of managing dozens of task group orders every time you deployed fighters?
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Though yes, rereading the original comment, sounds like Precursors, since they were specified as using missiles. Precursors do sometimes like to ram, and they're fast enough that they probably got attacks every tick, especially if the fighters were ordered to hold range for their firing rather than just running away.
Most importantly though, you also misread what iceball wrote.
The ramming attacks did 160 damage to the fighters; the returned damage to the ship(s) that conducted the attacks was only 9 points of damage.