[Daynarr]

I think Talenn has explained the reasons why opportunity fire is not good in this game. You can make a decoy ships that will take away the fire from ships and then have the big guns get close and personal. In the game where you can have custom designs that is always the case, and in the game like "Steel Panthers" you can't make decoys.

There are 2 options for opportunity fire:
1) The point-defense type that reacts automatically as the ship moves in range. Decoys can easily divert this type of fire.
2) The type that is used in most tactical games like Jagged Alliance where you get limited control of the unit and the ability to choose its actions (retreat or fire). There are several issues here:
- In order for ship to move, it would have to have movement point left (right now almost all ships use up all their movement points when they can). You will have to make AI wait for the enemy to come in range and then use opportunity fire which means completely rewriting the algorithm AI uses in tactical combat. It is exactly the opposite of the 'simple' and 'easy to fix' solution. It may be a long term solution until all other issues are solved.
- That wouldn't help static units since they can only wait for enemy units to come in range and that puts us back to point-defense type of reaction.
- How do you make AI decide what ship is a real threat in a game where everybody can make custom ships, components, etc. If you make AI see threat in ships with lots of weapons on them, you can use a ship with lots of low-cost weapons with smallest weapon-mounts and use it as a decoy. If you make AI see threat in ships with most powerful weapon on it, you will make a ship with single most powerful weapon and lots of shields and use it as a decoy. If you make AI see threat in ships that have the biggest overall damage potential of all weapons on them, it will completely ignore the weapons that damage weapons, engines or shields only.
In short opportunity fire is no go because you give human much more options to (ab)use AI in this kind of game. There are simply too many options for scripted AI.

If you want to have AI and human on more even grounds in tactical combat, you have to limit the human to do what AI can do. AI can't move-shoot-move at this point and removing this will help make game more interesting. Just like Talenn said this could be a temporal solution until MM makes AI use move-shoot-move tactic efficiently.