Turn and fire. Why?

Scenario:

I have a Warlord set to hold fire since I want to control exactly what it's doing with its low RoF weapon. I tell it to face side-on to my intended target, so that it can bring all its guns to bear. I then tell it to attack a cluster of enemies on the radar. It proceeds to turn toward them so that only its forward guns fire. The rear guns are now on cooldown and are completely useless: I just wasted half my barrage.

Scenario:

I am using a Penetrator, also set to hold fire, and want it to take down an advancing Grizzly. I point it away from the grizzly for some easy skirmishing. I tell it to attack the grizzly. It turns all the way around before firing, and I tell it to turn back around to get away, and it slowly complies. While it's spending 10s turning around the grizzly finally gets into range and zzap - 1000m down the drain.

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Is there any way of giving an attack command that won't cause this kind of stupidity? I just want to tell my units to aim their turrets, not face the target. Mostly this behaviour is good, but when using the Pene it can be SO frustrating!

If this command doesn't exist, I'll put it forward in the suggestions section.

All three guns on a Warlord cool down independently.
It should be smart enough to turn for a broadside yeah.

For this sort of thing the best option would be the set target functionality, but the buttons are hidden at the moment. I'll try to have them unhidden (need icons first).

If a unit cannot fire at a target, it will A. Face the target. B. Move towards the target.

This includes if the target is behind an obstacle, terrain, out of range, or otherwise obstructed.

In both these situations, this is probably what is happening to you. The battleship will not turn from broadside as long as it can fire its primary weapon. The penetrator will not turn to face its target if it is in range and unobstructed. What you want is to be able to tell it to hit a target, when it is able, but not to move towards that target: the settarget command.

We could make the battleship turn broadside to fire using a fake weapon, but we'd have to chose whether it turns to fire from the left or right. The current behavior is probably better.

Ooooh while we're at it. Can we pleeeeeease decrease Warlord's turnrate? Right now it dodges shots by turning. It turns very fast. That just ruins any feel of heavy- or clumsiness. It's a bit similar to Sumo's insane jumprange, but worse!

Acceleration's a bit high too, but that's nowhere near as extreme, so it's alright.

Same applies to Reef and Snipersub I think.

We also need a unit facing command. Works like a move command, except the unit turns in place to face in that direction.

Units that can't turn in place obviously do not have this command (or ignore it)

>> We also need a unit facing command. Works like a move command, except the unit turns in place to face in that direction.

I'm not fond of the idea of adding excessive amounts of interface commands just to help the players get around stupid unit behaviour. Preferably the unit behavior can just me made smarter. (SetTarget does this very well being integrated into attack command imho)

Perhaps battleship could be forced to broad-side before attacking in the unit script...

Licho is the one generally on a mad spree to increase the turnrates and acceleration of everything until facing and velocity of everything is totally irrelevant and units control like starcraft. Doing this to ships is, IMO, a travesty.

allow some units to go backwards?
i found it improves mobility while keeping a "realistic" turnrate.
With complex walk animations there is the problem to play them backwards, but ships or hovers should not have that problem.
to stop units from going backwards all the time (looks silly), set reverse speed to ~75% of maxVelocity.