1) You're in your light mech, running circles around enemy mechs in a big fight, with friends and allies on all sides. Suddenly someone from your team calls out a new target, mech B, for whatever reason. Maybe it's an LRM boat causing trouble, or maybe they need help finishing off a wounded assault mech. With up to 12 enemy targets in sight, you need to press Q and start looking over the battlefield to find your target.
2) You're in your heavy mech sniper or LRM boat, and there's a wounded enemy mech that just needs one more solid hit to be taken out. Someone identifies the target, mech F. Unfortunately, all the enemy mechs are in a tight formation. You can see all of them, but when you aim towards your target and click R, you get mech A, mech E, mech G, and not the target you want.
Here's my suggestion:
- Create more targetting controls, such as pressing R for target under reticule, T for closest enemy target, Y for closest target that is targetting you. These have been basic targetting commands in space sims for 20 years, and they're very useful.
- Create a pop-up HUD interface covering only a small area of your screen. When you click a button, let's say O, you get a pop-up list of all available targets. Kind of like when you click a button to bring up a large map, except that the large map covers the whole screen, and the targetting interface doesn't need to.
As you're looking at the list of all available targets, just click A, B, C, D, E, F or whatever else, and you'll have your target. Very useful against tight formations when pressing R is too inaccurate and takes too long.