 So, a lot of you liked learning how to dodge, but you're still wondering how to hit the target. Not a problem. The FCS system has been an armored course since the beginning in 1997, and for 26 years it really hasn't changed. To put it simply, the FCS is comprised of two main phases. The pre-lock phase and the lock phase. The pre-lock phase is what happens when your FCS first detects a potential target. As soon as the enemy enters your field of view, the pre-lock phase is triggered, and your FCS will start to try and calculate the enemy's future movements. Unlike previous AC games, you can actually see your intercept calculations visually in the form of the red reticle during combat. The big gray circle is your target identifier, but the actual intercept targeting is the smaller red reticle. You need to understand that if the red intercept is not on top of your target, do not fire your weapon, because your FCS is still in the pre-lock phase, which means it has not calculated the intercept yet. So if your enemy is moving while your FCS is in the pre-lock phase, you're going to miss. Pre-lock usually takes about half a second depending on your FCS, but after it's finished its calculations, the FCS goes into phase two, which is the locked phase. During the locked phase, your system aims ahead of the target and tries to intercept them for you automatically, and it does this for all bullet projectiles of all different speeds. It doesn't matter if you're using a weapon with a high velocity like the laser rifle or a slow velocity like the plasma rifle. The FCS does all the calculations relating to target with all weapons automatically for you. This allows the player to focus less on aiming and more on movement, position, evasion, and strategy and tactics. Once in the locked phase, if the enemy does not change their velocity, your weapons will hit the target even if they are moving. So two phases, the pre-locked phase and the locked phase. Wait till the red reticle is on the target to fire your weapon. You do that and you'll hit a lot more. So now that you understand how the FCS phases work, let's talk about lock speed, which in this game is called assist. The speed at which your FCS transitions from a pre-locked phase to the locked phase is determined by your FCS's assist speed plus your firearm specialization. We'll talk about specialization in just a second, but for now let's just worry about assist. Remember, assist equals lock speed. The more assist you have, the faster your FCS will go from the pre-lock phase to the lock phase and the lock speed is broken into three types of categories. Close range, medium range, and long range. Close range is anything from 0 to 130 meters. Medium range is 130 to 260 meters and long range is anything beyond 260. So let's say that you're using the best close range FCS. What that means is when the enemy is closer than 130 meters, the time it takes for your FCS to go from the pre-locked phase to the lock phase will be extremely fast. However, if you are targeting an enemy outside of your FCS's ideal range, your lock speed will be significantly worse. So to explain all this, I've prepared some demonstrations. In this first demonstration, I will be using the worst firearm specialization arms with the best close range FCS on a target that is inside our ideal close range using hard lock. As you can see, the average lock time with these conditions is about 0.58 or half a second. Now in the next demonstration, we are going to do the exact same test, but this time the enemy will not be in our ideal range. Instead of close range, the enemy is going to be at medium range. Now obviously without me saying anything, you can probably see just how much worse the targeting gets as soon as the enemy is outside my FCS's ideal range. Remember, I have a close range FCS, so I want the target closer than 130 meters, but my target is out there at 200 meters. So my lock speed goes all the way up from half a second to almost four seconds. So rule number one, stay within your FCS's ideal range. Do not be going in close range with your medium range FCS. You're not going to hit anything. If you have a medium FCS, stay at medium range. Likewise, don't be going into medium range with your close range FCS. Again, you will never hit anything. Now something else to keep in mind is there is a difference between hard lock and soft lock. Now most of you probably already know that soft lock is better, but the question is how much better? To figure this out, here is a demonstration that is exactly the same as the first, but this time we will be using soft lock. So inside our optimal range, you can see that our lock speed is about 0.36 or 1 third of a second. Compare that to 0.58, which is when we were using hard lock. So that is soft lock inside of our ideal range. But how does this change when our enemy is outside our ideal range with soft lock? Well, if we test it, our lock speed is about 1.3 seconds. Now that's a lot better than four seconds when we had hard lock, but it's still about four times slower than when we were at our ideal range. So once again, stay inside your ideal range. Even with soft lock, your aim is about four times slower. Now there is one more important piece to this FCS puzzle. If you want to hit your targets, you have to think about firearm specialization, which is a stat in your arms. Now technically recoil is really important too, but recoil affects your bullets trajectory, while firearm specialization affects your targeting. And in this video, we're just worrying about targeting. So here is another demonstration, just like the one that I showed before, but this time we are going to have arms that have the best firearm specialization in the game. Now I want you to see how the lock speeds compare to when we were using the arms with the worst specialization in the game. Keep in mind everything else on this AC is exactly the same as the last one. The only difference is the firearm specialization in our arms. So here is what the lock speed looks like when we have the best firearm specialization with the best close range FCS in our optimal close range distance while using hard lock. 0.28, less than a third of a second. So just changing our firearm specialization has basically doubled our lock speed from what it used to be at 0.58. Now let's see what our lock speed is when the enemy is outside our ideal range. One and a half seconds. That's about five times slower, but it's not as bad as the four seconds we had with bad firearm specialization. Now let's do the same test but with soft lock. So if we have the best arms with the best close range FCS with a target in optimal distance using soft lock, our lock speed reaches a whopping one fifth of a second, which is crazy. But what's really crazy is if we do the same test but with an enemy outside our optimal range, the lock speed is still about half a second, 0.66. So if you have good firearm specialization and you're using mouse and keyboard, you kind of don't even have to keep the enemy in range because at worst your lock speed is still gonna be half a second. So if you're using mouse and keyboard you have quite a bit of leeway when it comes to targeting. But if you are using a mouse and keyboard there is one thing you should know though. The soft lock bonus is not flat. It is contingent on your skill which means the better you are at keeping the enemy in the middle of your screen, the stronger the soft lock becomes. If you are using soft lock but you are bad at keeping the enemy in the middle of your screen, the reward you get from soft lock will be much smaller. Here you can see an example of me using soft lock. One where I don't keep the enemy in the middle of my screen and one where I do keep the enemy in the middle of my screen and you can see we get a whole second of difference. So just because you're using soft lock doesn't necessarily mean you're getting a bonus. You'll need to keep the enemy in the middle of your screen if you actually want to get a relevant bonus. So that is how the FCS targeting system works in the Armored Course series. Basically don't fire unless you're in the locked phase. Pick an FCS with the ideal range you're most comfortable with. Stay in that range once you've picked it. Pick arms that have the best balance between firearm specialization and recoil that you feel comfortable with and try to use soft lock whenever possible. Otherwise you probably want to invest in arms that have really good specialization. Thanks for watching and as always hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.