Federation Commander

We were playing one of our random mix up races games and my opponent had a Tholian with a webcaster. At one point in the game i was more or less chasing my opponents ships. It came to direct fire declaration and i said i had none; my opponent then said that the Tholian ship was going to cast web (mostly to block my fire) and pointed on the map where the web was going. So i said wiat a minute if you are going to cast web i might want to shoot, which i did end up doing. After the dice were rolled and shield boxes marked my opponent then put the web down in a different position than previously indicated. Now that didn't bother me to much at the time (I was losing pretty good anyway), but it does bring up the question.

When cast web is announced in a direct fire step, when is the hexes the web goes into actually selected and announced? I can see three places. A) Immediatly when the cast web is announced, as the hexes are the targets of the webcaster. B) After all fire is declared but before dice are rolled and damage resolved. C) After all dice are rolled and damage resolved. Ok, it could be when the Tholian ship resolves it's volley of fire, but (like our previous question with the ESG damageing friendly ships and directed targeting by the enemy) then who fires first?

Ok, maybe that was a little long winded for a simple question and i am overthinking it. It happens alot for me coming from SFB

As currently written in Rev 6b of the Reference Rulebook, I read "declared" in 4Q1b to mean that you declare all aspects of the web cast prior to resolving any direct fire.

All of that should happen when the fire is declared. Just like you can't change which ship a phaser is firing at after realizing you just overkilled the declared target, you can't switch target hexes for the cast web.

(I.e. Jim is correct.)