Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: General Battuta on August 03, 2016, 09:10:40 pm
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I was thinking today about how annoying massive numbers of AAA beams become for players. The beams can't be dodged or distracted — but like, I bet, lots of you, I still find myself dropping countermeasures!
I'd like it if players could drop countermeasures to attract AAA beam fire. And I think it might be easier than I thought...
It just occurred to me that you could give the countermeasure some HP, give it the "turret interceptable" flag, and then create a new object type (you can do this, right?) containing only countermeasures (you can do this somehow, right?)
You could then use the #Weapon Targeting Priorities entries to tell the sAAA, AAAf and AAAh to target this object type before all others.
Is it that easy? One obstacle is the very short lifetime of countermeasures — they would probably spawn and die before the beam had even finished charging...
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and then create a new object type (you can do this, right?) containing only countermeasures (you can do this somehow, right?)
You don't want to do this, you want to create a target priority type containing all countermeasures:
#Target Priorities
$Name: countermeasures
+Weapon Class Flags: ( "countermeasure" )
#End
...Or that's how it should be defined, but for reasons unknown, "countermeasure" isn't one of the valid weapon class flags for target priority groups to be made out of. :rolleyes:
So instead you'd need to use "+Weapon Class:" and enumerate every single countermeasure you want to decoy beams.
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Cool, cool. So let's say we made all CMs instantly die, spawn 1) a copy of themselves, and 2) a longer-lived (invisible) beam decoy.
How would this alter game balance?
The AI would not know how to use it. However, AI ships popping off countermeasures would create targets for AAA beams. Assuming we make them lower priority than bombs, warships will tend to shoot at bombs, then (hopefully IFF sorted to enemy?) countermeasures.
AAAs will thus in general have fewer shots on actual targets. This would probably require a test setup...
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I didn't realise this was about letting the player dump CMs to avoid AAAs. That sounds like a great idea, though I'm pretty sure they should normally be lower priority than bombs to avoid incentivising ridiculous tactics.