[Singh]

I need to know, is this issue with FRED or the AI? if its with the AI, can it be worked around?

Currently, I have one enemy ship far away that jumps in first, and a few ships nearby that jump in later. Now, I want the capship in question to focus on the far away ship mostly (the nearby ones dont matter) and destroy it. I gave it orders with 89 priority to attack the enemy ship far away - but its main beam cannons keep firing at the nearby ships as soon as they come in even though the far ones are in range and they were firing fine right before the nearby ships came in!

How can I get around this problem? Is it that the AI is too close or that they arrived later and hence 'caught' the attention of the bigger ships from the main one. Any help would be much appreciated!

[Fergus]

The ships that arrive later could have arrived nearer to attacking ship in question.  I'm not sure how the AI on the capital ships work (I never trust it, usually just set waypoint paths and beam free) so I can't provide much advice, sorry.

[karajorma]

I suppose you could just FRED the beam fire.

A repeating event with the correct delay telling the ship to fire it's beams at the far away ship should do it.

[Singh]

ugh...I hate FREDding beam fire. How do you make it repeat everytime though?

[magatsu1]

there's an "everytime" conditional though I've yet to try it. Or just use a time delay.

could you not beam protect the other hostiles though, untill you want them to be targeted ?

[Singh]

urrr.....its a BoE sort of a thing, they have to be targetted, or else might as well forget the entire thing
Oh well, might as well FRED the darn thing to beam-fire then. Stupid FS Ai....

[karajorma]

If you beam protect the ship no beams will be fired at it but all the other ways of killing it will still be attempted so it just depends on the number of friendly capships present.

As for the delay follow the link in my FRED FAQ to Zylonbane's beam FAQ. Use the delay in that as the repeat delay and no one will ever spot the difference.

[Kie99]

Or put in a delay of 1 second on fire-beam and a repeat count of 999999!
Try it!

[Singh]

i dont need to! Besides, done it before too

[Goober5000]

"Attack my target" doesn't really work with capships, who have turrets but no primaries.  Turrets target anything in range, prioritizing closer targets.

So the solution is to use either fire-beam or beam-protect-ship, as described.

[Trivial Psychic]

He mentioned that it was a BoE situation, so the ships he wants the main capship to fire on after destroying the first, might need to be fired upon by beams from other ships.  I'd advise beam-locking the beam turrets on the side of the ship facing those that need to be fired upon later, and freeing them on the side that faces target 1 ship.

Later!