[Anaz]

cool AI fighter idea - if they "hugged" the surface of cap ships, like in that one ep. of B5 with the drach carrier & delenn with the white stars. 'twould be much more interesting to see a wing of shivan fighters 10 meters above the collosus flying around and blowing turrets up. Or your wingmen for that matter.


Another AI problem...I have often seen bombers (especially big ones) run into the ships that they're bombing. I've seen a nahema do a run on an orion, and just keep going in a straight line until it hits the orion. Then it decides it is a good idea to launch off a few more cyclops.

[LtNarol]

Ya, the 'i' in "ai" really doesn't make sense for fs2.  I'm not sure how surface skimming could be implemented however, perhaps a surface detection function used with a shiplength function of some sort to have the attacker follow a ship's surface for a given length before breaking off.  This would probably be best if only used at the higher ai levels, since using it at all levels could burn a lot of memory, constant surface finding and all.

[##UnknownPlayer##]

It wouldn't be too hard to grab a triangle from a ship of sufficient surface area and have a fighter fly along it since all triangles in 3D space lie on only one plane. It'd only work for huge things like the collossus however.

You gave me an interesting idea however - how about a 'drop' bomb function for the player? If you get in a certain range then you can force the bombs to lock onto the hull of a warship and fly stright down into the surface after launch instead of homing on an aspect.

[J.F.K.]

Originally posted by ##UnknownPlayer##
You gave me an interesting idea however - how about a 'drop' bomb function for the player? If you get in a certain range then you can force the bombs to lock onto the hull of a warship and fly stright down into the surface after launch instead of homing on an aspect.

I like that idea a lot, or at least something like it - I always thought that the bomb locking system in FS2 was kind of impractical, seeing as I often ended up with an entire capship filling my screen (case in point, the Sathanas) and my targeting system was still trying to lock onto some slowly-moving arbitrary point.

I know the big bombs (Cyclops and above?) require a lock to fire as a precaution, but it makes me feel more like I'm playing a computer game and less like I'm an actual experienced combat pilot who can override the suggested systems and deliver my payload in an extreme situation. I'd hate to tell the GTVA's civilians that I couldn't stop the Sathanas because my Bakha wanted to get a lock to make sure I was launching my bomb at an enemy

[LtNarol]

I'm kinda against that, because some of us actually use bombs up close to take out specific subsystems and...turrets

[kasperl]

what about a middle-of-the-road solution, a button to override the locking system, turning the bomb in a dumbfire. it would be a great idea, but it would need some disadvantage to, since it would make bombing a bit to easy. perhaps a longer lockdown rate, or only one bomb can be fired in dumbfire mode, or something like that

[LtNarol]

If you want a "bomb" that can fire without a lock, just take the "no_dumbfire" flag away from the weapon in weapons.tbl

[TrashMan]

Well, you could make a dumbfire version of the bomb, and when mission starts select it from the loadout.
Didn't we stray a bit from the AI topic?