Since there's no other way I know of to tell a flight of fighters
not to use their missile loadout when attacking a target, I stumbled upon the fact that the good-secondary-time sexp has a numerical limit on the number of missiles the fighters can use against the listed target.
Thinking my problem solved by setting the missile cap to 0, I started putting the expression together, only to discover that the only missiles listed as valid for the sexp are those with the 'bomber+' and 'huge' flags in their TBL entries. I shrug it off, manually punch in 'Hornet' and 'Harpoon' in the weapon name field, naturally Fred gripes at me, and I go to test it in game. Started loading the mission, and up popped the error dialog, of course. I hit Cancel, FS2 neatly crashed, and I come here to regale my woes.
So, could there be a modification to the good-secondary-time sexp such that it can be used with any type of missile? (I also would like to note that beam weapons were also in the list of valid weapons). As it is, the structure is:
+ good-secondary-time
- 1. - ( Team name the sexp affects )
- 2. - ( Max num. of missiles team can fire )
- 3. - ( Weapon Name the team can fire )
- 4. - ( Individual ship name team can use aforementioned weapon on )
In my opinion, this sexp could do with some rather extensive modification, and the altered model doesn't seem to have any backwards compatibility problems from my point of view:
+ new-secondary-time
- 1. - ( Team, wing, or ship name the sexp affects )
- 2. - ( Max num. of missile rounds affected team/wing/ship can fire)
- 3. - ( Weapon name affected. No delimiters should be listed, since this sexp can feasibly be used to, for my example, prevent a wing of Perseus from wasting their Harpoons and Hornets in clearing out a handful of Watchdog sentries )
- 4+. - ( Target ship(s)/wing(s) the team/wing/ship listed in field 1 will be (or not be, as the case may be) attacking with the aforementioned weapons )
Yes, that is a '4+' there. All additional entries are simply more targets, to condense what could be several separate entries for a team-wide instance down to a single sexp.
It'd be neat if the original had an optional field for a specific subsystem to be targeted, which would be the only breaking factor between the two. Although there's quite possibly another sexp or three that covers that, which I've obviously yet to discover.
So, what say you?
