Ship Facing During Battle A2

[Rifraf]

Does anyone know if it's hard coded for ships to almost always turn to face the enemy directly when firing on them? Generally there are weapon hard points in multiple places to allow a ship to fire broadside however, it stops and faces directly at them. Anyone know of any odf trickery to stop this? I guess one would have to add many more hardpoints in order to get full 360 degree weapon coverage?

Also, I put all my weapons together on one line like: weaponHardpoints1 = "hp01" "hp02" "hp03" "hp14" "hp15" for phasers and then torps and pulses on their own lines respectively. Does the game try to always use the first hardpoint listed every time or does it generally fire whichever weapon is closest to the enemy?

 

[Majestic]

Generally I have found that the physic files have a lot to do with this. The Stock A2 physic files are almost identical to A1, which they themselves where lifted off a Tank game which is where the Storm 3D engine was originally designed and adapted for the space RTS. So it was never ideal.

Have multiple hard points for the same weapon is a good move, I do that myself but I have found the ship will still try and turn to face it's target rather than broadside. I don't have a lot of experience with this kind of thing, so others may be more helpful but I do think improving the physic files or use some of the already available to download ones would be a move in the right direction.

 

[dvatreknerd314]

Also, there are some attack patterns that'll make them go into broadside eventually (mainly circling the enemy and cloverleaf patterns) but they will try to face the enemy directly at first anyway

 

[CABAL]

Fleet Ops has turnToFire=0 ship odf command which causes the ship to only turn if it has to move, like to chase a target. It doesn't work in stock A2, though.

 

[Rifraf]

I have altered all my own physics and like the results I've gotten. I probably have my ships turn and accelerate etc slower than most would like though. Like in the physics project he has a value of 1 for turn/pitch omega on battleships where as I have .15 to be pretty slow and graceful.

I don't think I've ever tried an attack pattern in all these years. How sad.

 

[dvatreknerd314]

speaking of attack patterns, does anyone know if it's possible to create new attack patterns?

 

[Dominus_Noctis]

Armada will fire with the hardpoint closest to the target, although this can be adjusted with some Fleet Ops cannonimp commands for instance.

Attack Patterns aren't modifiable, although you can adjust some of the parameters via the configuration (.cfg) files to adjust the size of loops. The Attack Patterns themselves are just modified from the A1 Director's Cut.

If you set the flag, canAttack = 0, craft will not turn in place to fire their weapons. That function exists in stock A2 as well. However, it carries some additional craft AI changes - When set to false (0), a Craft with weapons will not pursue a target it has attacked automatically and will not close to weapon firing range if an enemy unit approaches. The Craft will also be unable to ignore its current Alert status.