fire state option

I think we need a fire state option that causes units to cease fire if they are being fired upon, For units that have extra defense when not firing such as the razor’s kiss.

Also ability to turn off power pants so they don’t explode (this was implemented at some point right?)

quote: Also ability to turn off power pants so they don’t explode (this was implemented at some point right?)

Err, no? Devs would be silly if they implemented that, don't you think?

Hold fire and stop will do this, but, frankly, turning a unit to hold fire should clear its targets.

Or, wait, do you mean 'Fire if not being fired upon, holdfire if being fired upon?'

This would actually work really well with Halberds against Maces say, where only a few of them are being shot at at any one time... hrrm... but it's hard to detect what 'being fired upon' is, so it'd be useless vs missile cruisers and hlt's and just instantly turn them all off vs AoE or fire.

And all of that occurs solely because of Halberd's armour when closed.

Yeah, armor has just turned out to be an annoyance, once again causing annoyance because of a failure of AI.

Let's take the Razor's Kiss, for example. If the enemy has one placed in front of their defense lines the amount of micro you must use on artillery jumps tenfold. Normally, you point an artillery unit in the direction of enemy porc with the fight command. The artillery shoots until enemy comes close, then retreats automatically. Cool! Then the enemy builds a Razor's Kiss in front of everything. Now, your artillery focuses all its attacks on the Razor's kiss, which is annoying as hell. You could manually fire on a target, but if enemy advances your artillery won't retreat and it dies. I want this to be perfectly clear: armor is exploiting unit AI, not the strengths and weaknesses of the players or units. Now of course we could code all this nonsense away, but that's sloppy and just skirting the main issue: despite ZK not wanting special damage types, we've allowed armor to exist.

Special damages were eliminated because they are confusing and require players to study which units have what special damages. Now I know that the primary justification for allowing armor is "the units that have armor visibly armor-up, therefore, there is no confusion." And it works to some degree. But it makes current unit AI useless and any more AI added to ignore armored units becomes overkill.

Is there any chance we could take the handful of armored units and try and buff them differently? Maybe more health, maybe more DPS, but anything but armor to see how it would play out?

Antelope - the problem isn't the "special-damage" of armor... the same problem exists for the Dirtbag. The problem is just having high-damage-capacity, low-value targets in general.

Dirtbags are still annoying, yeah. Fleas are powerful, but they're more or less fine because they die horribly to even the smallest amount of resistance. But dirtbags just walk through all your porc and scout everything and take a long fucking time to clear out. And they only cost 20 so you can just make a constant stream of them forever. They'd be pretty annoying even if they didn't make dirt at all.

I really think they should cost like 50 and have less HP. Restore the old mound size if you feel like it.

I think he's referring to using fleas as shot-wasters for low-ROF units like Banishers.

I think the problem here is the use of conditionals, not armor per se.

Attack order is unconditional: attack that unit or radar blip and if you die in the process, that is okay, I just want you to attack that.
Fight order is conditional: attack any stuff in that area but do your best to stay alive, i.e. retreat from raiders, assaults and riots moving your way.

What you really want is something in between the attack and fight order, e.g. attack that that that and that but certainly not that and do your best to stay alive. General priorization based on attacker versus defender does not really work because of all the special cases, e.g. hammer attacking glaive is silly, but not so silly if the glaive is standing still. Hammer attacking RK is also silly, but considerably less silly if RK opens up to shoot at flying stuff. There is simply too much variety of that nature and if coded into the AI would make it really complex and vulnerable to balance changes.

Power plants should explode on general principle, even if turned off. All that fuel on the premises, let alone that you still need a containment field turned on to keep that singularity inside the singularity power plant.

To expand on Gretchen's idea: what if we had some sort of "Bombard" command. You click Fight, click ON THE UNIT, and it sets a state called "bombard", which fires at that unit as long as no other units come within range. Basically, a mix between attack and fight.