Spring RTS Engine

standingfireorder and standingmoveorder are the tags you want.

The reason that bombers move to attack lone targets enroute to their actual order is that they have to move just to attack where as a passing vehicle doesn't. It simply spins its turret and fires - they use similar behaviour for firing iirc.

Black Liger wrote:

Therefore, it needs to depend what unit is selected what the orders do. For bombers, Fire at will should equal : GO through standing orders, then go do my own thing ONCE MY ORDER QUEUE is empty. This should be the case even on roam.

The tags i mentioned will give you a quick fix, but they won't attack anything unless instructed to do so. So i'd suggest modfifying the bombers to have hold fire and hold position only while they have a queue of commands. Once that is finished they are set back to fire at will and maneuver or whatever their starting values were.

Haven't you read what ILMTitan said? It's a bug and it's getting fixed. End of story.

Must have missed that message :S
I was only trying to help...

ILMTitan wrote:Hmm, It seams that AirCAI gives Attack commands to planes that are moving. I don't think this should be happening. I'll look into cleaning this up.

That would be awesome if you could fix this (apparently there are also some different issues with ground units too: http://taspring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=7160). And please ignore the naysayers who don't know what they are talking about (**wonders if they have actually used planes in spring**). If planes are on patrol, or have finished their queue they should engage targets if they are set to fire at will. Planes should not engage targets when they have specific move and attack orders, however, as that could result in them dropping their payload shortly before they reach the actual target, and thus failing to attack it. If I set my planes to attack a lab also I don't want them spending their bombs on the solar collector that's a little bit in front of it. Also, if I have a swarm of freedom fighters and I set them to attack a com, I want them to attack the com, not the nearest targets they happen upon along their route. When patroling or idle are the appropriate times for planes to be choosing their own targets.

@Das Bruce when I said "moving" I ment "currently executing a move order".

@LordMatt, I will look into that issue as well.

As for the holding fire when near the target of an attack run, I'm not sure how to solve this in a truely generalized way. Take the pheonix for example. Would you want it to not attack with its aa weapon when approching the drop point. How about a hawk with its secondary missles? (Do they sill have those in current mods?) Perhaps I could look into making weapon[0] hold fire, and let all of the others do what they want.

Naah, that'd be hacky.

How about a tag that lets modders choose between the following behaviorus:

Weapons Free: The unit will engage any available targets with this weapon, prioritizing any it is currently ordered to attack.

Controlled Fire: The unit will only use this weapon when executing an attack order, when on patrol/guarding, or when it has no orders queued.

ILMTitan wrote: As for the holding fire when near the target of an attack run, I'm not sure how to solve this in a truely generalized way. Take the pheonix for example. Would you want it to not attack with its aa weapon when approching the drop point. How about a hawk with its secondary missles? (Do they sill have those in current mods?) Perhaps I could look into making weapon[0] hold fire, and let all of the others do what they want.

Well, could you make it specific for payload type weapons? The problem is that bombers have a fairly long reload time, so you won't want them dropping their first set of bombs at any random thing they happen to fly over when they have a designated target. In OTA, I'm fairly certain that they coded payload weapons differently from other units to avoid these problems, by the way. AA missiles could attack whatever of course, though they should prefer to attack air units (I think that is mod specific thing though?). I think Egarwaen's idea is a good one, but I know nothing of how easy it would be to code.

But what if my bomber doesn't have a slow reload and I want it to drop crap on anything on its path?

Attack move?

No, fight just gives attack orders on anything nearby, the change LordMatt proposed would make them only drop bombs at the target they've got the order on so they hit only one target per bombing run.

Well, we have Area Attack, why not Line Attack?

Because few planes make sense for both and having a unit that needs a special attack order to be effective because its default attack behaviour sucks isn't good. That just means more micromanagement.

KDR_11k wrote:But what if my bomber doesn't have a slow reload and I want it to drop crap on anything on its path?

Mod defined ftw? The point I'm try to make is that if you have a bomber that can only drop one payload per pass (such as an AA bomber) you don't want it to waste those bombs if you've picked out a particular target for it. BTW, I would love to see OTA style line bombing possible in spring, but I have a feeling that's not going to happen

Yes but it needs a tag to define that per-unit. You said specific to payload-type weapons which would probably end up meaning anything droppable in the code.

As an interim solution, holding ctrl while giving a move order will make aircraft work properly. This should work even in .72, as it appears to have been added at the same time, but never really documented.

On another note, I don't think I'm going to work on this until after .73 comes out. I already have a patch on that file that won't be committed until after .73.

Will solution that work with multiple queued move commands? I look forward to the fix when you get a chance to do it.

I haven't tested it, but it should.

Queueing does not work with ctrl

Fixed this in 2.2