Friendly Fire on Splash Damage

We don't, what we want is to zealously kill any enemy we see to prevent potential damage from not shooting at all.

I do not want a situation where a single dox can destroy my entire base because my defences are afraid of missing a few shots.

It also wont be 1 unit. In order to get any units into your base, they'll need an army. Seriously, if they get just 1 in there, they could have gotten 100. That army is now tearing up your base; I wouldn't be worried about a little friendly fire.

I expect friendly fire in a game like this.

And even a few casualtys is nothing to worry about considering the games scale.

So send a unit after it? Rather than have the Dox outrun the Holkins shots and the Holkins levels your base.

And that doesn't even factor in Hornets. Those things would level your base.

Then if there's a bunch of units the match would determine that those unit should be shot at since they'd do more damage to your opponent than to you.

Why bother having automatic defences if they don't work.

Keeping in mind it won't be just 1 dox, how much damage will the enemy force do before your own troops get there?

If you can answer that 100% reliably, then I will agree with you.

You'd pretty much have to have told them to bomb in this situation.

But you just said it doesn't take time into account, only it's own shot. This also fails when artillery isn't 100% accurate, since even if it calculated it would do more damage to the enemy, it might miss them completely. So now you really have an essentially random firing artillery that you can't tell whether it will or wont fire, or whether it was right or wrong.

Why bother having automatic defenses if they'll just destroy your own base.

You're right it doesn't. That's why you use other things to take out those single doxes that invade your base rather than level your base trying to kill one dox.

"Random firing artillery that you can't tell whether it will or won't fire?"

Not really. You can tell it to fire or switch firing modes if you want it to.

You are exaggerating on that point.

and even if they do, what's is the problem with that? Keep them on the outside, and you want have any problems.

If they get in, they shouldn't become immune to static defences, that is full on stupid.

If I'm not looking at my base, I want to know that it can defend itself. I have absolutely no way of knowing if artillery will fire in that situation. An even if it does fire, the randomness means it wont prevent the situation where friendly damage is greater than enemy damage anyway.

If you want it as an alternate firing mode, sure. But given it doesn't even do what you are asking it to (because of randomness), I don't see the point of spending time to implement it.

Keep them on the outside? Can't do that when the unit cannon is released. That'd likely become one of the best strategies. Send in Doxes here and there and let your opponent's Holkins and Hornets destroy their own base.

Why do you keep on saying randomness? It's not random. It's very specific and simple math.

If units get into your base, precision shots should defend the base, not AOE that can destroy many buildings with two shots or one bombing bass.

I don't see a problem with that.

Randomness in the firing of artillery - eg., if they are not pinpoint accurate, how can you ever tell where exactly the shot will land? Also, what if the target moves? Basically, the amount of times that your artillery would correctly determine whether to fire or not, according to your criteria, is close to 0.

From a players' perspective, this is just going to make artillery look bugged. Sometimes they fire, and hit your own units anyway and not the enemy. Sometimes they don't fire at all.

I never said that.

It has to part of the AI's processes. If it isn't, the AI's lack of understanding about splash damage is an utterly exploitable weakness.

I'm not really sure how "Don't friendly fire with Holkins/Bombers, instead use mobile units" is exploitable against the AI? It seems much less exploitable than the alternative.

Given you're inside their base, it stands to reason their mobile units aren't there either. So you run your force into the AIs base, and as long as they are next to the AIs structures, they won't be fired upon, letting you attack with impunity.

Stop playing TA, start playing PA. That's a very stupid assumption. You're in their base.

You're right next to their factories.

And killing their units as they are built one at a time, until the factory dies. For all you know, there's 20 units surrounding that factory, all happily immune to artillery. Or the entire base is filled with units. I also know that I don't need to worry about killing the AI's artillery when I attack, since I can exploit the fact that they aren't going to hurt me anyway. Manual fire is not a valid solution, since the AI can't use it.

I've already shown that firing randomness and unit movement makes your proposal unworkable, since it can't even tell when it would or wouldn't be doing damage to what. Unless you have a solution to this, your proposal is unworkable, except to not fire at all if there are any friendly units within the entire possible impact area.

At this point, I have to ask.

It it even worth the effort to introduce this mechanic?

AI smart-avoiding friendly fire? No. Friendly fire splash damage? Yes.

That'd be a downside, but not a crippling one - because they'd still be great at leveling the enemy's base, as is intended. Don't Hornets desperately need a downside to their current omni-mobile utility? Wouldn't enabling friendly fire be a good way to do that?

maybe only against units. let structures be immune to your own splash damage, and have units be affected.

PA should use the TA friendly fire system.
In TA it wasn't like your own weapons would wipe out your entire base if a few units got in.

To Brianpurkiss i read you never played TA! If you have time go look at the Spring project XTA mod, you will love it.