Friendly Fire

If it's not abusable, has no more than a reasonable performance impact and doesn't need me to babysit units to get them to be effective in groups (or spend lots of time planning a base layout), then I'm cool with it. If any sacrifices have to be made to include it though, then I don't think it would be worth it.

Then he dies and immediately leaves the game.

Half of the fun of griefing is watching other people get pissed off. That doesn't happen if you can't sit around to enjoy it.

Besides, friendly fire can always be defeated with more friendly fire. Backstabbing is just another reality of war.

This.

Social problems demand social solutions. It is no excuse to cripple gameplay.

Limit friendly fire only to the player's units or else there will be plenty of griefing. Unless of course it's an asteroid or a nuke. If you're on the half of the planet getting destroyed then chances are you are doomed.

I feel like weapons that worrent it should get frendly fire damage, like artillery.

And for allies, becuse heavy artillery affects all!

but that's just me, and could be subject to greifing.

Honestly, a nuke defense shouldn't care about who's name tag is on a missile. If it's flying in, it gets shot down. The end.

After the first 5 nukes raining down on your territory, it's probably time to reconsider your choice of allies. Locked teams are the source of griefing more than anything else.

Friendly fire for nukes and superweapons is understandable, but besides that it would be a gameplay nightmare. It would also add much more micro into the game to make units as effective as possible. If your opponent ran a fast unit into a large force of your mobile artillery, then your entire army would end up firing upon itself. It would be more effective for you to individually select units and move them around in an attempt to get te enemy to fire upon itself, which is an impossible task to do for every skirmish on a game the scale of PA. As cool and realistic as it may be, it's one of those things that must be sacrificed for gameplay.

I think the greater problem is that mobile artillery are trying to shoot a fast unit.

Well it doesn't even have to be fast. Imagine transporting a unit into a group of units. Every unit would fire on it, and the resulting friendly fire would probably destroy a large portion of your army

I think if your enemy did that to you, he was being clever.

/agree

If the AI is intelligent enough that it can avoid the vast majority of friendly fire then perhaps all weapons should deal friendly fire. However if it means that units in skirmishes only fire half as fast as their maximum to avoid shooting their comrades then it would be a very irritating bad thing.

Without knowing of any fancy AI tricks that might be implemented, I'd go with having it the same as SupcomFA, where the rule of thumb is that direct-fire weapons don't do friendly fire, but anything that lobs a shell, a bomb or a missile does.

Friendly fire was kinda the reason why tanks in TA couldn't have a true direct fire weapon.

And there is nothing quite like a march of hammer bots, with their arc fire they made effective assualt units.

I support full time friendly fire. The layer of strategy it brings I feel is very welcome. However, There could be-some interesting tweaks. Such as unit temperaments or aggressive status. By default leave things in the middle, but for players who really want to micro more, they can choose to adjust the temperament of the units AI.

Anyone remember how in TA you could build some huge banks of guns, only to have the rear guns wipe out the front guns? That was awesome. It forced you to plan your base and it provided an opportunity to exploit a poorly laid out base. A smarter AI might have prevented the rear guns from firing, but that wasn't the point. The point was that you had to be smart. The gameplay mechanic was consistent and believable, so after it happened to you a couple times you learned to be more careful in construction.

+1 to friendly fire on all guns. +1 to good AI. +1 to consistent and believable.

I'd say it's worth a test assuming it doesn't take uber too much work to set up. I'm skeptical that I'll find it fun (I won't speak for everyone though).

I think maybe this thread needs to be split into two questions - should weapons do hit checks on friendly units, and should explosions do FF damage.

It's worth looking at an actual gameplay example from TA below, of a fight going on in a base. I've ringed in red all the units that wouldn't be able to fire (because they'd hit your own units) if hit checks on your own units was on.



You would have to spend this fight (and every other fight) trying to micro every unit to get it out of the way of others.

The thuds and towers shoot over becuse the thuds arc their shots, and the towers are tal enough to fire over.

I'm fairly certain that TA bullets will clip through friendly units. At least, I've been able to fire D-guns through my guys before.

Virtually everything in TA did some kind of splash damage, including death animations. Getting too close to the enemy did FF. Shooting wreckage in the way did FF. Missed shots did FF. Blowing up did FF. It's amazing how much damage an army did to itself compared to any hostile action!

Why not do like Supcom? AOE will cause friendly fire, but not non-AOE, because otherwise you will have to micro your units into either large lins so they can't hit eachother or the AI will have to devote huge cycles to setting this up, personaly the FF in FA worked just fine.

Friendly fire will encourage intense starcraft-like micro, unless the AI is amazing and can put all the units into their best possible position and avoid doing friendly fire to its own units (and as much confidence as i have in uber, controlling it manually will almost always be more effective) and I think the time doing that could be spent better elsewhere.

not only that, but the amount of abuse this opens up to players is way too much. Your supposed teammate could snipe your commander easily by just rolling his tanks in and firing on it.

Mobile artillery could probably hurt you more then It would damage your opponent through a well placed unit launch or drop.

And what if the enemy commander suddenly teleports into your base, and you have fortified artillery or mobile artillery defending it? With friendly fire the commander could probably dodge it and the shells would destroy your own buildings. And if the AI recognized that the artillery would be doing friendly damage, well than all your artillery defense will be useless.

I say let there be an option for friendly fire, but putting into the main release would not be a good idea.