Friendly Fire on Splash Damage

While I hate to cite the SC2 example again, Banelings ignore friendly fire. It's probably the only reason they can roll up to and crash against an enemy base with any sort of effectiveness. However, they also don't have formation spread.

Friendly fire on bomb-bots might be what allows it to be powerful, though. The greater risk would justify a greater reward.

Indeed. If you pack your army with nitroglycerin, you can expect nothing less than some pretty fireworks.

I have a question.
If I give a group of Artillery an Area Attack command will they only attack things in that area?

because that would basically solve every problem I have with friendly fire.

this

... sometimes, elegant simplicty wins the day. Can we put this in super bold?

I feel it would actually be detrimental to see your bomb bots blowing each other up instead of the opponent because you didn't micro the bomb bots effectively to not blow themselves up.

I like the SC2 Baneling and command and conquer generals Terrorist Friendly fire ; it's straight forward and already difficult enough to get the bomb bots in range to utilize their payload.

I first want to actually play with the bomb bots before we decide that friendly fire should work on them though.

I'm pretty sure that when using an area attack the order expires once every visible target is destroyed, then they return to business as usual. This is how units handle it when you have an area attack order attached to the factory. If they don't have a target in the kill zone the order is nulled and they idle by the factory until you give new orders.

Area Patrol should give artillery a persistent order that keeps them focused on that area. I doubt it's enabled yet, but it would be a solid solution. I also want this for nukes, but that's just me

I have a confession to make... I only read the first 6 pages and last page (12) of this thread and I gave up... it's the same argument over and over.

I really like Brian's point about "why not just do a calculation and see if it's cost effective to AoE blast that target?". By itself it's a very reasonable argument, and honestly, the calculation overhead is not that high. However, I have a completely different problem with it.

In a purely hypothetical case, a few enemy dox get into my base (maybe unit cannon?) behind my other defenses and only my artillery and patrolling bombers can reach them immediately. A quick cost check will show that blasting them will destroy an advanced powerplant and cost 100X as much in friendly fire. So my guns sit idle. The Dox destroy the power plant and move the next target. Now my guns decide that it would cost too much if I accidently hit that orbital launcher... so they sit idle.... etc. etc. My base is gone, so now it's safe for the guns to fire. Thank God I didn't destroy a power plant.

Sure, I'll get alerts, but if I have 3 planets and an active ground war I may easily miss them, or confuse it for another battle. It happens. We have too many battlegrounds to babysit and little raids get overlooked all the time.

I'd rather the guns fire, even on one scout, than behave unpredictably. I think knowing exactly what my units will do is more valuable than the occasional power plant they might destroy.


Knowing how my units will behave allows me other, more predictable ways to manage my defense. If we have area patrol orders for artillery (like discussed a couple posts above), a minimum range (a well established tradition of RTS and real life alike.) we can avoid needless risks to our bases but not have to wonder if the units will attack when they need to.

I will amend my earlier statement.

Static Defense Commands Needed In Planetary Annihilation
Area Commands for Static defenses should work as follows: (In my opinion)
Attack Area: Will kill anything in the area (within range) then return to normal operations.
Patrol Area: Will only fire on targets at the patrol location until order is canceled or is given another order.

Everything should have friendly fire. When raiding the enemy base, a good strategy should be having your bots run behind the enemy's power gens so the commander will accidentally hit them with his bullets.
This behavior would of course be toggle able. You would be able to tell units to hold fire when there is a chance of hitting friendlies, or to blast away indiscriminately if there is any chance of hitting the enemy and not care about collateral damage.

It's a physics based game which simulates individual projectiles, it makes no sense to have bullets magically not harm friendly units.

Summarizing, ten day later we had this result.

64 Pro for everything that causes Splash Damage.
18 Against the idea, or doubtful.

While I agree with the results the poll itself was very biased. It was a multi-select with 3 positive answers vs 1 negative. I would only count the 64 Everything votes without bundling the extra bomber and artillery votes because we don't know how much voting overlap we have. Many of those may have also voted for "everything" or they may want a specific condition of artillery or bombers only.

Still 64 to 18 is a pretty solid result.

That's true. So I edit my comment above.

Re Tolerance:

Firstly I clearly got confused - low tolerance means side effects aren't tolerated at all, high tolerance the opposite. So you were saying that there is a high level of tolerance.

If you think about in terms of medical drugs.

There is essentially no such thing as a harmless drug. Many medical drugs harm your body to some degree. If you're health and well, you don't take the drug. You tolerate the harm that a drug does to you because the alternative is worse.

Particularly with a general anaesthetic, which shuts most of your systems down, to the extent that someone can chainsaw through your bones and you aren't able to respond to pain.

The tolerance on general anaesthetics is quite low - their availability is pretty tightly controlled. Likewise with the tolerance on ethanol. Unlike paracetamol, which is much more readily available, and the systems to control its availability aren't as tightly controlled. The tolerance is much higher. Clearly there are toxins available in nature where the aren't any control systems in place whatsoever, and so a tolerance on their availability and use would be very very high.


I had a spelling fail. Holistic, not heuristic. While it is true that if one unit could infiltrate, 20 units could infiltrate, it is more likely that that 1 unit began life as a 20 unit army, and likewise if 20 units are swanning into your base, they are the remainder of a 100 unit army.

Likewise, for a position that could be under constant attack from many incoming waves, it makes more sense to reinforce that position with mobile units until you can build the static defences, rather than simply punching a hole in your defences the first time enemy units start to put pressure on your defence and allowing the rest of the army to stream in through the gap.

We're not thinking about an asymmetric tower defense game where mobile units aren't available to the defender.

And having your artillery units commit suicide *as the default* would just result in everyone complaining about the mechanic and the inherent artificial stupidity.