Fighters Kill Air Factories - Bug, or lame feature? :(

I don't know what the solution is, but I think I lost a game because my advanced factories were obliterated when fighters flew through. It was so fast! I wanted to record it when it happened to me, but I accidently crashed the game trying to use Open Broadcaster to record the scene.

So when I saw the similar thing happen in a game I was in, I recorded it with Fraps (FTW). It really wasn't cool to lose 5 advanced factories within 2 seconds, but this guy in the video only loses 2 or so.

So here I have a video of the incident.

What I think is happening is that the factories are building aircraft at the time - the fighters are targeting the unfinished units, but the shots are landing on the factories.

Can you reproduce this on an air factory that isn't producing anything?

I think you are right, but I don't feel like trying to reproduce that right now. Feel free to.

It's the nature of a projectile simulation based game. This can also be done by camping an orbital launcher and destroying it when they build a unit. It needs to be tweaked for sure, but I think it should still be possible in some form.

Just flag half-constructed units (but not structures) as something that can't be targeted.

Or, flag grounded aircraft as something that can't be targeted by other aircraft.

From my point of view there is nothing wrong that even fighters might attack land units. They just have to be not as effective as on your video.

Yeah, that video was nothing compared to what happened to my base one game. It was almost instant destruction with advanced fighters coming in.

It should probably be called a bug and prevented.

The biggest problem with it is that once you have air superiority, you can do this and pretty well keep it. Ground based AA isn't good enough to stop swarms of fighters, which can blow up all your air factories really fast and get out without taking too many losses.

I do it to people all the time because I can't give them the chance to do it to me first.

I think Bulletmagnet hit it on the head. Just prevent attacking partly built units.

How about removing arbitrary target restrictions and allow everything to target everything else?

Ever tried throwing a rock at a bird flying 500 feet over your head?

Removing all restrictions would totally defeat the point of having a diverse unit set.

I wouldn't be able to hit a bird flying at 500 feet so whats the point of disallowing me to try it?

Having no arbitrary targeting restrictions means exactly that. Units that actually can hit a high altitude target will do so while other units will not because their projectiles are too slow or because they don't have enough range to hit it.

There are three issues here:

1. Units just finished from a factory will still attract fire.
   
2. Aircraft factories have large vertical hitboxes that absorb damage from nearby air combat.
3. Peregrines do an enormous amount of damage, about the same as an artillery bot, but a faster rate of fire.

Probably one thing they could look at is simply reworking air HP.

Like make X-to-air missiles do 5 damage.
Lower all plane hit points accordingly.
Then the planes can continue their current logic and will still hit your factory, but not for very much damage, because their air-to-air guns simply aren't good at dealing damage to things not built out of hollow aluminum.

Well they did increase the HP and damage a few versions ago.

They don't. Check out my video of this in my little thread in the video forum.


It happens when the constructed unit is finished. As soon as it is rolling off the factory, it becomes a valid target. The missiles all miss it, and hit the factory. So the units attack again and again until they finally destroy the rolling off air unit.

You could change the hitbox such that the missiles only hit if they actually hit the factory (I.e.. They can skim the airpad)

But it's just a byproduct of there being simulated projectiles. Other ways to deal with it is to build more land AA and have them camp your factories, or to build more missile turrets. And hopefully one day we'll have AoE cannons to use.

I.e. prevention is better than the cure. I guess if you had some defence unit that destroyed hostile missiles that could be good as well.

Then this is sounding a bit like the ACU hitbox exploit with transports in Sup2. XD

Is there a shortcut key to turn hitboxes on/off? Looking at that might be able to shed some more light on the matter.

I think F11? The one that shows the pathing stuff also shows a box surrounding units and structures.

On topic - lame side effect of a feature.

I would call its mechanics a feature but it's implications a bug.

So yeah, there are ways to fix it. A modder will gracefully swoop down and patch this issue himself if allowed to continue, so it doesn't matter if they fix it, it just matters that it sounds like they should.

Actually, even better. There is a related bug where parked t2 air can still attack while being on the ground while being difficult to attack. Fix both.

I suggest limiting the difference in their height to aim. Some units currently don't target if the height is excessive, it imagine air units couldn't either if parked or shooting grounded, both causing issues mentioned here.

It's been known for quite some time there is a report on the bug tracker: http://pa.lennardf1989.com/Tracker/index.php?do=details&task_id=2300