Riffing on the Ragnorak

A number of new weapon features were introduced to support the Ragnorak's countdown. I've been thinking of a lot of ways to use them.

- ammo_source: time
- auto_fire_when_charged
- fire_delay
- max_range: 0 - maybe just filling a required field?
- only_fire_once
- start_fully_charged: false

With a short time and no once limitation it can provide for many types of passive abilities, with two limitations:
- A unit can only have one ammo weapon *sometimes it can, see later post
- It triggers the fired event, and will cause spurious muzzle flash if one is present *use fired0-fired3

With a tiny splash, degeneration that doesn't affect wreckage

With a negative armor mod, regeneration.

With larger splash, provide a healing aura.

If resource ammo was used, regen rate would be be limited by economy.

If the unit had negative regen, it could have an upkeep cost, and degenerate (or degenerate faster) if the economy sank.

With ammo `spawn_unit_on_death`, a unit could be self-replicating (Tribbles!)

As a `self_destruct` weapon, a non-health unit timer.

Combining those, a cicada that turned into a different unit if lived long eough.

Bonus: at least with source 'time', setting capacity/shot to 0 lets free passive effects run off rate of fire with no ammo bar.

If there was a non-ammo version of auto_fire_when_charged, these types of effects wouldn't need the ammo system at all. If there was a flag to turn of the fired event, they could be free of side effects. (Better yet would be an array of triggered events, which defaults to ["fired"])

So far, I've been able to have a time ammo and an energy ammo without crashing. The ammo bar is blank if the time is non-zero or has a valid record index, but the passive rate-of-fire ones seem to cause no conflict, unless I've just been lucky.

So now it's possible to make a missile that can destroy planets, right?

I haven't played around with planet_impact_spec in the ragnarok ammo, but it might be.

I stopped to check this before doing something else; while I haven't checked all ammo scenarios, it definitely works on nukes.

About the fired event causing muzzle flashes - you can have different muzzle flashes for different weapons, so that's not really an issue

A unit that "dies" and spawns a slightly more powerful unit after x minutes is a really cool idea... I'm thinking change the Booms in Boom Bot Wars to grow over time and eventually become the giant ones if they're kept alive for long enough O.O Their death weapon could interfere a bit though (even if just with the effects) so not sure. Will have to try it out probably next weekend