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[DesperatePeter]

I'm really liking the new ShipTarget tag for the purpose mentioned in its tooltip. Thanks for the update

Glad you like it, thanks for the feedback! =)

Is there any way to have it so guns try to overflux enemy shields instead of just bringing them to 85%? I remember that in the old mod that there were "Avoid Armor" and "Avoid Shields" settings so they would try to chew through what they were good at, popping shields and stripping armor.

Short answer: Open the Settings.editme file in the folder of the mod in the editor of your choice and add "TgtShields+" to the tagList. TgtShields+ is the same as TgtShields but fires up to 99% flux rather than 85% flux.

Long answer: In the old mod you had TargetShields and AvoidShields, AvdArmor is new in 1.x. I might have tweaked the values for Avd/TgtShields a little bit since the old mod.
The reason why TargetShields only fires until the enemy is at about 85% flux is that enemy ships will usually try to avoid taking kinetic shots to their shields by lowering their shields once they reach high flux. To actually overload them, you need to either fire a big burst of kinetic damage at them while they are at ~70-80% flux or severely damage their hull so that they keep their shields up at high flux. I'm not 100% confident that 85% is the best threshold, maybe 90% would be better, but from my testing 85% seems to work pretty well in most circumstances. If you want to play around with that threshold, you can also modify it in Settings.editme (targetShields_threshold).

In my personal experience, what works best is if you have multiple kinetic weapons, set one to default mode and the rest to AvdArmor or TargetShields. That way you will keep up some kinetic pressure all the time. AvdArmor works similarly to TargetShields, but will also shoot when the enemy shields are down (or the enemy is at high flux) but enough armor has been stripped off that the weapon will still do reasonable damage.

[Catscrath]

Bit hard to do in a brawler with the two mid mounts being set to strip armor and the side railguns for shields. What ends up happening is the railguns burst down the shield to 85% flux and then just stop firing, so if the enemy keeps their shields up, my guns are silenced, never a good thing for a pather.

[DesperatePeter]

Bit hard to do in a brawler with the two mid mounts being set to strip armor and the side railguns for shields. What ends up happening is the railguns burst down the shield to 85% flux and then just stop firing, so if the enemy keeps their shields up, my guns are silenced, never a good thing for a pather.

Yeah, that strategy works best for bigger ships with more weapons.
Try out TgtShields+ and let me know if it works as intended =)

[Catscrath]

Bit hard to do in a brawler with the two mid mounts being set to strip armor and the side railguns for shields. What ends up happening is the railguns burst down the shield to 85% flux and then just stop firing, so if the enemy keeps their shields up, my guns are silenced, never a good thing for a pather.

Yeah, that strategy works best for bigger ships with more weapons.
Try out TgtShields+ and let me know if it works as intended =)

Tried it out and now the guns will not fire at all.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[DesperatePeter]

Bit hard to do in a brawler with the two mid mounts being set to strip armor and the side railguns for shields. What ends up happening is the railguns burst down the shield to 85% flux and then just stop firing, so if the enemy keeps their shields up, my guns are silenced, never a good thing for a pather.

Yeah, that strategy works best for bigger ships with more weapons.
Try out TgtShields+ and let me know if it works as intended =)

Tried it out and now the guns will not fire at all.

Thanks for letting me know, the mode actually did the opposite of what it was supposed to do (I used 0.99 instead of 0.01 for the threshold, i.e. "Fire if the enemies shield value is higher than 99%", which never was the case, as 99% is the max...).

I just released 1.6.1, it fixes the issue.

It also changes the jar format into a pom-style library so that people importing it as a library can see the javadoc when hovering over stuff in their IDE, though that's probably not super relevant for most people xD

[Catscrath]

Bit hard to do in a brawler with the two mid mounts being set to strip armor and the side railguns for shields. What ends up happening is the railguns burst down the shield to 85% flux and then just stop firing, so if the enemy keeps their shields up, my guns are silenced, never a good thing for a pather.

Yeah, that strategy works best for bigger ships with more weapons.
Try out TgtShields+ and let me know if it works as intended =)

Tried it out and now the guns will not fire at all.

Thanks for letting me know, the mode actually did the opposite of what it was supposed to do (I used 0.99 instead of 0.01 for the threshold, i.e. "Fire if the enemies shield value is higher than 99%", which never was the case, as 99% is the max...).

I just released 1.6.1, it fixes the issue.

It also changes the jar format into a pom-style library so that people importing it as a library can see the javadoc when hovering over stuff in their IDE, though that's probably not super relevant for most people xD

Nice! More Shoots for my shoots. I will see how it works out and hopefully be able to dispense Ludds holy light upon those shield using heretics.

[Catscrath]

So I came across a really strange interaction. If you have guns set to avoid shields and they go up against a ship without shields (Like a hound) they will not fire until the enemy craft gets to a high flux level. This lets me get bullied by hound in an eradicator and just feels wrong.

[DesperatePeter]

So I came across a really strange interaction. If you have guns set to avoid shields and they go up against a ship without shields (Like a hound) they will not fire until the enemy craft gets to a high flux level. This lets me get bullied by hound in an eradicator and just feels wrong.

Huh, that's weird, that shouldn't happen.
I just tested it and can't reproduce the issue. Did you possibly have some other tag on that prevented the weapon from firing? If not, could you maybe provide some additional details and/or a screenshot or two?
Thanks!

[Catscrath]

So I came across a really strange interaction. If you have guns set to avoid shields and they go up against a ship without shields (Like a hound) they will not fire until the enemy craft gets to a high flux level. This lets me get bullied by hound in an eradicator and just feels wrong.

Huh, that's weird, that shouldn't happen.
I just tested it and can't reproduce the issue. Did you possibly have some other tag on that prevented the weapon from firing? If not, could you maybe provide some additional details and/or a screenshot or two?
Thanks!

I don't know how to directly reproduce it either. I will keep playing and if I see it again I will take some screenshots. It may have just been an error setting up the guns on my end, but I will keep you updated on anything I find.

[Space_Lettuce_OG]

Just wanted to thank you for this mod.

Letting the player decide autofire settings for a weapon group and then having the AI completely ignore it is a waste of the players time, but more importantly the dishonesty of it is deceptive and will lead to a lot of wasted time for the player trying to figure out what a problem is.

Also, without being able to force autofire for the weapon group I assign the laser sword from the Arma Armature mod, the laser sword will rarely if ever be used, because the AI turns off autofire.
Wasted about 2 hours of my life trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Pretty salty about it, and justifiably so.

Again, thank you.

[DesperatePeter]

I don't know how to directly reproduce it either. I will keep playing and if I see it again I will take some screenshots. It may have just been an error setting up the guns on my end, but I will keep you updated on anything I find.

Gotcha! =) Thanks for letting me know ad keep me updated if you ever encounter the issue again.

Just wanted to thank you for this mod.

Letting the player decide autofire settings for a weapon group and then having the AI completely ignore it is a waste of the players time, but more importantly the dishonesty of it is deceptive and will lead to a lot of wasted time for the player trying to figure out what a problem is.

Also, without being able to force autofire for the weapon group I assign the laser sword from the Arma Armature mod, the laser sword will rarely if ever be used, because the AI turns off autofire.
Wasted about 2 hours of my life trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Pretty salty about it, and justifiably so.

Again, thank you.

Thank you, glad you like it! I guess the way it's implemented in vanilla kind of makes sense, since setting a group to autofire is only intended to work for the player ship, but I also felt like having the option to tell the AI "nope, set that group to autofire and this is not a suggestion!" is quite useful =)

On an unrelated note, 1.7.0 just came out.
It mainly features many new tags and the option to ignore fighter shields (configurable in settings.editme, on by default), both contributed by Seanra (many thanks for the contribution!).
It also adds a scrollbar for the tag list in the GUIs.

[SturmPionier]

Is there a way to add a control for ships to behave defensively? For clarification I don't want to change the Pilot AI from being aggressive to staying at range but instead to focus on turtling with shields. Primarily ships like the monitor which suffer from the pilot randomly flickering the shields despite having fortress shields up and 0 flux. Maybe simply "Entrenched mode" to avoid confusion with fortress shield that locks shields on. It would also be nice to keep frigates from getting sniped by long range ships they cannot raise their shields fast enough to block.

[DesperatePeter]

Is there a way to add a control for ships to behave defensively? For clarification I don't want to change the Pilot AI from being aggressive to staying at range but instead to focus on turtling with shields. Primarily ships like the monitor which suffer from the pilot randomly flickering the shields despite having fortress shields up and 0 flux. Maybe simply "Entrenched mode" to avoid confusion with fortress shield that locks shields on. It would also be nice to keep frigates from getting sniped by long range ships they cannot raise their shields fast enough to block.

That sounds like a cool idea and I think it should be doable. How about: Keep shields up while Flux < 90% and while within range of enemy weapons?
If that sounds good to you, I'll try to include such a ship mode in the next update.

Edit: That was actually fairly easy to implement. I pushed it and will include it in the next release. If you want to try it out, you can simply use the current master branch: Download. Let me know if that works out for you =)

[Kumanix]

Is the Fighter control in the same files as this?

Sometimes you want your bombers keep around your Battlecarrier, not go off and die.

[Catscrath]

Can there be a setting to only shoot when the shields are down, regardless of their flux, same goes for always firing on shields no matter what? I feel making the AI have to choose to flash shield or drop the all together would be a good tag, a tag that would have saved me in countless battles.