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[Alex]

Hmm - maybe try putting some of them in a linked group? If you have a bunch of one-shot small weapons on a battleship, it's possible that it would prefer another weapon group for manual fire due to it having too much "weight" in weapons. A weapon being STRIKE (and missile) adds weight, but that might not be enough to overcome, say, a group of 3-4 large ballistics.

An ALWAYS_PANIC hint on the ship is also an option. As is removing STRIKE from the Reaper and/or adding USE_VS_FRIGATES.

[Morrokain]

Ill try some of those tags, but I've already tried Linked vs Alternating groups and the reapers are in two separate groups of 4 medium in one group and 2 large in another. I didn't combine them because turrets and hardpoints in the same group have weird behavior sometimes. Maybe I'll try that too

[Alex]

Ah - if it's 4 medium Typhoons in the same group then that (the weights stuff) is likely not the issue. USE_VS_FRIGATES would also have it have more tolerance for enemy lateral movement (i.e. it's not trying to be as accurate - hitting with a torpedo from a moving ship vs another moving ship can be tricky), so that might make it fire (and miss) more.

[Morrokain]

I forgot PANIC_FIRE makes them use torps vs fighters too much so that's out.

I had considered the movement issue and maybe I am miscalculating there so I will try USE_VS_FRIGATES. The thing is, that capital shouldn't be able to outmaneuver the torps and when I personally fly the ship I launch everything directly at the enemy ship (no target leading) at close to maximum range and the majority of them hit without issue- barring PD.
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Separate question, does the UNBOARDABLE tag for a ship also mean it will not be sold in faction markets? Or just that it can't be recovered after a battle through loot?

[Alex]

Just post-combat and derelict recovery.

[Morrokain]

Excellent thank you.

[Bad_Idea]

New question:
Is there any good way to, in the refit screen, refund or return a weapon in a specific slot? Changing the hull of a ship when weapons are mounted leads to some funny things happening (namely crashes) and i'd love to be able to return a weapon to the player or the store without costing the player extra money/giving them free weapons. I've been looking into both the stripWeapons function and the player market transaction APIs for some ideas on what to do, but both of these are rabbit holes so deep i hardly know where to begin.

In addition to this question i'm wondering if there is a way of forcing the refit screen to update, such as it does when you restore a ship. I thought maybe i could simulate an R keypress which would reopen the refit screen, but this does not seem to be working.

I don't think so? At least, nothing that I can think of in the API. There may be some creative workarounds, but that'd be more a question for someone other than me.

That's quite unfortunate... The inability to strip a ship i can work around (put the weapon in the player inventory, they'll still be paying for it) however the inability to update the refit screen is pretty damning. Is there really no way in the accessible API to force the refit screen through an update (i'm calling it an update because i presume the refit screen saves a copy of your fleet whenever a transaction goes through or you open it)? What triggers updates in the first place?

[Ed]

How to make a custom engine flame? I want to make mine light purple.

[Morrokain]

Ah - if it's 4 medium Typhoons in the same group then that (the weights stuff) is likely not the issue. USE_VS_FRIGATES would also have it have more tolerance for enemy lateral movement (i.e. it's not trying to be as accurate - hitting with a torpedo from a moving ship vs another moving ship can be tricky), so that might make it fire (and miss) more.

Actually seems to make the problem worse. There was scattered torpedo fire previously (but not nearly clip optimal as DO_NOT_CONSERVE would suggest) but now the weapons are literally never utilized under the same conditions:( This is for phase ships in particular, btw. I'll run a similar test with non-phase ships and compare and post an update here.)

I can probably provide videos if that would help. I'll try and work on that too.

[Alex]

One other option would be to change the weapon type to ballistic, I think - may or may not be reasonable depending on exactly what you're doing here, of course. Could try setting ammo really high and see if that does something, too. E.G. Locusts etc seem to have no issue firing at stuff.

How to make a custom engine flame? I want to make mine light purple.

See: data/config/engine_styles.json. Then you can refer to the style from your .ship file.

[Ed]

Thanks again Alex!

[Alex]

Yep!

[Morrokain]

Thanks i'll try additional ammo too because the large variant has more ammo and seems to operate better- especially when turreted.

See: data/config/engine_styles.json. Then you can refer to the style from your .ship file.

I was also going to ask about this (same color too actually, haha) so thanks!

[Morrokain]

Could try setting ammo really high and see if that does something, too. E.G. Locusts etc seem to have no issue firing at stuff.

Ok, so more feedback here. The problem was 2 things coming together to create a "no fire ever" situation for the AI.

Increasing the ammo from 2 to 8 seemed to help considerably. This makes me think that the DO_NOT_CONSERVE tag is a little misleading because with low base ammo the AI still wants to conserve one or two missiles. Maybe a separate tag for that would help? For some missiles I want the complete alpha strike because it has the most chance of getting through the PD screen or capitalizing the most on an overload, etc.

Second: Unlike energy or ballistic weapons, missile hardpoints don't swivel their firing projectory for hardpoints with increased arcs. This means that any weapon hardpoint projectories that could include missile weapons have to tilt their axis to converge to a point as close to maximum range (hard to balance as you'd imagine if rockets and torps have varying max ranges) as possible in order for the AI to fire those weapons. Adding tags like GUIDED_POOR (merely better... still not optimal unfortunately) or DO_NOT_AIM (100% fine) help if the missile can track, but if the missile is a rocket or torp it has to converge its projectory to be fired or be included in an alternating weapon group. The problem with the second solution is the AI still isn't very efficient with that setting atm:

For instance, the medium reaper with 2 max ammo put into hardpoints set to alternating fire with two total weapons in the group can't even fire enough to reduce the max clip of 2 down to 0 even with a 67 reload time on the missile.

Setting the ammo to 8 leaves the average clip size to around 5 to 6. So not optimal considering the DO_NOT_CONSERVE tag for sure.

Setting the ammo to 8 and making the hardpoint projectory converge around max range for the weapon fixes the problem and the AI empties the clip and kills the enemy vessel.

In this case, its the difference between the vessel losing horribly or, alternatively, if the behavior is accounted for, alpha striking the (weaker) opponent and winning with a supreme victory itself.
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Ok, now all of that said, the above fix is irrelevant for phase vessels. Phase vessels are very unwilling to use strike weapons in general. I had to change a tier 3 dps weapon with minimal flux build up to not use the STRIKE,USE_VS_FRIGATES tag combination in order for that weapon to ever even be fired by the phase battleship at all (Its a large energy weapon).

The long range strike beams (also large energy strike weapons) are fired more often, but at about 1/3 effectiveness over their actual cooldown, reducing weapon effectiveness by the converse amount. This is while the phase battleship hovers at ~15% to 20% max flux, so it's not that its unable to fire the weapon in case that was the concern.

Torps- almost no matter what I do- are either fired at 1/3 effectiveness in the best case scenario where the large weapon with 12 ammo converges to a point for AI hardpoints to fire, or at worst case scenario the group of 4 turret Reapers with 8 max ammo are never fired at all- even within range with either STRIKE,DO_NOT_CONSERVE or STRIKE,USE_VS_FRIGATES,DO_NOT_CONSERVE tags set.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you need more testing to help further narrow this down!

*EDIT*

I tried some more tests for phase ships and it definitely seems linked to their threat evaluation. The phase battleship is much more likely to use large hardpoint (with a high max ammo) torps against cruisers it can easily outgun. It still won't use turreted medium torps against them unless they overload or are already mostly beaten. The DO_NOT_CONSERVE tag doesn't seem to affect the behavior here.

Against a battlecarrier roughly equal in combat strength, it refuses to use torps unless at half health or more. It will also use them (again very sub-optimal to actual reload times) against overloaded ships at equal strength.

If I pilot the vessel myself and use the torpedoes optimal to reload times, the fight is fairly easy in all cases.

[Sinosauropteryx]

What does the 8/6/5/4% in ship_data.csv mean?