Okay, I think this has been posted before, but I couldn’t find it, and I think it’s worth bringing up.
Just looked at challenge # 4615492, a little Swarm challenge on a map with the following anomalies:
Must have Engines
Fighters unusable
Weapon ranges reduced by 90%
It’s the last one that’s a problem. Turns out there are exactly two weapons (excluding race-specifics, I only checked against the Feds) where 10% of the maximum range isn’t less than the minimum range: Anti-Fighter Missiles (max range 550, min range 50); Fighter Laser Cannon (max range 300, min range 30). Meaning any weapons other than those two can’t fire at all.
Let’s all please try to keep this sort of thing in mind when setting up our challenges. If something seems pretty extreme (I’d call a 90% reduction of anything pretty darn extreme), take another look at it to make sure it doesn’t hose your own weapons, not to mention your opponent’s.
As a side note, I let the battle run for over 20 minutes. with the opposing cruisers periodically cloaking and uncloaking, and my frigates loosing an AF missile at random, sometimes impacting enemy shields, sometimes spiraling into oblivion. I really expected a stalemate condition before then, considering usually it’s less than 5 before I get a defeat if I’m using fighters to shred an enemy cruiser, doing almost constant damage, but losing to the stalemate condition because I have no capital ships. I’m just saying that the game should spot that nothing is happening way before the point where I gave up waiting for it.
Sorry for the rant-esque post, but I though it needed to be said.