Hello,
In my mod I have some capital ship weapons which have more than 12000 second refire times. Unfortunately, the AI tends to use these against fighters (before the enemy capital ships come into range).
Is there any way to add a flag (or make some other change) that permanently disables a type of weapon from firing against fighters?
Thanks,
Sorry, no - not at this point in time.
One possible option is that you use Direct Control (New feature in v1.60) and manually target cruisers.
(While the cannon will shoot at figters if there is nothing in range - it will switch to the cruiser you selected once it has entered range)
I have been away for some time, are you now saying there’s a way for the player to target a ship in game now?
This is shocking new info…I MUST update!
OFF: Yes the new patch lets you control how the ships do move and how to give more precise attack orders
ON: Well if i remember right cant u just remove the fighter order and they stop attacking them ,if i remember right they engage other ships instead
Yes - although one can’t give other orders (eg. co-operative) that could cause them to attack fighters.
Thansk for the info guys! It would be grand if one of the updates allowed us to limit the launching of massive swarms of capital ship torpedos at a single fighter.
Avimimus, I know that this might seem only peripheral to what you were originally looking to find here, but if you read the excellent AI thread at the Suggestions subforum, you’ll gain much more illumination about why some of the funny (and not nearly so funny) things happen in GSB.
Make sure you read the entire thread, though. It’s a highly informative discussion, and even Cliff Harris himself dipped in an oar from time to time.
Thanks for the reply! I do hope this feature is added sometime (good for weapons that fire only once every few minutes).
I thought of a possible work around:
Can you think of any way to ensure that weapons aren’t fully charged when a match starts (i.e. ships don’t begin with fully charged weapons but have to charge them before firing). It wouldn’t really get rid of the problem, but it would at least increase the chance that a capital target would be within range when the weapon first charges (so it wouldn’t look quite so foolish).
Nope, weapons start with a random percentage of their charge. 
This is exactly what anyone deleting the attack fighters order would expect the game to do, but not what it does, sadly. We are admirals, but apparently we don’t issue orders, just suggestions.
As I understand it removing the attack fighter order means that the ship in question will never maneuver to attack a fighter. This means that your cruisers won’t start flying in circles when fighters get close. Additionally the ship will continue to pursue whatever target is closest and of the highest priority, if you remove the attack fighter order from your the cruisers in your fleet they will fire on enemy fighters until an enemy frigate or cruiser comes in range.
Precisely. In simpler terms, the absence of a specific attack order (fighters, frigates or cruisers) only affects the ship’s pilot AI, rather than its gunner AI.
while i have no idea how wny of this works, at all
i’m going to jump of the limb and say
that sounds like its easy to change
The only way we could change this behavior is if we had access to the source code.
Then we would need someone with the ability to ‘code’ in the language it’s written in. (I believe it’s C or one of it’s counter parts)
I’m confident that cliffski will never open up the codebase to public access for any reason.
With regards to this specific thread’s topic, we’ll just have to pin our hopes onto GSB2. The limitations of the existing game are already well-known, and they’re not going to change.
wait let me guess, because if he did that it would make it really easy to pirate
I doubt that - I think it would be more of an intellectual property thing
Attack means shoot, though. Common sense would dictate that your orders are for targeting priority. Like your ww2 battleship being ordered not to waste 16" shells on the lifeboats, and to shoot at Yamato, instead.
but the Yamato was sunk by carrier borne bombers
What’s your point?
Had the commander ordered Yamato to not fire at fighters AT ALL, would he or would he not obey? Particularly if the order was not to shoot their main guns at aircraft (that they’d never hope to hit anyway) while they closed to fire upon appropriate prey?
How about in GSB if weapons would simply not fire at targets they cannot hit (tracking speed vs target). The current situation gives them a small, non-zero chance of a hit. It seems like they should entirely ignore targets that are “impossible” to track unless no other targets exist on the entire map. Not is no other targets exist in range, but none exist, PERIOD. The current rules are really dumb, frankly.