And Law Enforcement

We've all noticed that it is quite common for innocent bystanders to be killed in battles of all sorts, including battles in which their own government is involved, but does nothing to help them. This is a very odd idea, but lets say I want the very highest ships in the government's fleet to have technology that will protect innocent bystanders. Perhaps this technology somehow creates shields for other ships, pushes them out of a battle, etcetera. Not only would this be a great technology just to play around with, but it would also be great for "escort ship to such and such a place" missions. My two ideas at the moment are some sort of repulsor blast that pushes anyone, friend or foe, away from the player's ship. This could create more than just the tactical advantage of protecting a certain ship, and could be used in other ways.

My second idea is somewhat odder: the player purchases an on-board fighter, that can be launched like any other fighter but has no weaponry, relatively high shield/armor capacity, and very good speed and maneuverability. The sprite could be whatever, but for my purposes let's say it's either a shield sprite or some sort of spherical tech thing. The player would launch this fighter, and command it to attack whatever ship the player wanted to protect. The AI would attempt to attack the protected ship, but without weaponry, all that it could do would be to hover around it. Depending on the stats, the way in which the fighter would hover around the protected ship would differ, but the basic idea would be that incoming shots would hopefully hit the player's fighter ship instead of the ship that's supposed to be protected. The major problem with this is that the ship would still follow the keyboard shortcuts for escort commands, and so commanding the fleet to attack a target would cause the escort ship to do the same. As such I don't think that this method is particularly useful. Indeed I don't think the feature is even particularly useful, but it's late and I had the thought. Any other ideas? Anyone ever think of implementing something to make those "protect this ship on it's way to deliver..." missions easier? Not that they aren't fun as they are...

What I usually do in EV Nova when a poor civilian ships is about to get blasted is do the stupidest thing possible and get in between the civilian ship and the attacker, and start hammering away. Sacrificing your own ship to protect someone else might not be unheard of in an honorable space faring society, wouldn't you think?

An idea I had for a potential EV4 included ships that would move themselves in front of missiles and other ships in order to protect ships that were vital to a mission's success, such as a flagship. Fighter pilots might try to shoot down a missile, and failing that they would set it off themselves, destroying the fighter in the process. Cruisers might kamikaze themselves on ships of a larger class in order to give a retreating fleet more time, a battleship would protect a shuttle from a small raider without second thought, etc.

You can use escort-class commands to allow the fleet to attack while the fighter protects. Make the fighter something like a "freighter" class, but everything else a fighter or warship class as necessary, and give different commands to the different classes of escorts.

Any potential EV4 should have more battle scripting ability, I think. The one thing I find really frustrating in EV Firefly is getting the big battles to work properly. You can only directly control the actions of mission ships with respect to the player; all the rest is just assigning a given govt and hoping the fleets do what you want. You should be able to say "fleet A attacks fleet B, which in turn tries to screen fleet C as it escapes." Or even "fleet D launches from the planet after a delay of X seconds and joins battle."

The idea of a bunch of ships that push bystander ships out of the way is a nice idea, but it will never work. Unless you only use BRLs, Ion Cannons or other very short range weapons you will most likely accidentally hit a stray ship. I don't think the AI will ever be good enough to heard other ships away from your danger zone, because you could be shooting in any direction.

The best thing to do is just to use the Monty Python maneuver and lead the bad guys away and fight at a distance. Then there will be no need for a fancy drone system.

What about having the civilian ship fly away, retreat, but not jumping until they are double the jump area away, they may even retreat at the first shot, if the fighting ships, are considerably stronger. Maybe maneuvering if an enemy gets close.

(Once again talking in EV4) I'd also like to build off of JacaBytes fighters interception idea. Maybe the AI would put a cap on how many fighters will follow the missile, or a ratio of fighters to missile. And only if the missile could destroy/disable the ship, or is below X percent mass damage (0% or -1 can also be an option so some fighters will never block the missile). The X percent then can be modified on the fighter 100% means the fighter will try to block all missiles, this will give Crusader Alpha's defense sphere the ability to defend.

I'd also love to see a decoy flare return. If a missile is coming towards the civilian ship, why not have it spew out a few flares and continue on it's path. Why did they remove them anyways?

Well, if we're suggesting AI behaviors that would be nice, how about when a ship is running away, it'll try to escape to hyperspace even if it's being attacked?

QUOTE (IT 000 @ Jul 10 2009, 05:33 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'd also love to see a decoy flare return. If a missile is coming towards the civilian ship, why not have it spew out a few flares and continue on it's path. Why did they remove them anyways?

What about the PD turrets... You can get a PD turret to the same as the flares did.

Decoy Flares distracted missiles, the missiles would actually curve into them. PD weapons cannot do that.

Ah never mind then, I will retract my statement.

Sure is a bummer that feature was removed. I don't know anything about the actual coding of the engine so I imagine it's perfectly possible that it made some other feature possible instead, but I miss it whether or not that is the case.