Repair Fighters?

[Shrooblord]

I've been playing with Fighters lately and I gotta say I bloody love 'em. Their vanilla behaviour is already pretty good, but enhanced with mods like CarrierControl, they're a dream boat.

 

I have a question about fighters equipped with a repair turret, though. As it stands now, in Attack stance they swarm around enemy craft as if they were equipped with "normal" damaging turrets, and actually shoot their repair beam at the enemy craft, healing them.

 

In Defence stance they swarm around the mothership that spawned them, but don't use their repair beam to heal the mothership.

 

This is strange behaviour. I would expect something like the following set of rules:

[*]Fighters equipped with repair beams don't swarm around enemy craft. If anything, they try to avoid them.

[*]In Defence stance, healing fighters hover around the mothership and try to repair her, repairing nearby friendlies as a secondary objective if the mothership is already at full health (or within a 95-100% margin for less "hot potato" targeting AI).

[*]In Attack stance, healing fighters actively seek out and chase hurt friendlies, using their repair beam to heal them up.

[*]In any case, repair craft never target enemy craft.

 

Do you agree? What do you think of this behaviour? Any thoughts or additions?

[Ulrich_Rüstungjäger]

I believe the repair fighters only work of they are ordered to attack the mothership. I do not think that captained ships have the ability to attack themselves.

 

I agree that repair fighters should have different AI from standard fighters, but this makes me wonder how much would need to be changed, how it will effect repair fighters on your own ship.

[Shrooblord]

I do not think that captained ships have the ability to attack themselves.

Indeed: I've noticed that having repair turrets won't heal your own ship, which makes sense to a degree. However, I'd expect fighters to be able to heal other ships, i.e. the mothership, or at least other friendlies.

 

This makes me wonder how much would need to be changed, how it will effect repair fighters on your own ship.

I admit I'm not familiar with how the AI chooses its targets, but presumably there's a flag or a list of entities somewhere that distinguishes "enemy" from "neutral or friendly", right? Otherwise all your automatic turrets and fighters would also target non-hostile targets, which they don't. I wonder how hard it would be to make repair fighters choose from the "other list", i.e. pretend that the "friendlies" list is the "hostile" list when it comes to choosing targets.

But maybe that would be bad practice to code it like that. I'm not sure.

[Uthael]

Attacking an ally with a repair fighter doesn't make them angry at you even though it's "attacking".

 

 

Repairing your own ship during combat like that would REALLY be OP (Edit: not since we got anti-fighter weapons and torpedoes for burst). But there's a workaround for repairs in a calm situation:

- build another ship next to your current one, consisting mostly of one big hangar

- transfer fighters and required crew (pilots, mechanics)

- attack your main ship with them

- return it all and delete

- save the blueprint for rapid deployment at a later time