Why do so many things have friendly fire disabled?

Even with splash damage. It's like people with bad micro don't want it to be enabled. It would add more realism and start requiring occasional micro.

Example: I fly above friendly cruisers with splash with my ASFs with impunity while we both murder enemy torpedo bombers. Enabling FF would mean I have to intercept them earlier.

Realism < fun

Because it’s hard&annoying to communicate to your ally that he needs to disable fire when it kills you. And it’s almost impossible to achieve this in advance

@kilatamoro said in Why do so many things have friendly fire disabled?:

Even with splash damage. It's like people with bad micro don't want it to be enabled. It would add more realism and start requiring occasional micro.

Example: I fly above friendly cruisers with splash with my ASFs with impunity while we both murder enemy torpedo bombers. Enabling FF would mean I have to intercept them earlier.

Reason 1: for some units, friendly fire creates problems even in a 1v1 setting. It's not fun if people have to do things like disable their cruisers from firing and then turn them back on again later. And if you forget to turn them back on, that's a problem. Or you might have to manually target your T2 PDs to make sure they don't do splash damage when a bunch of LABs try to run by.

Reason 2: the exact same thing, but it's even worse in multiplayer games, because you not only have to do that for your OWN units, you also have to do that for your allies, and you need your allies to do that for you. It would be very frustrating to have an ally's cruisers shoot down my own planes and then we're both mad at each other ("why didn't you turn off your cruisers and turn them back on again" "why did you fly there, why didn't you ping me first")

Reason 3: friendly fire creates a lot of opportunities for mischief, like intentionally killing allied units in a team game. That's why TMLs don't do friendly fire any more. People used to use TMLs to assassinate teammate ACUs.

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One way to address this, without turning friendly fire back on, would be to reduce the damage that splash does to enemy units when friendly units are around. Every time a flak fired, the game would ask "is there at least one friendly plane in the splash zone?" and if the answer is "no" it would do full damage and if the answer is "yes" it might do half damage.

That would take away the potentially-unfair advantage of fighting over flak

But I don't know how eager people are for that -- I think most people don't want a fix for this

@arma473 I play BAR, and no one there demands to turn off friendly fire. People just play taking FF into account.

I play FAF and no one there demands to turn on friendly fire.

@jaggedappliance Yeah, but both games are simulations, and FAF is the only of the two having inconsistencies in friendly fire.

Why is the giant flying saucer unable to damage friendly units with its giant particle beam? How would any dev come up with "Oh, I don't like it damaging my units, its FF has to be turned off"?

Why wouldn't alien space magic be able to differentiate between friendlies and hostiles?

making enemy units do friendly fire to their own units is very fun
i remember doing that with bombers and with cruisers and with t3 mobile arty
it is probably no big deal if that gets removed but maybe kinda sad.
afaik rawagers and strats still do friendly fire (at least to your own stuff), as well as t1 and t2 bombers
(Edit: oh yea, in BAR it is probably extra fun as there are few direct fire units with gigantic splash damage and slow projectiles and yes people sometimes have to micro them by putting them on hold fire (but you can still shoot stuff even with "hold fire enabled if you give attack order or target priority order)

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@kilatamoro said in Why do so many things have friendly fire disabled?:

@arma473 I play BAR, and no one there demands to turn off friendly fire. People just play taking FF into account.

Can't really compare bar to this. Of course the are both RTS, but the actual gameplay is way diffrent. Not to mention the scale.

@arma473 said in Why do so many things have friendly fire disabled?:

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One way to address this, without turning friendly fire back on, would be to reduce the damage that splash does to enemy units when friendly units are around. Every time a flak fired, the game would ask "is there at least one friendly plane in the splash zone?" and if the answer is "no" it would do full damage and if the answer is "yes" it might do half damage.

That would take away the potentially-unfair advantage of fighting over flak

But I don't know how eager people are for that -- I think most people don't want a fix for this

Using the word "fix", you imply it being a bug or not intentional.

The "half damage" mechanic is just another unintuitive feature. And full damage is just way to punhishing and bad gameplay wise.

The "unfair advantage of fighting over flak" is (if i understood your argument correctly) the most ridiculous thing i have ever heard. One team build AA and should not have an advantage when fighting there? xD I guess we can just remove AA from the game and only build air instead

FAF players love it when simulated missiles and simulated shells randomly collide with simulated air planes, probably costing you the simulated game.

FAF players hate it when you suggest normal simulated weapons should collide with the simulated units in reasonable and predictable ways.

My one opinion on this is that the chicken's storm should have friendly fire enabled.

@snoog said in Why do so many things have friendly fire disabled?:

My one opinion on this is that the chicken's storm should have friendly fire enabled.

yeah coz when two chickens fight 2 GC's its totally great that after 1 of each dies its still 2 v 1 coz the Storm attacks your own chicken XD

Sure with decent micro you can walk the dieing chicken into their team, but now you cant advance for a while and all your ground units are caught in the crossfire aswel

Ravager friendly fire got removed so that they can be used as teledef like every other PD.

Chicken storm got fixed again to be able to hit friendlies, it's just that the storm's weapon is unable to track allies so it does way less damage since it misses a lot.

@firv GC doesn't destroy an enemy base if it dies there.

@nuggets said in Why do so many things have friendly fire disabled?:

The "unfair advantage of fighting over flak" is (if i understood your argument correctly) the most ridiculous thing i have ever heard. One team build AA and should not have an advantage when fighting there? xD I guess we can just remove AA from the game and only build air instead

Now do the same but with AA in WW2.

@Kilatamoro wrote: "Now do"

c'mon man, you have to make more effort than that if you're going to troll people

telling people "Now do [X]" is the laziest form of bad-faith argumentation

@kilatamoro said in Why do so many things have friendly fire disabled?:

@nuggets said in Why do so many things have friendly fire disabled?:

The "unfair advantage of fighting over flak" is (if i understood your argument correctly) the most ridiculous thing i have ever heard. One team build AA and should not have an advantage when fighting there? xD I guess we can just remove AA from the game and only build air instead

Now do the same but with AA in WW2.

realism < fun