Is this allowed?

[Dragon_Slayer]

In this video, you can see that the spider can shoot out of the water, while not being able to be targeted.

I had to ground fire in order to kill it, and you can see a lot of my shots missed. (It was much harder to aim compared to what you see in the video, because the model did not appear and all I could see was where the laser started) I also didn't select my PD, so they did very little.

I personally think this is unfair, and consider it a bug.

If this is against the rules, please don't punish the guy who did it, since it isn't clear that it is not fair play. (Not in the list of banned exploits.)

[Sladow-Noob]

It's allowed

[IndexLibrorum]

Allowed! Just part of normal micro gameplay.

[Sprouto]

There's nothing quite normal about it - and it's a relatively easy fix.

In this circumstance, the spider's weapon is 'above water' and is allowed to fire. The body, however, is likely on the 'Seabed' layer - and as a result, your weapon is not likely allowed to target that layer.

Weapons aim at 'target bones', and in many cases, a unit will only have one, which often defaults to the 'root' bone (often around the base of the unit). Large units, like the spiderbot, should have multiple target bones specified - and ideally, there should be one up near the top of the unit, which would be targetable.

In order to check this, refer to the blueprint of both your unit (to see if it's allowed to target 'Seabed' targets - but is restricted to 'AboveWater' targets only) and the spiderbot, to insure that it has a targeting bone that would be above water when the weapon it has is.

It's not 'micro' at all - it's just lax coding.

[Nomander]

Monkeylord has a target bone on its turret, and as far as I know all surface targeting weapons can target the seabed layer too, so it is not an issue with seabed layer targeting or bones. I thought it was related to LayerChangeOffsetHeight, but changing that doesn't affect the targeting, it only affects how deep in the water the Monkeylord shows up with vision (which would be a good improvement by itself). So it seems to be entirely an engine issue with how weapons target things on the seabed but on the land layer (because if you disable AboveWaterTargetsOnly, then the weapon fires at underwater, seabed-layer targets just fine).

For example, although these two can hit and see each other, they won't do it without an attack command:

Slacking on the job when the commander isn't looking :

[Sprouto]

LayerChangeOffsetHeight can alter which weapons will fire, and when they are seen as 'above water' - so quite likely this value exposes those bones that would otherwise be targetable. I've often worked this value carefully (especially with multi-weapon units) in order to get a better response to weapons firing when actually out of the water - so yes, it's a finnicky thing.

[IndexLibrorum]

@Sprouto said in Is this allowed?:

It's not 'micro' at all - it's just lax coding.

We can argue about whether or not this should be a thing. Being able to shoot the weapon sticking out of the water to damage the unit makes sense to me, and if that's the direction the devs want to go in to fix this 'bug' then that's all well and good. However, I am not speaking as to the reason why this happens, I am speaking about using the emergent mechanic in a way that gives an advantage to the player; that's micro.

[Nomander]

@Sprouto I randomly found out that Monkeylord's SinkLower causes this, as for GC it doesn't use SinkLower and its target is rather messed up still so I don't know.

[Sprouto]

Interesting - I'll have to check if we even use SinkLower in our units.