The use of mass, for veteran levels, is purely a FAF based change. It supplants the original kill based mechanic. The healing mult is likewise, a FAF-only change. In the original game, when a unit made a vet level, it would have it's HP set to a % of it's new HP max, based upon how damaged it was. In FAF, this gets replaced with a fixed % of healing, based upon the HP of the unit at the time it makes the level.

There was a mod, many years back, called Total Veterancy - that extended the concept pretty much along the lines described above. It was quite popular, balance issues aside.

The primary drawback of this method is performance. Unit buffs are very memory intensive - especially when considering stacking multiple unique buffs, and even moreso when you consider that buffs are stored per unit - this adds up VERY quickly, not just for adding and removing the buffs, but the amount of memory consumed by each buff, for each unit, grows very quickly and will grow to a point where it will lead to memory cap crashes.

The mechanics for doing this work are pretty sound, but fairly code heavy.

BrewLAN

Splitting a single projectile - into multiple 'child' projectiles, is currently done in a couple of already existing weapons. The Cybran T2 Mobile Tactical Missile launcher unit, and the AEON T3/T4 Artillery Experimental.

You should look at how those scripts deal with creating new projectiles, based on the trajectory of the old one - while in flight.

There are several moving parts at work here.

First off, the GC is not on the Land layer, it's still technically on the seabed - and you don't have Water Vision, so to you, it's not visible. If you had WaterVision, in your blueprint, you'd be able to see him. Even though the GC is underwater, it still has normal Vision, so it can see you.

Second, your weapons are not likely allowed to hit units that are on the seabed AND below water. Whereas the GC's Eye beam weapon is allowed to fire when it's above the water level at targets that are above the water. This particular situation, might be improved by insuring that the bone, on the GC, that is above the water, is listed as one of it's 'Target Bones', as found in it's blueprint. In this way, your weapons would have a bone, that they can target, when it gets above the waves.

@destroier6 It's not a bug - and it's not the AIx Omni setting.

The stock campaign AI is almost entirely 'scripted' and isn't really doing anything but following the plan written for it.

There is a flaw in the targeting process, where an empty launcher will remain 'locked' on the target - which prevents other launchers, which are loaded, from firing at that missile - it's called the 'shooter cap'.

What needs to happen, is that shortly after firing (even when there are additional rounds in the launcher), the launcher needs to go 'offline', and drop it's target - which will allow other launchers to engage the missile. Now, this is how the launchers are meant to work, and most of the time they do this, but - if there are a lot of launchers involved, and the primary happens to go empty - there's little to no chance that the target will drop, in time, for another launcher to perform an intercept.

This is the same mechanic that keeps all your SMD's from firing at the same inbound missile - so it's not something to be disabled.

@Laso That's essentially how M28 (and many previous AI as well) performs. It has information it shouldn't, and does things with units that you would find it either impossible or incredibly difficult to do. It's not, and doesn't claim to be, a level playing field.

There have been several attempts over the last decade+, to loosen the source code from it's rights holder. All have been denied or rebuffed, even with significant monetary offers. The game still provides a small, but steady, revenue stream, so it's still viewed as a productive asset. While that situation is most certainly declining, year over year, I don't imagine that any offer south of $100k is going to get a whole lot of notice.

I'd like to hope that I'm wrong, and sometime soon - but that's how it stands.

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

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.

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.

The kind of crash you are describing is more consistent with something doing something illegal, rather than an out of memory error. Out of memory almost always will just dump you out to the desktop.

@Sainse Technically - the game can use up to 4GB of memory - but - due to the way that lua handles memory, the limit is about half of that. At some point, the number of units becomes the main reason that memory usage grows to that point (around 2GB) - and it will then simply crash to desktop.

The size of the map, and the number of units in the game, and to a lesser degree, the number of wrecks and props, contribute to the overall memory usage, for the main part. After that, the AI (and the number of them involved) plays the largest role in how memory is used up.

The game simply doesn't have the memory to support games that size - even if the performance could handle it.

There are a lot of other factors that can contribute to the 'threat' of a unit, beyond DPS, namely range, mobility & protection (HP) - all have a part to play in how 'threatening' a unit can be - and a discussion of those is likely beyond the scope of the question here. I'm not familiar with the contents of the FAF threat calculation, in as much as dovetailing threat to DPS was a big step forward when we introduced it in LOUD back in the day, so I was pleased to see that idea taken to heart some years later in FAF. It was abundantly clear, especially for AI (and the long standing issues with Sorian AI's in particular) that threat assessment, and understanding how it works internally, has a lot of follow-on impact on how any AI 'reads' a situation, and the map. It impacts almost every aspect of activity, pathfinding for example, and building position and selection, to name just two.

The LOUD project has extensive work on threat values - and as you have already determined, modification of the blueprint values, at runtime, is the most accessible method of doing this. Your intent is aimed in the right direction - without meaningful, and accurate, threat values, no AI can make informed decisions based off of the data - and this is a long standing problem going back to the release of the game. No direction was provided, so many unit authors just dropped in values that made sense to them, and were not related to any particular capability of the units.

Since you have no surefire method of controlling the load order of mods, your blueprint changes are at the mercy of any other unit mods that may alter the values. As Maudlin identified, he sidestepped this issue by performing calculations similar to what you are proposing, but doing so on the fly, during the game. This gets around any question of the values in use, but it may have performance concerns - doing it during loading has no impact on the performance of the game itself.

DPS calculations are going to be an issue, as unit authors are not exactly consistent in how they arrive at the kind of damage output their units will put out. There are MANY combinations and control values that can impact the actual DPS calculation - it goes far beyond the 'RateOfFire' blueprint value, which many consider to be the 'be all and end all' of DPS calculations. It is not - and anyone who has done sufficient weapon 'rigging' can tell you the many pitfalls, in the blueprint values, that can lead to an erroneous DPS value.

One issue that is not addressable is the impact of unit enhancements on DPS - as the blueprint threat values, once set, are static for the duration.

The expectations are always what get you.

Aside from the basic sound configuration - which it appears you have done - most motherboard manufacturers install an applet (usually found down in the system tray - near the time - that allows additional audio controls. These applications are typically the cause of the problem - uninstall them if you don't absolutely need them.