Using fighters as missile

going to have to give fighters an ability, and make their attack to zero damage, and make the ability do damage to your targets, and make the fighters get a makedead buff.

take a look at the advent scout's suicide ability. cause thats basicly what you are doin.

It kills the entire squad, so you'll also have to make your squads only have one fighter...

I tried doing this a while back and ran into a couple of problems...

1. Spawning SC with abilities, even on autocast, will cause erratic behaviors.

2. Minidumps will occasionally occur for unknown reasons when you have a specific number of these missile craft...

Type "Ability's on strikecraft"/bombers"/fighters" into the search bar at the top and look at what your allowed on fighters

what I would do is erm.... 

Decrease fighter weapon range to about 100 and give them a Very slow firing very damaging weapon.

then give them a Passive buff ability that uses OnWeaponFired - 1 second delay Makedead, or enough damage to suicide

they will fly in, shoot there weapon once at such close range you don't see mimicking missile impact damage , then die like a missile from the ability

this gets around Alot of the issues / minidumps giving fighters ability's that can target other ships causes.

entityType "Ability"
buffInstantActionType "ApplyBuffToSelf"
instantActionTriggerType "AlwaysPerform"

V

V

V

• instantAction
      buffInstantActionType "ApplyBuffToSelf"
• instantActionTriggerType "OnWeaponFired"
      numWeaponClasses 1
      weaponClassForWeaponPassive "MISSILE"
      passiveWeaponEffectChance
          Level:0 1.000000
          Level:1 1.000000
          Level:2 1.000000
          Level:3 1.000000
• buffType "BuffRevengeFromBeyondDamage"
•     effectInfo
          effectAttachInfo
              attachType "Center"
          smallEffectName "Boom"
          mediumEffectName "BadaBoom"
          largeEffectName "BigBadaboom"
          soundID "BOOOOOM"

Cool.  Does it work?

Wouldn't work.  The squad gets the ability, not the fighter, so you'd have to transfer it to the fighter through ApplyBuffToTargetsInRadius which is never a sure thing.  Sure, you can use a short range and a target filter, but there never is any guarantee.

again, have only one fighter in the squad...

does usesFighterAttack FALSE just make it.... do attack runs?

or make it  "use" "fighters" to "Attack" ?

something I have never tried changing to True

usesFighterAttack is a bool for whether or not it makes attack runs like fighters and corvettes do.  (Corvettes have the value set to true while all other frigates and capitals are set to false.)

What about making alternative strike craft(like the advent mines) and have the 'new craft' be something that explodes on creation without requiring a target, like the starbase's self destruct but scaled down immensely. This way the fighters might retain their normal behaviors or just 'deploy entity' with another ability that that explodes like that and depends on an enemy being in range, not an enemy being targeted, this kind of layout seemed to work for the DS team with their EWP bombers and gunships without causing any big hiccups.

Again, this is all kind of theory, and it would probably be best if you just put this sort of thing on carriers, otherwise it may start doing some crazy things with the AI.

The main issue with this is that you can no longer focus fire.

I really don't understand the desire to morph strike craft into missiles. It would just look odd to me having them linger around the carrier and be able to dock/launch missiles.

Now suicide strikecraft does have more merit especially against Imperial Star Destroyers. Try giving a buff to the Carrier you want to have suicide units on and have it use ApplyBuffToTargetsLinked. The ability could be passive or not depending on what your goal is. You then might be able to reduce the range of the weapons as suggested and use the OnWeaponFired bit to self destruct and do damage to the target as part of the buff chain.

The trick is you have to go through the carrier to apply buffs directly to the fighters.

Now if they added a ApplyBuffToSquadMembers then we'd be set.

Where ships launch nukes / missiles at each other but you can intercept them with Point defense and fighters.

think the Idea is to have something like Nexus I remember Nuke launch and sending every single fighter to intercept it

I was searching youtube for a good example

think the issue is the Missiles (as fighters) will just orbit the friendly ship when not in combat and look silly.

Unless you can find some way of launching fighters only in combat.

Perhaps with Antimatter limitations.

Could have your Capital ship only have 200 Antimatter, and the cost of launching a fighter is 300 but they build instantly, then have a targeted ability that needs an Enemy which also increases your maximum antimatter by 100.

this would... "launch" a Missile which would immediately attack your target and fly to 100 range to Explode.

Could make it do 2000 damage to all in a huge AOE on impact(this could also be used to kill the fighter/missile), just have to make it slow enough for players to Respond and intercept it with there own fighters/PD to avoid the booom.

You could give the squad(missile) a second ability that Either deals a constant 1 damage a second, or Kills the fighter after 20 seconds to Mimic Fuel / flight time, so you won't end up with a load of missiles stacked up

No one suggested magnetize?

There's a working system for this in SOA2, AbilityBorgDroneMissile.  Feel free to copy and edit.  It's probably overly complcated for your needs, but it should get you where you're going.  The "missiles" will impact the hull of their targets, as opposed to exploding nearby.

oh wow, nice one psychoak. i had forgotten about magnetize hull, all you'd really need to do is alter the damage done and make it select friendly strike craft as opposed to enemy craft. Seems like the biggest leaps we have in the modding community happen when someone takes a step back from all the overcomplicated solutions and points out the simplest and more often, best fix x.x

Umm..  Magnetize is an overtimeAction to all things in the radius.  That would force you to only focus-fire one ship at a time which wouldn't work either.

you could make an AOE ability on the strike craft that , when in range, could apply the buff to all in the area and just make that buff be a version of magnetize like stated above. With that all the strike craft should smack into the nearest buffed target and you could make the buff persist at whatever time frame you want it to.

is there a way to make Magnetize apply only to one type of strikecraft? cause if yes, this would be a cool way of making Drone Weapons in the Stargate mods

It works just fine, I've already done it.  The Borg in SOA2 have a cruise missile launcher, see AbilityBorgDroneMissile for a working example.  The timing takes a little work when you're using fighter movement, but it's quite simple.  Not at all one of my more difficult ability systems.

Were you responding to this with the above psychoak? Making a particular type of strikecraft a target?

No, but it works just fine for that too.  Magnetize comes with the normal filter capabilities, so if you have PhaseMissiles on just one type, you can further restrict it quite easily.

It's not necessary however.  I set the missile ability up in simple fashion.  The magnetism is set by the fighter itself, using a single target radius application of exceedingly short range.  By giving it an even shorter attack range, it runs itself right into it's target, triggers the magnetism, and draws itself in.

For an alternative method for differentiating between classes of strike craft, look at the Dominion strike craft instead, the Jem'Hadar fighters have a suicide function not used by the Breen bombers.  You can filter based on weapon type using OnWeaponFired.