Flak Frigates not behaving as expected

from Sins2 Forums

TL;DR: Flak Frigates, given no specific attack orders, were fruitlessly attacking large, armoured targets and ignored missiles streaming past them.

Long version

In a recent game one of my planets was coming under repeated pirate attack, and I noticed that the Pirate Corsair's missiles were extremely effective at destroying orbital structures. So I decided to augment my defences with some Garda Flak Frigates (the description mentions they excel at intercepting strikecraft and missiles) however, during the next pirate wave, I noticed that the Flak Frigates were shooting exclusively at the Corsairs (against whom PD autocannon bullets just kinda bounce off) and not the missiles they were firing, so they were offering no protection to my structures.

Based on the Garda Flak Frigate's description and it's general purpose, I would expect it to prioritise missiles over heavy cruisers.

Given that I've seen Garda's behaving as expected in other situations, I expect this was to do with the small size of the gravity well bringing the Corsairs into weapons range but in that case I would still expect defence frigates to favour shooting down fighters and missiles over attacking large warships.

Some particulars

- The Gardas were part of a mixed fleet, alongside Light Frigates

- The fleet had been given no specific attack or movement orders, the AI was wholly in control of what the ships did

What I think would help

- Some tweak to the AI such that, in the absence of any specific attack orders, Gardas ignore anything larger than a strikecraft when strikecraft and missiles are in range.

- A passive ability on the Garda that can be toggled by the player to have it focus on strikecraft and/or missile defence (the advantage here is that they can then be in a mixed fleet but can be set not to attack whatever large target you tell the overall fleet to attack but continue concentrating on point defence).

This would obviously apply to the Advent and Vasari defence frigates as well.

tec garda flak frigate point defence sins of a solar empire ii
6,499 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Sins2 Forums Top

I think it has to do with the priority attack section in the entity file for them... it's set up to attack torpedoes but not missiles. Will attempt to change it tomorrow and see if that fixes it.

Reply #2 from Sins2 Forums Top

Thanks for the report. It's a bug. Will be fixed soon.

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Reply #3 from Sins2 Forums Top

Did some testing, they do target missiles in range but if they have already locked onto a target they tend to focus on that instead of any new missiles. You can test via sending any missile ship (I was using the Marza), and sending it to the nearest planet with a Garda defender. The Gardas will lock onto the Marza and not shoot at incoming missiles. If you send a single frigate first and send the Marza as the frigate is about to be destroyed the Gardas will attack missiles before they get into range to attack the Marza.

If you set Gardas to use ATTACK type circle_strafe or strafe_and_pull_away, and set the max range further than the autocannons they will attack any missiles until they are back in range of the Marza. Also weirdly the Left Rear turret tends to not fire at the primary target and will normally only attack missiles in range. Changing the priority target settings had little to no effect as far as I can tell with my limited knowledge of how the current code works.