Keeping ships at bay

Hello!

Is there any way to keep a ship that is in a system with a spob in it from visiting the spob? I have a ship that is, in game, by far to big to be manouvered near stations. It is so large that it has other, smaller escort ships that service it. I would like to prevent it from hovering around planets and stations.

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks,
Rik

Not that I know of.

I was recently told on the IRCchannel that giving AI ships an interceptor AI will keep them from landing on planets! Who would figure.

I wouldn't turst your source as far as I could throw them. An Interceptor type ship:

                       Seeks out his enemies, or parks in orbit around a planet
                       if he can't find any. Buzzes incoming ships to scan them
                       for illegal cargo. Also acts as "piracy police" by
                       attacking any ship that fires on or attempts to board
                       another, non-enemy ship while the interceptor is
                       watching.

"Parks in orbit", from my observations, means sits on top of a spob waiting for another ship to enter the system. This doesn't sound like what you want.

Now, I seem to have accidently found a ship/govt combo that does something like what you want, at a big price. If a ship (with a trader type AI) has no fuel, and the govt of the dude that creates it has a very low tolerance for being outnumbered (try 0), it will try to run away. However, because it has no fuel, it can't enter hyperspace. So it sits right where it is, generally in open space near a planet (that's where the game places ships when it generates a system).

Unfortunately, this will probably only work in a system where the ship has enemies, although it seems to be possible to confuse the issue for the AI by making some-one in the system both an enemy AND an ally. Also, the ship cannot make a hyperjump, no matter what you do.

Yeah, that's no good.

Okay, there are two ways to do this. There's the sure way, and there's the unsure way.

The kinda unsure way is just using the intercepter AI and having a couple ships in the system at all times. It will be too busy scanning the ships to land.

The very sure way is to make it part of a reinforcement fleet and then call in the reinforcements. Reinforcement fleets only fly between all the ships in the system.

I haven't tried this, but it might be possible to make it park away from a planet by giving it an alternate/primary sprite about 500 pixels in diameter. This may have some consequences in how easy it is for a shot to hit the ship, though...

Are you mad? That's a sure way to slow down the graphics engine or cause other such problems.

My point would be just to ignore the issue and say that, though the ship may appear to be above a planet, it is in fact far from it thanks to the third dimension (which is very practical to explain why ship don't run into asteroids and each other, why some hyperlinks cross, etc...)

Yes, I guess I was being a bit mad there. Having several of those ships on-screen slowed down the game very badly (on a brand-new iBook), and it didn't work anyway. Also, I was using a 512x512 black square for the graphic, and the same with a white pixel in each corner for the mask, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been...

Anyway, good luck solving this.

Give it a landing sprite that puts it farther from the planet. Of course, that would probably mess up the targetting system... And if it is that huge, you would have a real problem getting the landing sprite to make it far away enough to make it seem like it isn't near enough to land, and the chance of this actually working with anything bigger than a Leviathan is very slim. Hell, don't even try it, unless the ship is not that much larger than a Leviathan.

Leviathan: 144144
A'ahait: 400400

rmx256, on Feb 6 2005, 04:42 PM, said:

Leviathan: 144144
A'ahait: 400400
View Post

I think you know not to try it.

Didn't anyone read my post (#6)? I gave a solution that was far more sane, if you could pull it off, then doing a landing animation thing with a ship 4 times the size of a Leviathan..

This post has been edited by Phyvo : 07 February 2005 - 09:56 AM

What do you need a 300,000 ton ship for, anyhow?

Also, does this ship have to move as an AI? If so, Phyvo prolly has the best idea.

If not...
You could give it 0 speed, and give it an outfit that gives it actual speed if captured by the player... or just make it uncaptureable.

You know... even a kilometer long ship, huge by nova standards, would be dwarfed by any sort of planet.

You just have to accept these scale issues and move on.

I'm pretty sure that dudes/ships with the Warship AI will only dock at spobs which they are allies with. For example, in the default Nova scenario Association warships will not dock at Federation spobs. They don't need to be enemies, just not allies.

Of course, this is only an option if the ship should have all of the other warship behaviors, and not be allied with any spob governments.

Has anyone played with 'planet-type ships'? How do they behave. I can't imagine that the engine would allow a planet-type ship to land on a planet? Or would this be another logical blind-spot in Nova?

I'm no specialist of planet-type ships, but from what I understand, it's just to make a ship sensible to planet-type weapons instead of standard ones, and nothing more. Of course for it to make sense the plug dever would be to give this flag to ships that cannot move (such as planet batteries), or move very slowly, or something like that. At any rate, stuff that is technically a ship but isn't seen as one (such as a fake station).

Planet batteries could merely be small spöb stations with weapons, I'd think. Unfortunately I haven't played with Planet-types at all. Death Star is all I can think of.

~ SP

Planet type versus normal type weapons are like MDC/SDC weapons from the Palladium rpgs... Kind of exclusive to each other, aren't they?