Cannot Target Enemy Ship After Killing Entire Crew

[JohnWittle]

This might seem like a small problem. It might even be intentional.

Here's what happened:

Was playing as the Mantis ship. I had a Heal Bomb, and was using it gratuitously. I came across one of the new alien's ships; it had no oxygen. I paused and thought up a plan.

I would teleport my Mantis fighters over. They would quickly defeat the enemy's crew, and then I would Heal Bomb them before they die while waiting the 10 seconds for my teleporter to come back online.

It worked flawlessly. My fighters killed the enemy crew in a couple seconds flat. Then, as they're about to die, I try to launch my (fully charged) heal bomb. No can do. I can launch it at my ship, but not the enemy ship.

My fully leveled fighters die before my teleporter comes off cooldown .

I'd be willing to bet that the "entire enemy crew is dead" subroutine triggers the same method that gets triggered when you accept a ship's surrender or bribe, i.e. all your ability to attack the enemy ship gets locked down. This has unfortunate consequences.

While I admire code reuse as much as the next guy, this particular situation needs fixed.

[5thHorseman]

I assume you were in an asteroid field or some other "dangerous" event? Teleporter cooldown is instant when you're in a "safe" situation.

But yeah, that very specific and uncommon set of events was unfortunate to say the least. For me a Heal Bomb is a down payment on a medbay and nothing more, so I've never used one enough times to see this situation.

[JohnWittle]

Yeah, it was in an asteroid belt.

I agree that this situation is an extreme edge case. I can think of a couple easy ways to solve it, though. Depending on how the code is set up, you could either give every weapon an attribute "offensive" or "not offensive". The "accepting surrender" routine would then lock out all "offensive" weapons but still allow you to use "not offensive" weapons. Alternatively, you could allow the player to still use all of his weapons but the enemy ship becomes invulnerable; this would hurt immersion but would probably be easier to implement.

[Merudo]

Just make an exception for the Healing Bombs.

[Matthew]

I'll look into it. It was the asteroid environment that really got in the way when combined with the neutral status of the ship. You're right that there needs to be an exception in place.