Is there a minimum weapons range?

[RogerBacon]

I just watched my cruiser follow an enemy that is was ordered to attack and it never fired. It stayed right on top of the enemy because it was faster and the enemy fired by my ship never fired.
Do some weapons have a minimum distance requirement?

[Aeson]

Not that I'm aware of, unless you count whatever logic is used to try to avoid friendly fire with area weapons. Are you sure you didn't just miss your ship's weapons firing? If the ships are really more or less on top of one another, or if there are a lot of ships firing a lot of weapons in the area, it can be a bit difficult to distinguish which shots originated from which ship.

[RogerBacon]

Thanks. I'm not sure what happened but I know my ship could have 1-shotted the guy if he fired so I know he didn't fire. I won't worry about it. Things happen.

[stuart3]

In a recent game, starting in prewarp, I declined to pay off the early pirates despite the fact that my spaceport wasn't yet complete. The pirate escort sat over my part-built spaceport without firing until it was completed, at which point the port destroyed the escort.

I tried the same thing in my next game and the escort blew my incomplete port away.

[stuart3]

Having given a bit more thought to that, I have realised that the reason why I didn't pay off the pirates in the earlier game was because my spaceport was close to completion and had enough weaponry built to have seen off the escort. It's just that neither of them fired until the port was completed.

In the second game my port hadn't yet built any of it's weapons. Perhaps that's the reason the pirate felt safe to attack that time?

[Bingeling]

Was the cruiser member of a larger fleet?

What I believe may have happened is something similar to what I have seen.

A large fleet sits around a colony (inside the gravity well). A single enemy troop transport attacks the colony. The guys around the troop transport don't fire at it.

And why? This is my guess. In empire options is the overmatch setting, which probably says something about "how much focus should be given to one particular enemy". 2-3 cruiser in the defending fleet actually starts to attack the troop transport, but they are out of range (on the opposite side of the colony). Which allows the troop transport to travel between other fleet members without them doing anything. Because the AI thinks that "3 cruisers are enough", and does not consider that they are actually out of range and we want this attacker dead right now.

I think I have also seen ships chasing one enemy in a fleet battle, while being out of range (by a little bit). They do not take pot shots at nearby targets of opportunity.

The above is why I always put overmatch at the highest level (5:1?) and tend to do all important colony defense quite manually.

[johanwanderer]

Two more things to consider:

1. Is the cruiser trying to capture the enemy ship? Once a fleet has launched boarding pods onto a target, it will stop firing at it.

2. Is the cruiser fueled? Without fuel to power the reactors, it won't fire its weapons.

[RogerBacon]

I found the problem. Part of my mod had a bug in it that extended my weapon range to an extreme value by mistake. Since weapons won't fire again until the existing projectile reaches its maximum range, the weaponas would never fire again if they missed. I've since corrected the bug and now everything is fine.

[Damiac]

So Roger are you modding the game EXE or DLLs, or are you just modding stuff in the text files? It sounded like you had gotten into some deeper stuff digging into the DLLs, and it'd be great if more resources could be exposed, to someday perhaps allow a fan made patch that fixes so many of the bugs that were left in the game.

[Hattori Hanzo]

ORIGINAL: RogerBacon

I found the problem. Part of my mod had a bug in it that extended my weapon range to an extreme value by mistake. Since weapons won't fire again until the existing projectile reaches its maximum range, the weaponas would never fire again if they missed. I've since corrected the bug and now everything is fine.

do your mod have a name ?

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Damiac

So Roger are you modding the game EXE or DLLs, or are you just modding stuff in the text files? It sounded like you had gotten into some deeper stuff digging into the DLLs, and it'd be great if more resources could be exposed, to someday perhaps allow a fan made patch that fixes so many of the bugs that were left in the game.

It's a DLL mod. I've made some changes to give me more control over my empire (such as my semi state-run passenger ships https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u3ifDsJSPY
Up through Legends the DLLs were open but for Universe they encrypted them, wrapped them in an exe and obfuscated the whole thing. It took me awhile to get everything in a readable state. Normally I post DLL mods for most games I play but shice the developers have taken such steps to make doing that difficult I believe that shows intent that they don't want any such mods so I won't be doing that for this game. As I posted in another thread, it is very rare for companies to do this. Not even Microsoft obfuscates their code but whatever.

ORIGINAL: Hattori Hanzo

ORIGINAL: RogerBacon

I found the problem. Part of my mod had a bug in it that extended my weapon range to an extreme value by mistake. Since weapons won't fire again until the existing projectile reaches its maximum range, the weaponas would never fire again if they missed. I've since corrected the bug and now everything is fine.

do your mod have a name ?

Not really. it's just a bunch of stuff I've thrown together as I go. At one time I was thinking of posting it but not any more. See above.

[Damiac]

That's really too bad, you've done some good work exposing those DLLs, and the game really needs at least one more big bug fixing patch, which I assume your work would have made possible. I know elliot didn't seem to respond over in your other thread though...

It's weird that they sold universe as being the extremely moddable version, and then took steps to make it less moddable...

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Damiac

It's weird that they sold universe as being the extremely moddable version, and then took steps to make it less moddable...

Yeah, REALLY aggressive steps too. They even updated the obfuscation between the release of Universe and the last patch. I almost gave up at that point.

[Bingeling]

You do not want it moddable beyond what it is design for, since that may cause people to arrive with problems that is no fault of the developer [;)]

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

You do not want it moddable beyond what it is design for, since that may cause people to arrive with problems that is no fault of the developer [;)]

Well, it's kinda implied that if you are rewriting code its 'at your own risk'. That's why I started this thread asking if there was a minimum weapons range instead of saying "wah wah my weapons won't fire". I knew there was a chance the behavior was my fault and, as it turns out, I was right.

[Damiac]

Well... unfortunately there are lots of problems that are the fault of the developer, and they don't seem interested in fixing them, so taking drastic steps to prevent us from being able to fix them is quite unfortunate. The fact that it was the "super moddable version" only adds salt to the wound...

So I hope you will rethink keeping it all to yourself Roger, because it sounds like you've done a lot of good work that could really help the modding community. If matrix has a problem with it you could always take it down, right? Either way, it's your work, and your decision.

[Bingeling]

ORIGINAL: RogerBacon

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

You do not want it moddable beyond what it is design for, since that may cause people to arrive with problems that is no fault of the developer [;)]

Well, it's kinda implied that if you are rewriting code its 'at your own risk'. That's why I started this thread asking if there was a minimum weapons range instead of saying "wah wah my weapons won't fire". I knew there was a chance the behavior was my fault and, as it turns out, I was right.

How considerate of you to mention that in the first post.