aliens

Author Topic: Reduce enemy suicides  (Read 936 times)

Offline Delian

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Reduce enemy suicides
« on: February 19, 2024, 08:07:54 pm »
When enemies are wielding explosive or incendiary weapons, it seems they don't care if they're standing within the blast radius. This is problematic because, well, from time to time they suicide this way. Note that this is not a problem in vanilla games, since enemies don't really get a large variety of such weapons there.

I'm not looking for a complicated solution, but:
If an enemy has a choice of using two weapons, they should prefer to use the one with which they won't cause substantial damage to themselves.

It recently happened to me that an enemy had a knife and a molotov cocktail. I was standing in melee range of them. So what did they do? They blasted me and themselves with molotov, instead of killing me with a knife lol. So a simple solution would be to prefer a melee weapon in melee range, if the other choice is a weapon with a blast radius.

A more complicated solution would involve blast radius and damage calculation on all the units caught in the blast radius, and to only use the blast radius weapon if the damage on friendly units would be a factor lower than the damage done on enemy units (either because of resistances, or radius damage dissipation). Could also include a random chance to just go and blast anyway.
An even more complicated solution would also involve moving away from the target until the calculation would be favorable enough.
But yeah, I think the first simple melee solution is good enough.

Offline Yankes

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Re: Reduce enemy suicides
« Reply #1 on: February 19, 2024, 08:22:18 pm »
Aliens already check what fail into explosion radius, and if more targets are than ally in it, they they decide to blast given potion.

Offline Delian

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Re: Reduce enemy suicides
« Reply #2 on: February 19, 2024, 10:21:52 pm »
Thanks for the fast reply.

Oops. Nevermind then. Then what most likely happened was, the enemy decided to target a different unit with molotov, but my CQC intercepted it, causing it to hit itself.

I suppose this is a problem with CQC itself, when intercepting arcing shot weapons.

Well, it happened to me 3 times in a row, which is a bit odd, so maybe something else is going on. I'll see if I can reproduce it later.
« Last Edit: February 19, 2024, 11:22:07 pm by Delian »