catapult shouldnt auto-target enemies close to friendly units

[Tom Brewe]

With the recent introduction to area damage, I observed that in some situation when your army is fighting other units, and a catapult is already built up, it might auto-attack those enemy units, which is alright.

But what happens is, that also alot of friendly units die because of the close proximity of the infantry enemies that the catapult has targeted to allied units.

An idea to change the behaviour is to let the catapult check if around a certain range around the target are already friendly units, if so, attack something else.

[Niek]

Is it really necessary?

I remember famous RTS games who had not such feature. Apart from that you may want to sacrifice a few soldiers to kill an enormous army. But perhaps a few behaviour modes (aggressive, stand ground, no attack) could do the trick.

[Marcio]

Replying to niektb:

Is it really necessary?

I remember famous RTS games who had not such feature. Apart from that you may want to sacrifice a few soldiers to kill an enormous army. But perhaps a few behaviour modes (aggressive, stand ground, no attack) could do the trick.

I agree with niektb., it's normal, realistic and historic.

[Tom Brewe]

I see your point, that sometimes you want to sacrifice units, and that it is realistic that units die because of catapult fire. But not if a single cavalry unit attacks your formation of 40 and suddenly the catapult fires at that one unit and your whole formation is destroyed. True, using standground-mode, you could prevent it, but gameplay-wise its quite frustrating, because you did not actively sacrifice your troops.

I do like the idea that your units can be damaged, but i find in unrealistic, that a catapult would basically attack my army, when there are only few enemies attacking, or even worse only some workers walking along my troops to gather resources somewhere, and then the catapult kills of my troops, that were guarding the resources.

[sanderd17]

The problem isn't really the friendly fire, you can normally hold your catapults on time. But the splash damage it does is huge, look at this picture: ​http://imgur.com/0jevuiC

It aimed at the female, the rock fell somewhere completely else, but still killed the female, and even caused damage to the catapult.

I think the splash radius shouldn't be bigger than 10m, currently it's 20m.

We definitely need to look at this before A15.

[alpha123]

Fixed by r14322. Reopen this if you feel like the problem is still UnitAI’s targeting, but I am of sanderd17’s opinion that it was just because of the ridiculous splash radius.