Friendly Fire

[Senator Popefist]

Is there a mod or a way to turn off friendly fire? Or at least the reputation loss as a result of it? I built a defense station in front of the TC gate to stem the Xenon flow. However, Arg sends in destroyers from time to time and get hit by the stations plasma/flak turrets. They miss like crazy and it pretty much guarantees them turning red on me.

[Sabaithal]

Or just make the friendly fire to "friendly" factions much more tolerant? Would be nice to not have to constantly load quicksaves because one stray bullet hit someone and now they are after your ass.

But if they accidentally hit me, they just radio "Sorri!!"

[Senator Popefist]

This is enough to make me quit tbh. I spent so much time grinding out the money and rep (didn't get SETA for a while). Now that the station is built, I have to tear it down because the AI is stupid. Hell, I would take having the game make the turrets not fire at the area around an ally to be a fix at this point.

[Multox]

I agree. Would love to turn off FF somehow.

[Jacquesera]

Same here, I let my fleet protect a construction ship which was building my defense station and surprise some of my ships shot it during a fight against xenon that wanted to destroy my defense station, so the construction ship turned red too and is gone now. It was a point where I thought that game is not worth it. The AI shoots and flies like there is no intelligence in AI. So friendly fire is commen.

[Gregorovitch]

This a pretty complex topic (for a number of reasons). There is a warm thread on the Egosoft board about it for those interested in the debate:

https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=146&t=425794&sid=3f66162db44d061a5a764f6d7f3c066e

Some of the interesting points are:

* bullets (and the like) are physically modelled and take time to reach targets, consequently with ships moving about left and right it is not possible for AI controlled ships/turrets to "know" reliably if they are going to hit a friendly when they shoot. Or a human for that matter.

* Many "solutions" for this problem are too easily exploitable.

* There is already a threshold in place where allies/neutrals will overlook a certain number of stray shots hitting them. This is not obvious to the player who only notices when the ally goes hostile.

Devs are continuously reviewing the issue. They are particularly aware of the issue with turrets spraying ordinance all over the place. Generally if you are aware of this issue when playing it is, most of the time, possible to avoid FF incidents with the exercise of due care and diligence. However in situations were you are already involved in a battle and an ally or neutral joins in deliberately of just flies into the fray by happenchance it can be extremely difficult bordering on impossible to avoid. There are some examples of that posted in the thread I linked.

[HoloByteus]

There's no need to turn it off, just have the automated guns not fire as part of their software if there's a friendly hit, player controlled guns omitted. This tech would be part of any weapon development program where AI is used.

I have to laugh when my destroyers fire on each other or even get destroyed because they get to close to each other and get flak'ed to death. Pathing needs to keep capitals from entering a bubble around them.

[Sabaithal]

OR, with AI vs AI, if the factions the ships belong to are 'ALLIED' to each other, just make the hits do no damage/not count (unless the player makes an attack order against them).

As infuriating as it is when something turns hostile due to a stray bullet fired by the player, its doubly so when its a stray bullet fired by an AI ship you own, because there was nothing you could have done to prevent, or cause that from happening.

I know this isn't easy to code in, but this needs to be done. I can definitely see why people would quit this game after this happens X many times.

[Senator Popefist]

I feel if this issue isn't addressed in some way, there's only so many weapon choices for fleet battles. Missiles and lasers would be about it as everything else has the potential to miss terribly. I tried to resolve the terrible aiming by swarming the area with turrets. I figured 60 plasma turrets must be able to take down a destroyer with some level of efficiency. It actually does, just doesn't care whose destroyer it is.

I've also had my own small defender ships wiped out by the flak cannons I put up as well. To be honest, I don't mind the FF but only if it pertains to how it affects the player controlled ship. At least in that situation, my actions could have consequences. However, it just makes more sense to turn it off for any bullet shot by the AI with them being so random. The efficiency would be terrible (it already is) but at least I wouldn't be double punished for it by taking a rep hit as well.

[Plaz]

I have found turrets (especially the dam flack turrets) do cause a lot of friendly fire when firing ordnance all over the place, especially if your in fleet combat and neutral / allied ships come help or vice versa. It can be a real pain in combat as well because by the time you notice the first shots hitting the target the next 6 shots have already fired and the ally is hostile. I can also see this problem being hard to fix, maybe adding in state fuses on turret modules as an upgrade might be nice (by this i mean any predicted hit on an ally is detonated mid flight), could run it as a computer module installation for a ship like docking computers and trade computers so on. Just and idea really.

[Sabaithal]

Originally posted by Senator Popefist:

I feel if this issue isn't addressed in some way, there's only so many weapon choices for fleet battles. Missiles and lasers would be about it as everything else has the potential to miss terribly. I tried to resolve the terrible aiming by swarming the area with turrets. I figured 60 plasma turrets must be able to take down a destroyer with some level of efficiency. It actually does, just doesn't care whose destroyer it is.

I've also had my own small defender ships wiped out by the flak cannons I put up as well. To be honest, I don't mind the FF but only if it pertains to how it affects the player controlled ship. At least in that situation, my actions could have consequences. However, it just makes more sense to turn it off for any bullet shot by the AI with them being so random. The efficiency would be terrible (it already is) but at least I wouldn't be double punished for it by taking a rep hit as well.

And this doesn't account for what the 'allied' AI might be using. Such as plasma and cannons. And if they hit your ships I believe it still counts as friendly fire, and they turn hostile.

[Warlock Raccoon]

Regardless of how difficult it is to program, it definitely feels like it should be mandatory. I don't really think main weapons are an issue, since they're player controlled, but it does lead to early game criminal hunting feeling really surgical and less engaging than it could be when people give you warnings about property damage cause you were hunting a criminal and missed once.

The current threshold in the game feels extremely low and is clearly damage based instead of duration based. While I did get warnings while piloting S ships, the moment I got into the captain's chair of L and XL ships, I found myself consistently and instantly skipping the "warning" and allies would instantly turn hostile during instances of friendly fire. This has made fighting to defend allied large ships an inherently risky endeavor and defending allied stations basically impossible without aggroing the station.

Also, it's infuriating when you forget to change your turret behavior back to "defend" from "attack all enemies" after getting out of combat, and then having your ship turrets go ham on and promptly aggro a station because a petty unarmed criminal showed its face. That's just the best.

[Eggselsior]

The biggest problem i have with the current system is that it kills dogfights around npc stations.

Ianamus Zura's Teladi Trade Station getting sieged and i want to join in the fight. Already knowing that my turrets even fully gimbal modded WILL aggro the station i turn em off by setting them to missile defense and still: me using shatter gunns and basically playing bumper car with Xenon P's i still occasionally hit or indirectly rickochet/splash dmg the station and get aggro.

I think it's good that you have to watch your fire around stations but in such cases it completely contradicts any chance of fun, action driven gameplay completely.

Create a some sort of recognition bubbling stations setting player to station- and heck also player to station vesselsdmg to zero - for the time of the engagement - or else this is just yet another thing for the ai u can just watch as a bystander....

[Playbahnosh]

Here: Apologize For Attack [www.nexusmods.com]

Is it a bit cheaty? Perhaps. Does it work? Yes.

[Jacquesera]

I mean beside the friendly fire option that is difficult to adapt there´s also a pretty easy to solve problem. Your own ships can accidently shoot each other.

If you got a big fleet that does happen not too rarely. You know how the AI flies, sometimes they just crash into the thing they are shooting at and if you got a dozen more ships shooting at that target that might damage your own ships.
The bigger your fleet the more ships are crashing into the target while a lot of ships are shooting at it.
Has anyone else made that experience?

[Playbahnosh]

Originally posted by Jacquesera:

Has anyone else made that experience?

It's called the AutoPillock™ and has been a main "feature" of X games since forever. Basically the autopilot and AI pathing in X games sucks terribly, crashes ships into asteroids, stations, each other, etc. all the time. And it gets worse the more ships there are and the less powerful your PC is. In X3TC is was straight up suicide to let the autopilot fly fast ships, especially the Spitfyre and Springblossom. It seems to be a little better in X4 after one and a half years of patching, but I doubt we'll ever get rid of the AutoPillock™.