Luring Enemies to a specific part of the sub?

[GameJayRemy]

I've been wondering about this for a while now, more so with the sub I'm building and the discussions of "Stealth Mode"

I know depth charges can lure enemies away from the sub, and supposedly Active Sonar can attract enemies to your sub.

Really the only ideas that come to mind is messing with settings on the Sonars you use for shuttles/drones and attaching it to wall or room with a switch that actives it. Or using a depth charge inside the ship but I feel like that would need a silly amount of fail safes to keep a NPC or even another player from using an explosive version inside the ship.

Has anyone else tried putting something together to lure enemies to specific spots, inside or outside of the ship?

[AlienJesus]

Technically yes a decoy depth charge dropped inside the ship while it is in stealth would make the enemies try and get to it. It wouldnt be super accurate though as enemies have a "path of least resistance" principle to get to a target. Where they calculate the hp required to deplete to get to target combined with their attack power.

I think a turret would be a better option. Search lights dont have "ai target" but turret lights do. |So you could set up a system to lure them to whatever turret spot you like, shut off the light, then they would just attack whatever part of the sub they were closest to before the turret light shut off.

One thing I wondered, but havent tested, is the alarm parts. I mean they emit light and sound, I just havent bothered to test or look at the source code to see if they have "ai target" like turret lights do.

If they do have ai target then you could simply install alarms on the outside of your ship in locations you will want them to be.

All of that depends on your sub itself having good stealth systems though.

You can also abuse their path of least resistance logic by using forcefield hatches and or moon pools. If they are close to an entry point into your sub that does not have a door, hatch or shell barring entry, but instead uses the hull cheese moon pools use then they will simply bypass attacking your shell and try and enter that area in most cases.

I have made kill rooms using that principle on some subs. They beeline right for the easy entry, but a motion sensor with a turret is in the room and it just mows them down until they are ded.

Keep in mind though not all monsters "try and enter your sub". Entities like mollocks just want to destroy you, not enter for a target like the reactor as mudraptors and husk puppets do.

[GameJayRemy]

That's actually what I'm doing, I have a bottom floor attached to a Moon pool.
There's double doors leading to hatch that goes up to the next floor.

The control panel has a switch that juices the turrets and turns on the motion sensor. When they receive power the doors to the area shut so NPC'S don't wander down there. It also toggles the turret lights, so if the system isn't active, the lights are off and when it is the lights are on.

I started this when another ship design didn't go (Because of crawlers latching into the bottom of the sub) so it needs a redesign but gave me the idea to try this.

[AlienJesus]

Yeah man, keep the hatches/ doors leading outside, but make them hidden and no AI target. Attach them to a motion sensor that opens for monsters, but not humans, and they will go right into that room.

Ngl though, it kind of negates any threat lesser mobs pose tbh. Mobs that seek entry into your sub are insanely easy to cheese into killing themselves. But hey, how you want to play is totally up to you and I dont support that whole "game isnt fun if it isnt brutally hard" nonsense.

I have a Babylon 5 Shadow vessel that has pulse laser beams, a nuclear splody drone and full electrified shell so mobs can even breach the shell. Made that just because I wanted to pwn face stuff in the last Biome after they killed me like 50x.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2901470381

Here is the sub folder if you want to check it out. Just dont upload it, or any of its systems, to the workshop pls. And yes, it has a lighting map bug....dont try and put in 150 neon lights or game gets angry. And I think the Agamemnon has the electrified shell, havent installed that onto nemesis yet. Nemesis just has normal plates on 5 sec timers. (I got poopy and stopped working on it after the lighting map bug came).

https://mega.nz/folder/6AcnjL4a#_NCiL5RQuNppDJxK_WmMxQ

[GameJayRemy]

Easy to cheese? You mean altering stats and giving easier entry to certain rooms?

My other thought was reworking the hull to my ship and making the hp in certain spots to the room weaker. I'll deff give that a try with the door bit.

Oh, yeah I remember this sub. I made a thread a while back and you posted what you had done up to that point. I really like the look of it.

Which, I tried the same idea for the indoor killing turret on the outside first (that ship that I have to rework I mentioned)

But it didn't go very well, the idea is essentially dual rail guns that have 0 turn radius hooked up to roughly 12 sensors. They were in sets of two, and each set was hooked up to lights.

the idea was when an enemy would swim close, the red lights would light up, if they moved towards the turret, the yellow light would turn on and if they were in line of sight then the green turret would turn on. Queuing the player to press the button to try to hit the enemy.

I have to rework the whole ship that's on, the lights just rarely activated and it could be something simply like only fast enemies moved through that particular area or something silly. It was part of a set where A tier one sub goes to tier 2 then tier 3 and is expanded. (So you can see most of the tier 1 part of the ship built into the tier 2 version.)

After I finish this build I'm going back to working on the set.

While I don't want stuff to be a cake a walk, I do want this to deal with those buggers that break in. Not necessarily mitigate their threat completely. But we shall see, Im wiring stuff still so I haven't even gotten to test it in an actual game yet. Just in the editor to make sure stuff I'm throwing together doesn't work completely.

Oh I use Neon lights to decorate, like a lot, but they're mostly turned off and the base is colored because you cant rotate normal letters in this game.

[AlienJesus]

Easy to cheese means you can make them attack certain parts or enter moon pools easily. And yes lower the shell HP will make them attack that part, but the calculation is a bit more complex as it takes into consideration speed of sub and distance to target. So that makes mobs just attack whatever is closest in most instance.

They basically decide "How much time to break this shell I am right beside, compared to how much time to travel to weaker spot and destroy it". So if HP difference are large, like most shells are 500hp and the parts you want them at are 50hp, yeah they will go to the parts you want. But if its 100hp and the other shell is 50hp, they wont.

And my mistake with the neon lights was placing them, moving them around, testing, cycling the light map from editor off an on. It just eventually made the entire subs lightmap bug out. I mean it still has lights, but new light sources dont register. I would have to delete every single light source and redo them all to fix it I suspect.

When I build powerful subs I tend to make its systems optional. Like on that ship above it has pulse lasers set to .010 reload for laser beams, but in the same spot it also has swappable chainguns and a toggle in the gun bays to switch between the two.

I use OP stuff as more of a "Holy Shiz" button if I really dont feel like restarting, or dying. Or if the crew just feels like melting some faces for some fun.

Oh and one thing lots of people dont seem to factor into their sub design is a game mechanic in relation to impacts. In the sub I linked it follows a "core systems in the core" principle. No junction boxes, oxy gens, nav consoles, or any other critical system is close to the outter hull, the front, or the back. That way you can smash full speed into something and only non critical systems will get their "damage radius" impact effect. It also keeps all core systems within a short run distance, even on large vessels. and prevents things like EMP artifacts from getting at your power systems.

It also follows the outer and inner hull principles. If you have inner walls not touching outer shells then your entire shell can be destroyed and all you have to fix is your inner walls and you can still be air tight and functional. And its not hull stacking cheating as inner walls are weak af.

[GameJayRemy]

Thats what I figured with the HP bit, for my build the moon chamber is the third floor down and the rest of the ship doesn't go down as far. Working theory was pushing it lower and to the front so its the most likely place they would run into it. Also building in the gap and putting discharge coils along the bottom of the ship it was my hope that the majority of them would try getting into the gap.

For your ship that's bugged, could you highlight everything to save it as a prefab then start a new save and just load the prefab? I've done that before and everything works as it should.

[AlienJesus]

Oh, thats a good idea for the lighting bug. Ill give it a try as light maps are in the save. I just hope it wont crash the game trying to save something so complex as an item assembly.

I made a ship a few years ago I called The Scoop. It had a vertical moon pool for almost the entire front of the ship and I would just scoop up the enemies with the front and the crew would stand in the scoop room and mow them down. Was super fun, but also super OP. Even got an entire mollock in there a few times.... they really dont like that and tore apart the entire room lol. Which was really funny to watch as they dont have any coding allowing them to move without water. It just kind of thrashed around until it broke through the floor and fell out.

Discharge coils wont prevent them from attacking anything btw. Even if the entire hull is charged they will just sit there trying to bite it, get stunned, wake up, bite it again, until they die. Even if they get shocked they have no coding to make them avoid danger or attacks. The end result would most likely be simply stunning them to death, not forcing them to enter your moon pool.

You could stun them with them and then scoop them up into your moon pool though. Also, if moving forward and you put a scoop shaped shell on the back side of your moon pool they will effectively float along the hull then get shoved into your moon pool as long as the sub moved forwards.

[AlienJesus]

Update: Your method to fix the lighting map worked! Thanks so much for that. Had literally stopped making subs for like a month because of that. Was on my last test before sea trials when it happened and it just bummed me out to do so much work and have it ruined.

Now it is fixed! And surprisingly the item assembly system is very very well coded. It barely even stuttered when saving and importing all of those items. So Kudos to the devs on making such a stable system as well.

[GameJayRemy]

You're very welcome ^.^ I've had to use that in the past for the one ship I have in the workshop, so I knew it worked to some extent. Glad you got it fixed!