Before Empire 2, nukes could be delivered only with bomb (special
mission 'n', airburst only) and launch (targeting sectors or
satellites only).
Empire 2 made nukes available for any kind of bombing, and for any
missile strike on sectors or ships. This included interdiction and
support missions. Nuclear-tipped anti-sats and bomb mission n were
removed.
Unfortunately, this was done in a messy way, which led to
inconsistencies and bugs. The problem is that ordinary damage affects
just the target, while nuke damage affects an area. Code dealing with
plane damage was designed for the former. Instead of rewriting it to
cope with area damage cleanly, nuke damage got shoehorned into
pln_damage(), the function to compute conventional plane damage, as a
side effect: computing damage blasted sectors in the area.
If the plane carried a nuke, pln_damage() returned zero (conventional)
damage. Without further logic, this simply bypassed the code to apply
damage to the target. This worked out okay when the target already
got damaged correctly by the side effect.
However, some targets are immune to the side effect: when interdicting
a move or explore command, the commodities being moved are not in any
sector.
For other targets, damage has effects other than damaging the target:
offensive and defensive support don't apply the (conventional) damage
to the target sector. Instead, they turn it into a combat bonus.
Without further logic, nuclear damage doesn't contribute to that.
To make all that work, pln_damage() returned the nuclear damage for
ground zero as well. Because a plane does either conventional or
nuclear damage, one of them is always zero.
Most callers simply ignored the nuclear damage, and applied only the
conventional damage.
Bug: land units and ships failed to retreat when pin-bombed or
missiled with a nuke. That's because they received zero conventional
damage.
The mission code flies planes and missiles and tallies their damage.
This mission damage included nuclear damage at ground zero (except for
missiles sometimes, see below), to make support and commodity
interdiction work. Unfortunately, this broke other things.
Bug: when bombers interdicted ships or land units, nukes first damaged
the ships or land units by the side effect, then again through mission
damage. Interdicting missiles had a special case to avoid this.
Bug: when interdicting move, explore or transport, nukes first damaged
the sector by the side effect, then again through mission damage's
collateral damage.
There may well be more bugs hiding in this mess.
The mess is not worth fixing. While the idea of interdicting and
supporting with nukes sounds kind of cool, I believe it's pretty
irrelevant in actual play.
Instead, go back to a variation of the original rules: nukes can be
delivered only through bomb mission 's' and launch at sectors.
Make arm reject marine missiles in addition to satellites, ABMs and
SAMs, and clear the mission. Make mission reject planes armed with
nukes. Oops when they show up in mission_pln_equip() anyway.
Make pln_equip() allow planes with nukes only for missions 's' and
't'.
Clean up pln_damage() to just compute damage, without side effect.
Change strat_bomb() and launch_missile() to detonate nukes. Simplify
the other callers. Parameter mission of msl_launch_mindam() is now
unused, remove it.
Missiles exploding on launch no longer set off their nukes. That was
pretty ridiculous anyway.
msl_equip() used mission_pln_equip(), which is for automatic defenses,
and therefore silent. Its users launch_as(), launch_missile() and
launch_sat() printed failure diagnostics based on assumptions on what
could go wrong.
Switch to the appropriate function for commands, pln_equip(), and
remove the guesswork. Implement mission 'i' there. When launching
from a foreign base, its owner now gets informed. Unimportant at this
time, as players can't easily deploy missiles in foreign bases.
This change also switches off automatic supply for launch. Consistent
with bomb.
When a manually launched anti-sat hits, it now always destroys the
satellite. This matches what it does when it intercepts
automatically. Before, it only damaged the satellite.
Before, it took a sector argument, and targeted the lowest-numbered
satellite there. Rather inconvenient when your own satellite masks
one of the enemy's.
Moreover, the command could be abused to find all sectors with
satellites. Now it can "only" be abused to find satellite ids, and
whether they're in range. Still not ideal, but tolerable.
launch_sat() failed to normalize the satellite's coordinates when it
added a random course deviation. Satellites with screwed up
coordinates were missed by skywatch, and possibly in other places.
The old code used getstarg() to get an argument with a different
prompt than snxtitem() uses, then passed the value to snxtitem()
unchecked. If the player aborts, getstarg() returns a null pointer,
and snxtitem() prompts again. Affected:
* load/lload plane/land third argument; load_plane_ship(),
load_land_ship(), load_plane_land(), load_land_land()
* bomb, drop, fly, paradrop, recon and sweep second argument;
get_planes()
* tend and ltend second and fourth argument; ltend(), tend(),
tend_land()
* mission second argument; mission()
Fix by making snxtitem() taking a prompt argument, null pointer
requests the old prompt.
Use that to simplify multifire() and torp(). Change the other callers
to pass NULL.
This outlaws launch from unowned sectors. Also, non-VTOL missiles
require an efficient airfield now, except that such missiles don't
exist currently, because init_plchr() makes all missiles VTOL.
launch_sat() failed to call msl_equip(). Change msl_equip() to take
the mission character as argument, because the old hardcoded 'p' isn't
appropriate for satellites. Best fit for satellites is 'r' for
reconnaissance, but mission_pln_equip() doesn't accept that
(pln_equip() does). Fix that as well.
Planes normally sit in their base (sector or carrier), where they can
be spied, damaged, captured, loaded, unloaded, upgraded and so forth.
All this must not be possible while they fly. There are two kinds of
flying planes: satellites in orbit, and planes flying a sortie.
Satellites in orbit have always been marked with flag PLN_LAUNCHED.
Works. What didn't work was tracking planes flying a sortie.
If you look at one sortie in isolation, up to three groups of planes
can be flying at any point of time: the primary group, which carries
out the sortie's mission (bomb, transport, ...), their escorts, and a
group of hostile planes flying interception or air defense.
The old code attempted to track these planes by passing those groups
to the places that need to know whether a plane is flying. This was
complex and incomplete, and broke down completely for the pin-bombing
command.
It was complex, because the plane code needs to keep track of all the
call chains that can lead to a place that needs to know whether a
plane flies, and pass the groups down the call chains. This leads to
a rather ugly passing of plane groups all over the place.
It was incomplete, because it generally failed to pass the escorts.
And the whole scheme broke down for the pin-bombing command. That's
because pin-bombing asks the player for targets while his planes are
loitering above the target sector. This yields the processor and lets
other code run. Which does not get the flying planes passed.
The new code marks planes and SAMs (but not other missiles) flying a
sortie with flag PLN_LAUNCHED (the previous commit laid the groundwork
for that), and does away with passing around groups of flying planes.
This fixes the following bugs:
* Many commands could interact with foreign planes flying for a
pin-bombing command as if they were sitting in their base. This
includes spying, damaging, capturing, loading, or upgrading them,
and even getting intercepted by them. Any changes to those planes
were wiped out when they landed. Abusable.
* The bomb command could bomb its own escorts, directly (pin-bomb
planes) or through collateral damage, strategic sector damage,
collapsing bridges or nuke damage. The damage to the escorts was
wiped out when they landed.
* If you asked for a plane to fly both in the primary group and the
escort group, you got charged fuel for two sorties instead of one.
* pln_put1() and pln_put() now recognize planes that didn't take off,
and refrain from making them land. Intercept (since commit
c64e2149) and air defense can do that. Making them land had no
ill-effects, but it was still wrong.
There's one new problem: if PLN_LAUNCHED doesn't get reset properly,
due to game crash during flight or some other bug, the plane gets
stuck in the air. Catch and fix that on game start in ef_verify().
Use new pln_is_in_orbit() when we want to test for orbit specifically,
and test PLN_LAUNCHED when we want to test whether the plane not
sitting in the sector (because it is flying). This distinction is
pointless at this time, because the only way PLN_LAUNCHED gets set is
when a satellite goes into orbit. It will become useful in a later
commit, which will use PLN_LAUNCHED to mark flying planes.
New pln_att(), pln_def(), pln_acc(), pln_range_max(), pln_load()
replace the struct plnstr members with the same names.
Make plane selectors att and def virtual.
other. Ensure headers in include/ can be included in any order
(except for econfig-spec.h, which is special). New header types.h to
help avoid inclusion cycles. Sort include directives. Remove some
superflous includes.
(launch_sat, scra, scut, scuttle_ship, scuttle_land, knockdown)
(ac_planedamage, detonate, attack_val, defense_val, air_damage)
(msl_intercept, msl_launch_mindam, pln_prewrite, shp_prewrite):
Simplify unit destruction: just zero efficiency, leave makelost()
etc. to the prewrite callback.
bad, do not loop prompting, just fail. That's what the vast majority
of commands do.
(launch_as, launch_missile, launch_sat): Don't zap the target
argument. If the target is given as argument, launch all missiles at
that target. Previously, missiles after the first prompted for
another target.
