Planet spore launcher attacks its own kind!

[Natalinasmpf]

I played several games where, engaged in combat in a sudden infestation of native lifeforms in a pod, such as say, two rovers surrounded by five worms and four spore launchers. The rover would attack one worm, perhaps capture it, the other would attack, or move away, or get destroyed. Sometimes, I'm not sure why, I'm thinking it (Planet) has to do with the fact that it tries to attack a certain square or unit, but one of its own units was there instead. So a native spore launcher engages in an artillery duel with its own side. The rest tend to fade away, and sometimes spare my rover (or rovers, if the other one survived)!

I think its a bug, but its hilarious at times. Battle confusion?

[SynthetGod8]

It's a bug with the Spore Launcher AI, I think. But I always think of it as the Spore Launcher over-shooting. Friendly Fire!

[H0bbes]

I think of them as very territorial!

[Qwerty88]

Planets Spore Launchers are very buggy, I've tried to recreate this bug with my own units, but only planet can do it, also planet can use Spore Launchers on IoD to make bombardments from the sea, no other land units can make bombardments from the sea, not even faction controled sporlaunchers.

[Natalinasmpf]

Eh? I never knew that...maybe I didn't bother with my own naval units.

Not even Amphibious Batteries/Artillery can bombard...?

Spore launchers go hand in hand with isle of the deeps though...to make up for the lack of bombardment capability...then they are the super naval unit!

[Blake]

I believe it happens when one spore bombards an improvement and then the other one "defends" the improvement, causing them to duel. I suspect it only happens in neutral territory, which may be considered planets territory, thus causing planet artillery to defend improvements.

I've managed to test this somewhat, getting alein spores to duel my own when I bombard forests in neutral territory, so it seems a good theory.

[johndmuller]

I think that Blake has got the essential element there, that one of them is defending something that the other one thought it was attacking, but the why of it still seems to be pointing to a bug of some sort.

It is not completely limited to the native life faction either, I've had it happen to me also. For example, I was firing a salvo from a conventional warship into a sea fungus tile (thinking that a native IoD or Sealurk might be there) and found my ship dueling my own SporeLauncher in a coastal base (all 3 of the relevant tiles were within 2 of each other). It might have been that my SporeLauncher did the initial bombardment and the ship defended, but I think it was the ship that started it off. In any case, I was fortunate that it was not a duel to the death, so I just ended up with a couple of wounded units and feeling puzzled.

It is possibly only SporeLaunchers that exhibit this undesirable behavior, but I don't know why other artie units would be spared this bug as there doesn't seem to be anything really special about the SporeLauncher unit otherwise.

Qwerty88, it is possible, but not necessarily ethical, for human controlled SporeLaunchers (or even conventional artie) to initiate artillery bombardment or duels from aboard IoDs or even regular transports - you just have to use the right-click-on-the-target-tile (and select long-range-fire from the menu) method to do it instead of the 'F' command (or whatever it is), which won't let you do it. The fact that you can only do it that one way is why I think it is likely unethical to do it, as the game designers probably thought they were disabling it and just forgot that one way.

[Natalinasmpf]

True true....after the battle I put a drop colony pod there (), but I had drop formers preparing the ground as I did so (and I had cloning vats). There was a nearby fungal tower...which I had extinguished, some farms...and some other things.