units dont shoot other units in range

[noobymcnoobcake]

Sometimes units dont fire at other units that are in range. I have only had this once and that was with some T2 pds. They were not on hold fire/attack ground and attacked the pds that were in range only when I ordered attack on them. It happens 25 mins in on the replay. He builds two aeon T2 PDs in range of my cybran ones and they dont shoot. They were not stealthed and were lit up on radar. They were not shooting any other units either.

Then about 30 seconds later I select my pds and click attack on his pds and kill them quickly. But only after he killed a bit of my base. This bug is annoying but not gamebreaking. Probaly game engine issue or something

[FunkOff]

This is not a bug and all units will do this.

For every weapon, there's a value called TrackingRadius. This is the radius, measured in terms of the weapon's MaxRadius, that the weapon will acquire and track targets. For weapons that attack ground, the radius is usually 1.15 and for units that attack air, it's usually 1.4. This means that anti-ground weapons tracking radius is 15% more than their max radius and anti-air weapons have 40% more.

Tech 2 point defenses weapons have 1.15 tracking radius. With 50 range, this means that they will acquire valid targets that they can see within a range of 57.5. They won't be able to shoot these targets until they get closer, but this enables them to turn their turrets before the target is within range so they do not waste time turning their turret when they could be shooting.

Reducing the tracking radius down to 1 could alter this behavior so that point defenses will never acquire targets beyond their max range, but this would allow more effective distractions of them. Also, as far as I know, there's no way to make the tracking radius apply separately to units that are mobile and units that are not.

[noobymcnoobcake]

Ah thanks for this explanation. I did notice units turn turrets before others are in range but thought they would priorotise targets in range than ones they cant shoot at even if they are higher value than the ones out of range. Prehaps he had some harbs or something juts out of range in this replay that had a higher targeting priorioty than his pds.