One back and forth rather than two and a half, over 0.85s rather than 1.2.
The tell is a recoil and a spring; repeating it turned a wind-up into a
fidget and the player stopped reading it as "about to happen".
And the charge is 1650px/s, up from 950, which read as a fast drift rather
than as the thing the whole wind-up was promising.
The test counts how many times the wind-up crosses its anchor: one back and
forth crosses exactly once, two would cross three times.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every enemy component used to ask the same question - which player SHIP is
nearest - so a structure was scenery they flew straight through. A Building
is also a plain Node2D, so there was nothing to collide with even if one had
tried.
EnemyTargets answers the question once, for pursuit, standoff, the lancer's
lunge and the ranged weapon together, so they cannot drift into disagreeing
about it. It keeps one thumb on the scale: a vessel inside 520px always
wins, even against a nearer building, or the fleet could not defend anything
by interposing itself and an enemy would fly past the ships shooting it.
Buildings get a hitbox - an Area2D in a group, the same shape as a Ship or
an asteroid, so EnemyProjectile needed one extra branch rather than a new
concept. It applies damage on a tick rather than on area_entered: entry
fires once, which is right for a rammer that dies on the first strike, but
would let a sniper that drifted inside sit there scratch-free for ever. On a
tick, an enemy parked on a structure is besieging it.
What one strike costs is data on the enemy definition, for the same reason
dies_on_contact is - a lancer arriving at 950px/s is not a sniper drifting
into a wall.
Also clears the asteroids in test_enemy_projectile_damage. set_process(false)
only stops NEW asteroids; the ones already placed keep drifting, and one
wandering into the shield vessel parked at (2000, 0) spent its single charge
so the projectile fired next killed it. That failed about one parallel suite
run in thirty and never in isolation. Clearing them is what the other combat
tests already do.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A second suicide vessel alongside the chaser, but where the chaser simply
beelines, this one is a rhythm the player can read. It drifts in from beyond
lock_range at half speed, LOCKS a point, rocks 30px back and forth along the
charge axis for 1.2s, draws a thin line down its trajectory for the last
300ms, and only then crosses the gap in one straight 950px/s run before
coasting to a stop and starting over.
The lock is what makes the wind-up worth anything: nothing re-reads the
fleet once it begins, so the charge goes where the target WAS and stepping
off the line works. Same bargain as EnemyBigLaserBeam.
EnemyLungeComponent is a Node2D rather than a plain Node because the
trajectory line has to be drawn somewhere, and top_level keeps that drawing
in world space while the hull it hangs off spins to face the lock.
The roaming spawner gets a 25% lancer share. It is the only place the player
meets an enemy off an authored map, so without that the lancer would exist
only in the setup editor.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
