A garrisoned vessel circles its post, engages what comes into range, and
goes back to circling. It steers by writing move_target and lets Ship's own
steering fly it, so it accelerates, banks and brakes exactly like a vessel
in the formation.
It is not in Fleet.ships. It does not follow the formation, does not count
against max_fleet_size(), and does not move when the player flies away -
which is the whole point of stationing it. A garrison that ate a fleet slot
would mean stationing a vessel cost the player a place in their own wedge.
The leash is the load-bearing part. Enemies are judged from the POST rather
than from the vessel, so a garrison that has drifted out to its leash cannot
see further still and be walked away from its outpost one enemy at a time,
and an engagement is clamped to a circle around the post rather than to a
straight line, so it still manoeuvres while pinned.
The orbit starts from where the vessel actually is rather than a random
bearing. A random one makes the first move_target a point on the far side of
the circle, and the vessel flies straight across the middle - through the
outpost it is guarding.
EnemyTargets.nearest_ship now searches the player_ships GROUP instead of
Fleet.ships: an enemy that ignored the guns shooting at it, because they
were not in the player's formation, would let a garrison hold a position
without ever being fought back.
The laser vessel is deliberately not garrisonable. Firing the laser lives in
LaserController, a fleet ability driven by the laser button, rather than in
VesselLaserComponent - so a garrisoned laser would hold its position and
never shoot, and offering a vessel that cannot fight is worse than a short
list.
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>
