Making 90 ton fighters causes Range Check Error in combat...

[Trancejeremy]

I can't really call this a bug, since the game isn't made for 90 ton fighters, but nonetheless, I thought I'd mention it.

I don't get it - I had played 2 entire games with 90 ton fighters, then I tried a small galaxy, high tech game, and boom, the range error crops up with the computer designed fighters.

Firing the weapsons on a ship seems to cause the problem. They can fire on other fighters, but when they (at least a stack of 7) fires on ships a second time, boom, the range check error happens.

As I said, if it's all fighters, it doesn't seem to happen. I tried a combat with 50 fighters per side (and 8 sides)

[Trancejeremy]

Hmmm, upon further review, it seems to only happen with shard cannons. I tried fightes armed to the teeth with oragnic weapons, and no problem.

Weird.

I guess the skipping armor quality could be causing it.

[Suicide Junkie]

Perhaps its trying to destroy specific components on any ship over X Kt (say 50). Since the fighters don't keep track of their individual components, you would get a range check error. (Trying to kill component #5, when theres only one component(entire ship))

I suspect that this would also occur for null-space, engine-disruptors, shield-destroyers (not depleters), and weapon-destroyers.

I suggest making abnormal damage-type weapons not target fighters.
OK damage types:
- shield depletion
- 4x to shields
- shield-skipping
- normal

[rdouglass]

Are your fighters loaded up from a "saved empire"?? It sounds like it may be - you mentioned it does not happen when you use organic. Are you both organic and crystal tech in your game?? I know this happens to me when I load a saved empire and I try to even look at a Weapons Platform, Fighter or Sat that has tech I cant research (or have not yet researched). If this is the case, try recreating your Fighter designs from scratch each game...

[Trancejeremy]

Upon further experimentation, it seems to happen when there is too many Shard III Cannons in a stack.

I went back to the completely original files, and made a regular large fighter (25 tons) with 3 shard cannons.

I didn't have any problems, until I made a stack of 30 of them.

Sure enough, I get the range check error again.

But it's very very rare to have that many shard cannons in one fighter stack in a normal game. It's a lot easier with my large fighter mod...

[Trancejeremy]

I never use saved empires, because it's a nightmare to navigate through the old designs. So that's not it.

And it's only when fighters target a ship, not the other way around. So I'm not sure what the trouble is. It's very weird.

I think I'll end up just altering the data file and getting rid of 'skips armor' for the shard cannons, and seeing if that does it....

[Trancejeremy]

Yup, when I change the damage type of the small shard cannon to 'normal' from 'skip armor' I no longer get the range error.

[Instar]

Send it all to MM - saved games, mods, empire files
They will fix it!

[Lord Felix]

I had exactly the same problem with big stacks of Null Space III weapons, as someone speculated about in this thread. It has nothing to do with the extra-big fighters per se. Some weapons are just SO good, the game freaks out when you fire them in big volleys.