FR: ways to limit support ships rearm capabilities.

[MoerasGrizzly]

We'd like to have more options to reduce rearm capabilities workout entirely eliminating them. Three options spring to mind:

1. A "don't rearm" flag for secondary weapons, so that some special missiles can't be rearmed at all.
2. A mission setting that limits the support ships' stockpile to that available in the loadout screen. If a mission has a starting stockpile of 100 harpoons and the player's wing equips 10 of them, the support ship should be able to refill 90 harpoons throughout the mission. If the player equips 95 of them, only 5 should be able to be replenished.
3. A mission setting that simply disables the support ships capability to re-arm, but leaves its repairing capabilities intact.

Wrt point 2, there's some considerations for extra complicated shenanigans:

• Bta2 is notable for giving the player a persistent loadout. Any system that allows someone to track missiles expended during the mission and re-arms could be neat
• If a secondary weapon is depleted, the possibility for the support ship to provide a different missile (as defined by weapon precedance, mission design or player choice) would also be neat.

I realize that this is a lot to ask, so thank you in advance!

[MjnMixael]

Re: Request 2, there are some considerations that come to mind.

• I would design this such that the mission gets a pool that's pretty much identical internally to the loadout pool in the code. The support ship can only pull from that (with all the proper flags set and stuff, ofc). This has the advantage of being programmatically simple, relatively speaking, but depending on where this feature goes could end up being a fundamental design flaw. Is there any chance you'd want the support ship pool to prioritize certain ships over others (say.. the player) so that the dumb AI doesn't blow through the available stock? If yes, that greatly complicates the design.
• For tracking I'd add a Lua API. I know you don't write Lua yourself but I'm somewhat against adding anything to the engine that would require custom graphics or a whole mess of line/shape calls in some kind of hardcoded design. Much simpler to make the data available and let designers work it out for their own projects.
• Reloading based on weapon priority could be really simple or really tricky. Weapons.tbl already has a player precedence list of weapons. The simple version is the next available weapon that matches the bank is what gets loaded. If nothing then the bank remains empty. But that assumes there's a linear hierarchy of weapons which may or may not be true. If it's not then I'm not sure the best way to approach the design yet.

[MoerasGrizzly]

Wrt all your points @MjnMixael , please go for the most simple options (from the programmer's perspective) in every outlined case.

• The reload pool being identical to the loadout pool is what I had in mind in the first place, so yes please! Priority wrt AI squadmates vs the player should, imo, not be considered at this time. If the players want dibs on a particularly valuable missile, the way to achieve that is to only equip it for themselves.
• I was actually thinking about BTA2 wrt the tracking - it's not a priority for us in BP atm. I vaguely remember that a 'weak spot' in BTA2's loadout system is that it can't account for support ships, so whatever you'd need to make that work?
• The simple version, based on the "Player Weapon Precedence" entry in the table, is more then good enough. This is one of those things I'd be fine to live without altogether, too.

For context, my primary objective with these requests is to get a few more granular tools to reduce Trebuchet/Grimmler/Anti-Matter-Torpedo spam in some FSBlue and Future BP missions without disabling support ships or those missiles entirely. Right now we don't have any at all - it's either no rearms or all the rearms all the time. So basically any option that's somewhere between those two extremes would help.