Problem with neutral vehicles being always capturable

[mevitar]

No matter whether it's a regular tank, a Robot Tank, a Visceroid or a Dolphin, all neutral vehicles are capturable with CanDrive=yes infantry (that is, in case of the Dolphin, if it can swim). There is literally no way to prevent that.

And while indeed there is ProtectedDriver=yes to prevent them from losing the driver in the first place, it doesn't work for pre-placed neutral vehicle types. The game only considers the house that owns them, not whether they were actually cleared from a driver or not.

While this isn't a bug per-se, as the entire system was designed to do exactly this, it's an oversight that creates big inconsistencies and issues for maps with pre-placed neutral units.
However, i admit that this should have been mentioned when the switch from the Special to all MultiplayerPassive=yes houses was made. I don't think anyone thought about it back then. I didn't.

Thus, i request a change to be done to which units exactly the game considers as "driverless". KillDriver and changing unit's ownership to neutral/special/civilan are fine, but the game shouldn't check the ownership itself as a way of determining the state of the driver.
For people that want to have "driverless" units pre-placed on a map, i think there needs to be a way to make the game "kill" the drivers at the start of the game, instead of one check for the unit's ownership.
Either a tag to kill drivers for all units owned by the house, or a list similar to VeteranUnits= to tell the game which units should have their drivers killed.

[mevitar (mevitar)]

On a side note, giving a neutral unit Operator= and no passengers basically makes the unit as good as if it was hit with a KillDriver=yes warhead, since it is completely helpless and only a CanDriver=yes (and i think a VehicleThief=yes) infantry can enter. However, Operator logic makes them dim, and there is still the issue of other neutral units being capturable.

If there's a way to achieve similar effect to how Operator= on a neutral unit works (except the dim effect), while regular neutral units remaining uncapturable, i think that would be all that's needed.

[Mustafa Alperen SEKİ (mustafaoyunda37)]

This wasn't really much problem until, setting country for KillDriver Warheads added in 0.9. This made all civilian units driveable. I opened a blueprint about it long time ago. https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ares/+spec/ability-to-cant-drive-civilian-vehicles even this would be enough for me, a rewrite would be good. I think we can kill drivers of a preplaced unit using the action that applies a warhead to a waypoint (i don't remember what it called as in FA2). But their lack of usability with cell spread may prevent this.

[mevitar (mevitar)]

Yes, it wasn't a problem, but the thing is, this should have been mentioned before Alex was made the change. Nobody did it back then, including me, so now we have this issue.
And i did forget about your blueprint when writing this request. Guess i should have wrote there instead. I don't really care about the way how it is implemented, though.

Anyway, since we basically created this problem ourselves, i don't really expect this to be changed anytime soon. if at all. :P
Just wanted to make a report about this.

[AlexB (alexander-b)]

See the related blueprint. It might not fully resolve this issue, because it's still based on country, not on whether a unit's driver actually has been killed, though.