Occupation attribute and controllingSovereign

[giantcabbage]

I’ve been trying to modify the Centauri occupation mission to work with my mission framework, so that the Centauri can occupy any station and you have a useful station after rescuing it. I’ve found an approach which works - change the sovereign to stop the travelling commonwealth ships and add a timer event to redirect any reinforcements. This isn’t perfect as the reinforcements will still gate in and be allied with the Centauri until the timer event triggers, changes them to the normal sovereign and sends them to wait somewhere.

The standard occupation stations (and Raisu) set the occupation attribute as the commonwealth traffic behavior class checks for this to avoid visiting these stations. However, attributes are fixed for a station type so I can’t do this.

Is there any better way to do this? What I’d really like is to be able to have "occupied" as another state the station can be in similar to being destroyed/abandoned. When a station is occupied all the normal behaviour: reinforcements, comm traffic, events, dockscreens would be disabled.

Also, what does controllingSovereign actually do? The standard occupation station sets this data field, but Raisu does not. It is also used for the two Xenophobe fleet "stations".

And finally, allowEnemyDocking is used by the occupied station so the centauri raiders can dock with it. It would be useful if this could be changed from a script, or if there was a "forcedock" command/order which could be used to make ships dock with enemy stations.

[RPC]

Yeah, the limitations of XML means that you can't set those things dynamically. I'll try to see if ShpOrder 'dock will still force a ship to dock with an enemy station.

This isn’t perfect as the reinforcements will still gate in

Can't we have the Centauri fight some low level CW ships?

[giantcabbage]

ShpOrder 'dock won't work if the ship and station are enemies. I think the ship starts to wait as if it had been told to dock at a station with no free docking ports.

Can't we have the Centauri fight some low level CW ships?

You can... but you end up with a lot of dead centauri. The Centauri are only really a threat to unarmed ships/stations. Even the &tbCommPrivateCrafts; ships which are set to gateOnThreat can 'accidently' kill the raiders while fleeing from them