This is a borderline shitpost, but I have a job where my mind wanders sometimes, and I come up with lots of weird stuff. Last week, I was taken with the absurd idea of making a satirical song about FAF to the tune of 'My Favorite Things' from Sound of music. Don't ask why.

For better or worse, here is the result.

"ASFs spew from a surfaced Atlantis
Three engies lost to a single rushed Mantis
Point defence rapidly blasting their beams
These are a few of my favorite things!

2 minute bombers, and engineers juking
SMD snipes and the subsequent nuking
Seeing your enemies power-stalling
These are a few of my favorite things!

Fatboys out-ranging Galactic Colossus
Monkeylords stealthing and bloody Ahwassas
Allies and all their "assist me plz" pings
These are a few of my favorite things!

When the com snipes and CTRL-Ks
have me feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad!

Rapid-fire arty and tactical missiles
mass fabs exploding, reactors so fissile
Mazers and cloaking and teleporting
These are a few of my favorite things!

Soulrippers belching out plumes of pollution
Salvations finding their firing solutions
Flak tearing bombers apart by the wings
These are a few of my favorite things!

Walking destroyers and cruise missiles soaring
"Commander under attack" AI warnings
Cheap ghetto gunships full of mech marines
These are a few of my favorite things!

When the com snipes and CTRL-Ks
have me feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feeeeeeel... sooooo bad!

@spikeynoob excellent news!~ We'll test the crap out of it and let you know if we find anything.

Thank you

I, for one appreciate the effort, folx.

"Learn Lua and be the change" is something you've almost tempted this zero-experience old-guy to try, but now is not the time in my life where I have the time, so thank you to those of you that do. Best I can do at this point is try to isolate things we find in our games and bring them up to smarter people.

Never underestimate the value of the participation marks.

And yes, it's on Assassination. lol.

But we've played several Phantom games now and every time a player dies, their stuff stays around. They are reported as dead, they count as an innocent or phantom death toward game victory, they cannot issue any orders -- but anything their base was doing continues to happen; factories still produce units, waypoints are followed, etc.

We usually play modded, but I can reproduce in vanilla with all mods off. Started a couple of weeks ago. Easily reproducable even with AI -- just build a few things and then ctrl-k your ACU. Your buildings will all remain. You will be able to select, but not issue any new orders.

If you want a replay, we did https://replay.faforever.com/18038205 last week. Takes 58 minutes for first death tho (dark green).

Let me know if you have any questions.

Can't wait to try it. Thanks for your time folx!

Crashes at the 40-minute mark and people with potato computers. What else?

New 'Mod' version of Phantom-X worked great for a week or two, but now after the latest Dev patch, it's doing the same thing as the previous version and then some:

When ACU dies, player counts as dead, but units and buildings remain.
NEW sometimes players don't count as dead and can continue to play! (Game will never count as over).

https://replay.faforever.com/19423345

@uveso OH I guarantee you you did. I blasted the hell out of our resident Aeon player who didn't expect it to be working. That'll teach them to read the forums. Lol.

As a fun note, this getting fixed just in time to coincide with the TMD changes is interesting, because we always thought the Purifier was a little bit too hard to stop if you stacked multiples up and fired them together, but the TMD buff has made it a little more reasonable to stop multiple purifiers, so win/win.

#SimCity Challenge.

I should add this only affects the two UEF units I listed. The Seraphim and Cybran BlackOps Dreadnoughts can be hit with torpedoes as normal.

@ZBC if you have the knowledge and time to fix a few of these outstanding bugs, as the main ringleader of a group that plays BlackOps every week, you have my sincere gratitude.

The big bug that is bothering us right now is that something has broken with torpedos vs a couple of BlackOps UEF units:

The two we've found are:

BES 0402 - UEF Dreadnought
EEB 0402 - UEF Philadelphia Stellar Generator (when built on water, obv.)

As you can see in the attached pic, torpedos from all manner of naval ships do not seem to hit either of these units, and just circle around. VERY rarely, a torpedo will land, but we're talking 8 minutes of heavy concentrated fire to finally take down the dreadnought.

I'm not sure which patch may have broken it, but it will be one of the more recent ones. This was not a problem in late 2023/early 2024.

Also food for thought -- There are other UEF BlackOps boats that are NOT affected (EES0302 - Knox Escort boat) and neither is the other BlackOps water-buildable structure (BEB5205 T3 advanced Air Staging).

@rowey Oh yeah I wouldn't touch the BlackOps mods themselves but couldn't you have an additional 'patch/balance' mod that also runs just to fix the problem if it's something in the blueprint? Or is that also no bueno?

I'm asking as someone who has just enough knowledge of how these files work to be dangerous. lol.

Just a bump a month later to see if anyone knows if this is something that can be fixed.. If Uveso is not active, even if you can give me an idea if there is something that can be added to the BlackOps blueprints.. We already play with a balance patch for BlackOps Teleports that I cobbled together by changing values, I'm sure I could add the fix to that patch if I knew what to add.

Sorry. I'm an ADHD monkey with absolute zero brain for programming.

@Blackrobe Odd. We play all 3 BlackOps mods on and I was manually overcharging last night no problem. Possible it's a conflict with something else?

I think you may be right about the cloaking though.

I should have also added, the Cybran and Seraphim BlackOps Dreadnought experimentals (and the BlackOps rework of the Aeon Tempest) all take torpedo fire normally (which is to say they have some torpedo defense but get easily overwhelmed with heavy fire, whereas the UEF Dreadnought has no torp defense.)

Hello friends!

We've been back playing Blackops after some time, and while it appears the last few patches have been kind to it, we have found one thing that has broken at some point -- Torpedoes do not seem to be hitting several UEF oceanic BlackOps-only units.

The two we've found are:

BES 0402 - UEF Dreadnought
EEB 0402 - UEF Philadelphia Stellar Generator (when built on water, obv.)

As you can see in the attach, torpedos from all manner of naval ships do not seem to hit either of these units, and just circle around. VERY rarely, a torpedo will land, but we're talking 8 minutes of heavy concentrated fire to finally take down the dreadnought.

I'm not sure which patch may have broken it, but it will be one of the more recent ones. This was not a problem the last time we were actively playing BlackOps.

Also food for thought -- The other UEF BlackOps boats are not affected (EES0302 - Knox Escort boat) and neither is the other BlackOps wter-buildable structure (BEB5205 T3 advanced Air Staging).

Thanks in advance, as always.
@Uveso, @Jip

FWIW, our playgroup digs this change. It's SO good being able to maneuver a couple of Atlantises while they continue to work on building planes. Big thumbs up to whomever we can credit with the idea.

Nice! Before the recent bug, we found it was causing desyncs too, but it didn't sound like an active project, so thanks for looking into it.

Some of the effects were pretty intense, but this mod is worth it alone for the oil slicks after a huge naval battle.

@jip Will definitely test it out. Thanks as always to you and @Uveso for getting on this stuff!