I found a minor bug today. When the target of a missile with on-board active sensors is destroyed, the missile looks for a new target (as in VB6). However, due to a small coding error, the missiles in that situation in C# decided to target their own ships instead of the enemy
Curious - did the anti-missile defenses fire at the incoming missiles, or did they ignore them, since they were "friendly"?
They ignored them - the defences only fire at hostile targets. I reloaded at that point
*Gasps*
Steve save scums!
On a side note, some way to trick hostile missiles to turn on their own ships would be pretty neat for a weird twist on a pacifist culture..... they refuse to use their own weapons, but see no problems turning their enemies weapons against them. lol
I've updated collateral damage based on play test experience. Collateral damage will now use the base value of a weapon, rather than the base value multiplied by the weapon tech. For example, personal weapons will always do 0.0001 collateral damage per combat round regardless of tech level. A heavy anti-vehicle weapon will always cause 0.0216. This is on the basis that higher tech weapons will be more destructive but more precisely targeted. Fighter pods have also been adjusted in line with ground units. This means collateral damage will be much lower overall, about 10-12% of current values in my campaign, allowing more extensive ground combat without completely wrecking the objective. However, collateral damage from orbital bombardment support has only been lowered a little, so that should be generally avoided if you want low collateral damage.
More detail in the updated rules post.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg110508#msg110508
With these changes to conventional attacks are there still reasonably easy means to essentially just scorch earth a target without being pigeon holed into just one option like dirty orbital bombs?
Probably beyond the scope of what you'd consider worth working on, but I quite liked the Stellaris approach where each empire had a selection of bombardment policies based on government type and you could then pick from the list that would represent your maximum stance for a fleet when attacking a planet.
Depending on your government type, some of the lighter policies might not even be available, for others you could only have lighter policies as viable. So for a standard empire you could set a higher government policy for allowed level of bombardment severity (At the risk of annoying other races), but still have fleets switch to lower bombardment stances on a case by case basis.