When a bomber dies, he seems to explode - I like it. This explosion seems to cause damage to fellow invaders. Is this correct? If "fratricide by bomber demise" does occur, I need to keep my bombers out of crowds somehow - hmm, an interesting tactical problem.
No affect whatsoever to friendliest. So fear not in using your bombers area explosion with your other pirates!
So, to clarify (edits after I clearly saw an example without extraneous action): 1. There is an explosion (of carried bombs?) when a bomber dies. 2. The explosion when a bomber dies doesn't hurt friendly pirates nor island items. Now, I wonder what the Deadman Switch does.
I assume the bombers in the screen shot did have the Dead Man's Trigger ability. Without this they shouldn't explode on death
No, my bombers do not have the Dead Man's Trigger. When they die, there's a flash and a circle of smoke radiating from their location. I'm sure on two occasions I've seen a lone bomber die and a nearby building take damage without any other pirates being alive. I like it, so don't fix it.
It seems like the Dead Man's Trigger ability is being assigned to bombers that haven't unlocked it. Make the most of it while it's there We will be fixing this
My bombers have always exploded but it causes no damage to anything surrounding them. I assumed that the graphic was there so when I do unlock it nothing has to change other than damage.
Death mans trigger will take out the bombers grouped around him. Watched 10 vaporize in a cataclysmic explosion. Wasn't even fighting one of the high level islands. Edit- dug through my log and found the battle. The 10 split into two groups of 5, one of which appears to have been wiped out by a mortar strike. Just weird there were no survivors.
Side note, why do they bunch up together, and why do they keep leaving an attack on a Defense before destroying it?
1. Bunching up: entities in games like this have simple rules for movement. Bunching occurs because the logic for moving to the next place is something like: "move to closest side of closest non-destroyed structure". This rule causes scattered entities to group themselves near the closest structure. 2. Leave attack: each entity type has special rules to govern movement; e.g., Brutes move toward the nearest weapon that is shooting at them and Gunners move to within their Range parameter. In this case, the bomber throws a few bombs and then moves on. I think the median number of bombs is 3, but there appears to be some probability of 2 and of 4 bombs. Combined with being able to throw bombs from some distance away (Range > 1), this gives the bomber the appearance of supporting Buccs and Brutes by dancing around behind them throwing bombs over their heads at the target. I find it fun to try to figure out the simple rules governing the entities. Don't be fooled into thinking there's any sophisticated reasoning going on. The developers are hoping for the appearance of coordinated action, but it's an illusion. If you're interested, you can read about emergent behavior from simple rules. "Flocking" is the canonical example. Here's a url: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior) . Sorry if this is more than you wanted to know, but I couldn't tell if your question was rhetorical or inquisitive.