This causes these mission targets to always appear the first time
the player enters an interception, and every time after they fail
to appear (so that you never have two time-wasting interceptions in
a row). In the case of the rescue slaves mission, this takes the
form of forcing the first ship to be a slave ship, and in the case
of the cloak fighter, it simply forces the cloak fighter to appear.
In each case, the variable controlling whether or not the condition
is forced gets set to 0 if the mission target spawned, ensuring that
time-waster interceptions can still occur as long as they both are
preceded and followed by worthwhile interceptions.
I decided this was important when I was playing and noticed that I
wasn't getting slaves to rescue several times in a row. This
situation would be confusing to new players and possibly make them
think they were doing something wrong. It can also be very annoying
to just not get any chances to make progress because of bad RNG.
Forcing them to appear the first time allows the player to be
immediately introduced to the targets, and forcing them to appear if
they didn't last time limits the frustration of bad RNG by ensuring
that even with the worst RNG, some amount of progress can be made.
This was done with "replace all" actions, but I have checked and
the only collatoral damage has been to capitalize some instances
of "objective" in comments.
This change in behavior has some very significant effects:
1. Damaging a child alien isn't rendered meaningless if you are
primarily attacking the owner. This could be especially annoying
with the miner bosses, which have tiny parts that are completely
impractical to aim at.
2. Again, for the miner boss: previously, you couldn't see how much
total health the ship had; the health bar only uselessly showed
whether or not you defeated half of the ship (which you could
already tell by looking at it). Now, the health bar tells you
how much more damage you have to do in total.
diligentcircle
Layla Marchant