🕵️‍♂️ New Encounter Type: Recon Patrols

Currently only appearing in Cold War spawns, Metal Clan will conduct regular Recon patrols which increase in behavior and difficulty as the player's threat score grows.

Recon vehicles are packed with valuable loot, and the lower tier Recon vehicles do not contribute much towards inciting a war with Metal Clan. The highest tier Recon vehicle is similar to the current Supply Convoy but perhaps a quarter of the loot value and points towards war.

The lowest tier Recon Convoy mostly "scouts" the terrain for hostile activity, and despawns after a great deal of time. A new player would benefit greatly from this loot, if one can manage to get past the armored vehicles guarding it.

The middle tier Recon Convoy searches for a target to call in a rocket strike. If not stopped before a timeout, this spawn will conduct a rocket strike and flee the battlefield. A decent reward awaits those who manage to stop the grid's behavior without destroying it.

The high tier Recon Convoy will look for a target for a missile strike. Once it reaches its timeout, a missile will spawn and the recon grid despawns. This contents of this vehicle make it worth capturing whole!

Eventually a Hot War version of this encounter will be developed.

🤺 New small grid, cold war tank - The Copper Mace - for combat spawns and truck convoys.

🐞 Update all spawns to set weapons to maximum range just after spawning.

Some players have reported that a few spawns had turrets set to 0 range.

I examined the prefabs, and noticed that some have a range of 0.1. May as well be 0.

Interesting, these all work for me in game, and players also report them working.

My theory is that I export these blueprints with weaponcore and vanilla-replacer in my saveworld, and that does funky things to the prefabs if they spawn in a vanilla world.

Using MES to set everything to max range is expected to fix this issue for any mod/vanilla setup.

This update adds 3 new small grid prefabs for cold war combat phase cargo ship and convoy spawns:

* Lead Mallet (light railgun tank)
* Copper Pitchfork (armored truck with custom rocket turret)
* Brass Caravan (armored van with custom gat turret)

Fixed an issue where small grid rocket trucks that get turned on their side or upside down were spawning rockets inside planet voxels.

All small grid vehicles (cold war state) now spawn > 50m in the air, and use parachutes to land safely.

This avoids spawning into voxels or trees, which strongly lowers sim speed, and often destroys a vehicle.

A couple of vehicles are currently able to spawn with so much loot that they need a couple more parachutes to land flat, and can more easily roll over during landing. Ill add more parachutes to those prefabs over time.

This also frees me up to design more and better prefabs for vehicles, as the code to avoid voxels was complex and meticulous. With voxels being a non issue, the cost of development and testing new small grid vehicles is greatly lowered.

The Small Rocket grid has been redesigned such that it uses hydrogen thrust. This allows it to be effective on moons or planets without atmosphere.

Installations now have size types. Larger installations are expected to spawn only in wide open areas, and are expected to have less of a chance of spawning in areas with high voxel size variation.

Rockets and Missiles will no longer have shields if they are used in a player's MES config.

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