I've been mucking about with the Operation Solstice Rain combats to get used to the mission editor and I hit a bit of a snag with the third mission, Downpour.

In the mission, there's are two consoles--one that can remove one of four freight cars/containers from the map via a crane, and one that rotates a turntable in the center of the map.

Currently the closest I've been able to get goes something like this:

1. The first console triggers a dialog with 4 options. Each option:
   1. Makes units in the container zones Invulnerable until damaged.
   2. Damages the zone enough to destroy 1 layer of terrain
   3. Repeats A and B twice to get down to ground leve
   4. Sets combat state variables so the option can't be chosen twice
   5. Creates a new action triggering the same dialog if there's at least one more choice that can be made.
2. The second console just blows up the train car on the turntable in a similar manner as the above.

I ran into three main issues.

The first is over-destroying terrain. If any of the terrain in the zones has been destroyed already, the script pummels further into the ground rather than maintaining the illusion of "moving" the terrain it is destroying by only destroying down the the ground level.

The second is invulnerability. I can't seem to set all units in a zone invulnerable--I can set the "first" unit in a zone invulnerable and I haven't figured out how to manipulate that the way I'd like to just make the whole zone invulnerable.

The third is placing blocks. I didn't expect to be able to actually "rotate" the platform, but using a script to place or move existing terrain blocks was something I had been hoping to do

My first question would be if I'm missing some neat trick to pull this off! My second question would be if not, would it be possible to have some kind of level/remove terrain feature in the event scripts to handle this sort of thing?

Thanks!

You’re not missing anything! Large-scale terrain changes were not something I was thinking about when building out the map system. Adding and removing blocks and setpieces isn’t currently supported by the trigger system. I’ve been thinking all day how I’d now go back and add it, but it’d be some pretty major retrofits. Most likely approach would be adding a trigger that can add/clear a certain kind of setpiece to/from specified tiles. I’ll make a note to explore that but it might be a while.

For second issue – I recently added functionality to the “emit trigger signal” event where if you feed a bunch of units into its “array” slot, it will emit that signal for each given unit. This is somewhat crude, but does allow you to then have another 1-unit trigger to respond to it and e.g. add invulnerability. There’s not a good example of it in-game yet and it hasn’t been thoroughly tested, but that’s what I’d try.

Sorry I don’t have more answers to offer beyond that atm!

Sounds good, I'll mess around with emit trigger signal and see what I can come up with. Nuking the terrain should work well enough to capture the core of the mission, which is to give players a quick way to expose an artillery unit in deep cover.