raiders

The ronin fleet and how it fights, for Ninja Pirates of the Baltic. Part of SLICE A (the raid); game.raid is the only thing that requires it.

local Raiders = require("game.raid.raiders")
local fleet = Raiders.create(NPB, hooks, tune)

It asks NPB.fleet() for its hulls and never builds one. The records live on NPB.state.raiders.

The behaviour

A raider runs one of four modes:

Only maxEngaged raiders are in circle at a time, and only a raider in circle fires. Without that cap the whole fleet converges at once: measured against a boat that never shot back, five simultaneous attackers emptied a full hull in six seconds — before the player had closed on any of them.

Guns bear on the beam, so a raider holds fire while the player is off its bow or its stern. That is what makes the circle read as a manoeuvre rather than a loiter.

aggression (1.0 at the start of a run, climbing with every rift stone the player takes) shortens the gun cooldown, shortens the time spent sheering off, and adds a little speed.

Sinking

damage(rec, amount) takes hull off and returns true on the blow that sinks. A raider whose hull reaches zero any other way also goes down — the update checks the invariant directly, because otherwise a record emptied outside damage() sails on forever at a negative number, alive to every count and immune to being sunk.

Going down takes sinkTime: the hull drops and rolls, then despawns and the sunk hook fires, which is where the rift stone is dropped.

Rules it follows

Every raider keeps its own logical x / z; the entity carries that plus the wave's displacement and is never read back. Every write is guarded by entity.exists, because a scene reload destroys everything.