Hi there.

I think I already know the answer, but can a burrowed lurker be ordered to attack within its range without unborrowing (and thus without moving) ?

I'm not sure how exactly the Order to attack trigger works on units, but I think it's different from when a player manually orders a unit to attack a zone with the A key.

My goal is simple : I was planning on spawning a burrowed lurker and make it attack as soon as it spawns (instead of letting it detect the presence of an enemy and then attack by itself, which comes few hundreds of milliseconds later).

Thanks for your help

You want the lurker to attack faster than it normally would?

Your best bet is to preplace the Lurker somewhere else and move it when you need it. The acquisition time is faster when it's moved rather than freshly created, if I remember correctly.

Oooh, good to know, I'll give it a try and run few tests. This might slightly improve other things as well, thanks.

And yeah, I want to try to make it attack as soon as it's in range (i.e as soon as the lurker is spawned / moved to a place with an enemy ground unit). The lurker is not supposed to stay either, it should be removed as soon as the attack animation (spines) starts.

Detecting when a unit attacks isn't an easy thing. It's possible, but much easier to detect "when a unit should have attacked".

My suggestion is to move the lurker as soon as it would be in range, give it a few frames, then remove it. You can easily time this so that the lurker only has time to attack once maximum. IIRC the cooldown of lurkers is 37, so if you wait 17 hyper trigger rounds before moving it back, it will only be able to attack once maximum.

Thanks for the idea !
This deserves a try, keeping in mind that if the cooldown of lurkers is always the same between 2 attacks, the timing when the first attack comes out might still vary a bit.

I made the thing work not too bad by following Roy's advice. I preplaced a lurker and move it everytime it's supposed to deliver a blow. It works fine, but the timing still isn't perfect, i.e I can see the lurker hole a time before the spines come out. Well.. it's not that much of a detail.

Oh, and I discovered that triggers are unable to create or to move Lurkers too close to unwalkable terrain (like water, even if you use a rectangular tile set) lol

I remember a video from Oh_man's The Architect RPG map which shows a mini boss battle (Infested Kerrigan).

In it, Oh_man uses lurkers to create a spine circular attack which looked pretty nice, but I'm not sure if he bothered about when exactly the first spines show up.

Here is the video.

The beginning of the attack there is a low number of lurkers but more and more spawn throughout the duration of the attack so the spell gets more and more deadly as it continues to rotate across the arena.

Thanks Yeah, this is it. So you just spawn them there and let them attack the unseen targets by themselves ?

And yes, it looks impressive, I guess the player wouldn't last much if he gets caught by it at full power ^_^' I liked really good the underwater spell in that video too by the way

Thanks. Yeah, they attack a burrowed unit that is connected to an observer.