The "flee" system is immersion breaking

[zdan30]

Now i assume this was put in place to make pirates relevant but please take another look at it as its an immersion killer, ive put in quite a few hours this weekend just watching my traders and the flee system is really bad for the player.
The average pirate attack goes like this...
Pilot: "I was asked to drop my cargo"
Me: ok lets see whats going on
pilot: lets stop here and have a look out the window and turn.... this way, yes lets full stop and turn this way
Me: No dont do that its silly, let me cancel the flee override because if you continue in the direction you are going at full speed youll be fine.
Pilot: let me override that, what we need to do is full stop and turn this way
Me: no dont do that the pirate is closing fast, lets cancel that override and just get to your destination
Repeat x5 until the trader is destroyed.

The solution is to take control of the ship, but i dont want to stop what im doing just to bail out a trader every 2 minutes.
My solution is give us a command for response to pirate attack IGNORE
I purposely build my ships to be fast and its frustrating to see my ships go full stop just because they were asked to drop cargo by a pirate.

To save me making another post i would like to point out also that spawning pirates in to a sector over and over is also immersion breaking, i have Ocean of fantasy,great reef, barren shore and watchful gaze locked down with patrols and i have the gate in to Boron space locked up tight so these SCA ships are spawning in, now i would think this weekend ive killed 100`s of SCA pirates that i know of let alone what my patrols mustve killed, im sure from an immersion point of view with the sheer losses the SCA have suffered they would go bankrupt or at the very least decided this is a bad idea going there but no you have some kind of repeated script going that just spawns them in over and over and over.
I get that at the start of the game with little defence its the perfect pirate spot but now i would think they would last longer in the Xenon core worlds, is there some way to make this script react to the defences in the sector?
Most of my patrols in a sector consist of a carrier with fighters and 25+ Hydras and a few Rays and that should be more than enough for them to think "lets not go there" or better yet how about stop with the spawning and make it so they are built and have to fly to a sector

Just a couple of suggestions and i realise i can terraform and stop the pirate attacks but this is an immersion post really as thats why i play and some of the issues ive pointed out are seriously breaking that immersion for me.

Thanks for reading

[adeine]

What's even worse is that every new instance of the Flee behaviour seems to pick a completely different orientation to stop and very slowly rotate towards. So if the ship drops out of 'Flee' behaviour and then is hit again, they just keep spinning endlessly, they are basically completely disabled.

[Rastuasi]

Agreed, we need an ignore setting that makes them not stop. I had a trader pull off the circle highway once harassed by a pirate.. just stay on the highway and it'll take you away from the pirate.

[mrwuggles]

I have been here myself many times, I would be happy to set my people's behaviour to stop this across different types of ships as the need different response order but I cannot do this in batches it's one at a time, so you end up using what you have available the override and heres where you run Into issues as you only get to choose one response.

I agree they need to rework this behaviour in some way, now it seems like they kept it this way so you would have to deal with pirates occasionally because if they didn't stop like this most of the time it would be impossible for the pirates.to catch them.

In my mind the gold standard for ai design control will always be finally fantasy 12, you literally could swap cards and control each behaviour script in copious detail. It was so good, that once I had it setup my party basically no longer needed any input from me. I know they can't do something like this, squeenix has thousands of people working there, but it's an excellent example in my mind of exactly what to do with ai control systems, it was easy to understand you had total control it was easy to navigate and make changes to.

[Zloth2]

The Gambit system was fun stuff!

"Ignore" sounds pretty insane to me. "Hmmm, I'm getting shot up, but the boss says everything is fine, so I'll just keep on going." The fact that it sounds like a better move than what they are doing now just goes to show how bad what they are doing now actually is.

The thing is, I think the balance between pirate and trader is pretty good right now. I would love to see a much better flee behavior, but that's going to need to be countered by giving the pirates some love (maybe more EMP missiles or some ion weapons?). In the end, we'll be right about where we are now, but with more believable systems. Given all the other things I would like to see done, it's hard for me to recommend spending the time to do all this. Even though I had to take over for my Osprey last night because it decided to "flee" straight at an incoming Xenon swarm.

[A5PECT]

I think the issue may be that traders being able to escape so easily would minimize piracy mechanics and make them irrelevant.

The way traders currently react to pirates seems like a contrivance to work around NPC pilots' inability to intercept targets when travel drive is involved. If pirates could effectively catch up with and knock their targets out of travel drive, traders could be given more realistic responses without trivializing the threat of NPC pirates.

[GCU Grey Area]

I think the issue may be that traders being able to escape so easily would minimize piracy mechanics and make them irrelevant.

The way traders currently react to pirates seems like a contrivance to work around NPC pilots' inability to intercept targets when travel drive is involved. If pirates could effectively catch up with and knock their targets out of travel drive, traders could be given more realistic responses without trivializing the threat of NPC pirates.

Think that's a reasonable hypothesis. Have sometimes wondered if EMP missiles are in the game primarily as a tool for piracy, but they haven't got round to setting up pirates to use them to intercept freighters. Current reaction of freighters to the pirates usual 'stand & deliver' message is effectively what would happen if the first thing a pirate did was launch an EMP to knock them out of travel drive.

[Panos]

Thanks for reading

2 options exist since we do not have ignore command.
a) Set default rule to flee. When get the warning press Pause. Remove the flee order. Un-Pause.
95% of the time the ship will go into travel mode. That is why combat engines are needed for all S/M traders (and miners).

b) Set it to obey. It dumps the cargo. Pause. Set it to collect the cargo and move the order to the top. Un-Pause.

[Chips]

If everything was perfect, then what'd be the point of pirates in the game, as they'd offer nothing but easy caps for players when they want free M or L ships.

Is anyone setting default behaviours for piracy for various ships? It's not clear. I say this as under "Individual instructions" there's the "Default response to attack" and "Default response to Pirate Harrassment". You can override the defaults, from the drop down select (instead of use judgement) from "Retaliate, Use Judgement, Escape and deploy laser towers, escape, and... IGNORE" - the last being one I believe someone is wanting but doesn't appear to know about?

I mean I've had M class frigates etc trying to attack when outnumbered as I keep saying "No, bloody flee!", but every time it got hit by another shot it goes "RAR ATTACK!!!" But that's because the pilot is set with default behaviour to consider what to do - and it thinks it's stronk enough to beat the enemy that hit it. Just doesn't seem to realise there's... more than 1 enemy.

Definitely had traders seeming a bit weird - but now it's really rare I have traders killed and there's plenty of reported piracy attempts for my ships - and I say that despite leaving it up to most trader's judgement what to do! What star rating are the pilots?

(should add that in really bad piracy sectors, I've blacklisted the sector, so other than Xenon sectors I've also black listed sectors which are primarily pirate stations with plenty of scavengers patrolling around - as it was just too high risk, so my statement of only losing 1 or 2 in several days of gameplay may be skewed by blacklisting 3 pirate heavy sectors - Silent Witness XI and XII, and Morning Star IV ).

[adeine]

I think the issue may be that traders being able to escape so easily would minimize piracy mechanics and make them irrelevant.

The way traders currently react to pirates seems like a contrivance to work around NPC pilots' inability to intercept targets when travel drive is involved. If pirates could effectively catch up with and knock their targets out of travel drive, traders could be given more realistic responses without trivializing the threat of NPC pirates.

Yes. It's really a combination of problems with the current piracy implementation, most of which come down to the game having travel drive:

1) Escorts don't work - you can't have ships escorting traders/miners because they get separated through travel drive. Even if the ship is stationary the ships set to "defend" somehow still manage to stray far enough to fail at their job. Part of the problem here is how the attack command works, ships don't use travel drive to close the distance.

2) The ideal place for a pirate to accost ships should be far from stations and sector police, flavour wise. But that's generally where ships are in travel drive or on a highway and therefore practically untouchable. So instead the best place for pirates to strike currently is during docking/undocking.

3) At the current range pirates initiate, ignoring them will pretty much guarantee safety unless they happen to be in the line of travel of the ship in question. Again, since declining or ignoring results in an attack command being issued, the pirate will just slowly fly towards the ship instead of using travel drive to close the distance.

You can't really fix any of these in isolation - if pirates manage to perfectly interdict travel there is nothing you can do since escorts don't work. If instead of using broken flee behaviour ships just continue flying (let alone flee in a smart manner), piracy is pretty much a non-issue.

[photomankc]

Outside the fact that "flee" is terrible at actually doing that (often my ships never actually move at all). Really piracy should not be happening everywhere like it does. Should be limited to places that would be lower security. Also should probably give the pirates some proprietary possible ways to pull ships down from travel drive so that they had a meaningful chance to actually be a threat. If a sector becomes a bustling hub then the activity would be in low density sectors leading to it. if they get cargo they should move on to collect and 'sell' it then cool down before they spawn again.

Right now you just have a ship randomly spawned anywhere that wanders around demanding cargo be dropped in the same location over and over again as far as I can tell it only cares that it's dropped, not about collecting it. Meanwhile faction patrols do nothing about it and if you do anything about via your subordinates you will lose rep. It's really kinda odd.

[Vheissu]

I suspect the pirates not collecting dropped cargo is because they have long ago filled their storage with loot from a slew of npc traders. It would be neat if they brought the spoils back to the nearest base.

[Chips]

I suspect the pirates not collecting dropped cargo is because they have long ago filled their storage with loot from a slew of npc traders. It would be neat if they brought the spoils back to the nearest base.

Agreed. Or offload it to a cargo ship they've got - so we can pirate that