Drop your carge... or not. We need an ignore default response.

[Ezarkal]

We really need an “ignore” option as default response for pirate harassment. Right now, what we have is Fight, Flee, Surrender cargo and Wait. Every single ones of them are ok in some circumstances, but stupid in nearly all of them.

Example: I’m currently building in Nopileo’s fortune II. My ships often get harassed when they are crossing in Nopileo’s fortune IV. I know it’s a peculiar example due to the very short distance between the gates and highways, but the principle is there.

One of my M ship gets harassed by a S fighter that’s still outside of radar range. When he pops up, he’s far, but incoming fast. My trader still has ample time to get through, though, as he’s really next to the superhighway to my side of the system where I have plenty of defence force.
Let’s look at the options.
1- Drop the cargo. Let’s clear this one out of the way. It’s something you do when your ship is loaded with energy cells. Not with claytronics. I understand why the option is there. It’s just not good in my situation.
2- Wait. Your ship drops dead in space until further order, and will wait for the pirate to come to it. Now is this stupid or what? It’s probably the worst “default option” you can set for pirate harassment. Enemy contact or police inspection, ok. Maybe. Pirate? Why is this even an option???
3- Flee. Your ship deviates from it’s course in a random direction and engage boosters. Why? Why not flee TOWARDS something, like a jumpgate or the station you’re supposed to head for??? This is not a dogfight. It’s piracy. If your ship heads to a random spot, it’s screwed. The pirate WILL catch him up.
4- Attack. Once again, why? Patrol ships don’t usually carry wares, so they don’t get harassed (although it does open options), but traders? An M traders with good turrets will be able to fend off a S fighter without missiles for a while, but you want him to get somewhere in the meantime. Not dogfight. A L trader shouldn’t even care about the fighters. And at any rate, your traders should want to eventually get away from the harassment, not run towards it.

My freighters in Nopelio’s fortune, even though they are right next to the superhighway, will turn around and try to get into a fight upon harassment. So I have to get them out of there manually every time by cancelling the “attack” and »”Flee” orders that queue. (Usually 2-3 times in a row, once for every pirate ship that just seem to spawn there). Then they turn around towards the fighter, or flee in a random direction. But while this is not so terrible for this specific place, where upon cancelling the response orders my ships still sometimes has time to turn back and run away due to the proximity of the jumpgates (if I don’t catch him already 30 km south of the gate towards pious mists already engaged with 2 pirates…) in other systems it gets terrible. The moment your freighter queue up its default response, it cuts it’s travel drive, and then it’s already too late.


So yeah, please consider an “ignore” default response to pirate harassment. That way, your ships will try to get to their destinations, and if the pirates ever catch them up, then they’ll still have a chance to fend them up with turrets while it tries to get to safety.

[Shehriazad]

I think if you change the global behaviour to "Flee" and uncheck "message me" you should get something close enough to what you want.

I never lost a single fleeing ship since the pirates usually scan cargo from like 30+km away. By the time they get their butts moving your freighter is long gone from the sector.

[Metran]

Ships fleeing will rarely ever flee in the direction of the their destination and thus further delaying it's delivery, and if there happens to be a lot of pirates around the sector you can easily have it be delayed for a long time, if not hours. As a player you can simply just ignore the popup (notification) and continue on your way giving you an additional 60 seconds before pirates go in for the attack which basically mean you can travel 10-15km further and are more likely to escape. I see no reason that your AI controlled ships shouldn't have the same option, even with such option it does not guaranties the safety of the ship.

I give this a +1.

[Drecksdusler]

Piracy wouldn't make any sense if you could just ignore them. I agree though that the whole thing feels off. For me this game mechanic is a weird workaround of a problem deriving from travel drive.

Pirates are somehow able to contact and scan ships that are 30km away because if they would wait any longer, the 4000 m/s freighter is already past them before they could finish their sentence

[Feloidea]

The "Flee" behaviour in general needs an overhaul because it seems to be consistently making the worst possible choice for any given situation.

Fast freighter is getting hailed by a pirate that would never be able to catch it? Oh, let's stop travel mode and run away at sub-travel speeds, maybe use the crappy travel engine boost to drain all your shields too, why not ...

Any ship is being attacked? OMG I gotta flee the sector, who cares that there's stations nearby I could dock at for safety. And with this one cames my personal favourite when a ship has been attacked and subsequently dropped out of travel mode ... at a point where it had already outrun the aggressors weapons range by a fair margin, but instead of continueing on the course and reengage travel mode to run, it TURNS AROUND to fly back in the direction of the attackers.


So yeah, what I'd like Egosoft to see tweak with this behaviour is a couple things: first a check on fast the trader is compared to the attacker. If the trader can easily outrun any wouldbe aggressor, the default behaviour ought to be "Lolno, eat my space dust". Maybe add a modifier based on proximity, say if there's only a small speed differential and the attacker is within X distance the logic says risk is too high -> proceed to flee behaviour step #2.
Secondly, for the love of profitsss, always flee AWAY from attackers. I know there's bound to be some complexity involved when multiple aggressors are in on it, but as long as the fleeing ship calculates its course to keep the angry red blips in the rear 180° halfcircle, that'd already be a huge improvement.
Third, if there's friendly stations nearby closer than jumpgates/accelerators, prioritize docking there over potentially running through an entire sector. This list of potential safe havens can be further tweaked to streamline the behaviour (for example fleeing ships will attempt to seek protection from defense stations, this would allow players to actively create protection roadstops along potentionally risky trade routes, just slap a dock and a couple defense modules together).

[Pesanur]

The best is when you freighters decide to flee towards a xenon sector.

[csaba]

The best option is to comply.

Even in the real world cashiers are told to comply and alert authorities without the perp knowing with the goal being to protect them from harm.

Now the latter part is missing where at the safe distance the trader comms/reports to local police but that can be solved with regular patrols that clear out your sector periodically. Although active distress calls should be implemented so this is a more regulated matter and the player is rewarded for properly policing his or her sectors.

The way the economy works in game where you basically make stuff for free from solar power and raw resources makes active pirate hunting pretty pointless. So I set them all to comply and mute all notices. The only annoyance they do these days for me is when they hack the player HQ while I'm collecting for mass teleportation 2 or a terraforming mission, but I noticed that Plunderer destroyers stopped coming to my station once I placed a guard destroyer near it. Might have been a coincidence but this is the only active method I found.

Also there is the issue with Pirate ships not turning hostile after discovery by scanning. They will stop their antics for a while but only temporarily. The default should either be a forced retreat from the local and neighboring sectors or outright hostile marking, pulling in all military ships into the cleanup.

Of course as someone pointed out above you could put wares on a destroyer and set it to kill all pirates attempting a scan but it's a bit dumb when a pirate fighter demands a destroyer to drop its cargo. Well you can roleplay that they were high on spaceweed or something but that still leaves a whole destroyer filled with trade goods for no other apparent reason than to catch drug addicts, it's like as if cops sitting in tanks waved packs of 100$ bills shouting catch me if you can.

[flywlyx]

Piracy wouldn't make any sense if you could just ignore them. I agree though that the whole thing feels off. For me this game mechanic is a weird workaround of a problem deriving from travel drive.

Pirates are somehow able to contact and scan ships that are 30km away because if they would wait any longer, the 4000 m/s freighter is already past them before they could finish their sentence

Yeah, pirate should somehow kick their victim out of the travel drive, but now, it is the victim himself who decides to stop and get robbed
It is just hilarious.

[GCU Grey Area]

Yeah, pirate should somehow kick their victim out of the travel drive, but now, it is the victim himself who decides to stop and get robbed
It is just hilarious.

Mechanism exists - reckon the devs should tweak pirate loadouts to have a preference for EMP missiles & at least one appropriate launcher or missile turret on each of their ships. Quite apart from being the perfect reason for why freighters drop out of travel mode near them, would also have the additional benefit of making pirates more interesting to fight personally (due to boost no longer being a reliable tool).

[blackphoenixx]

1- Drop the cargo. Let’s clear this one out of the way. It’s something you do when your ship is loaded with energy cells. Not with claytronics. I understand why the option is there. It’s just not good in my situation.

I do it with everything. It's actually my default option for all trade ships. And the cost is barely noticable, it's a drop in the bucket.
Certainly much cheaper than buying escorts for everything or constantly replacing losses.

It should be noted that your traders only drop as much cargo as the pirate can carry. Which isn't a lot even for a destroyer, let alone anything smaller.
The only real exception there is the Prometheus, but those only appear in a few paranid sectors and you want to set up patrols to farm them anyway since they drop tons of purple mod parts.

You can and should still use patrol ships to kill pirates, but leave the fighting to them instead of your traders.
Anything except comply on those has a decent chance of losing you the trade ship and (possibly high star) pilot when he decides to flee straight past a destroyer and gets oneshottet.

YMMV, but that risk certainly isn't worth saving a negligible amount of credits to me.

[Nanook]

The biggest problem with the patrol solution is that the pirates often don't even expose their real ID when they comm you or your freighters. And if their demands are met, they may not ever expose their real ID, making patrol interception impossible.

[ahostofissues]

We really need an “ignore” option as default response for pirate harassment. Right now, what we have is Fight, Flee, Surrender cargo and Wait. Every single ones of them are ok in some circumstances, but stupid in nearly all of them.

Bump. Yes please…

The lack of “ignore” as a choice, combined with the “you have to make a decision right now, in the next 8 seconds, with zero information about context” is just a horrid confluence of implementation decisions that, when added together, result in a terrible, awful gameplay experience/feature.

Most people seem to suggest solving this by “just set to drop cargo for everything, never think about it again.” Which, ok, is basically adding a game difficulty modifier by having a -X% revenue generation on all cargo transfers. But if that’s the “best” solution, then what the heck is the point of pirates and piracy in the first place?

[BitByte]

Piracy wouldn't make any sense if you could just ignore them. I agree though that the whole thing feels off. For me this game mechanic is a weird workaround of a problem deriving from travel drive.

Pirates are somehow able to contact and scan ships that are 30km away because if they would wait any longer, the 4000 m/s freighter is already past them before they could finish their sentence

Or they even scan and harrast ships in highway (going 11+km/s) which from my point of view should not be possible (or ships should automatically ignore them).

I have spent my time to gather destroyer (Phoenix, Behemoth & Rattlesnake) & minotaur / dragon raider fleets all over the galaxy (thanks to SCA & FAF) to guard mostly used trading paths. So I would definately prefer get "Ignore" as automated answer for pirate harrassment. If pirate turns hostile my guard patrol will take care from it.
Like someone said if you have high speed freighter (e.g. Boa) good luck for SCA Minotaur Raider to catch it

[Ezarkal]

You guys realize I started this thread nearly 4 years ago, that the only answer for all that time fixed the problem in 95% of the cases back then, and that there has been multiple improvement to the automated response behaviors through various patches since I wrote this?

Don't get me wrong, an "ignore" option would still be nice, but flee just work in most cases now that they patched the behavior. If it doesn't, well... piracy happens and that's the game.

Just saying...

[flywlyx]

You guys realize I started this thread nearly 4 years ago, that the only answer for all that time fixed the problem in 95% of the cases back then, and that there has been multiple improvement to the automated response behaviors through various patches since I wrote this?

Don't get me wrong, an "ignore" option would still be nice, but flee just work in most cases now that they patched the behavior. If it doesn't, well... piracy happens and that's the game.

Just saying...

The funny part is still there, pirates don't have the ability to kick their victims out of travel drive in most cases, it is the victim who decided to be robbed.

[ahostofissues]

You guys realize I started this thread nearly 4 years ago, that the only answer for all that time fixed the problem in 95% of the cases back then, and that there has been multiple improvement to the automated response behaviors through various patches since I wrote this?

Don't get me wrong, an "ignore" option would still be nice, but flee just work in most cases now that they patched the behavior. If it doesn't, well... piracy happens and that's the game.

Just saying...

And yet people are still complaining today. I don’t think your acceptance of the existing options as of 5.10 is widely shared. I get what you’re saying. I do. But I don’t think “it’s better than horribly awful now!” is an acceptable bar for “good enough.”

We’re hijacking and reviving the thread because having everything in one place allows the developers to read this and realize, “wow, there seem to be many people really hate this aspect of our game, and have for a long time… maybe we kinda/sorta should do something to make it not so awful…”

So while you may be satisfied-ish with the solution, I for one am definitely not.

[user1679]

I would also think a "use judgement" option would be a good idea. The pilot could decide to flee if the cargo is too valuable or fight if the pirate is weak. This action is already available
for "attack" response so adding a bit of logic to determine if the cargo is worth a lot shouldn't be difficult.

[Meister_Lampe]

I'd still love that little "show me where" arrow-button in the log for this messages. Would be a true QOL improvement!

[Scoob]

I've asked for the exact same "Ignore" option. It WOULD prevent my trade ships being stupid as stopping dead in space the moment they're hailed by a Pirate. This "Ignore" option works great for combat ships as a response to being attacked. It means that they WON'T try to flee in a stupid direction, killing themselves. I've used it to save many a ship (all L-Class, usually Destroyers) that would otherwise have killed its self through poor flee choices.

As an aside, I actually had a funny Pirating encounter last night. I was travelling through Getsu Fune when I got hailed by a Pirate (the "what have you got" message). Soon after I got the "nothing, on you way" (paraphrasing) message, The funny thing was that I was LOADED with cargo but, also, flying an Asgard, they were only in a Destroyer. Sensible Pirate

[Sound19]

Has there been any communication about this from the Devs?

This issue is one of the big list of annoyances that seems like it wouldn't be that hard to fix.