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[nomadic_leader]

Getting ambushed is boring in starsector. I suggest some changes to make it less boring. Inspired in part by this thread http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=14105.0

In the early game, you often get ambushed by pirates. First, you click through a bunch of dialogues.  Ok, that's boring, but surely it leads to something exciting? After all, this is an ambush. No, it leads to you to one of the following outcomes:

a) "out maneuvering" them somehow by dialogue-fu.
I have no idea how this calculation is made, but you feel you earned it only as much as you earned fording the River on the Apple IIe Oregon trail. And it makes you wonder why it should take place at all if that's all that's going to happen.

If you can't do that, then one way or the other you'll have to spend several boring minutes fleeing up the combat map, at the end of which you get one of these:

b) escaping
the game divorces fleet combat speed from campaign map speed, so that you can get caught on campaign map, but then use maneuvering jets / burn drive etc to escape the "faster" fleet sometimes. Which raises the question - if I am able to escape the enemy fleet by flying up the map for 5 minutes, why couldn't I just "outmaneuver" them in the dialogue? What was the point of that 5 minutes? Then there's a bunch more text dialogues, and for some reason the pursuer fleet can't chase you again because hand-wave.

c)  getting chased down and inevitably killed,
This is often the case since the early pirate scouts are speedy.  Defeat is a foregone conclusion, yet  the game insists on dragging it out with the long "fleeing up the map" interlude. Usually this feels cheap because you got caught while  reaching for a glass of water next to your mouse, and you were just trying to go to some planet to do something else, but the game's punishment for this is death, so you rage-quit.

Probably 99% of people either quit as soon as they get caught, or quit as soon as they lose a ship, and then reload. So why bother even having the escape pod respawn thing? Why have the boring fleeing up the map sequence? Why is the game designed this why if 99% of people aren't even using it, or are erasing it from history (reloading) as soon as they can?


Here's what I suggest:

1. Get rid of the outmaneuver text dialogue outcome. If you're caught, you're caught.

2. Make your fleet and the enemy fleet spawn next to / on top of each other in the middle of the combat map, and on vectors/positions/velocities comparable to how they were in the campaign map, sometimes even colliding explosively with each other, which adds a risk to the ambusher. Only the ambusher gets to choose which ships to deploy.  Ships can retreat by reaching any of the edges of the combat map.

This means no boring fleeing, just an exciting furball as the ambushed ships tries to make it out anyway they can. New and different types of combat, and an actual reason to give your civilian ships something besides logistics hullmods.

Oh no you say! "It will be harder. I'm gonna lose my spaceships and then I will be unhappy since I play the game to collect spaceships and never lose them. I'm just going to rage-reload even more."

Yes, I've thought of that.  To balance the less forgiving but more exciting ambush mechanic, you should be able to payoff pirate fleets (and many other factions too probably) in the text dialogue before battle. Rep, respective fleet strengths etc being taken into account to determine how much the bribe costs. So you actually have a way to avoid death/reload just because you were eating a french fry.

Surely this is much superior to what we have now.

[Draba]

...

Two notes:

• I like the concept of escape scenarios, it makes freighter stats matter a bit/could be fun on paper.
• The game is going in a direction where getting caught and losing a chunk/all of your fleet isn't that big a deal.
  Early on it's certainly annoying, but chances are some combat ships will make it out anyway.

Mostly agree in that current escape is usually a bit boring.
Unless you are filled with drugs it's better to leave the freighters, combat ships are worth more/harder to replace.
No real incentive to try and stall/protect anything, just run and let the slow things get picked apart.

[nomadic_leader]

The main thing is, since most people reload/quit anyway, just let them pay bribes to avoid it. If they won't pay, then at least give them some quick, amusing excitement rather than the tedious fleeing.

Can you imagine you're poking along, and one of those burn 20 pirate scout fleets zooms in and catches you, and so then in the combat map, they also zoom in right in the middle of your ships and one of them hits a freighter and they both blow up? It would be funny at least.

[TrashMan]

Pirates forcing a battle makes no sense.
After all, how pirates normally operate is in asking for bribes to leave you alone.
Going in guns blazing makes no sense for them.
Pirates that needlesly kill are bad pirates, since it just further ruins their reputation and reduces the chances of the pray stopping. If they know your word is worth nothing, then why not fight?

So yeah, pirates should ask for money or a portion of your cargo, and generally let you go if you comply.

[nomadic_leader]

Pirates forcing a battle makes no sense.
After all, how pirates normally operate is in asking for bribes to leave you alone.
Going in guns blazing makes no sense for them.
Pirates that needlesly kill are bad pirates, since it just further ruins their reputation and reduces the chances of the pray stopping. If they know your word is worth nothing, then why not fight?

So yeah, pirates should ask for money or a portion of your cargo, and generally let you go if you comply.

Right, it also works from a "making sense" perspective. I consider the bribery essential to this scheme. Basically it just makes the combat interesting/fast if for some reason the player insists on it , or if they have absolutely nothing to pay with. The mind boggling consistency and lack of random, quirky stuff happening in combat is the reason I often avoid it in early game.

[Torch]

Pirates going in guns blazing to snag some sweet cargo/ships to add to their fleet makes perfect sense to me, as long as they're not picking fights with fleets that are obviously going to steamroll them.

I agree with pretty much everything in this thread, combat is too predictable - the only things that ever seem to change are the ships you use/fight, but even then the ubiquity of pirates makes most fights be against the same collosi, ventures, hounds etc. over and over again. Making combat dynamic and less predictable is essential IMO.

[nomadic_leader]

Pirates going in guns blazing to snag some sweet cargo/ships to add to their fleet makes perfect sense to me, as long as they're not picking fights with fleets that are obviously going to steamroll them.

I agree with pretty much everything in this thread, combat is too predictable - the only things that ever seem to change are the ships you use/fight, but even then the ubiquity of pirates makes most fights be against the same collosi, ventures, hounds etc. over and over again. Making combat dynamic and less predictable is essential IMO.

Yea, this is true. I like that the developer thinks about fairness, so he wants to make sure that there aren't situations where the battle is really unfair to either the player because of some starting condition, or the AI because it's something it isn't used to dealing with.

But it needs to be relaxed to improve variety. The current emphasis on pitched line battles is a bit artificial and primitive, and does really have a pokemon vibe. What makes for interesting battles and tactics is that sometimes you are put in a very unfair or unexpected situation, and you have to come up with something original to deal with it.

I think this revised ambush mechanic would help, because the starting positions of the ships/fleets would be somewhat random, and might often be quite 'unfair' so that the player is forced to make split second decisions about which ships to sacrifice, fight, etc. (if they won't/cant pay off their attacker)