NPCs using Bats and Bots

Amen to that ,Chips. When you load a new mod, create your new character and then spend half an hour trying to kill your first wave of enemy fighters in a mission, you quickly get pissed off with it!

Moonhead wrote:
And indeed: endless fights are boring. An idea I had/have to overcome this. is to see if I can equip the NPC with just a fraction of their max capacity with bots ‘n’ bats and maybe other ammo. I’d even like to give them a little damage, to suggest they have had theirmown history before you meet them, but I don’t think that’s possible (besides, it would bea bit lame that every randomly spawned e.g. lvl 14 Outcast has the same number of bats ‘n’ bots and the same damage to his ship, so if I’d do it that way, it means I’d have to expand the NPC ships a lot!)

I only mentioned it as I myself got bored playing my own mod.

It was a face palm moment, one which I never actually fixed

In my opinion this nanobot and battery thing is rather bad, as it hides the actual hitpoints a ship has. It would be much better to enlare the hitpoints or shield capacity in general. Or to make them regenerate the hitpoints over time so that they are only useful after the battle has ended to repair your ship.

Well yes you can go back to no repairs for the NPCs.

But then that was not good, which is why we all changed it - to give NPCs the realism of being able to do the same as the players can.

One thing I have always had a wish for is to have to buy fuel for the ships.

Dilithium Crystals!

This might be manageable by modding, by setting power drain to not recharge and have to buy a power cell that discharges from the engine, then remove or reduce the power drain from all equipment?

But a buyable non-recharging limited fuel cell that must be mounted for the ship to launch, like the scanner or tractor, would be cool.

That would also mean you will have the risk of getting stranded in space!

Then you would need to call a SpaceWays Corp. Recovery Vehicle or mobile fuel cell shop ship - Paddy O’Shea’s Flea Market to the rescue!

Or - Fuel scoops, to recharge from a sun corolla like Elite? Wow! Cooler and Cooler!

Anyone else like this suggestion?

I have played around with the fuel idea, what i did was use a powerplant with not regeneration but high capacity, also setting the engines to drain energy as well as sheilds and other auxillary equipment (i don’t think i managed to get tractors or scanners to drain energy though) to you have to watch you energy and not let it drop to 0 or your engines die and you are stranded. Probably a little too ‘hardcore’ for the average player in terms of realism so im only introdusing it as a separate class of ship.

Ozed

Give npc bats and bots will not NPC become invincible. I actually tried to increase the rate of the usage to make NPC hardly dead in NPC vs NPC combat, but sadly i got fail and have to decrease the gun accuracy for NPC to 0.0X.

NeXoSE wrote:
Give npc bats and bots will not NPC become invincible. I actually tried to increase the rate of the usage to make NPC hardly dead in NPC vs NPC combat, but sadly i got fail and have to decrease the gun accuracy for NPC to 0.0X.

The point isn’t that they’re invincible… it is that if you can beat them, then giving them bats/bots makes beating them tedious rather than more of a challenge. I’m urging caution based on experience if you think players will enjoy repeatedly regenerating opposition (give them a full compliment of bats/bots and they will have a regen of at least 3 or 4 times).

I’d definitely urge caution in making anything less than lvl 8 have any ability to use bat’s / bots as new players will find it incredibly tedious to keep shooting the same guys over and over again as their loadouts/ships aren’t sufficient. Initial missions can take 20-25 minutes instead of 5…

When testing your changes, I’d definitely recommend trying to play your mod as a new player by doing missions to earn money etc, and seeing how you fair. Don’t forget to try as a trader. It is very easy to overlook how increasing NPC’s fighting ability can seriously screw traders (of course you may already do all this, but when I modded, I tended to check things worked more than experience how they affected the game play! )

Chips wrote:

When testing your changes, I’d definitely recommend trying to play your mod as a new player by doing missions to earn money etc, and seeing how you fair. Don’t forget to try as a trader. It is very easy to overlook how increasing NPC’s fighting ability can seriously screw traders (of course you may already do all this, but when I modded, I tended to check things worked more than experience how they affected the game play! )

We taking different things.

I’m not a radicals. Few years before when i’m 2.29 player, i really despair when i doing mission with the ge_fighter, so i know that’s very annoying things to do. In my mod, only NPC higher than MAD will use repair, so im not very worry about this point.

Old topic anyway I m not sure, if that info has been posted somewhere.
So here goes a part of one of my old death fuses:

…;-------------- dump cargo --------------
[dump_cargo]
at_t = 0.500000
origin_hardpoint = HpMount
…

With this, we did have NPCs, which were not dying.
Clearly related crashes to this have not been noted.
Setting
at_t = 0.000000
solved all issues.

Obviously those NPCs made it, to repair from death.
Dumping their cargo at the start of the death fuse,
removes those bots + bats, before they can use it.

Hope it helps.