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Enemy of my enemy... Wait... What?!


Thundercraft
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Please change faction dynamics such that players always have an enemy to fight besides the Xsotan aliens! Please make bandits a perpetual enemy of all factions. (Or, if that sounds too drastic, please at least give us the option to make this happen.)

 

I'm not sure about other players' game experience. But I've been seeing regular factions - particularly my (formerly) green ally faction - ally themselves with pirates.  ??? And I'm not talking about a faction with "Pirates of" in their name. I'm talking about bandit-type pirates.

 

As a consequence, I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. :( Bandit-type pirates respawn at roughly 10 minute intervals. And they all hate my guts (abhorrent). Aside from the Xsotan, they're the only faction that hates me. (Regular factions were all neutral or allies.)

 

I have the choice to either fight bandits, flee, or let them pound my ship mercilessly. If I fight them, though, I suffer a whopping 13,000+ relationship penalty - per ship destroyed - to any faction in the system.  :o This very quickly turns all my allies in enemies. I no longer have a green ally. At this rate, I'll have the entire galaxy hating my guts!  >:(

 

This behavior is particularly noticeable in the Creative Mode galaxy I created just to design ships. As my starting sector did not have any faction ships of a military nature, I relocated to one that did, on the assumption that they would engage the Xsotan and bandits, leaving me to design ships in peace... That was not the case, though. They only engage the Xsotan.  :(

 

This must be due to how the 'enemy of my enemy' game mechanic works. My (formerly) green ally used to attack bandits. But bandits also attack Xsotan on sight. This must have gradually raised the relationship between bandits and other factions such that they all consider bandits as allies now!  ::)

 

Some patches ago, koonschi drastically reduced the occurrence of wars and infighting between factions - to the point that faction infighting seems pretty rare now. This behavior makes me very concerned, now that we often only have Xsotan and bandits to fight. (That is, without picking fights with a faction or loosing too much rep due to this silly 'enemy of my enemy' thing.)

 

The only way I was able to design ships in peace was by finding a quiet sector with nothing in it. I then purchased a station-founding ship from a shipyard and created my own station in the sector. (This was not easy as a large patrol of bandits now seem to be in every sector with a shipyard. I had to run in at full speed, quickly dock and purchase a station-founding ship, and try to flee before they crippled my new ship.)

 

I had to create a station in an empty sector because the /Sethome mod requires a friendly station in the sector before it allows us to set it as our home sector.  ::)

 

Since then, I've built a huge ship of my own with lots of guns to protect me while I build. Soon, a wave of Xsotan appeared. But I did not attack them. After telling my ship to stand down, I'm going to let the Xsotan fight anything that enters the sector - including bandits.

 

I just feel that it is pretty ridiculous that I had to go to this extreme to build ships in peace. That, and it feels funny to rely on Xsotan ships to protect me from bandits.

 

Edit:

 

I would have posted this in the Bugs section, but I have a nagging suspicion that I would be told that this is not a bug, but rather intended or a feature.

 

(Incidentally, when I told my friend about this and other Avorion game quirks tonight, he laughed and laughed.  ;D He was never keen on trying Steam games, particularly something in a beta phase. And this conversation only reinforced his opinion.)

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I haven't seen this happening for me, so it is likely an issue with staying in a single system for way too long and also not killing incoming waves of pirates and Xsotan quickly enough to avoid them stacking.

 

It certainly would make sense to have the dedicated pirate/bandit factions be unable to gain positive faction reputation with the more-reputable factions.

 

There are certainly more complicated ways to solve this, but at this point in time a simple solution to this likely makes the most sense. Sometime in the future it would certainly be interesting to have a more complex dynamic handling faction reputation, which could lead to interesting alliances of two or more factions.

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Update:

 

I've been designing ships in my empty sector for a while now. And I've enjoyed the peace.

 

However, I've noticed that the small force of Xsotan ships has grown to a mighty fleet of nearly three dozen! And it keeps growing! :o

 

No force of bandits stand a chance.  ;D But then, merchants are very quickly wiped out.

 

Thankfully, they still ignore my ships. But the game is designed such that new waves of aliens spawn every few minutes. As my ships do not engage them and no bandits can make a dent in them, their forces keep growing with every wave. I'm a bit afraid of the day when they do turn on me, too.

 

I guess it's only a matter of time before the lag catches up to me or so many ships spawn in the same sector that it crashes the game. (Actually, I've had several crashes recently...)  :( [sigh]

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That's an interesting issue, a limit on spawn rates might slow it down but not stop it altogether. eg if there's 2 Xsotan spawns still active in a system, then no more will spawn in that system until one set is killed.

 

Maybe make bandits/pirates rep with other factions constantly tick towards a value?

This could effect other factions as well, so that some will never get on with each other.

Could also effect the player as well, you've not been in a certain factions space for a while doing things to raise your rep and they'll no longer love you, they shouldn't start hating you, just not loving you, although if they are very xenophobic they might start disliking you.

Also rep with other factions could effect the amount of rep gained for actions. 

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The Xsotan forces continue to grow and now number almost 5 dozen.  :o

 

But, I think I'll just start a new galaxy now. I don't need another possible cause for game crashes. Those cause me enough headaches as it is.

 

BTW: The author of the Hostile Factions mod replied with a method of fixing this issue:

I changed both the pirateattack.lua and alienattack.lua events. What happens now is once the event starts and creates ships bandit factions(pirates), xsotan, etc. will have -200k reputation with each other. I'm pretty sure this fixes the scenario you're describing.

 

They WILL turn on you, flee while you can.

 

I'm not afraid. Well... maybe a little.  :P

So far, they've been neutral with me.

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They WILL turn on you, flee while you can.

 

I'm not afraid. Well... maybe a little.  :P

So far, they've been neutral with me.

Actually, they won't. Not as long as you don't fire a weapon or a mining/salvaging laser. Never. Do they follow you around? I also don't think so. Once they've warped in, they're in that sector and that's it. The only thing that follows you around is the "aliens are going to attack" thing that you basically can't escape until they've warped in.

 

Presumably, you could just mark that sector as the sector that doesn't exist anymore on your map and be done with it. Too bad if you have a lot of nice stuff in there, though.

 

BTW: The author of the Hostile Factions mod replied with a method of fixing this issue:

I changed both the pirateattack.lua and alienattack.lua events. What happens now is once the event starts and creates ships bandit factions(pirates), xsotan, etc. will have -200k reputation with each other. I'm pretty sure this fixes the scenario you're describing.

That should do it, yeah. Although it doesn't fix relation changes after they've spawned, but honestly it's kind of your fault if you wait for 60 ships to warp in... (I'm kidding, it's unwanted behaviour regardless)
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60 ships?  :o that's a battle fleet.

Before you abandon that galaxy, post a screen shot please?

 

It seems that I may have overestimated slightly. There's only somewhere between 46 and 48. (It's hard to count them all.)

 

20170302202041_1.jpg

 

I've left it running for several hours and no more will spawn it seems that I've reached some coded limit. Though, this is still pretty ridiculous. :P

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[...](It's hard to count them all.)[...]

 

Mouse over the sector in map view and it should give you an overview of the current contents of the system, which will include a quantity of Xsotan ships.

 

And I may be misremembering, but I recall that if a fleet of Xsotan or pirate ships warp into a sector and I leave that sector, they'll often be gone when I return (usually after not visiting for either a few hours, or having restarted the game, etc). It certainly seems like it'd make sense to have a "garbage collection" system set up to clean up the possibility of massive war fleets overloading a single sector.

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I'm not sure about other players' game experience. But I've been seeing regular factions - particularly my (formerly) green ally faction - ally themselves with pirates.  ??? And I'm not talking about a faction with "Pirates of" in their name. I'm talking about bandit-type pirates.

 

I dunno about you, but the "random" pirates on the attack timer (every 5, 10, 15 min) aren't completely random.  They are a faction, with territory and everything (they even own warp-gates).  You simply haven't found their territory yet.

 

I should know, I've wiped out a few of the smaller pirate empires, and the "random" pirates started being from a different (but still nearby) pirate faction.

 

 

I get it, you want a hard-coded enemy other than the Xostan.

What you aren't getting is that the Xostan are the bandit enemy you seem to want.

 

 

They don't hold territory:

Have you ever found a Xostan station that wasn't a breeder? No! Because they don't have anything but people/avorion farms.

 

They're hostile to everything for the slightest and flimsiest of reasons:

you fired one bullet, on the other end of the sector, and in a direction such that it could never possibly hit the Xostan. (and don't give me that old spiel about bullets in space, that clearly isn't true within Avorion.)

Or, you were mining an asteroid when the Xostan popped-in. Auto-hostile Xostan.

 

Getting physically close enough will set them off sometimes too!

 

 

Compare that with every other faction ever:

They hold territory, and can even lose it:

As ownership is defined by "he who has the most stations in a sector", once a faction loses all stations, they lose the sector. (yes, even the warp-gates count)

 

Non-Xostan Factions have over a dozen station types:

(I'm not building that list here, ignore the "size" categories and it is still over a dozen

 

Non-Xostan factions won't flip their shit simply because you were mining, or shooting pirates. (they care if and only if your "stray" shots actually hit them, OR if you were salvaging in a scrapyard sector without a liscense)

 

In conclusion, "Xostan" is Avorionese for "bandit"

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I dunno about you, but the "random" pirates on the attack timer (every 5, 10, 15 min) aren't completely random.  They are a faction, with territory and everything (they even own warp-gates).  You simply haven't found their territory yet.

 

I should know, I've wiped out a few of the smaller pirate empires, and the "random" pirates started being from a different (but still nearby) pirate faction.

 

I get it, you want a hard-coded enemy other than the Xostan.

What you aren't getting is that the Xostan are the bandit enemy you seem to want...

 

You must be confusing naturally hostile factions which happen (randomly) to have "Pirates of" in their name. (See the "Pirates" strictly as BANDITS, not a Faction suggestion topic.) Those are not bandits or raiders, but a regular faction. And, yes, they do have stations and gates linking their territory together, like any other faction.

 

The hostile "Bandit" and "Raider" ships that randomly spawn to attack a sector are generated from thin air. Don't believe me? Take a look at pirateattack.lua inside your C:\{Steam folder}\steamapps\common\Avorion\data\scripts\events\ folder. These ships behave differently from the hostile ships of typical factions.

 

In any case: Not having another hard-coded enemy other than the Xostan is not what bothers me.

 

No, what bother me is the situation - where Bandits and Raiders will always, eventually (over several in-game hours), become allied with the local faction. And when that happens, that puts the player in an impossible situation: You either defend yourself and ruin your relationship with the local faction, or you let the pirates attack (and conceivably destroy) your ship - over and over again, ad nauseum.

 

In other words, if a player does not attack bandits/raiders by letting the local faction's forces defeat Xsotan and bandits/raiders, then it's only a matter of time before the player's relations with the local faction are ruined.

 

I looked up this old topic because I wanted to point out that, several patches later, this is still an issue. In fact, in my latest creative-mode galaxy which I use to design ships, after destroying just one bandit ship, my relations with my starting faction instantly went from a bright green high "Admirable" to scarlet red of absolute 100% "Abhorrent" hate!  :o  :'(  >:(

 

Please, tell me how that is intended behavior and how that should be the way things are!

 

Tell me how I'm supposed to fix faction relationships when they instantly dip that far into the red, through no fault of my own? With an Abhorrent relationship rating, I am unable to trade with them at all, so I can't fix it that way. And there are only so many large asteroids to claim and sell to factions. After all such asteroids near a faction have been claimed, a player is out of luck if they need more. And while I could fix it by fighting Xsotan ships, I'd only make things worse by fighting bandits. Also, I'd have to worry about both bandit ships and ships of the hostile faction as they will both attack on sight.

 

As far as I know, there isn't even a server command to fix faction relations. I'm not aware of any (easy) way to fix this situation. The only solution I know is preventative, by using the Hostile Factions mod (or part of it) to prevent this from happening.

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Enemies and factions need to be improved in general, but we'll see what happens with the faction/alliances update. To respond to someone else above, I do think pirate attacks are actually random, they seem to be on a timer rather than actual fleets warping from pirate territory to your current sector.

 

Infact I think that's quite likely, because the game doesn't simulate anything outside of your current sector currently, iirc.

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The scripts for generating Xsostan and pirate/bandit incursions are currently overly simplistic, but I don't see it as a big deal - they can be modified.  Having said that, I'm not familiar with the scripting language nor the game engine limitations... but I see this as something that should be open to increasing the sophistication over time.

 

The real problem (as far as I'm concerned) is that the scripts are too localized in scope - they need to be aware of activity in the active region and even over the entire galactic map so that more interesting behaviours can be coded.  They need to be running at a global level with variables that say something like 'increase the probability if there's an active player in a sector, because we want to keep it interesting'.

 

This would allow things like invasion fleets sweeping across the map, and waves of refugee ships fleeing before them.  It would allow wars, with strategies and tactics and allies.

 

Then again, with enough humans playing the game, you get all that and pirates and Xsostan are just annoying and need to be dialed back anyway.

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