Captains with a desire to live, fight, run

[AvorionCraft]

There's a problem with Captains presently.

If they're on a trade mission and they get ambushed by pirates, they will sit there.

Not only will THEY sit there, their escorts seem to just be sitting there as well. 

Unless this is resolved---Captains need to be programmed to jump to a sector over with escorts, or fight back. Zoning into a sector to find your ship's shields at 30% and not a single pirate has taken a hit is unacceptable when your ship has 10x the pirates individual firepower.

With economy spam and chat there's no guarantee that we can know if a ship is under an attack.

Alternative: a notification mid-top-left that shows a flashing angry red "you have a ship under attack" light/icon.

[MoreChainguns!]

2 hours ago, AvorionCraft said:

There's a problem with Captains presently.

If they're on a trade mission and they get ambushed by pirates, they will sit there.

Not only will THEY sit there, their escorts seem to just be sitting there as well. 

Unless this is resolved---Captains need to be programmed to jump to a sector over with escorts, or fight back. Zoning into a sector to find your ship's shields at 30% and not a single pirate has taken a hit is unacceptable when your ship has 10x the pirates individual firepower.

With economy spam and chat there's no guarantee that we can know if a ship is under an attack.

Alternative: a notification mid-top-left that shows a flashing angry red "you have a ship under attack" light/icon.

A low-tech fix for not knowing that your ship is under attack is choosing the 'Fleet' chat tab. This cancels out economy notifications. If there is one. I'm not sure, exactly, but...

Besides that, the problem with AI escorts has always been in Avorion. I think it has something to do with the game not mapping out a sector as a 3D space and conduct a battle of ships within it, but simply regarding each ship as an integer of their Omicron. Again, not sure exactly, because my miners are never escorted, and in the version I'm in setting escorts to 'Patrol Sector' still works.

[thoraya]

Captains could do better when attacked on a mission, for sure. I.e. they should try to escape if they cant win the fight.

But as far as i can tell, they fight back. Several times when a ship was attacked on a mission i examined what happens. I jumped into the sector a short time after i got the message and the ship was in fight with the pirates. Some of the pirates were already killed. I watched the fight for a while. While watching the ship killed another pirate.

Maybe there is a problem with turret-configuration? On my ships i have configured 2 or 3 groups:

Mining/salvage ships:

- 1 group mining/salvage turrets (controlled by captain)
- 1 group combat turrets (auto)
- 1 group point-defence turrets (defence)

Other ships:

- 1 group combat turrets (controlled by captain)
- 1 group point-defence turrets (defence)

I cant tell about escort-behaviour. I only whatched what a single ship does when attacked while on a mission.