Suggested Pirates are too easy.

[Chromework]

Once you make a good enough ship, then pirates become so easy that fighting them is no longer fun. It would be cool if pirates got increasingly harder the farther away you get from Sector 0,0,0

 

[IG-1000]

Pretty sure this has already been suggested, Also you realize you can build your own Pirate Ships and set them to be spawnable by the Pirate Faction.

 

[Ithirahad]

If you've been watching Criss and Saber's Tuesday/Thursday streams, you'd know that this is in development.

 

[Valck]

You can also allow enemies (ie. pirates) to use any blueprint on the server to keep them on par with your tech:

Spoiler: server.cfg

DEFAULT_BLUEPRINT_ENEMY_USE = true //Default option for blueprints not in catalog yet

EDIT: This may have the effect of spawning in useless ships or turrets without bases etc., something to keep in mind.

Not everybody has the time/patience/opportunity to watch streams. If there are regular dev streams in which new information is being disseminated (as opposed to let's plays), I think they should at least put a summary of the current development highlights as posts on the front page or something like that.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Yes this has been suggested many times. The current dev focus is expanding the factions system. We see this by the work being done into the three known future factions, Trade Guild, Outcast and Scavengers. These factions will likely own their own and protect their own territory using fleets. I suspect that hanging out in Scavenger controled space or making enemies of the Outcasts or Trade guild in their space will make the game much harder. There is also the Fleet build challenge to populate the galaxy with random minor factions. These may have randomly assigned atributes that will determine how they interact with players and likely their own space ton control. The future for Starmade looks bright and much more interesting (IMHO) than the game just getting harder because you fly further from 2,2,2. There are also plans to make the void more dangerous so it will be harder to leave the spawn galaxy.

 

[kiraen]

I don't watch the streams (wrong time for me), and I knew that this was in development.

Pirate spawning is/will not be based on location. Pirate spawning directly affected by ship scoring, which is still a work in progress.

StarMade News - StarMade v0.19361 Flash Light, Ship Scores, On-Ship Spawning & Bugfixes

we can also then use the scores to determine pirate spawning by difficulty, and adapt it depending on how powerful the combined scores of the players in an area are, which should lead to a lot better scaling difficulty and therefore more fun.

 

[LoSboccacc]

crap no just no. or at least make it a settings or a parameter

enemy scaling according to player score alone sucks terribly, and contrary to single player games where it's at least bearable, imagine having someone jumping in with a huge ship while you were still grinding asteroids with your little miner and suddenly billion mass pirates are pouncing on you

it also prevents many interesting interactions. like mounting expeditions to pacify fringe sectors. having richer or contested sectors more dangerous and requiring more effort to pacify.

just say no to player power scaling

 

[MacThule]

Once you make a good enough ship, then pirates become so easy that fighting them is no longer fun. It would be cool if pirates got increasingly harder the farther away you get from Sector 0,0,0

AIs are always too easy as soon you learn their particular ways or get the right gear.

Fight humans.

I've never heard "humans are too easy." Not ever.

 

[Proxima_Centauri]

AIs are always too easy as soon you learn their particular ways or get the right gear.

Fight humans.

I've never heard "humans are too easy." Not ever.

The AI as it is now is completely incompetent
-it doesn't take full advantage of the thrusters on a ship
-it doesn't fire any weapon at the max possible fire rate
-its only strategy is to get as far away as it can without getting out of weapons range, and travel in a slow circle around the target
-it can't use 3/4 of the weapon combinations
-it never "chases" players anymore
-it can't use any passive effect

2 years ago the AI was actually moderately decent due to its ability to chase down players and its near-perfect accuracy
The AI in the game now is simply a pushover, no matter how good the ship it is driving is.

 

[Madman198237]

Actually, the AI can be quite decent...provided you give it ships that require no thought and have a 1.0 T/M (Or less) and all the weapons have the same range and there are no jumpdrives and no passive effects and no logic and no special weapons and no drones being carried and plenty of time in order to grind the materials required to replace that ship that just flew off to nowhere for no apparent reason.

 

[Edymnion]

Well, the main problem for this is the same as for servers with custom pirates.

If they are tough enough to be entertaining for the established players, then they are so strong that they walk all over new players. It is not fun at all to try and get started on a server who's pirates are built to be a threat to somebody thats been there for 6 months and is fielding planet sized cruisers.

It just ends up being a huge "New players aren't welcome here" sign which eventually causes the death of a server as older players fade away and no new ones come in to replace them.

Simply making the pirates stronger the farther out you go doesn't work either, because older players will often be the ones at the center of the galaxy, who got there first, meaning new players have to constantly move farther out to find unclaimed space, right into the path of the harder pirates.

 

[Madman198237]

And you can't put hard pirates at the center of the galaxy, because guess who STARTS in the center of the galaxy? Usually, anyway.
You have to make incentives to travel outward and leave galactic-center space open for new players and factions. Perhaps resources become richer the farther out you go? Maybe make it so that galactic-center territories are easy to hold FP-wise, yet provide little FP and fewer resources of their own. Then galactic-rim territories are expensive yet profitable, making it attractive to remove claims on central systems in favor of holding a little more rim territory.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

One approach to balancing it could be to show how much territory in a particular galaxy/bit of the universe is under control by that group, which could determine the size/strength of their fleets. That way if you're looking for a fight you'll know what you're getting in for. So a single system would be very manageable, and a huge clump of 20 systems would be fielding formidable groups of ships.

 

[MacThule]

Well, the main problem for this is the same as for servers with custom pirates.

If they are tough enough to be entertaining for the established players, then they are so strong that they walk all over new players. It is not fun at all to try and get started on a server who's pirates are built to be a threat to somebody thats been there for 6 months and is fielding planet sized cruisers.

It just ends up being a huge "New players aren't welcome here" sign which eventually causes the death of a server as older players fade away and no new ones come in to replace them.

Simply making the pirates stronger the farther out you go doesn't work either, because older players will often be the ones at the center of the galaxy, who got there first, meaning new players have to constantly move farther out to find unclaimed space, right into the path of the harder pirates.

This is spot on. Upscaling pirate ships is a dead-end approach to improving MP server play. It hurts far more than it helps, and so many MP servers fall into that trap because a handful of short-sighted players start loudly demanding it.

Once the pirates are too easy for you, it's time to put big boy pants on and go outside to play with the other kids. Either that or go play something like WoW that provides you with an infinite treadmill of ever-harder (but still dumb as rocks) AI mobs to grind on.

Pirates are just creeps, they are for noobs to cut their teeth on, not what Starmade is about. This isn't called 'Pirate Wars.' The real action is with other players.
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One approach to balancing it could be to show how much territory in a particular galaxy/bit of the universe is under control by that group, which could determine the size/strength of their fleets. That way if you're looking for a fight you'll know what you're getting in for. So a single system would be very manageable, and a huge clump of 20 systems would be fielding formidable groups of ships.

I think the approach the devs are taking is perfect. The best way to provide some variety of difficulties in AI opponents is to have random regions of harder and easier enemies. The NPC faction system looks like it will do something along the lines of what you're saying here, which is to procedurally generate regions of AI opponents of varying difficulties and characters.

The NPC faction system will probably eventually give us a situation where some regions are controlled by factions favoring armor tanks, others by mostly civilian miners and traders, others by factions favoring shield tanks with ion defense, etc.

 

[Madman198237]

I hope defense strength in faction territory does end up based on areas controlled, distance from garrisons, strength of controlling faction, all of that. It will give a lot to the game, especially if you can tell, by looking at the map, what the strength of an area is.

 

[MacThule]

I hope defense strength in faction territory does end up based on areas controlled, distance from garrisons, strength of controlling faction, all of that. It will give a lot to the game, especially if you can tell, by looking at the map, what the strength of an area is.

I'd like to be able to get a rough idea from the map, but honestly I hope that it's only very rough, because one of the most fun activities in the game is running reconnaissance missions (or sending recruits to run them for you) that have real meaning.

 

[Madman198237]

I want the map to be unrevealed until you receive information about the area from some source. Information trading, intra-faction sharing, personal scouting mission, whatever.

I have a list of game-depth improvements (That also generally follow realistic technology) that I want to see in-game someday. But anyway, pirate strength should be determined based on a distance system---the farther you are from a center of activity (Pirate planet base, pirate station, pirate fleet) the fewer and weaker ships you should see.