Nerf Pirates

[Fiestaguy]

Maybe just do it this way: Sector A is where you start and is surrounded by Sector B,C and D. behind those sectors are Sectors E,F,G,H,I,J. then the pirate ships that spawn in Sector A are very weak. easy enough for new players. then when you head out further to Sectors B,C, and D pirates get a bit stronger then when going to Sectors E,F,G,H,I,J they will become even more stronger. but only by small bits so that you wont notice much.

 

[TENTACLE BOSS]

Me and my friend when we first played would get constantly pursued by raiding parties adding a survival aspect, and that was part of the fun. But now that we have built up a station and some strong ships we can take on anything. As the game has progressed we would find ourselves wanting stronger variations of pirates in the universe as opposed to weaker ones.

 

[ne3zy]

Even if I love the game I\'m pretty disapointed because beautiful ships are almost useless even if you optimize them. If you want to kill the pirates easily you have to make a flying brick of the death...

 

[Winterhome]

It\'d appear that pirate ship purchases are scaled by price... The vast majority (read: 90%) of my pirates are buying my mini-fighters, which are about a quarter of the price of an Isanth-IV. Others are buying a turret that I put in the catalog to easily rebuy over and over again.

I have yet to see any in my cruiser or heavy bomber.

 

[The Kind Knido]

Pirates are certainly a case of being overpowered and weak. If you have a terrible ship, you can\'t win. If you\'re ship is really good and you make blueprints so you don\'t lose hours and hours of work, they start buying thise blueprints as well.

I\'ve found a fleet of huge and powerful ships and simply ran away because a 1v1 against you\'re own ship if it\'s large and powerful enough will cause massive lag on your FPS and ping.

My suggestion for next update - give the pirate and trade factions a large line of ships that begin popping up the more powerful your own ship becomes and ban them from buying your blueprints. If the mobs get really large and/or have a lot of weaponry, reduce their numbers so it doesn\'t lag so bad that it\'s a slideshow.

 

[MrNo]

It is possible to prevent the pirates from using your blueprints as is. When making the blueprint, you can set it so that only you can use it, this should prevent them from grabbing it.

On the other hand, you should find groups of 5 of your own ship floating around. I would say that the more blocks in the ship there are, the fewer the pirates should be able to spawn in a single group. This would probably help lag a fair amount (wouldn\'t surprise me to discover that a lot of server lag is pirates grabbing large ship designs) as well as preventing them from suddenly steamrolling everyone.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Easy solution if you are admin on the server, build a crappy ship, upload it to the catalog, go into admin settings for the catalog and set it up as usable by enemies. As far as I know this will override the default spawns so you will only come across ships of your choosing.

 

[Gameguru]

Pirates are WAY to easy. Granted, I thought the size of pirates was capital ship when i first started playing. Pirates have a very distinct weakness. SHIELDS!!!! they have TWO shield blocks, even new players can bust through a two block shield system. Oh and a tip for new players, MAKE YOUR ANTI MATTER CANNONS LONG, NOT WIDE!!!! Thanks

 

[benzilla3]

Oh my god I am really sick of these posts



Pirates are easy as f**k to kill. Period. I barely ever even SEE pirates, and they came and wiped everything out? Were you just like \'\'Oh hey theres some pirates, we are unprepared and instead of running WHICH ALWAYS WORKS AGAINST PIRATES we will just sit here so they can actually have a chance at killing us\'\'? Pirates need to be stronger if anything. I don\'t know about you guys but on my first day it was a piece of cake for me and I didn\'t even have shields on my ship. They have like 2 shield blocks on their ships too. That is basically nothing, and with 24 antimatter guns you should be able to do that EASY.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Pirates are only as easy/hard as you/sever admins set them to be. I only have three types on pirate ships on my server and I regularly end up limping home to my starbase because I couldn\'t handle three pirate gunboats solo.

 

[Nootau]

Ships for looks will find issue with pirates. Ships built to kill will find pirates a joke.

 

[benzilla3]

That ship is tiny, and from the looks of it barely has any shields or weapons. Of course you couldn\'t kill those pirates :P get a bigger ship ffs

 

[Morrigi]

Pirates on the server I play on are based off the Reavers from Firefly and have access to a ship design with 150k shields, turrets, missiles, and 4 600-damage main guns.

 

[wideasuthrow]

what happened to me is i built a little mining ship and the pirates would chase me accross systems and i could never get rid of them

 

[Omni]

Actually, I find the pirates and the Isanth ironically iconic, but problematic when so many other gameplay systems are not yet in place. When you first start out, they seem like gods. When you know how to build a ship and have any barely reasonable amount of money, they become a joke and stay a joke for the rest of the game unless you give them better ships to play with. I tried starting a new universe recently and found myself struggling to avoid pirates ganging up on me and maiming me in my attempts to make money. The increased aggro radius causes some serious problems that weren\'t there before. Yet I know once I have a ship that I\'d actually call a proper ship, I\'ll be completely safe. At that point, I\'m going to love the increased aggro radius.

I don\'t think they need to be nerfed, I think wide-sweeping changes are needed. While this game is usually very high quality and playable for an alpha game, there are currently some issues with the implementation of pirates and that\'s to be expected from an alpha game. For anyone having trouble with pirates, consider turning them off until you have a ship with reasonably heavy shields, or disabling the Isanth blueprint and giving them something even weaker, something even a small ship can defeat. Once you get the hang of things, though, OP is easily the last thing you\'d be calling the default Isanth pirates. At that point they feel more like annoying little bugs.

 

[Archer6621]

The game needs a proper progression system for single player, so that the pirates gradually get stronger as you progress. It already tries to do this by using the blueprints you make as pirates by default, but it\'s not good enough imo.

 

[Omni]

The game needs a proper progression system for single player, so that the pirates gradually get stronger as you progress. It already tries to do this by using the blueprints you make as pirates by default, but it\'s not good enough imo.


It\'s a start, but we\'re a long way away from a proper single-player progression, not to mention simply a long way from real, proper singleplayer. (Right now it\'s kind of like sandbox with money and pirates.)

 

[Ultraviolet Dugong]

Lack of progression was one of my greatest frustrations with Minecraft, and it would be a shame to see it cripple this game as well. Let me be clear, here: the difficulty in games should always be back-loaded. That is, the game should start out somewhat easy and become more difficult over time.



The trouble with the current pirates is as follows:

• They can track the player from ridiculous distances. Radar jamming does nothing to help with this.
• The top speed of all ships is capped, and Isanths are plenty manuverable. So you cannot outrun them.
• They are just as strong at the beginning of the game as they are after you\'ve been playing for weeks.

A player just starting out can\'t hope to have the resources needed to fight off a swarm of them. They can\'t hope to run, either. I know there are crazy money making schemes in the game (I\'m sitting on a somewhat secret one that can easily net me a million or two within the first couple minutes), but it\'s not just an issue of money. Shops have limited inventory, and will probably be lacking enough of something in order to build a powerful enough ship.

 

[blindmind]

I don\'t think pirates should be buffed. Neither do I believe they should be nerfed. Instead, they should be modeled after a more dynamic and wider range of difficulty, based on the specs of the ships entering or about to enter a sector.

The should be a bell curve for how often ships get ambushed, based on the specs of the ship. Small ships on their own, in isolation, will attract pirates less often and will generally encounter fewer pirates. Medium-end ships, your quintessential cargo-hauler and utility ships or very attractive fighters, will get attacked most often and by decently sized groups. Your High-end galaxy enders will inspire fear in all of pirate-kind, save for the especially ambitious warlords who\'ve managed to inspire courage in at least one or two pirate hordes. These attacks are exceptionally rare, but exceptionally dangerous (or fun).

 

[FlyingDebris]

Some crazy admin made the pirates only spawn using top-of-the-line heavy cruisers, which had something on the order of 1.5 million shields. This, and Vaygr, are the reasons I developed the DFN MegaMAC MKI. Now, we\'re onto the MKIIIs, and an isanth would be dead before it even came into nav range. Well, that and the point-defense systems on our newer cruisers, I can fly by a herd of pirates, without even noticing they were there. So, just work on your turrets, and they\'ll be going *poof* before you can even turn to look at their charred hulls.