Pirates waves - how they scale, how they are triggered, do they work at all?

[Matt_Bradock]

I've been trying to figure out how pirate waves work for a while now. I always seem to get mixed results. I'd like to call upon the community and Schine staff to disclose the math behind the game choosing which wave to spawn upon a trigger event (like the attack on a shop or a pirate station.)
I ask this because my results have been erratic, and I'm not alone with it.
What exactly are the factors that determine the wave? Does the game care at all about the mass of ships in a wave, or does only the triggering ship's mass count?
What are the thresholds between the mass ranges? How big do you have to be to trigger a level 1 and how big to trigger a level 10?

Without information like this, trying to hunt pirates as a player, or manage them as an admin, is nothing more than fumbling in the dark.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

Alright, so far what I found out by talking to people is the reason why I couldn't find a system is because there seems to be none. At this stage, the game just picks a random difficulty and picks a wave assigned to it. If there is none, it spawns a random number of ships marked as enemy spawnable in the catalog. Mass of ships or mass of the triggering ship doesn't matter the least.

 

[timethatswasted]

For me it only ever spawns the first wave in the list, never spawns any of the other waves.

What it does allow tho is for you to assign waves by faction. So you can have unique ships spawn for each of the AI factions. So you kinda can have custom AI factions.

 

[Reilly Reese]

Using the /initiate_wave command works as a form of keeping track of what difficulty spawns what.

 

[Kiithnaras]

I have also been fumbling with this very issue, acquired blueprints, modified existing ones, etc, and set up several waves with scaled difficulty only to find that, as far as I can tell, it only uses the last wave that I edited/created.

It's rather frustrating since that particular wave (set at Diff 6) includes two Darkphenixes (heavy bombers) and four modified Nemesis heavy fighters (with some decent weapons) - A challenge for all but very large capital ships.

It's fantastic to know that the system is being worked on, but without any determining logic, pirate hunting feels stagnant: obnoxiously difficult or impossible for newer players, and laughably easy for older ones.

 

[kiraen]

iirc, the main problem with the wave system is the ship scoring. The code which determines the 'difficulty' of any ship (including yours) is only a placeholder, and drastically incorrect 90% of the time. A larger and more combat capable ship may be calculated as a lesser threat just because it has a higher ratio of thrust blocks even tho it's weapons can pierce your ship with a single shot. A 30 mass ship made of almost entirely weapon systems could be rated as a planet cracker.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

That's why they should be scaling off mass imo, easier calculated and more trustworthy about the combat capability of the vessel.

 

[SuperWookie]

I've been wondering about how to spawn harder waves for bigger ships on my server, although since it doesn't work properly I think the way to go would be to keep pirates small and make the trade guild have the bigger ships, since they're optional to fight.

 

[Reilly Reese]

I've been wondering about how to spawn harder waves for bigger ships on my server, although since it doesn't work properly I think the way to go would be to keep pirates small and make the trade guild have the bigger ships, since they're optional to fight.

Trading Guild and Pirates share the same category right now. The only way to somewhat control the sizes is to use the admin command which restricts things to be a server hosted event.

 

[Kiithnaras]

Actually, I have set up a separate spawn group for the Trade Guild faction ID, and that works appropriately...since I only created one spawn group for that faction. It's just the seven other groups for the Pirate faction that have the issue. When attacking a pirate station, my 13,000 mass ship spawns the exact same wave that a small, 50-mass ship does, and so far it has always been the last-created spawn group for that particular faction ID. At least that's what players on my server have been reporting. Inaccuracy of second-hand accounts and all that.

Mind-boggling.

 

[kiraen]

That's why they should be scaling off mass imo, easier calculated and more trustworthy about the combat capability of the vessel.

A 500 mass cargo transport has significantly less combat ability then a 500 mass warship, especially since half of the mass is in the cargo.
Mass is not a very good metric by itself. Which is why we have the calculations. (even tho they don't work right now).

Incidentally, if anyone wants to mess with the scoring, it's in starmade/data/script/statistics/ship-index-calculation.lua
If you really want to just work off mass, then that's the file you need to modify. Let us know your results.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

Actually, I have set up a separate spawn group for the Trade Guild faction ID, and that works appropriately...since I only created one spawn group for that faction. It's just the seven other groups for the Pirate faction that have the issue. When attacking a pirate station, my 13,000 mass ship spawns the exact same wave that a small, 50-mass ship does, and so far it has always been the last-created spawn group for that particular faction ID. At least that's what players on my server have been reporting. Inaccuracy of second-hand accounts and all that.

Mind-boggling.

As my experience goes, currently, attacking stations tends to spawn one specific wave only, if you have more setups than a certain amount. I have seen servers that had about 2-3 waves for pirates max, spawning them at random, when you have more than 5 however, game tends to always grab the highest level for stations.

A 500 mass cargo transport has significantly less combat ability then a 500 mass warship, especially since half of the mass is in the cargo.
Mass is not a very good metric by itself. Which is why we have the calculations. (even tho they don't work right now).

Incidentally, if anyone wants to mess with the scoring, it's in starmade/data/script/statistics/ship-index-calculation.lua
If you really want to just work off mass, then that's the file you need to modify. Let us know your results.

A 500 mass cargo ship is even more of a tempting target for pirates than a 500 mass combat vessel. From the pirates' standpoint, it absolutely makes sense to devote more effort to taking it than to a say, 100 mass curier. (although 500 mass is still pretty damn small)

 

[kiraen]

A 500 mass cargo ship is even more of a tempting target for pirates than a 500 mass combat vessel. From the pirates' standpoint, it absolutely makes sense to devote more effort to taking it than to a say, 100 mass curier.

True, but you are only looking at one side. With mass as the only metric you are just as likely to get attacked by a cargo vessel as you are a warship.
How many times have you forgot to set a blueprint as non-pirate and been attacked by an elevator? Or a door hatch?

 

[Matt_Bradock]

True, but you are only looking at one side. With mass as the only metric you are just as likely to get attacked by a cargo vessel as you are a warship.
How many times have you forgot to set a blueprint as non-pirate and been attacked by an elevator? Or a door hatch?

In fact, if pirates were realistic, you'd be MORE likely to get attacked in a cargo ship than in a warship. Real life pirates fear their lives enough to prefer the easy prey :p
And let's get real, a cargo ship better have an emergency jump drive ready for hot situations. A small, couple blocks drive charged up at all times so you can initiate GTFO maneuver if the situation gets too hot for you to charge your main drive.

Oh, and those... with the customizable waves, they'll spawn only what you put in those waves. The game only picks random if the RNG picked a difficulty that has no waves assigned to it.

 

[Kiithnaras]

That may be true, but I haven't experienced that. I have four waves set up for pirates right now at difficulties 1, 2, 7, and 10. I have never, ever seen 10 spawn, and I have had it set up since I first set up custom waves. Travelling seems to have randomly spawned diff-1's wave, though I have yet to attack a station to confirm that. Any time I've attacked a station, it's always been the last-created wave which hasn't always had the highest difficulty (varied between 1 and 6 tested so far). This time, I created Diff 7 followed by Diff 2, so we'll see.

 

[Reilly Reese]

True, but you are only looking at one side. With mass as the only metric you are just as likely to get attacked by a cargo vessel as you are a warship.
How many times have you forgot to set a blueprint as non-pirate and been attacked by an elevator? Or a door hatch?

Add PD, Cargo Crates, Land Speeders and Reactors to the list.

 

[Ithirahad]

I've been 'attacked' by shuttles and docking tubes.

 

[TFlok]

The pirates have no brain, about 90 percent of the time they just float or play sitting ducks and if they have missiles on they just keep launching them. The pirates are not even pirates at this stage of the game, there are no lifeforms on-board, just some dumb on-the-fritz AI that keeps malfunctioning constantly. Even turrets on their stations keep switching off their brain.. or whatever passes for a brain for them. It's like an equivalent of giving electricity to some dead animals head, aka nerve reflex.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

Huh, in my experience, the pirates are sorting by cheapest credit cost. (aka, the one metric you can't sort your ships by)
Thus, why you get attacked by elevators, space-bikes, and shuttlecraft. (they're usually cheaper than even the lightest "fightercraft")

That said, if you set up AI waves, but only set 1 pirate wave, that wave will spawn. no matter the situation.

I'd started building my pirate waves from 10 on down, and as I'm just starting on selecting for wave 9, here comes wave 10 to assault my shipyard.
Thank god it was home-based, and had some truly lethal turrets on it.

I later went looking around just because, and shot a pirate station. The response was that same wave 10.
While running back to my shipyard, yet another wave 10 waylaid me in open space.

I later managed to finish and save wave 9, and wave 10 utterly quit spawning, since 9 was cheaper.

I'll admit though, this was back in the last release version. Things may have changed, or simply broken, since then.

 

[RabidBat]

The pirates have no brain, about 90 percent of the time they just float or play sitting ducks and if they have missiles on they just keep launching them.

We've found a work around for this. Currently doing a pirate building competition on our server and have restricted ships to one main weapon type. As the ships will withdraw to the furthest range of it's weapons, e.g if it has a 5km Beam and a 10km Missile, it will retreat to 10km making the beams essentially useless. Plus their habit of continuously firing weapons drains them of power often leaving them dead in the water, so we've made it so they must be able to sustain power. Another solution is to put a short range weapon on the ships as their main weapon so they close the gap, e.g beam/cannon gives a 2.5km beam, and any secondary weapons like missiles are equipped to turrets as the ship will ignore them when it comes to it's attack range.

My main concern now though is AI ships are not spawning for us at random like they should be for Universe Simulation being enabled, and we have no idea what difficulty numbers should be.

Is 1 easy or hard?
Is 100 hard or easy?
Is 100 even an option? What are the difficulty number ranges?

All I know is we have 4 difficulty options on the launcher, Easy, Medium, Hard and now Mean
Does this mean we should set difficulty in the waves list as 1-4?

Just be nice if the devs or Schine staff would chime in and set us all straight and give us 100% facts on the matter.

schema Bench Criss AndyP or any one else can we get some info on this please?