3 Zoltan Ships Sector 1

[tiberiansun371alexw]

Anyone ever see 3 Zoltan ships (pirated or otherwise) Sector 1? I know it should be possible for that many pirate ships to coincidentally spawn. However I never actually saw it happen. My Slug B runs are very grateful for this.

[New Moon On Monday]

I think there are only 6 categories of pirate ships: Rebel, Federation, Mantis, Zoltan, Rock, and Slug. I don't know how evenly distributed the categories are. However, if they are fairly evenly distributed, the odds aren't all that low that you can get 3 consecutive pirate ships that are Zoltan designs. It's 1 in 36 that the second and third pirate ships match the first's category, or 1 in 216 of 3 Zoltan pirate ships in a row. (The latter is the same chance of rolling an 18 on three six-sided dice, something with which long-time Dungeons and Dragons players are familiar.)

You can get 4-6 hostile encounters in Sector 1. While I have no idea what the chances are to get each type of hostile encounter, in Sector 1 they seem to be mostly Rebel, Auto-Ship, or Pirate. Again I'm generalizing and assuming some even distribution, if you have 6 hostile encounters drawing from 3 categories including Pirate, the odds are ~32% that at least 3 of the 6 would be Pirate (using the Dice Probability Calculator[www.omnicalculator.com] to figure that out).

I'm making some generalizations and estimations, I think sounds rare but not astronomically improbable, and the kind of thing you might eventually ecounter if you play enough games.

[Mike]

Note that the number of "hostile" events in a sector, shown on the wiki, is misleading.

There are other events that lead to fights, and I think some may even be unavoidable fights (not sure).

[tiberiansun371alexw]

Originally posted by New Moon On Monday:

I think there are only 6 categories of pirate ships: Rebel, Federation, Mantis, Zoltan, Rock, and Slug. I don't know how evenly distributed the categories are. However, if they are fairly evenly distributed, the odds aren't all that low that you can get 3 consecutive pirate ships that are Zoltan designs. It's 1 in 36 that the second and third pirate ships match the first's category, or 1 in 216 of 3 Zoltan pirate ships in a row. (The latter is the same chance of rolling an 18 on three six-sided dice, something with which long-time Dungeons and Dragons players are familiar.)

Rolling 18 on 3 different six-sided dice do happen. I've seen it in real life. I've also seen a triple pirate spawn in game before (although I'm pretty sure it's not 1 in 6 since many of the Slug events can only spawn as filler events). I have never seen 3 ZS pirated or otherwise ships in a row in Sector 1 or 3 ZS in any order in Sector 1 and as I said I am glad when playing the Slug B that it doesn't happen.

[Mike]

I think I have seen 3 Zoltan (pirate) ships in sector 1 before.

I had one Crystal B run where I took a first-jump store, to sell the augment and buy a shields buffer; and the next beacon was a regular fight that got me two shields, and the next five fights or so were Autos and Zoltans, culminating in a horrible Artemis + Heavy Laser Zoltan fight.

... where the Artemis hit my shields.

If I hadn't taken that first jump store, I wouldn't have gotten two shields up for that fight, and there would have been a moderate chance of dying to that Artemis into shields.