Ridiculous encounters

[ValerianN]

1. T-Drive or T-Gate into friendly space, often next to a friendly station and literally a dozen enemies suddenly warp right in front of your face.

2. These enemies aren't always raiders, syndicate, etc. They also include ships marked as belonging to Trinity Free States, Gemini Protectorate, battleships from factions that are supposedly friendly firing on me. This frequently happens if I drop out of warp near a friendly station, which makes it impossible to anchor, and nearby allied ships don't help you in the fight.

3. Not sure if this is related to 2, and it's something that some people seem to have talked about, but the space around Planet Trinity is quite unsafe - I've taken off from Planet Trinity and died in 5 seconds. Didn't even get the chance to identify who the attackers are.

Now it might not help that I'm at Level 40 and my ship is a pathetic freighter, but you gain experience much faster than you make money in this game, so it's not something that can really be avoided. It's understandable that you can't just go where you please without danger, but shouldn't there be a degree of safety around friendly planets and stations, or at least not a degree of unreasonable danger? I'm just tired of flying around friendly space, within visual distance of friendly planets and stations, and then have a massive enemy fleet appear out of nowhere and die instantly.

[Sutek]

+1 Game balance and longterm playability issue, safe , friendly planets should be relatively free of hostiles. and friendly ships and police patrols should be ready to step in

[ragequit]

No you're right, this game constantly is breaking immersion by coming up with ridiculous encounters. The galaxy won't feel real if you have a bunch of pirates killing people in supposed green zones.

Another example: Level 70 hereos in green zones coming in and killing me when I'm level 20 in a corvette?

Come on guys.

[ValerianN]

Did a little bit more testing and it seems like the massive fleets that warps in out of nowhere might be mission-related and levelled to mission requirements.

Still a really, really bad idea to have levelled enemies warp right on top of you, because you have nearly no chance to escape, and like I said money doesn't ever catch up quick enough with your level.

And if you're not going to run freelance missions, why bother play a sandbox game at all?

[danijel]

Please do comment further guys. We sure can use the feedback. I would want to get to a point where all these things are controlled through outside opened files. In great part they are (region files), but there might still be some things lurking in the code which we'll flush into those same region files and scripts. All feedback is welcome.

[ValerianN]

Ferry mission, marked as level 20 or so. Everything in friendly space.
I leave T-Gate and there are about 7 enemy ships, at least 1 of which is a battle ship that just pop up on top of me and block my access to the station that I'm heading to. as though they own the place.

Another case, also Level 20, taxi mission. A fleet of 9 ships including 2 cruisers and 2 destroyers warp right in front of me. I barely make it through the blockade and then 3 or 4 more ships warp to my front and mop up what's left of my freighter, but I doubt even a destroyer would have survived that encounter.

Oh, and the first thing that goes is always the PTE, so you are always a sitting duck with a dozen ships bearing down on you.

It's gotten to the point where I don't even bother with taxi and ferry missions anymore. How on earth can Assassination missions be so much easier than Ferry missions?

[Butchinger]

I just got attacked by a stiletto hero lvl 70 as a lvl 5 arround the crossroads region right before the start of an early mission in the main campain. I am wondering is this supposed to happen? Should i try to flee or reload or what? I have pretty much no clue about all the factions, all i did were some freelance missions but already seem to have made a lot of enemys...

[Aetheogh]

Go check the workshop, there are mods that can help level the playing field and keep you from getting killed a lot... Playing game on 4th storyline redo on extreme using mods and killing enemies has been total fun... There is one mod that quite interesting, gives you perks and ups your level to 90.. Quite fun...

[Dindon]

One weird thing I noticed was this: at one point, it seems all missions (not encounters, it seems) switched from the usual low level goons I was familiar with to multiple large ships. At the time I was still in the initial ship and something like level 15. Tried a level 14 assassination mission and got faced with two (maybe three) cruisers, who very politely proceeded to reduce me to my basic molecular components.
This happened a few times, with me barely escaping.
After a reload, however, the game was back to normal (revenge time !) and this has not really occured since then.

[wiredhands]

well..persoanlly I bump into difficulties because i make the game harder for myself on purpose (aka I'm only flying my starting ship)..I do die a lot, and as such also save my game often..

That being said, my current game started out with me @ level 1 having 2 heroes in my starting zone..I sorta took that as an invitation and killed one and the other friendlies in the zone helped me take out the other level 70 hero...

Later in the game while on a level 16 assasinate mission..I'm still in the trusty Taurus, now 4 heroes under my belt..and then I take this mission...and the ships I have to kill are x2 reliant battleships...y...after them taking out my shields in 1 shot I sorta ran the hell outta there..figured that was odds I couldnt beat..left them a couple of mines to run into though..

but y, sometimes the game does all of a sudden have a huge leap in difficulty on the missions even if they are supposedly around your level...

[Brother PaciFist]

Hello, i am only at level 15 now and got my first upgrade. I thought a freighter Mainz class with more trooper and freight capacity would be a good idea to get more money. So now i am in the situation where i can not do anything wihtout being killed horribly. All assasinate mission have 1, 2 or 3 impossible enemies. Mostly one impossible and a swarm of trivial enemies that slaughter my ship in seconds. The scaling of enemy spawn seems to account my total tonnage not my combat ability. In terms of combat the freighter is worse then the starting ship, low speed, lower armament. I am not saying a freighter should be able to shoot down combat ships, but even the random spawns get rediculous. I cannot fly about and explore the world without being threatened by highly mobile easy and trivial targets that easily destroy my slow freightship. I can not go mining in the asteroid field or make peacefull delivery jobs because i can not beat or escape any encounter i have.

Even with the smaller gun boat i get more and more ridiculous encounters. A normal difficulty mission can have 2 freight liners of impossible difficulty on the ID of the ship. I read about the super pilots here on the forum who manage to board battleships with gunboats. But not everyone is a super star fighter on steroids. Can we have no levelscaling but handplaced encounters or fair missions for the not so proffesional star pilots on normal difficulty please?

when i level up in my little gunboat i reach a point where the system powerups can compeat with the scaling of the enemies. They get improvements with every level i get. So i get the feeling i am getting worse with better level without being able to do something about it. The upgrades on the system parts are not good enough to compete with the scaling. The weapons get better but with every upgrade the energy costs get higher too. To the point where the energy reload rate cannot feed my weapons any more. So i quickly get to the point where the standart ship can get better anymore. But the difficulty gets higher and higher.

When i buy a bigger ship, the problem stays the same. The enemies suddenly spawn in bigger more threatening ships and gain upgrades for every level i get. Just in combat stats without skill involved i get worse instead of better. The skills are too short lived to mitigate the problem. E.G. A boost of 10 seconds more firepower does not help me at all. My railguns are missing all the time or i am not in the right position to fire my weapons.

Perhaps i am doing something fundamentally wrong in combat, i am more frustrated with the game mechanics now then having fun.

Have a nice day

[Wrathinside]

It was discovered even before me in some thread(probably money making tips) that using T-drive spawns ALL the ships that would normally spawn on your way to the destination. While I haven't checked if spawned ships would indeed be hostile friendlies - I've checked it multiple times, and it's indeed bugged.
The thread suggested that you could use it to spawn tons of enemies near a friendly base, like Trinity, and have them be blasted by security, giving your plenty of cash from derelicts, let alone experience.
However, the truth is worse than that. When I last used T-drive, the game dropped to 2-5 fps for a few minutes after arriving. Presumably, because it had to process all the ships spawns and whatnots. Now, my PC isn't a beast, but I doubt that this game-breaking bug has any reason to exist, save for expkoiting.
I am seriously surprised how it's been a week and something like that was NOT fixed. I don't even mention the manual looting bug, where your tab is always bound to "Equipment", instead of first tab, commodities. So when you try to dump some cheap cargo and take more expensive one, you are actually dumping equipment from your ship, have to take it back and manually re-select the tab. And that itself - is a workaround from the bug of disappearing collectibles from "collect all".

Time to do something, not ask for feedback. If possible - make collectibles removable. Some people already legally farm blueprints by afk-camping spots and it leaves dozens of collectibles. And, of course, making some kind of ... how to put it... mechanic of picking up loot of highest value first and foremost - would also be great. Like, you have 30 pieces of some 300-600 stuff, nearby collectible has 5 ATRs worth 5k each. Since you are full, "collect all" won't work. You have to select the node, dump your items, take expensive loot, rinse and repeat.
However, these two suggestions are not a priority. At least fix the T-Drive and Collect All.

[amisianer]

For me the main issue was, that the ambushes warping in on you more often than not had better ships than me, even while in the starting area. The moment I switched to the frigate, I had freightliners warping in and blasting me to bits, with my cruisers it was suddenly battleships coming in.

Now in the battleships it hasn't occured anymore, weirdly enough (maybe because I started capturing ships for money and didn't level up as much?), I only met a patrol consisting of dreadnoughts and a carrier once.

The missions were somewhat random sometimes too, but I think the differences were area-specific there. The ambushes on the other hand were random no matter where I was.

I suggest implementing something that forbids those to have stronger ships than you. Might make it seem less realistic, since an ambush is supposed to be stronger. But really, it's just no fun fending off 3 freightliners with a weak ship like a frigate. Make it 2-3 frigates or a frigate and 3 gunships or something like that. Would still be a challenge, but manageable.

Yes, I'm aware that there are players out there that have a good enough knowledge to deal with stronger ships. By now, I could probably deal with it too. But for most new players it's just a huge motivation killer.