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- Omicron (weapon damage) definitely has an effect on ambush chance.
- Armor/shield HP may, but it's been a while so I'm not certain. It might only impact your ambush chances when not on a mission.
- Number of ships increases omicron (and mining/salvaging lasers, for the appropriate missions), which has a direct impact on both ambush chance and loot numbers.
- The number of populated sectors in the target area affects how much loot you'll get, as does scouting the area beforehand.
- Pirate sectors are pirate sectors; cleared or not, they can (and do) spawn pirates.
TL;DR: Moar dakka solves all your problems.In the case of mining/salvage missions, you can check the box for "safe mode" to avoid known pirate sectors and minimize the ambush chance, but it reduces the overall loot value.
If more violence isn't solving your problem, you're just not yet using enough.
Currently running a 10 of my largest ships to mine, each with one squad of attack fighters, 1 squad of salvagers, and the rest mining fighters. They bring it a large chunk of ore, but I hate micro'ing them so was hoping to have a way to not set the safe mode that reduces my gains. I did go ahead and clear all the pirates I could find in the area previously. But my ambush chances are like 20% without safe mode, 2% in safe mode. Though i know some of that is the lack of selecting quality officers, Im sure there is at least 3-4 of them with increased ambush chance, to lazy to fire them.
Someone else had suggested they had observational evidence that having both mining and salvaging fighters on the mining mission ship reduces the mining output.
I didn't believe it, but I recall looking at the code and thinking .... oh, they might have a point.
Exploring AND equipping a high rarity mining subsystem will help your % hit higher numbers for sector exploration and thus better returns.
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But that's not specifically what you asked.
It's been a while since I poured over the code in depth, but from what I remember -
(apologies for anything I get wrong)
What the mining mission simulation tries to do is to emulate the old r-mining loops.
In the old mining loops pirates would regularly appear and attack your ship. (People forget this bit for some reason, but can confirm it was a regular thing) And you'd send reinforcements to chase them off.
In general the ambush code tries to take into account:
(1) how dangerous the general area is
(2) can the average pirates in that area kill you before you either kill them or last long enough for reinforcements to arrive
(3) the simulation ignores things like weapon range and firing arcs
So it's basically your DPS / their hp vs their DPS / your hp
That forms the basic calculation. More specifically it's trying to figure out if they can kill you (IIRC) in ten 'rounds' of combat.
It gets slightly more complicated with multiple ships. Each ship individually has its own comparison with the theoretical average pirates.
However, each escorting ship _also_ adds its own damage to the damage of the lead ship.
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Personally I think this is probably a bug (effectively* double-counting escort DPS), but .... eh.
*It's kind of only double counting it if that ship is also strong enough to last 10 rounds against the pirates IIRC. So if you had a bunch of glass cannons escorting it wouldn't be as effective as a genuinely dangerous ship.
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Personally my method for (mostly) avoiding troubles with pirates while mining:
(1) farm swoks to get swole
(2) shove lots of guns on the mining ships - typically chainguns or (since I modded tesla cannons back into the early game) tesla cannons -> they have high DPS but their range is too short for my actual ships of the line.
NB: I do something similar for traders.
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If you want and read code I can cite lines in the lua script for you to reference.
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Also - FWIW I _do_ think that cleaning out pirate sectors (in the mining area) makes a difference. And you _should_ know where those are because you _should_ run an explorer over the entire area first.
> Ship Size?
No. Indirectly yes, but only through HP. More HP is better. But size/slots is meaningless (outside of enabling more dakka)
> More ships?
Very yes.
> total weapons dmg?
Indeedy-doodly
> Explored sectors?
No but it improves profitability of the mission.
> Populated/controlled sectors?
Yes, but you have to understand the map colouring. Inner faction vs Outer faction vs unclaimed. Populated areas are always claimed by a faction.
There's an inverse relationship there with danger and profitability - but it's non-linear.
E.g. the gains you get from avoiding mining in faction territory are much higher than the additional risk.
(NB: that might flip if your ships are too weak - the risks might greatly outweigh the benefit if the ambush % is high because your ships are too small for the area)
> Clearing out known pirate bases/units?
IMHO yes, but I don't have hard evidence to hand.
D'oh! I forgot to mention this bit, and managed to skip over the title of the post, so didn't see that we were discussing mining, specifically. My bad, and well played, Rick.
100%, you should always put the highest material mining subsystem on your mining ship(s) that you can. The only benefit you see as a player is seeing the "invisible resource" asteroids, which you get from having a mining captain onboard... but the mining captain themselves gets a boost to their yields for having the subsystem on the ship.
You can test this by not having a mining subsystem on the ship, and setting up a mining mission but not sending the ship on it... note the predicted yields, then cancel out and permanently install the mining subsystem, set up your mining mission from the same starting sector, and note the predicted yields. It's a substantial increase.
Wasn't anything wrong with your post - they were asking about ambushes, not yields. I just tossed it in on the off chance they didn't already know. Your post was great and on topic.
Nice post thank you. I do appreciate the reminder about the subsystem, most of my mining ship do have one should probably check that again. I completely forgot about asking if that affects yields. Thank you for staying on topic though, my question was specifically on pirates, so I appreciate you answering both. I set up my empire on the border of the barrier in a expanse of unclaimed territory, though I am butted up against 2 factions cause I wasnt sure if I get more money if Im within range for NPC's trade ships. I explored the whole area plus some, and I murdered any yellow blimps that had hostiles where I mine. Percentages didnt change when I finally got rid of the last station that had 15 ships in it, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ called in the Xotan, and was raided by apposing pirates, all while trying to take it out. There is 1 more station that is about 3 sectors from where I mine, it also has 15 pirate ships in it, maybe it also affects percentage. Its not looking like it though, but I will take it out soon enough and find out. The next closest pirate station, that I know about, is about 20-30 sectors away, but there could possibly be one closer on the other side of the barrier.
I just wanted a way to both increase yields and not have to worry about pirates. Which to be honest I barely worry about pirates or yields, I have over 10 million of each type up to yellow. But its also for future knowledge, so I can min max with less in a future game.
Im basically maxed out at yellow tier and probably should have moved on to cross the barrier, but I got locked up with not finding the mobile equipment merchant for awhile but also knew I needed to build up a bit more anyway. So instead of looking/paying for him, I built like 30 mines/stations attempting to build up supplies so I can later build all the turrets I want, then I was having money issues for a long time, money would jump for 10 million to 0 and back to 1 million every few minutes until insurance was fully paid, finally stabilized and have over 200 million(working on that 1 billion achievement). I now have all the artifacts and decided to build 8 new ships, each with 1 artifact on it. Each ship is a tank beast for my tier, 4 million shield, 1 million hp(stone, lol), only about 5K dps though
It hinges on a question of semantics - does the pirate faction count as a faction you are at war with?
If you look at the diplomacy screen you might think "well yes, obviously, _duh_".
So what's the difficulty. Well .... Essentially the simulation has two different ways it's tracking that you might get ambushed. Either by a faction you're at war with .... OR (exclusive) by pirates.
It assigns the area of the mission a weighting based on the following baked in variables.
Core Faction Area -> 0.0
Outer Faction Area -> 0.4
No Man's Land -> 1.0
Outer Faction Area (if you're at war with that faction) -> 0.8
Core Faction Area (if you're at war with that faction) -> 2.0
Moreover, for the purpose of determining whether the ambushers think they can beat you up, factions you're at war with will send _much_ bigger ships than your average pirate. For those calculations the enemy faction gets a x5 boost to hp AND dps. For a net gain of approximately 25x.
So the TLDR is - don't mine in core areas of people who hate your guts.
(NB: you can tell core areas vs outer areas by the way they're coloured on the galaxy map)
And that _might_ include pirate factions.
I _think_ the game _might_ be counting generic pirates and pirate factions as two different things. In which case it's counting the deep red areas around the pirate base as being twice as likely to cause ambushes, and those ambushes will have 25x higher combat values ... for a net of 50x increased danger as compared to just normal 'no man's land'.
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So I think you shouldn't just avoid the base per se, I think you should also avoid any of its red areas of influence too.
I think that _might_ explain something which perplexed me the other day, why one of my mining missions kept getting ambushed, IIRC I'd carefully made sure the local pirate base wasn't inside the square, but the square butted up against it, so there would have been areas of pirate influence in it. In retrospect I probably should have moved my mining area over by one column so there wasn't any red in it at all.
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Ergo _if_ the above is the case ... although most of umop-apisdn's advice is good, I think that this specifically is not accurate:
> Pirate sectors are pirate sectors; cleared or not, they can (and do) spawn pirates.
I think (for the purpose of ambushing) it's like any other faction - if you wipe them out the sector doesn't belong to them, and regardless of what kind of sector they were initially they don't count as hostile (for the ambush calculation).
The corollary of that, which is kind of interesting, is that there are many different kinds of pirate sectors*, and so long they don't include a base or some other structure then they won't affect ambush chance.
*E.g. the one where two different bunches of pirates are fighting each other, the one where they're waiting for a rendezvous and ask you to leave, and the one where they just sit around and toss insults at you (I thought only intelligent species were allowed starships; if you fell into a black hole that'd be unfortunate, if someone pulled you out it would be a disaster etc.). You could have a mining area stacked to the gills with those and it wouldn't change the ambush chance.
However, the flip side of _that_ is that you'll occasionally have smuggler factions who hate you (are in red), before they even meet you and _they_ might trip the 'enemy faction you're at war with' feature.
So ... that's interesting.
I don't think it's lazy coding, I think it might just be an unintended side-effect of how ridiculously detailed the simulation is.
Basically it looks at each and every turret to decide how much it's contributing to the mining process.
(See: function MineCommand:getMiningProperties(ownerIndex, shipName) for more details)
There's approx. 150 lines of code there, and it includes stuff like trying to figure out if your mining fighters actually have enough pilots, and trying to figure out which weapon is more likely to get the 'killing blow' against the hypothetical asteroid (for factors such as refined vs purifying)
What I _think_ might be happening is that in the late game salvaging weapons get exceedingly high dps compared to normal turrets, and so they might start factoring into the equation in ways that the normal turrets probably wouldn't.
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You _might_ also see a difference (not sure if it's good or bad) if your mining ship's defensive weapons were all electric (e.g. tesla cannons or lightning guns), as (IIRC) those ones have a vs stone efficiency of 0 and so they would just get skipped.
Another thing you could try testing, is dropping all the weapons other than the mining lasers and seeing if that changes the yields at all. (I'm starting to suspect that it might). (Of course, it _would_ send your ambush chance into the toilets so ... eh)
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Anyway, I'd poured over that chunk of code a small handful of times (trying to understand mining fighters in detail), and in those roughly half-dozen passes it had never occurred to me to even question whether salvaging lasers might cause problems on a mining ship.
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Executive summary: I blame the unintended consequences of large amounts of complexity, rather than laziness.
Wow, both posts were very informative. In the future I will arm my mining ships with tesla or lightning. That will take some time to build up the number of turrets I need, lol. Getting rid of some salvage fighters will be easy enough, I just feel bad for the pilots I have to kill, "I'm sorry I little buddy, I have millions of dollars and your not worth the time to save, just go fly that direction."
Good to know about the pirate territory and the rando pirates. Glad I cleared out the pirate shipyards. My mining area is fully explored, so no surprise bases. And I'm mining next to where I set up shop, I made it a point to build faction rep with the smugglers near me. I think they are all blue now, not that they were hostile before.
Similarly with respect to opening up the airlock and pushing all the salvaging pilots out - that's an experiment you can try without doing anything irrevocable. Just pull up to another ship (or station) you own, move the whole squad across and compare before and after yields in the mining mission.
Why is that worth doing? Because the game is under development. So things that were true in 2.1 might not be true in 2.3. Just because something was the accepted wisdom doesn't mean it should become unquestionable dogma.