Should AIpursuit.plist be written?

[Flying_Circus]

We all do it, I'm sure; end up in a fight where we're outnumbered by our AI enemies, and the hull's taking a bit of a 'paiking'...

So we turn the helm towards some vacant slot of space and hit the injectors to escape, to lick our wounds...

But we may ask ourselves... what do we do when this happens ... after, say, some vexatious Wolf Mk2 attacks us, but then discovers that they have bitten off too much than they can chew..? Well, we, of course, hit the injectors, ourselves, and hare off after the cheeky cove to finish them off!


What if a small percentage of pirates, or other (perhaps legitimate) AIs could return the favour, and do this to us: "Dead or alive, you're coming with me!"?

[Rxke]

Hmmm...

Tactically, it would be unwise for pirates to hit the ole fuelinjectors for several reasons:

If they work in groups, it would lead to the slower ships getting behind, taking away their advantage of being in a group (which means the slow AND the fast ones become more vulnerable)

using fuel, as a pirate... They obviously dock as little as possible, and always want to keep a reserve for fleeing themselves, so they'd be stingy re: using fuel-injectors (i.e. only in cases of emergency) pursuing a fuel-injector-using ship seriously increases getting into contact w/ police or 'uncooperative' rivals or traders coming to the rescure (since victim will travel throug the spacelane at high speed, in search for help...

And finally: in the wild, when the hunter sees that its prey can run very fast, it breaks off the attack, goes looking for a slower one (!)

[Flying_Circus]

Hmmm...
using fuel, as a pirate... They obviously dock as little as possible

...so they scoop fuel from the sun instead? It's free.

pursuing a fuel-injector-using ship seriously increases getting into contact w/ police or 'uncooperative' rivals or traders coming to the rescure (since victim will travel throug the spacelane at high speed, in search for help...

I never flee along the space lanes: my primary objective is to get out of mass lock as soon as possible and hit 'J'. I head at as near to 90 degrees from the lanes, as possible.

And finally: in the wild, when the hunter sees that its prey can run very fast, it breaks off the attack, goes looking for a slower one (!)

I always persue and batter my targets down! Especially ponces in Rattle Cutters or Wolk Mk2s: the only hard thing about those things is their front ends, and nuking a Wolf2 pays a lot better than hitting on his pals in the Sidewinders. Why would you not take the opportunity to nail one of those things while it's showing you its arse? A Wolf2 that's running is a guaranteed dump of cargopods. He's easy meat, and the fact he's running means you know that the bad boy is about to pop!

[Frantic]

...so they scoop fuel from the sun instead? It's free.

I'm yet to see anything at the sun, in the windows version at least. The error log mentions that it generats sunskimming pirates though.

[winston]

They aren't very common, but sunskimmers are there. I've seen them perhaps once or twice.