Oolite Bulletins

Cody wrote:

That is expected behaviour!

Ok. But why? It is difficult enough when no new ships appear, and it seems to make winning such a battle logically impossible. There is a random factor to this, but the time needed to destroy one warship even with very good aiming is usually enough for one or two replacement ships to appear.

Now I want to own a Colonial Battlestar even more!

Or, to be more realistic, I'll try to find the file where I can tune down the re-spawning probability...

It's kinda linked to the IS escape mechanics - and you can accumulate oodles of inert drones.

I believe you should be able to override the repopulator JS function responsible for generating entities in withcspace so that Thargoids are spawned when the player enters and then no more. Of course, as Cody mentioned above, this might nullify the chances of spawning a trader (which are anyway very low to begin with), which under normal situations could be your ticket out of there.

Cody wrote:

It's kinda linked to the IS escape mechanics - and you can accumulate oodles of inert drones.

I assume, your cargo hold was full!

I already found the responsible function/method: interstellarSpaceWillRepopulate(). I never saw a trader being added, but the probability is low (1 in 20) and I didn't force so many misjumps or survived them long enough.

By the way, the implementation of this method seems wrong because a trader can only appear if the number of Thargoid ships is lower than specified. But logically, both things shouldn't be dependent from each other, i.e. a trader should appear with the same probability if more than enough Thargoids are around. A NPC trader wouldn't survive very long probably but it would give the player a chance to recover a little bit.

Meanwhile...

I changed the Thargoid respawn probability to a value that usually allows me to scoop at least some of the Thargons until the next baseship arrives. I also reduced the maximum number from five to four, but I'll probably change that back when I gain more experience.

I'm the proud owner of a "Python Gunship", a very well armed Python with only 75t of cargo space but with the top speed of a Cobra Mk III. I didn't change the thrust, pitch and roll rates, but the standard Python is quite agile already and I like the feeling of flying something a little heavier (I tried the Adder once but didn't like the handling at all). I didn't want to be unfair, and so I added the Gunship as a NPC ship too. In my imagination the Gunship is a former tactical navy freighter, and so I would like to add it as an operative navy ship too, but there seem to be no suitable standard roles. Perhaps I can create a new role/AI myself some day. There are Cylons around in my Ooniverse and a navy would have something to do!

Now I'm able to combine trading, passenger cabins and scooping space, and low paying contracts are acceptable. I made my first "contract tour" over a longer distance with three contracts at once because the destinations were not far apart. I thought it was a good idea to take a passenger and two weapon plan contracts...

It was _very_ obvious that some people didn't like what I was doing, and my Thargoid-tested gunship proved barely enough for two "welcome parties" I encountered during the trip - of course after jumping 6.8 light years! Strangely my passenger didn't say a single word, although 17 tons of computers were destroyed around him in one battle until I had destroyed about the same number of attackers. And strangely I wasn't attacked more than usual in any of the three destination systems.

Oolite is getting better every day!

Fritz wrote:

It was _very_ obvious that some people didn't like what I was doing, and my Thargoid-tested gunship proved barely enough for two "welcome parties" I encountered during the trip - of course after jumping 6.8 light years! Strangely my passenger didn't say a single word, although 17 tons of computers were destroyed around him in one battle until I had destroyed about the same number of attackers. And strangely I wasn't attacked more than usual in any of the three destination systems.

I've not tried the passenger/documents thing myself in quite a while, but from what I've read of Cody's exploits, assassins tend to favour certain systems, particularly chokepoints, as ambush sites along a route. Once you learn where to expect trouble, you can be ready for it. Coming out of witchspace with injectors already firing is often a useful tactic.

Good to hear you're enjoying the game so much!