Thargoids and the law: Thargoid ships are no longer affected by most things which change bounty (setup actions and changes from Javascript still work, the rest are ignored)
Wormholes: Collisions on wormhole exit should be much less likely. All ships exiting a wormhole will be travelling at 25% of the
lead ship's max speed, not their own max speed. This means one of Eric's post-MNSR changes can be enabled, so if the player and NPCs share a wormhole, they come out in about the same place.
AI and weapons: Lots of changes in this area
1) weapon_facings can now be specified in shipdata.plist (same syntax as shipyard.plist) to restrict the weapon mounts available on NPC ships. shipyard overrides shipdata if both are specified on a player ship, and the default value is 15 (all four mounts). Weapons specified to non-existent slots are ignored for both NPC and player ships.
2) NPCs now have identical laser overheating and cooling to the player. This gives them quite a few more shots than they generally had before, especially with the military laser, so their ability to tell the difference between "on target" and "nearly on target" has been worsened. They will miss more often than before, especially at long range. Nevertheless, military lasers on NPCs are still considerably more dangerous than they used to be.
NPCs with more than one weapon will switch between weapons to let them cool. NPCs with only one weapon may back off to let it cool down properly, some of the time. (NPCs are marginally less accurate with their aft and side weapons than with their front weapons)
3) The "accuracy" parameter in shipdata is now used for quite a bit more (and so there's a read/write ship.accuracy JS property). It's now for ships a general measure of pilot skill (its use for missiles is unchanged)
The Wiki claims that this can vary between -5 and +10, and it does, but then in 1.76 ships are further clamped to a range of +1 to +10. It doesn't make very much difference anyway, though.
In trunk, the range for ships now really is -5 to +10, with a default value if unspecified in shipdata (i.e. pretty much everyone) randomly selected so that -5 <= accuracy < 5 (ships with scan class CLASS_POLICE or CLASS_MILITARY, and the Constrictor in Constrictor Hunt, always have accuracy >= 0)
This leaves a range of +5 to +10 available for OXP ships to use, and there are some additional AI improvements reserved to those ships. (Well, okay, mining ships have +8 accuracy from shipdata, but they only use it to blow up rocks...)
In detail, and so far, and none of this applies to Thargoids:
- in general, accuracy affects aim more than it used to (low accuracy are worse than before, high are better)
- accuracy >= 0 removes some bad combat tactics from consideration, deals with laser overheating more usefully, sets a minimum missile_load_time (if none was given in shipdata), and makes token efforts to dodge your lasers while fleeing
- accuracy >= 5 is the threshold for advanced combat tactics and must be explicitly applied to a ship.
- accuracy >= 5 takes evasive action if hit, and will try to keep you off their six at close range much more
- accuracy >= 6 applies a larger "jink" at long range while fleeing or retreating, to make a harder target
- accuracy >= 7.5 gives much closer target tracking. They will miss much less than before.
- accuracy >= 8.5 enables "sniper" AI. It's not much use without a forward military laser, but is deadly with one
- accuracy >= 9 significantly increases the size of the "jink" for fleeing and retreating
Feedback on how this affects the combat experience very welcome. Overall difficulty
should be staying about the same as in 1.76, except for ships with military lasers. Ships with military lasers will be quite a bit more dangerous but there's only one of those in the core game, and it's supposed to be a tough fight (it's still beatable, though). The danger increase is mainly a consequence of the overheating changes, which approximately triple the number of shots they get, rather than the AI changes, though.
To try out the high-accuracy ships, Random Weapons above is now
Varied Ships. As well as adding some extra weapons, it also increases the accuracy of the ships it upgrades (ships which fail to get a military laser upgrade still get an accuracy boost). I've set the default upgrade chance to a quite high 0.5 in this version, so there will be a few multiply-upgraded ships hanging around...
An "accuracy 10" ship is probably about as good as a Competent human pilot, at the moment. Further suggestions for new advanced tactics are needed, to bring this level up a bit. Suggestions on how a ship which is either slower than or barely faster than the player, without injectors, and with only a forward laser, can deal with a player hanging around on their six and following them through turns, would be especially useful.
