Anti-Personnel Turrets in Odyssey Should Take Out Scavs in Reactivation Missions

[ferus]

It’s so satisfying in Cyberpunk to hack the turrets and let them shoot unaware enemies.
It’s fun and it’s a different approach to complete a mission.

However, in Elite the turrets don’t engage scavs even if they shoot the turrets themselves.
Any action from turrets is always towards the player only. And that is dumb.
Just like immediately dismissing any idea OP has as dumb.

 

[CMDR Yates]

Another way to balance it would be to allow players in the security room to interface with turrets and control them manually one at a time using telepresence.

One player per turret, but you can switch between them. Your physical body would be vulnerable while you're connected to the turret. Scavs would need countermeasures for the turrets, like rockets, with the ability to hack doors and the smarts to sometimes realise they need to come and find you.

 

[insanephoton]

They seem to work now. Maybe it was just a one off as I often don't bother powering up settlements for the 'kill the scavengers' missions, but it's the only way I can explain what happened. I took a mission, went to the base, got perched up on a roof and waited. Mission brief is 9 scavengers. I spot 3 and let them get close before taking them out. The remaining 6 aren't visible, so after a quick scout around I decide to power up the base to make it easier to loot. Power comes back on and suddenly the mission counter goes 6/9, then 7/9, 8/9 and then mission complete, leave the site. Since I was in solo it can't have been another player and there were no other living npcs it must have been the turrets. I didn't see because I was inside opening up lockers and downloading data.

 

[Darrett]

They seem to work now. Maybe it was just a one off as I often don't bother powering up settlements for the 'kill the scavengers' missions, but it's the only way I can explain what happened. I took a mission, went to the base, got perched up on a roof and waited. Mission brief is 9 scavengers. I spot 3 and let them get close before taking them out. The remaining 6 aren't visible, so after a quick scout around I decide to power up the base to make it easier to loot. Power comes back on and suddenly the mission counter goes 6/9, then 7/9, 8/9 and then mission complete, leave the site. Since I was in solo it can't have been another player and there were no other living npcs it must have been the turrets. I didn't see because I was inside opening up lockers and downloading data.

When that’s occurred for me, it was that the scavs didn’t appropriately leave the drop ship and despawned after it reached a certain distance away, or clipped through the surface and hit some kind of exclusion zone.

Not to say it couldn’t be any other cause, I just haven’t seen a turret behavior change myself.

 

[Daniel Cloudsifter]

Basically the title.

I know it's a relatively minor thing, but if you reactivate the base the Anti-Personnel Turrets should target and engage any remaining scavengers in the area. It's pretty lame that they don't ever seem to engage anyone or anything except for when the Player has a bounty and ignore all else

Certainly would be easier if missions finished themselves.

Maybe they could also add base NPCs that do the activation mission for you? Then all you need to do is land : the base NPC competes the reactivation for you, then switching on the base kills of any scavengers.

In fact that sounds too difficult. Maybe change missions just to autocomplete when you take them. And pay 20 billion each. Then we can finished the game in 30 minutes and go do something else

I've often felt that if you are sent to restore a base, are given the security access, etc. then the defenses logically should take out the scavengers. However, I can live with that not being the case.

Not only would this be a case of making missions "too easy" but also... wow, can you just imagine the number of bugs this would introduce. We already have recurring issues with not enough scavs spawning for mission completions (or optional completion), or more than are needed spawning, but only some count for the total (eg. you need 4, their are 9 targets, but only four count). If you have the base defenses killing them, you can bet that would add to your count and just cause more misery for people trying to complete missions.

I already occasionally suffer from a similar problem when taking a BUNCH of ship assassination missions with all the targets in one system. I'm used to having the targets of other missions show up while I'm engaging another, but their have been times when I'm fight two targets, it's taking awhile, a third shows up, the system authorities kill him before I even have a chance to plink him once and ... mission failed. I have no desire to see this happen on ground missions. Ugh.

 

[insanephoton]

I've tried it again on a 'Exterminate Scavengers' mission. The AP turret did take out some of them. You've got to remember that the turret is fixed and has limited coverage. If the scavengers aren't in range or line of sight of the turret, it can't do anything about them.

 

[insanephoton]

An update, having tried it on some restore power missions, the turret does not seem to recognise hostiles. To be honest it does not appear to work while visible to the player unless it is attacking the player.

 

[de_richleau]

I've always thought it would make sense to have the turrets tackle scavengers once back on line. Currently the only purpose of the turrets appears to be to attack me...

We've had games where we can hack and use turrets to tackle enemies since the 2000s with Deus Ex etc (if not earlier), so it just seems bizarre to me that this can't be done in Elite.

No doubt some balancing would be required (e.g. the scavengers etc could maybe shoot back and disable the turrets?) but it just seems a bit lazy that this hasn't been in place all along.

 

[Dragsham]

Omg just 9 easy peasy scavs. I disable the alarms 1st always. Then I jump back in my scorpion and nuke the place using the rocket launcher. Killing anything I come across outside. Then back inside and kill em all @@@
Then loot.

 

[Mark Zero]

So, for what it's worth? I don't think I've ever actually been engaged by a turret at all while on foot. I've been engaged by NPC soldiers and by skimmers, but I can run directly in front of anti-personnel turrets while the base is hostile and they don't seem to do anything.

However, I have been routinely shot at by turrets when in a ship or an SRV.

So maybe the turrets not firing on the on-foot Scavs is normal? I know somebody's going to nitpick the semantics that "anti-personnel" should mean "thing that shoots at people", but I can't recall one time I set off an alarm and the settlement's turrets fired on me. Maybe I've been lucky, I dunno.

I don't see a problem with the turrets firing on Scavs, but I think to balance it, you should have to go manually activate the anti-personnel turrets after powering up the station. And since, as previously mentioned, turrets have a set range of engagement, that'd keep them from just mowing down all the Scavs for the player in most instances. But, of course, this assumes the anti-personnel turrets are meant to shoot people and not SRVs.