Errrrrrrrm (yes, it's yet another whine thread!)

[CMDR Adelind]

If anyone thinks NPCs are just easy meat, please go to Na Chem now and enter a CZ, low intensity. Alone. Shoot a video, I'd love to see how well you do.

I've getting my engineer parts by grinding high cz's in a Courier with collector limpits. I use fixed multis and a railgun, sometimes a laser. I'm not going to Na Chem or upload anything, but feel free to come to Eravate, we could wing up for a civil war.

 

[micky1984]

Which is, BTW, not exactly a pinnacle of courtesy, either, as that is lazy and rude (you do not care whether others have problems understanding what you are trying to convey).

Personally, I'm puzzled by that attitude. Punctuation is ingrained. I cannot just stop using it.--

so your saying you cant understand either of my sentences??? then its you who has the problem did you know in WW2 long range messages no punctuation was used how ever did we win that war ? and einsteins theoty of releativity was full of errors in punctuation and speliing imagine if you just wrote that off as less serious PFTTT

 

[Ian Phillips]

Keep on topic please.

 

[StiTch]

If anyone thinks NPCs are just easy meat, please go to Na Chem now and enter a CZ, low intensity. Alone. Shoot a video, I'd love to see how well you do.

 

[lausianne]

Thanks for the kind offer, Adelind. I'm happy to come and join you. But: after returning from vacation last week I went on a trip to Jaques right away ("Jaunt to Jaques"). Another couple of weeks before I'm back from that. Will fly over and contact you then.

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Challenge accepted

Great! Looking forward to your video. I hope to learn from it. (... and my mates as well, who fail just like me ...)

 

[Defector]

I don't have a problem with the npcs, but I'd assume any ship, given enough time, can destroy a CMDR who's not watching the screen.

 

[micky1984]

What we have here are frankly garbage players losing ships easily and then assuming it most be overpowered NPC its not the case get gud lol

 

[JuicerPrime]

Something like the huge damage the OP reported nearly happened to me in a HiRES a few days ago. Fer-de-Lance, C-rated shields with 2 A-rated boosters (don't give me that look, I'm saving for upgrades at the moment), so not the toughest but not exactly fragile either. I dropped into a fight to help 2 NPC's finish off a damaged (<49% hull) FAS. Got in a couple of good solid blows, then it rotated and hit me back with a plasma shot and a mix of beam lasers and multicannons. Only a couple of seconds face-time, but my shields dropped from full to barely one red ring left.

My immediate response

4 pips to SYS and bolted right the bleeping bleep out of there. Luckily the NPC's dragged it back and finished it off while I was out of range.

I know NPC FAS's can do a lot of damage, but going by prior experience losing that much shielding in a couple of seconds against one seemed a tad extreme. :X

 

[lausianne]

I don't have a problem with the npcs, but I'd assume any ship, given enough time, can destroy a CMDR who's not watching the screen.

You are wlecome to join the StiTch challenge. Post a video of yourself in a CZ. Let us participate in and learn from your greatness.
I have not been to a CZ for a month now, quite possible that it's been nerfed since then. But that would be evident from a video, too.
And: It's not about NPCs in general, it is (for me at least) specific to CZs.

 

[SheepDip82]

I'm convinced the NPCs do still have engineers mods - got attacked a bunch of times yesterday by NPC wings with "thermal attack".

 

[LoneWolf2183]

1st they're too hard, than they're too easy, than just right, and now too hard again.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Since the removal of mods from 99% of the NPC's out there I gotta say that I am yet to see an example of these killer ships and I am Elite combat ranked so always get Deadly/Elite's coming after me. Gotta ask but did you actually do anything defensively right? I.e. unless you at least have 4 pips to sys, while stationary, an ASP's shields are paper thin at best and a quick series of rails/plasma will rip right through them.

Also, I am yet to ever see an NPC pirate actually be a "pirate" (as in stealing booty n'all) in the game, they are all just homicidal maniacs.

I've had a deadly FAS kill my Python's hull in under 15 seconds. I know this is the length of time it took because I elected to low wake when my shields were about to go down. The FAS had one multicannon, one pulse laser and one plasma accelerator, which narrows the outfitting options down. Assuming the highest DPS undmodified loadout, it should have taken ~30 seconds to kill my hull; it took less than 15, so the FAS must therefore have been running modded weapons that at least doubled its DPS.

I'm not complaining - I know how to avoid combat but I chose not to. There are some interesting aspects to these kind of encounters though. For instance, I've noticed that there appears to be a half-dead man's switch on these NPCs - they fly a bit like lemons initially, but if you don't kill them quick enough, they turn into demons.

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I'm convinced the NPCs do still have engineers mods - got attacked a bunch of times yesterday by NPC wings with "thermal attack".

This happens with unmodified plasma accelerators.

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I know NPC FAS's can do a lot of damage, but going by prior experience losing that much shielding in a couple of seconds against one seemed a tad extreme. :X

Quite.

 

[lysan]

NPCs are particularly crazy at the moment. I just lost an Asp to a pirate Python. My bad sitting pretty at 0m/s, my bad that i didn't notice the comms while browsing the contacts, sure. My bad.

Shields (A5) down in less than two seconds (Around the time it took the ship computer to say "under attack"), my ship exploded within another three seconds. Not fun. This has nothing to do with "dangerous". It is completely out of whack. I don't care about the insurance costs but this is just plain terrible gameplay.

Pirates no longer use Hatch-breakers, it appears - I wonder why? A pirate has nothing to gain from destroying a ship like that. It makes no sense. They're just wasting a metric flip ton of cash on rockets for no reason, with nothing to gain. That's not funny. I'd file this as a bug if it wouldn't appear to be a deliberately change :\ maybe it's just carelessness?

On a positive note, I've seen other pirates (Eagles) shy away from attacking me when I was flying a Python - so in some scenarios, the NPCs are less suicidal than they used to be (and say so over comms). That's good!

We can't apply any logic to the NPC gameplay, they are 100% illogical. They do things no one who are just a tiny bit sane would do. They also teleport like crazy (very popular in this game apparently)

They can teleport into system that is 100% empty 100.000Ls away from a star and then drop out, when they go into SC they teleport to the cloud. So maybe they are controlled by the Q's