Horizons Game is hard. I am terrible. I love game.

[CaptainSeriousFun]

Rep given. Respect given.

 

[Hexcaliber]

Just made an attempt to get back into the game and thought I'd give mining a go. Bought a decent size ship, watched a few YouTube vids to get an idea of what to do and before long I was happily mining away. I even picked up a mission meaning that 18 of the 65 gold I'd picked up would be at a premium, not to mention all the platinum which already is. After two hours and with my cargo finally full I headed back to the nearby station to reap the rewards....and of course was interdicted and blown out of existence in seconds. Why oh why wasn't I given the chance to drop cargo and negotiate. He could have given me ten seconds to disable my frameshift / shields and then we could have negotiated the bounty. Instead, he destroys me and my cargo, leaving me cursing the game.

AI pirates will send you a message before they interdict you, but if your attention is elsewhere you may miss it. When you are interdicted you can choose to drop a couple of items straight away and you can be on your way, but don’t wait for the AI to say anything, often they will, but sometimes not. The exception is in Anarchy systems, in these everyone is flagged lawless and you will often be attacked on sight.

Further, in case you are not aware, and it seems a great many traders are not, throttling down and submitting to an interdiction reduces the cool down of your FSD, you do not take damage, and you do not spin out of control when entering normal space. The cool down is just 15 seconds if you submit making it much easier to run. You should also switch 4 pips to shields, this increases the shield strength to 150% of its base value, while 3 pips only increases it to 37% of the base value, a huge difference and it buys you significantly more time should you wish to try and get away or drop cargo.

If you would like to attempt to get away, having changed your pip settings begin boosting as soon as you enter normal space and keep boosting as much as your capacitor will let you, the aim is to open range as far as possible before you jump out, The more range the better as it will reduce any incoming damage. Always jump out (high wake), do not just enter super cruise (low wake); this is because low wake is susceptible to mass locking while high waking is not.

Including shield cells, chaff, and at least one heat sink in your build will improve your chances of getting away too. Obviously the shield cell and chaff are pretty self explanatory, they are there to keep your shields up as long as possible, and chaff throws off gimballed and turreted weapons. What may not be obvious to new or returning players is the heat sink. Because scanners in game use heat and not radar, releasing a heat sink once you have some range can break scanner lock; it is for all intents the same as switching to silent running briefly without your shields dropping.

Also, should your shields be taken out while you are running waiting to jump out, immediately switch to silent running and put 4 pips into engines, do not worry about taking heat damage, a little extra heat damage is far better that than losing your ship. With practice, and a calm approach there is no reason you should ever die to AI interdiction.

 

[Devari]

With practice, and a calm approach there is no reason you should ever die to AI interdiction.

Except when you choose to submit, but the well-known interdiction bug that many players have experienced causes you to have a failed interdiction anyways and you get a long FSD cooldown. Lost two T9's that way vs. elite NPCs since 2.1 launched despite immediately cutting my throttle to submit when I was interdicted. That's when I parked my T9 and use a heavily-armed Python for trading instead. If I didn't have the cash for that, well, I'd probably have just stopped playing rather than losing massive quantities of credits trying to trade in my T9.

 

[4gui4]

I must be playing a different game.

 

[madbilly]

Game is now less hard:

NPCs

- When determining the rank of NPC ships for interdiction, use the player's combat rank, rather than their highest PF rank, although add 1 rank if their trade or exploration rank is higher than their combat rank
- Updated the Archetypes of the NPCs in the USS cargo drop missions - they are now Ambush Pirate and should attack the player on entry
- Fixed AI rotation damping to work properly across the AI skill range
- alter the changes in allowed interdiction ranks based on security, so that the biggest rank disparities are reserved for very low security and anarchy systems
- Reduced the number of engineer mods on AI ships substantially, now only Deadly & Elite rank ships are guaranteed to have mods and any below Master are guaranteed to have none
- Fix for Large AI ships ramming large player ships
- Slightly reduced the ranks below an AI that they can interdict players, this will tighten up the difficulty a bit
- Add state to Powers Assassin and Powers Security ships to allow them to threaten the player before attacking
- Reduced the percentage interdiction chance of power play ships by 10%, and altered the ship type chances and combat ranks to be more mid range, dropping a lot of the top range down
- Balance mission generated NPCs to be lower ranked (for the most part)

(Taken from the latest patch notes.)

You may still be terrible. I hope you still love game.

 

[Mordhar]

Game is now less hard:

(Taken from the latest patch notes.)

You may still be terrible. I hope you still love game.

For someone the reason to rage-quit was too hard AI, for me quite the opposite.
Ten minutes ago I destroyed TWO FDLs (1 deadly and 1 elite) in python (!) without SCB (!!), heat sinks (!!!) and no engineer upgrades except FSD. Cursed and closed the game.
If it what ED (“dangerous”, what a joke) meant to be, well… maybe I need to finally find another game to play.