no, but seeing her miss her target for a full weapon cap from a few hundred meters doesn't fill me with confidence in letting her drive a real ship
My Elite SLF Pilot Seems To Have Lost Her Mojo
- Thread starter Lyla
- Start date
no, but seeing her miss her target for a full weapon cap from a few hundred meters doesn't fill me with confidence in letting her drive a real ship
im regularly leaving my slf pilot in low cz/res (or as i call it npc kindergarden). its a little hard to judge as i think the fully engineered vette is pulling a lot of weight there, and every time its a bit different scenario, but it does feel like he is taking a bit more time than i was used to even on lower ranks...
mine use fixed and they seem happy to shoot warning shots until they run out of capacity frequently. that would indicate aiming is off... since counter measures wouldn't do anything about that.
eventually she does land shots. but yea...slf's are basically gnats. the best you can hope for is for them to distract some npcs for a while. the big ship will still be doing almost all the work.
it does seem like that wasn't always the case... but at the same time, back in the day, a ship couldn't tank and do the dps it can these days, and that may be skewing the memory of just how effective slf's ever were.
or maybe there's an inverse relationship between how on target the npc crew is with the human combat rank... as some sort of balance.. but that would be giving a lot of credit to an area fdev has ignored from the game's release (npc's scaling with player skill)
The last time I used mine, a few months ago, it was definitely better than a distraction I would sometimes send them in against a distant target which would be half dead or worse by the time I had lumbered into range. That was an Imperial Fighter with Fixed Beam Lasers and an Elite NPC pilot.
Like I said they were still effective a few months ago.
I don't think so the effectiveness improved a lot when I changed from the Federal Fighter with Plasma to the one above but I had been Elite for a long time as had the SLF pilot.
They were effective the day before the update since I was afk'ing in my Type-10. This bug combined with the system authority shooting you when they scan you has killed Afk'ing.
well, i'm not sure you'll get much sympathy for that.
hrm. I've rarely (in recent memory) have seen my slf actually kill a ship or nearly kill one by itself. But npcs that attack me dont last very long and generally the slf is only attacking ships attacking me. So maybe i just haven't been the target player for using them lately. But i definitely have recently noticed that it shoots next to ships for no good reason and i always use fixed weapons for it. I just started role playing that my favored crew that i got when the feature was first released and have kept is just tired of flying RC toys. She wants a docked sidewinder to take out and finally die for real when exploded.
Not looking for sympathy. I have tendinitis and carpal tunnel from a lifetime of gaming and computer work so it helps with the carrier grind. I'm merely confirming when things broke since I sometimes left my Type-10 at a nav beacon fighting whomever attacked me to reduce damage to my wrist while getting a few bounties and some credits.
I think everyone has a quick excuse for their little exploits. However the NPC crew isn't an exploit. Players paid lots of credits, collected significantly reduced income and spent a lot of time to level crew.
Would you like to see that simply go poof by some decision by the devs? Or a stupid bug? Nullifiying player progress is a recurring theme in ED.
It definitely is a recurring theme with them. Especially mining. But yeah, an effective slf is not an exploit. Hell, afk is not an exploit either. It's not more efficient than exploration or exobiology, trading or mining. All it is is using turrets to tempt people to shoot you, while your ship is tough enough to survive on its own. It is the least efficient method of making money per hour.
She can pick some up at the grocery store.
Using built in game mechanics for your own advantage, regardless of player popularity or opinion, is not an "exploit".
Elite Dangerous does in fact allow us to build an autonomous death machine that does its thing with minimal input.
I think that is frigging awesome! I have an AFK T-10 myself that took me many hours of planning, gathering and building.
Some would rightfully call it "playing the game". I don't use it much but when I do I get a feeling of immense accomplishment.
Just hitting external cam mode and seeing it be unstoppable is a blast. I could watch it for hours. So technically, not even AFK.
The rest of your post I agree with 100%. My NPC babe is worth a cool 4.5 billion. It would be nice if she worked properly.
I also don't really AFK, but built one just to see if it really works or not. It does make for an awesome backdrop when flying an SLF yourself. Also great fun to replace all the lasers with multi cannons and go to town on some poor NPCs.
my fighter pilot gets paid to much,cant get her out of the bar but does a not bad job with fixed beams when i do,been with me for a few years now,never changed her. lol
Hmm, maybe this shot while scanning thing is what has been happening to me lately. Police NPC's have been attacking me without warning, last time earlier today three of them jumped me all at once in res site, then I flew to station to dock and one police NPC attacked me there (while screaming "crime detected" in local chat).
Was this perhaps due to them trying to scan me, then attacking me while scanning due to bug?
That would, funnily enough, mean that the crime this cop at the station detected was his own :3
Was this perhaps due to them trying to scan me, then attacking me while scanning due to bug?
That would, funnily enough, mean that the crime this cop at the station detected was his own :3
“Unfortunately”, security NPCs attacking a clean ship don’t suffer any consequences from unwarranted aggression(even without you carrying a wanted passenger). Nor do military ships interdicting you in war systems, outside of the conflict zones.
Bumping again, my SLF pilot underperforms quite seriously.
After all the training I put him through - from Harmless to Elite - and the millions of CR he keeps on raking up (not to mention a chunk of my combat rank progress), I expect better results.
As things are right now, I might just as well send a limpet after an enemy
After all the training I put him through - from Harmless to Elite - and the millions of CR he keeps on raking up (not to mention a chunk of my combat rank progress), I expect better results.
As things are right now, I might just as well send a limpet after an enemy
This issue sortoff may have been fixed because of the friendly-fire NPC fix, that is in Update 18?
Just saw this comment on the Canonn discord:
It wasn't in the patch notes, but I'm not complaining, if it's true.
Just saw this comment on the Canonn discord:
It wasn't in the patch notes, but I'm not complaining, if it's true.
Could be. The patch that caused the issue might not have mentioned in the notes what started the problem either.
I think it's semi intended behaviour though. Crew missing so much with fixed beams I believe coincided with NPCs being able to miss the player with railguns, since both crew and NPCs probably use the same AI, it would downgrade accuracy for both. I switched to gimballed pulses which is much better, although of course the damage is worse.
Excited to see how it's working now. Thanks for letting us know!