Don't forget this one....
July 31-
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=171185
I am a PvP and PvE pilot and I think the mechanic is fine the way it is and should not be changed what so ever. Without SCB's I can not take on 2v1 and 3v1 situations and makes all engagements extremely short and unsatisfying.
CZ - NPC's tend to focus target on CMDR's. No SCB's means you either must go in there with wings or not at all. No SCB's means I could probably only last a couple minutes before I had to jump out.
PvP - limits engagements to only fair fights only for the majority of the community. gone are the engagements listed above and all that is left is more balanced engagements which is more "fair" but less "fun". And I am talking about I like being on the "unfair" side of that coin.
RES - same issue as CZ's but maybe to a lesser extent.
There are many other examples but I believe SCB's, in their current form, enrich game play, not reduce it.
Hi, I do high-intensity RES and CZs in a Viper without SCBs.
I'll go ahead and do some hypothesizing about the AI based on what I've observed in there:
The NPCs actually seem to have some kind of threat system that decides who they focus on. Once they decide to focus on someone they tend to stick to it unless something significant distracts them. It seems to be pretty heavily weighted toward damage-over-time, though I think they also put a higher priority on big ships than smaller ships (which means when I start flying bigger ships, managing aggro will probably get more difficult). Any individual NPC, of course, puts the highest priority on whoever is inflicting the most damage to their own ship. Due to NPCs having terrible aim when shooting at each other, this is typically becomes the player within seconds of engaging.
As long as I'm floating around not shooting anything, and the NPCs have someone more aggressive to focus on, they generally ignore me. This allows me to sit around scanning people and picking my targets even in CZs, where they're all hostile by default instead of neutral.
When I engage a target, typically that target and only that target will immediately switch its attention to me. Because I quickly became its largest source of damage.
If I spend too much time blasting a single target or chain to too many targets too quickly, I start attracting attention from unengaged NPCs because I've built up a lot of aggro. As long as you have a good number of friendlies around, boosting away for 20-30 seconds will generally drop your aggro enough that they will break off and start focusing on the friendlies damaging them. Like I said, it's very heavily weighted toward their current largest source of damage. If you have no friendlies nearby then there's nothing to distract them and they will swarm you: either FSD out to reset the instance, or boost toward the largest group of friendlies you can see. The enemies chasing you will disengage as soon as the friendlies start damaging them.
RES are even easier because the NPCs you're after are neutral by default, and will not aggro unless you damage them first (and as long as you don't carry any cargo into the RES, always empty your cargo hold before bounty hunting). So only engage one at a time, and if it's not a ship you can kill quickly then wait for them to engage another NPC first. It will quickly turn into a 2v1 or more in your favor, especially if they engaged a Fed. Similarly for wings, wait for the wing to engage someone else first. Once they're distracted, you can pick them off one at a time without the whole wing going after you.
Obviously managing aggro like that means you have to play slower and more cautiously, with a good eye for when you're drawing too much attention. The quoted post seems to be a pretty good example of "players start seeing it as a baseline and can't imagine playing without it".
I hope this little peek into how the NPCs think helps make fighting them easier for you though. Good hunting, pilot.
