NPC enemies are magicians

[Avaruus]

It has been a while since I wondered about them: how comes that NPC enemies who are hunting us down are able to know the exact system we are jumping in, and manage to arrive BEFORE us (or at the exact same time), even when they failed to interdict us several jumps ago and couldn't immediately tail our FSD jump?

"Magical powers" is the only explanation I could think of.


Today's example:
I was in the end of a mission in which I had to bring a criminal to different locations. He was a high-value target. So I was expected to be hunted down by some enemies of him during the mission. This is not a problem, it is even perfectly coherent with my passenger status.

At some point, we got spotted. BTW, I don't know how, because I managed to avoid scans during the entire journey. But ok, why not, the bad guys got the information that he was in my ship and even managed to know our route. It could be consistent from a RP perspective.

Anyway, I managed to escape the interdiction of my enemy (he was named Jetson, or something like that) and I followed my route, flying back towards our starting point. After two jumps of 50+LY (so more than 100LY away from the system where my enemy failed to interdict me), as soon as I exited hyperspace, I read a message where "Jetson" said something like "Target's ship spotted, I'm on my way to intercept her".

How the hell is that realistic? I don't have a problem with being hunted down by enemies in several places, moreover if my passenger is a high-value target and a wanted criminal. The fact that enemies find me and try to intercept my ship is not a real problem either, because I always manage to escape interdiction. But I'd like to see a little bit of coherence here. There is no way this same guy could have followed me this quick.

And even in the case where several enemies were hunting me down, how can they possibly know this fast in which system I am jumping? Especially since I was flying in the Bubble, so in a part of the galaxy where you can basically take 50 different routes to go to the same point.

Ambushes at strategic points would be more coherent. I wouldn't be surprised to have a nice and warm welcome committee in the system I'm supposed to fly back at the end of the mission.

Do you know if there is any possibility that FDevs can change this? I don't know if it's a lot of work to change random enemy popping into strategic ambushes (according to our route for example), but it would be far more logical.

 

[Bloodsign]

I do hate how NPCs broadcast their intentions on open comms.

"Ooh, you tasty mate, I gonna interdict you before you land!"

 

[Stealthie]

One of the first "anomolies" that I noticed was one of the most obvious.

I was flying a fairly heavily engineered AspX with a jump range of about 45Ly and I attracted the attention of a pirate in a Vulture.
I jumped out, to a system 45Ly away... and he's right behind me - in his Vulture, which has a jump-range of, perhaps, 15Ly.
Somehow.

Meh, "gameplay reasons", I guess.

It'd be nice if they put a bit more nuance into this stuff though.
Set it up so that, for example, if you've got a hold full of VOs/Painite then there's almost no risk of being interdicted unless you visit a station or get scanned.

 

[metatheurgist]

Do you know if there is any possibility that FDevs can change this? I don't know if it's a lot of work to change random enemy popping into strategic ambushes (according to our route for example), but it would be far more logical.

It would be extremely difficult. The game universe doesn't exist except on a instance by instance basis. Nothing is keeping track of where Bob the pirate is flying or where Jane the Trader is going on their usual trade routes. Bob and Jane don't even exist until they're created on someone's instance. The only thing that lets the game know that you're on a mission or carrying cargo is the mission transaction or the fact that you have cargo in your ship. To stop the game from being a walkover the game pops up some random guys to interfere with you. They could make the triggers more authentic and give players a chance to manipulate them with skill but that's about it.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

It's to compensate for the one thing we can do that NPC's cannot:

Think, with an organic brain.

 

[Schmack]

The interdiction used to scare the bejeezus out of me, especially in VR. I rarely notice the comms.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

The interdiction used to scare the bejeezus out of me, especially in VR. I rarely notice the comms.

Interdiction stopped bothering me shortly after I bought an Adder.
Interdiction stopped stopping me about two hours later when I learned to evade consistently.
Consistency stopped bothering me after I learned to evade interdiction in the bugged evasion minigame when multiple escape vectors would appear, and you only had to stay aligned between the two vectors, even though it looked like you'd fail, but you'd still manage to evade instead.

 

[Icybow73]

Oh yes. Im Pretty sure an alliance challenger cant jump 70 ly the amount of time it takes to do one jump...

 

[Babellon]

The one that gets me is when you take a bounty mission and go hunt the pirate down but instead of you interdicting them they are hard turned facing you in a circle constantly until you submit. its amazing that they can stay nose in to the turn facing me at the perfect angle at all times to insure I cannot interdict the target I am supposed to be pursuing. "I'm supposed to be pursuing"....It gets tiresome being the chased all the time.
I'd like to know why my mission giver keeps notifying the target that I am after them.

 

[MickyG1982]

Who's to say they jumped in at all?

If you think about it, there is a very good chance that a rival faction knows both the start point and end point of your trip. They can make a well educated guess as to the route likely to be taken so can preposition their ships accordingly. All they are waiting for is confirmation that their intended target has been picked up, by whom and what ship they are in then they can spring their trap.

Of course all it is, in reality, is a roll of the dice once certain conditions are met, there isn't really any other way to introduce the danger element after all.

 

[Factabulous]

So what's the solution OP? From the way players play the npcs should hang around engineer bases and cgs and gank you there - if you're after realism...

Or you can step back and realise it's a computer game, not a 1:1 accurate galaxy simulation

 

[Ian Doncaster]

So what's the solution OP? From the way players play the npcs should hang around engineer bases and cgs and gank you there - if you're after realism...

Or you can step back and realise it's a computer game, not a 1:1 accurate galaxy simulation

Easy solution: randomise the names and ship class of the intercepting NPCs every time you change system, so it's not obviously the same NPC getting you the next time.

Then when you jump into the system, the local assassin gets an "incoming mission critical message", accepts the mission to kill you, and goes for it. They didn't have to know you were coming in advance - if you'd gone a different way, they'd just have kept hanging around until someone else did come through.

And even in the case where several enemies were hunting me down, how can they possibly know this fast in which system I am jumping? Especially since I was flying in the Bubble, so in a part of the galaxy where you can basically take 50 different routes to go to the same point.

Ambushes at strategic points would be more coherent. I wouldn't be surprised to have a nice and warm welcome committee in the system I'm supposed to fly back at the end of the mission.

I do think it's unfortunate that one of the things FE2 introduced and Elite Dangerous kept was variable - and potentially very long - jump range.

Elite had a fixed and short jump range, so the maps there had a definite topology with bottlenecks. http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Sector2/Index for example - Galaxy 2 in the original Elite - has that cluster in the northwest with only one way in and out through three separate systems, all of which are low-security. Perfect places for an ambush.

Far too late now, of course.

 

[Stealthie]

Easy solution: randomise the names and ship class of the intercepting NPCs every time you change system, so it's not obviously the same NPC getting you the next time.

I don't mean to be contrary but, honestly, I prefer the idea that you're being pursued by somebody (even if they're in a ship with a magical FSD) to the idea that you're just being attacked by a string of rando's.

I wonder if they could tweak it all so that it's a bit more plausible by, perhaps, making it so once you're attacked by somebody from one faction the game will deliberately spawn other NPCs from the same faction to interdict you next time around and then have the original attacker show up a few seconds later saying something like "I knew I'd catch up with you eventually!"?

It might also provide a bit of extra entertainment as a result of the "chase" escalating if you escape 2 or 3 times, so you'd end up with half a dozen ships from the same faction chasing you.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I don't mean to be contrary but, honestly, I prefer the idea that you're being pursued by somebody (even if they're in a ship with a magical FSD) to the idea that you're just being attacked by a string of rando's.

True

I wonder if they could tweak it all so that it's a bit more plausible by, perhaps, making it so once you're attacked by somebody from one faction the game will deliberately spawn other NPCs from the same faction to interdict you next time around and then have the original attacker show up a few seconds later saying something like "I knew I'd catch up with you eventually!"?

It might also provide a bit of extra entertainment as a result of the "chase" escalating if you escape 2 or 3 times, so you'd end up with half a dozen ships from the same faction chasing you.

The hunters who come after trade/courier missions tend to be in groups of 3 or 4. Rather than making it so that the second one won't possibly attack until the first one's dead, it could tell you about all of them up front, and cycle through the names when it needs one - obviously once the second one has found you the first one you escaped earlier will know where you are.

With a little bit of extra work - it always picks randomly from the full set, and just doesn't spawn them if they're dead - it would mean that as you kill them the ability of the others to track you down appears to decrease.

 

[Frank]

I do hate how NPCs broadcast their intentions on open comms.

"Ooh, you tasty mate, I gonna interdict you before you land!"

I quite like how the baddies blurt our their intentions on open comms. It gives me a chance to get ready for them. I also prefer the same NPCs to keep the same name for the same reason. If I've stacked a heap of missions I want to know if there are going to be more than one baddie that drops into normal space with me if I submit

Elite is a computer game. It doesn't need to be realistic

 

[Kissamies]

It really gets ridiculous on piracy missions where targets often fly DBXs. I find those ships hard to disable without killing them and often I just let them escape with low health, exit the signal source, circle back and they will be there again with full health, sometimes with a different loadout. It's a farce, really.

 

[Kzak]

As Elite doesn't have persistent NPCs beyond a certain level, we get such 'wizardry' teleporting assigned NPCs to a mission, for example, around from star system to star system.

 

[Stealthie]

The hunters who come after trade/courier missions tend to be in groups of 3 or 4. Rather than making it so that the second one won't possibly attack until the first one's dead, it could tell you about all of them up front, and cycle through the names when it needs one - obviously once the second one has found you the first one you escaped earlier will know where you are.

With a little bit of extra work - it always picks randomly from the full set, and just doesn't spawn them if they're dead - it would mean that as you kill them the ability of the others to track you down appears to decrease.

Yep.

Just seems like, with a bit of extra effort, it'd make the whole thing a bit more plausible.

Honestly, I'd like to see missions (or, perhaps, making use of chained-missions) that involve visiting several different destinations and each step of the mission would provide an opportunity to be spotted and that'd have an effect on the strength of the subsequent response.
Try to create a feeling like you're being hunted and it'd be (at least partly) up to you how easy or difficult you make it for the hunters.

 

[Jack Schitt]

If you think about it, there is a very good chance that a rival faction knows both the start point and end point of your trip. They can make a well educated guess as to the route likely to be taken so can preposition their ships accordingly. All they are waiting for is confirmation that their intended target has been picked up, by whom and what ship they are in then they can spring their trap.

The problem is that it's the same ship (or at least an identical ship with an identical pilot name, which is the ED instancing equivalent).

When we first saw this back in the early days of the game, many players dismissed it as placeholder because we were still holding out for the semi-persistent NPCs as discussed in FD's NPC proposals. By now it's clear that we're not getting anything close to those any time soon, if ever, and yet this tired mechanic persists.

What FD should be doing is admitting that the game engine as is cannot support persistent characters, nor can it model the jump limitations of NPC ships. And they should be coding some digital smoke and mirrors around it.

Easy solution: randomise the names and ship class of the intercepting NPCs every time you change system, so it's not obviously the same NPC getting you the next time.

Exactly. That's step one. Dead easy.

Then you make sure that the spawned ship is from the same faction as the original pursuer, or at least from an appropriately aligned local faction depending on whether you're being chased by bounty hunters or pirates. Also trivial.

What remains is simple text manipulation. Instead of "tasty cargo", "boil you up" etc. have a bit of context to the comms chatter from a tree of options.

• "Ah, Commander {cmdr_name}. {original_pursuer} said you'd jumped to this system and here you are, right on cue."
• "Looks like yours is the ship that just escaped from the {jump_origin} system. My contacts in the {originating_faction} will pay well for your demise."
• "{new_pursuer} to all allied ships. Send a message to {originating_faction} and tell {original_pursuer} I have located the {player_ship_name}."

This is not challenging stuff. I wouldn't know where to begin creating something as complex as ED but this basic pseudorandom text manipulation is the sort of stuff I was doing in Sinclair BASIC 35 years ago. I can only assume that a relatively easy win like this hasn't been done because it's never made it onto the to-do list. Whether that's because there are still long-term plans for something better, or simply because FD don't care about that part of the game experience, only FD know. But we're a long way into the "ten year plan" now. If anything's going to change I hope it changes soon, otherwise I fear we're stuck with this until the servers go dark.

 

[Walter2]

I don't mean to be contrary but, honestly, I prefer the idea that you're being pursued by somebody (even if they're in a ship with a magical FSD) to the idea that you're just being attacked by a string of rando's.

I wonder if they could tweak it all so that it's a bit more plausible by, perhaps, making it so once you're attacked by somebody from one faction the game will deliberately spawn other NPCs from the same faction to interdict you next time around and then have the original attacker show up a few seconds later saying something like "I knew I'd catch up with you eventually!"?

Could be difficult given that interdictors don't remember that they've inderdicted you once already: "So the rumours are true. Good job I found you first" - for the second or third time.

Or you can step back and realise it's a computer game, not a 1:1 accurate galaxy simulation

Elite is a computer game. It doesn't need to be realistic

(Inserts smiley expressing horror at such devastating revelations, moderated by a sly, sardonic wink.)