I honestly figured this was a bug and initially submitted this as a bug report, but it got rejected with a "By Design" tag somehow. Anyway, this hardly seems like proper gameplay.
The current most effective NPC piracy system requires you to take down the NPC's shields, module snipe their Drives/FSD, and then use your own ship to slow down the now endlessly drifting NPC by flying past them and making them crash into you. All of this must be done without the NPC dying, or you get nothing. Almost all miner NPC ships found in supercruise will have mine launchers these days, and this is fine, but it is not fine when they keep spamming mines after their drives are shot out.
Many times, the NPC will crash into its own mines due the tumbling motion acquired after their drives get shot out, damaging itself. I even tried using a Repair Limpet to try and keep them alive, but these stop healing anytime damage is applied, rendering them useless in this scenario. This leaves the mine spamming NPC slowly killing itself, and the player has no way to stop this. This is exacerbated by the fact that module sniping requires you to take down shields, and while explosive damage is insignificant with shields up, it is far more damaging to most hull types with shields down. NPCs are the topic here, so things like effective hull engineering or Reactive Surface aren't present (I wish they were, but that's a separate issue.). Add all that on top of the natural hull damage done during the module sniping process, and it gets easy for the NPC to die when this happens.
I tried maneuvering myself ahead a problem NPC, I tried stopping, and I tried moving far away from the NPC, but nothing works. There was no way any mines launched by it could possibly hit me in these scenarios, but they still spam them into their own demise. The larger surface area of bigger ships makes this issue worse for them, but it can still happen with small ships too.
This could theoretically be countered by sniping the FSD first, and waiting out every single mine the NPC has before sniping the drives out too, or maybe sniping every single mine launcher without killing the NPC somehow, but NPC piracy already takes too much time, and is hard enough without this mine issue. I am not asking for an "I win" button. Even when NPC mines have no deployment issues, I still lose plenty of targets to accidental overkill, or failure on my part to snipe modules before they jump away. Heck, I'll even accept the few times I have technically killed an NPC with its own mines by virtue of my own ship being too close to them when their mines hit both of us due to the explosion radius.
The easy solution is to make NPCs stop using mines when their Drives are out all together. Another more "lore friendly" solution would be to implement some kind of "check" that is done to make an NPC stop deploying mines if it detects friendly fire from them, maybe something like "if own mine hits self, then stop deploying", or a loop like "if own mine hits self, stop deploying mines for X minutes and then try again". Maybe even make a "harder" solution, like an extra module to carry, or a special flying technique, but there needs to be something that a player can do to stop or at least mitigate this behavior if it can't be stopped outright.
The current most effective NPC piracy system requires you to take down the NPC's shields, module snipe their Drives/FSD, and then use your own ship to slow down the now endlessly drifting NPC by flying past them and making them crash into you. All of this must be done without the NPC dying, or you get nothing. Almost all miner NPC ships found in supercruise will have mine launchers these days, and this is fine, but it is not fine when they keep spamming mines after their drives are shot out.
Many times, the NPC will crash into its own mines due the tumbling motion acquired after their drives get shot out, damaging itself. I even tried using a Repair Limpet to try and keep them alive, but these stop healing anytime damage is applied, rendering them useless in this scenario. This leaves the mine spamming NPC slowly killing itself, and the player has no way to stop this. This is exacerbated by the fact that module sniping requires you to take down shields, and while explosive damage is insignificant with shields up, it is far more damaging to most hull types with shields down. NPCs are the topic here, so things like effective hull engineering or Reactive Surface aren't present (I wish they were, but that's a separate issue.). Add all that on top of the natural hull damage done during the module sniping process, and it gets easy for the NPC to die when this happens.
I tried maneuvering myself ahead a problem NPC, I tried stopping, and I tried moving far away from the NPC, but nothing works. There was no way any mines launched by it could possibly hit me in these scenarios, but they still spam them into their own demise. The larger surface area of bigger ships makes this issue worse for them, but it can still happen with small ships too.
This could theoretically be countered by sniping the FSD first, and waiting out every single mine the NPC has before sniping the drives out too, or maybe sniping every single mine launcher without killing the NPC somehow, but NPC piracy already takes too much time, and is hard enough without this mine issue. I am not asking for an "I win" button. Even when NPC mines have no deployment issues, I still lose plenty of targets to accidental overkill, or failure on my part to snipe modules before they jump away. Heck, I'll even accept the few times I have technically killed an NPC with its own mines by virtue of my own ship being too close to them when their mines hit both of us due to the explosion radius.
The easy solution is to make NPCs stop using mines when their Drives are out all together. Another more "lore friendly" solution would be to implement some kind of "check" that is done to make an NPC stop deploying mines if it detects friendly fire from them, maybe something like "if own mine hits self, then stop deploying", or a loop like "if own mine hits self, stop deploying mines for X minutes and then try again". Maybe even make a "harder" solution, like an extra module to carry, or a special flying technique, but there needs to be something that a player can do to stop or at least mitigate this behavior if it can't be stopped outright.
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