NPC Ramming attempts during combat out of control...

The NPC's desire to ram is totally out of hand. I've accepted a pirate massacre mission and each one of the first 12 has attempted to ram, then keeps matching my speed and turns whilst trying to ram me. It's obscene!

Aren't the massacre missions supposed to be combat and not a test as to who has more integrity... some of them attempt to mount my FAS... [woah]

Come-on FD, please give the NPCs some Bromide! I want combat not NPC love.
 
Are you sure you're not confusing ramming with the NPC's clumsy attempt at head to head dogfighting?

NPC's will always try to turn to face their weapons toward you. This means they will always attempt to initiate a dogfight since you'll be trying to keep your weapons on them.

So far their coding for "Right of Way" is rather lacking and they tend not to calculate proximity to players well when they try to turn and boost.
 
I did a little HAZ RES hunting in beta 3.0 yesterday and the NPC's i fought did seem a little off in reguards to ramming.

I don't mean the odd love tap that inevitably happens occasionally.

The NPC's just seemed to not care about the space my ship occupied. They blazed onward reguardless of the fact I was in their path.

It's more like their collision awareness routines were switched off.

I joked to my bud that the NPC's are getting more humanlike all the time. =P
 
It's a reflection of PVP tactics. Ramming as a viable tactic is totally stupid in a space combat game. It's not bumper cars or Mario Cart. Should definitely be in the game, but only as a last resort that severely damages both ships and is only used as a murder-suicide option.
 
It's a reflection of PVP tactics. Ramming as a viable tactic is totally stupid in a space combat game. It's not bumper cars or Mario Cart. Should definitely be in the game, but only as a last resort that severely damages both ships and is only used as a murder-suicide option.

Can attest to that. I just got destroyed by a double team. I rammed a python in a dropship going much faster then the Python was. By all accounts I should have sheered him in half since he was going slower then I was.

Instead my shields got dropped entirely and his were only down to half. I was then destroyed when a second pirate showed up and ate me alive while I was focused on killing the first pirate.

Not a fun rebuy.

The damage should have been the other way around.
 
I LOVE IT! :D

I use it against the big Threat Level 4 Corvettes and Condas all the time. Using my Corvette, I take every opportunity they offer to head straight for them and BOOST just before impact! Nothing takes their shields down to nothing faster! Depending on my own shield strength at the time, I might also fire off a SCB from one of my two 7A SCB launchers just before impact.

I also will Ram them every chance I get as well. I find it a really fun kind of Jousting technique, but you obviously need a pretty robust ship to pull it off without blowing yourself up in the process! :D

Its a totally justifiable technique, used for centuries by armies/navies through time if they had the equipment to pull it off. Many a classic Sci-Fi novel has offered up thrilling accounts of space combat that involved ramming into the enemy ship. Nothing more dramatic and fearless! [up]

So spare me the "It isn't a viable tactic for space combat" meme. According to who pray tell?

Sounds like the OP needs stronger shields and maybe a bigger/stronger ship? Then you can turn this behavior into an advantage and reduce the amount of time you spend taking these guys out. :)

I hope they never remove this behavior. NPC combat would be incredibly boring and predictable without it.

I'm tempted to buy the new Raider Pack for my Corvette, since it totally goes with the combat style I use with this ship.

:)
 
Last edited:
Can attest to that. I just got destroyed by a double team. I rammed a python in a dropship going much faster then the Python was. By all accounts I should have sheered him in half since he was going slower then I was.

Motion is relative, in a different frame of reference yours could be the slower ship. What matters is which is the heavier ship and which is better built to handle the stress of a collision.
 
Are you sure you're not confusing ramming with the NPC's clumsy attempt at head to head dogfighting?

NPC's will always try to turn to face their weapons toward you. This means they will always attempt to initiate a dogfight since you'll be trying to keep your weapons on them.

So far their coding for "Right of Way" is rather lacking and they tend not to calculate proximity to players well when they try to turn and boost.

They don’t even turn or try and fight. it’s almost as if their shields get intertwined and stuck to mine. I boost and they’re stuck to the top of my ship. it’s really weird and not any fun.
 
They don’t even turn or try and fight. it’s almost as if their shields get intertwined and stuck to mine. I boost and they’re stuck to the top of my ship. it’s really weird and not any fun.

What ships are these again?

I have only seen this ramming behavior with the big guys. And there is definitely not any kind of weird entanglements going on aside from the grinding against the other ship you often get with a head on direct hit.

You might want to submit a bug report along with some video footage of this happening. There might be some issues going on here that are not supposed to be happening.
 
Last edited:

Deleted member 38366

D
Well, why else would they run around with these Patent-Pending Inertia-free(tm) Grade 8 Modded Thrusters?

They can Afterburn without hardly gaining any distance in any Ship, decelerate or accelerate in a heartbeat even if the Ship type could never afford such maneuvers, selectively accelerate even without Afterburner, utilize their Grade 8 Maneuvering Thrusters and achieve turn rates at speed regimes way beyond the Player's Flight model in the same Ship, fly around as if their Ships were only 1/4 of their normal weight...

It's absolutely ideal to virtually Turret any Player Ship and ram it :D
 
Last edited by a moderator:
OP. I don't mind ramming in combat, it's ramming out of combat that annoys me - I was rammed 3 times tonight whilst being scanned and not in combat during my 1 hour haz res. Crazy.

NPCs seem to have gone kamikaze over the last few months. It doesn't matter whether you're in combat or not, in a haz res, conflict zone, coming into dock at <100 m/s or being scanned; NPCs ram you.

4 pips to shields seems the best plan.
 
Motion is relative, in a different frame of reference yours could be the slower ship. What matters is which is the heavier ship and which is better built to handle the stress of a collision.

His was heavier and moving slower. Mine was smaller and moving a twice the speed because I hit the boost and caught him during a mid change of direction turn which he needed to slow down for.

Also the FDS is angular. The pointy nose made direct contact with the broad back of the Python.

I'm pretty sure physics support my smaller impact point against a flat surface as a puncture as a high amount of energy impacting a single point before slowly spreading out creating a crater and fragmenting the rest of the space around it. See bullet impacting a wall.

Better example of what happened:
(I am the orks in this case)
[video=youtube_share;UHgu_fBlSjk]https://youtu.be/UHgu_fBlSjk?t=1m24s[/video]
 
Ramming as a viable tactic is totally stupid in a space combat game. It's not bumper cars or Mario Cart.

It kinda is. Because of the existence of shielding technology. In the real world ramming would be stupid. In this fictional world, it's not.

I don't consider it a viable tactic unless you are desperate. Because even if you have strong shields, it will deplete them, and you will need to regenerate them. I'm in a Federal Corvette with engineered grade 5 shields, and I never do this on purpose for this reason.
 
What I dont understand is the NPCs constant need to go nose to nose, literally. Its boring. If theyre gonna be on my nose, Im going to decimate them without any effort... boring.
 
It works the other way around too though. You can put 4 pips to shields and ram an anaconda several times until it's down to 30% hull before you open fire. That gives it no chance to fight back and saves a lot of time.
 
Top Bottom