Not sure why anyone would want AI that has infinite cap and isn't limited by heat. It's a serious issue worth discussion. This video shows we can't trust the devs word that everything is fair.
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The state of NPCs and their blatant cheating, how to get the trust back?
- Thread starter Vincent Starson
- Start date
This doesn't prove that NPCs aren't affected by heat, either.
You could say it's a Plasma Accelerator that has a Multi-Cannon rate of fire, in which the heat would flash fry the shop in seconds.
--OR--
You could say it's a Multi-Cannon that is shooting the wrong projectile. Obviously it wouldn't generate any heat, because the game thinks it's firing a multi-cannon, but it rains destructive death because a Plasma round is a lot more powerful then a Multi-Cannon round.
This is, of course, assuming one would put the code for heat generation in the weapon itself rather than the projectile fired. I'm not a coder, but I did mess around with modding Jedi Knight back in the day, and the first thing I did was modify the Imperial Repeater (the machine gun) to fire Concussion Rifle shots (the BFG). It used only one ammo per shot because the game thought it will still firing Repeater shots, and obviously it fired them just as fast as a machine gun should. If I had modded the concussion rifle to shoot as fast as the repeater, I would have run out of ammo in seconds.
To me, that video just shows an extension of that mod.
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I don't think this is exactly intentional.
It's a very nasty bug, but still a bug.
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This actually makes a lot of sense.
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I know that the machine gun plasma is a bug, but I really hope the infinite cap / zero heat issue is a bug too.
It would go against what they've said was their intent that NPCs don't cheat if it was intended. And for the past year and a half FDEV has been honest about everything NPC related afaik.
I'll stop discussing this now. FDEV don't let us down! Fix these bugs and show us without a doubt that NPCs can't cheat! I trust FDEV to make things right.
See ya in space, Commanders
LOL. When did plasma multi-cannons get added? looks legit.
See my previous post, you are inferring there are two bugs when there may be just one.
Something I have not seen in this thread, btw, would be a sufficient reason why for FD to lie about NPCs not having to deal with ammo counts or shield counts. Would it completely break the AI routines to run out of ammo or SCBs? I would hope not. What would a human player do if they ran out of resources? Retreat. And we've already seen that the NPCs know how to retreat.
Methinks people may be confusing FD with EA. This is understandable, as the letters are close together.
If the weapon doesn't generate heat or drain the capacitor (due to a bug) there is no reason to make it stop firing.
Javert
Volunteer Moderator
All,
One question - if you have video which shows that NPCs are "cheating" by having infinite ammo, shield cells or some kind of invulnerability, have you raised a bug report? FD have gone on record saying that the only thing that NPC have as infinite is Multicannon ammunition.
Therefore if you are seeing something that proves otherwise it is a bug and should be reported on the bug reporting section.
Keep in mind that NPCs are not persistent across instances, so I suspect that if an NPC appears to chase you into SC and then interdict you again, they probably have a full load again, so if the NPC has followed you across multiple instances that's a different report and, for the moment at least, that may be a design limitation.
The other symptom of this as far as I can tell, and I need to take a video to prove it and post, is that NPCs are capable of chasing you into SC without respecting the countdown timer after they have interdicted you - they appear again almost immediately in SC whereas if another player interdicts you and you have submitted, they have a longer timer.
I suggest you submit a separate bug report for each individual symptom, with video if possible and as much details as possible. You will then hopefully get a specific response back as to whether this is a bug, or perhaps the AI pilot is just very good at managing their resources.
One question - if you have video which shows that NPCs are "cheating" by having infinite ammo, shield cells or some kind of invulnerability, have you raised a bug report? FD have gone on record saying that the only thing that NPC have as infinite is Multicannon ammunition.
Therefore if you are seeing something that proves otherwise it is a bug and should be reported on the bug reporting section.
Keep in mind that NPCs are not persistent across instances, so I suspect that if an NPC appears to chase you into SC and then interdict you again, they probably have a full load again, so if the NPC has followed you across multiple instances that's a different report and, for the moment at least, that may be a design limitation.
The other symptom of this as far as I can tell, and I need to take a video to prove it and post, is that NPCs are capable of chasing you into SC without respecting the countdown timer after they have interdicted you - they appear again almost immediately in SC whereas if another player interdicts you and you have submitted, they have a longer timer.
I suggest you submit a separate bug report for each individual symptom, with video if possible and as much details as possible. You will then hopefully get a specific response back as to whether this is a bug, or perhaps the AI pilot is just very good at managing their resources.
This in itself would show that NPC and player weapons have different code. If the same code was used for both then you would see players being able to produce the same effect.
The fact that player and NPC weapons operate differently shows wherever it may be there is differentiation in the code, somewhere this is causing issues. I can understand why a developer treats NPC's differently it is to make up for the lack of human level AI. This being the case FDEV have made a big thing about they could ramp the AI up to be much more challenging,I think we all want a variety of challenge in the AI depending on its rank. If FDEV are to be taken at their word they should be able to do this without the AI blatantly cheating.
To take one example of this, it has been stated the AI cheats on MC ammo so it doesn't run away due to reloading. The infinite ammo is a crude way of getting around this, why not have it check for the ammunition left or the fact it is reloading. I would like the AI to fly evasively with full pips to engine while their cannons reload. You could also in this scenario prevent AI from running away by having their FSD drive pay attention to damage states, in fact I would like to see all ships AI or PC degrade as they take damage. This is something the X games used to do and it made sense.
AI should run if they have no chance of winning, I find a good the counter to this is missiles. It would also depend on the pilots attitude, just like some players you would have pilots that would fight to the death and others would flee depending on different combat conditions.
I would also put the point forward that in my opinion shields are way to ineffective, if they where two or three times stronger with higher recharge rates combat would last longer. This would also require increased ammunition amounts for weapons that use ammunition or energy weapons would become the go to weapon.
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The video doesn't show jack squat except a networking error. I've seen Anacondas flying 1000m/s backwards due to networking errors, why should I think this one is special and proves the AI cheats?
This shows that there is some errors about. Nothing more. This trust thing is just over the top. Of course you can trust them. They don't program the NPC's to cheat, there are just some hiccups in the programing. That is common enough. The only thing I can truly say about this is; Get a grip.
Find an incident of the bug, document it as best you can and report it. Job done, be careful out there.
Find an incident of the bug, document it as best you can and report it. Job done, be careful out there.
Not at all. Engineer mods have influence on all weapon stats. Ammo, capacitor draw, heat generation, damage etc. are all influenced by modifications. They created a table with different variables that the NPCs semi randomly pick from for upgraded modules. This table should be in line with the modules we can craft. However they got some weird numbers in there, that's why we have buggy results. Since we don't access the same table when doing engineer mods we can't reproduce the results. BTW the only one cheating in this case are players, we have access to special effects which isn't the case for NPCs.
Reloading is not the issue. It's a design decision based on the idea of having bullets fly all over the place. They make them miss deliberately so you can see more bullets flying around, this is why they don't want to restrict ammo for MCs.
This was the case in the first beta, the community voted against it because they feared they couldn't make money bounty hunting anymore.
I am not sure about this. I think it might be better if shields would be weaker with faster recharge rates. Shields shouldn't be the only "meta", combat would be more interesting if we could afford to lose shields more often without waiting 15 minutes to recharge.
This is not "every game". AI doesn't have to "win" this game, therefore it is pointless for it to cheat (sans exceptions for very few things and of course bugs).
Not true at all. Games that are praised for their good AI get that praise specifically because the AI doesn't cheat. Strategy games in which the AI cheats get railed on for having to resort to cheap tricks, even the vaunted Civ V. Firaxis caught hell about the AI in all of their games since release for this, and I don't play their games in single player because the cheating AI is just annoying and it's incredibly easy to beat once you learn it's basic patterns. The first time I completely stomped a round of 16 AI players on Immortal difficulty/marathon length with a randomly picked civilization 600 turns in in Civ V was the last time I clicked the single player button in the menu. I play online with friends or I don't play it at all.
Cheating AI is bad PR, it's easy to exploit, and it's horrible game design. I thoroughly berate any game that I find has cheating AI, and ED doesn't have it. Buggy as all get-out, but it doesn't cheat beyond the all-seeing-eye exploit WHICH NEEDS TO BE FIXED.
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Cheat or bug, I just got shot down in the mailslot while leaving the station without any warning, "ship scanned" msg or anything. Didn't even have time to deploy hardpoint- And it was one shot, one kill. That is extremely frustrating, especially for relatively new players like me 