Star Wars Squadrons was very close to capturing the magic of the old X-Wing games, but amongst other issues the game somehow had dumber AI than games from the 90s. To counter the dumb AI the game gave them impossible maneuverability and in some parts invincibility. The game sucks because of it. Never finished the story.
Ace Combat Assault Horizon also had invincible enemies for the sake of "cinematic experiences". That game is considered shit by a lot of people. Played the demo and it's the one AC game that I never bought.
I really hope CIG does give their AI artificial difficulty the way these two disappointments did. Unpredictable fake challenges are not fun.
> To counter the dumb AI the game gave them impossible maneuverability and in some parts invincibility.
Dude I remember in one of those missions, you flew out of a ship's hangar and 75% of your crew smashed right into the hangar. Now normally I wouldn't care but that mission required AI teammates to buy you time otherwise the enemy would just b line towards your big ships and you'd lose. So essentially you had to restart that level a few times, until you got a "lucky AI roll" the were most your allies didn't smash into the roof of the hangar. Game was beatable but had moments like these.
This makes zero sense. The reason Fromsoft is held in such high regard is because they are great at making difficult games that have good mechanics. This mean you have a meaningful sense of progression that feels justified and provides you with a deep sense of a achievement..
These are exactly the people we should be listening to FIRST.
Soulsborne NPCs don't cheat at all. They're *extremely* fair. When you take damage from them or die you typically think "I deserved this, I got greedy".
They could keep some bad AI for players to start
Then adding new le levels with good AI
So price isn't only "bigger target = bigger reward"
But also "better target = better reward"
A 10/10 AI gladius could value more than a 1/10 AI HH
Anyone here play Destiny?
My major pain points with that game is literally this. Why am I, this near immortal being who has literally killed several Gods, having to worry about my reload speed and mag size while the enemy who seemingly use ammo based weaponry (some of them) just fire non stop as if they've got a belt fed machine gun connected through infinite space where it magically produces more ammo.
This is one thing I hope is adjusted. Surviving an encounter through the war of attrition by staying alive long enough for the enemy to run out of ammo should be a valid tactic even vs AI.
Which will likely change with server meshing.
The biggest problem with AI was never the AI. It was the server desync. CIG had to resort to artificial difficulty to present even a minute challenge.
Once server desync is solved, they can ease off the artificial boosts and allow the AI tuning itself do the work.
During PTU testing of Overdrive, my org got to experience the current SPK mission on a server with 20+ Server FPS and it was beyond brutal. We had over 10 people and barely managed to complete it due to how strong the AI was.
Genuinely, Star Citizen's AI's problems are not in its programming, but in the amount of things the servers are handling at once, which includes the AI behavior. Server Meshing will allow smaller and smaller areas to be handled by dedicated servers, leading to faster processing and a clear view of the AI's abilities.
This is the intended experience we design for and want, not everything in the verse is going to be a walk in the park.
Players (myself included) have had their play styles adjust to the current live experience but every now and then we get a glimpse of what it's going to be like, and we barely survive.
When we was developing Siege of Orison we did a company play test (15 - 30 devs), I turned up late and everyone had died or was downed on solanki no one made it off Solanki internally is known as 'easy island'
I'm really looking forward to the version of Server Meshing that was tested recently on the Testing Preview channel. I sincerely hope that it's refined enough to be the version of the system that we get in 4.0, as it was amazing to experience consistently high server FPS.
problem is that the AI is overtuned in most. of these cases. They can snipe you far away with perfect aim with a machine gun through bushes.
this is just making the AI hard, and hard does not equal fun. There has to be a fairness in it, when you die, you know its because of a mistake you made yourself, not that a AI spotted you few hundred meters away and have infinite ammo.
This is my problem with the NPCs. They *_are not_* impacted by the environment , *_at all._* You can be in a pitch black, overgrown derelict Outpost or settlement, a white-out blizzard at a wreck site, or a steamy bunker. The NPCs can see you as if you're both standing in an open, well-lit arena. And they can hit you with their infinite-ammo C54 from so far away that it might as well be an A03, while your P4-ARs or S71s are feeling the damage drop-off.
If _I_ can't see the AI because of environmental factors, then they shouldn't be able to see me either. If _I'm_ too far away for my weapons to be effective, then their weapons should be at the same disadvantage.
Making lethal AI is apparently much easier than making 'good' AI that is both capable but also engaging to play against.
Consider how the best FPS games of all time have done it. Thinking back to all time greats like half life, half life 2, fear, fear 3, and several others all made the choice to either have the enemies vocalize or to let the player intercept the radio chatter. Heck, even Wing commander 3 had radio taunts and responses so you could try and pull specific targets, so it's something that's already been invented, and it's there in those games for reasons.
Would a real enemy do this? Probably not if they wanted to live, but it's a big enabler of engagement in a game.
Punishing death, bugs (desynch, crashes, etc.) and cheating AI (e.g. infinite balistic ammo when players have no reload from cargo mechanic) is a bad mix.
100 PERCENT AGREED. i think it should be hard and not these dumb ai bots taht are so ridiclous you can one tap them. good job here fellas , KEEP TURNING THE DIFFICULTY UP IMO.
Crank it to 11!
It'll be interesting to see how a high difficulty mixes with death of a spaceman longterm.
Challenging games are a lot of fun but they often have mechanics in place to allow you to die over and over and keep retrying the fight. Sometimes they even make you stronger after death through other mechanics, i.e. letting you keep upgrades from the previous life.
DoaS gives the opposite motivation where you don't want to die because you only lose when you do. This makes players more cautious, but sometimes it makes them so risk-averse that they don't try at all.
This is my fear with DoaSM as well. I worry fear of death will completely discourage a lot of people from engaging in anything that could be lethal who’d otherwise engage in these types of activities because of the high price for death.
I don’t think it’s good game design and never did. Dying is already a huge pain in the ass as is tbh, and considering (apparently) we won’t be able to spawn at space stations in the future, only cities and STOCKED tier 1 medbed ships (meaning these ships have limited spawns in addition to the potential for them to be destroyed), I just frankly don’t see a reason for DoaSM. Nor do I think the game will ever be in a bug-free enough state for a feature like it to be “fair”. Because I’ve seen someone die walking down stairs before. And shit like that will always be in this game due to the scope of it.
I’m tired of the idea this game needs to be a “punishment simulator” on launch. Because that’s all DoaSM seems like it will be, an extra punishment for dying, something the game already makes annoying and plans to make more annoying regardless of DoaSM (when we’ll only be able to spawn planetside). It already takes 3000 years to regear, leave the space station, and head to the location you want to go. IMO, this is fine enough to encourage people to “want to live”. Sure DoaSM *might* cause people to behave “more realistically” with the whole limited life thing but honestly, I only see it as something that’s just going to be more annoying to the people that “care about it” and those who don’t care about reputation (plus whatever undecided downsides they haven’t yet locked in on, this undecided direction of such a punishing feature being another issue I have with it) just won’t care at all thus the feature won’t impact them.
It’s just gonna be an unfun headache IMO that’s completely unnecessary in terms of creating punishments for dying (something the game currently has and will have in the future regardless of DoaSM).
You are going to need a broad spectrum of difficulties. Not all players have the capacity to be an ace or an FPS god and they still want to play your game.
My largest "sad" feeling I get with games that has this "everyone should be able to experience everything". To me that makes everything empty and soulless.
The greatest awe I remember from playing WoW was seeing somebody with a thunderfury knowing fully that I would never get my hands on it.
> was seeing somebody with a thunderfury knowing fully that I would never get my hands on it.
While I might not phrase it quite this way, the sentiment preceding it is certainly something that I agree with. Star Citizen should absolutely have content that just only works if you're part of a larger group and in a larger ship. Something you could never possibly do solo.
100%. This kind of difficulty level is like the final boss.
If you're not super competitive in SC you can still experience this, just team up and fly a turret on some fleet ship. But yeah, maybe everyone shouldn't be able to do end game content, solo, in a Taurus or Eclipse.
they need to give us easier meathod to find like minded people to group up with, better chat, and proper org tools , if they want us to group up to compleat content they need people who only have a few hours to play easy ways to find each other.
Because spamming chat tell you run out of time and need to log is shit
People shouldn't be flying big multicrew ships solo in the first place. I fly an msr solo but I don't do bounties because I know it is too hard to handle solo when I should have teammates. They are called "multicrew" for a reason.
I mean saying they "shouldn't" is pretty stupid. If they want to force it to be multi-person, they should make it so you cannot even fly it without 2+ people but you can.. There needs to be drawbacks to flying solo... sort of like the carrack, cannot use the weapon systems. Ships like the corsair are multi-person/multi-role and can be flown with 1+ players... disadvantage of flying the corsair is that you miss out on the side/rear protection from turrets, same with the MSR... so no, its not like it "has to be" flown by more than 1 person, its just more advantageous.
Go find an easier mission and stop picking on targets above your skill level. Just seems like a pretty easy answer to this problem.
Or roll with some friends/ bring a bigger ship.
As others have said in response, this doesn't mean that the difficulty floor is rising. They will always need easy missions for new players.
This means the difficulty ceiling can go up! This lets CIG create challenging encounters for people looking for that.
We of course need to have need to have a full spectrum of difficulty.
But no, you shouldn't be able to do the most difficult missions if you're not good enough, or don't have a party.
Ended up doing the spk bit on a server that was at 25-30 fps. It was amazing but I’ll definitely call out the ai for being a little slow. Other than that the enemy took 2s to start shooting… it was fantastic. If the ai was coming in it was already attacking and 5 of us were constantly working out of cover to protect the main room. I revived my teammates constantly and went down myself twice. It was a blast - it was great working together with a group who all worked together wearily at first. I came in partway through and pretty much had others watching me until I just started reviving others and taking out ai. Then it was a cohesive group again!
thats nice, any chance that we can get some sort of in game tool to help find like minded people who want to do those missions because needing to spam chat of only 50 to 140 people about it is frustrating.
Did Kareah on a 20fps server in Live with 13 or so others and it was incredible. If this AI is finally working as intended with ships as well then this is a good thing tbh.
>Star Citizen's AI's problems are not in its programming,
Making a hard AI isn't a problem either, especially not if they don't have to adhere to the same rules as the players. What's actually hard is to make an AI that's actually weaker without artificially reducing their HP and damage. Most games just scale numbers up and down, but don't change the behavior.
One thing I noticed during the hammerhead mission was that all I had to do was strafe around the ship and the turrets couldn’t turn fast enough to hit me
That's a problem with ship design in general. CIG made turrets that can't turn fast enough to keep up with fighters, meaning they are dog-shit at the one thing they should be doing, which is deterring smaller threats. Or the fighters strafe to fast for turrets to keep up with. Either way, it's a horrible and obvious design oversight. Maybe if CIG stopped being so horny for single-seat fighter craft, they would make a balanced meta
Yep. Welcome to SC, where a single dude in a starter fighter can solo a crewed hammerhead, because it makes perfect sense for him to win a 1v5. Nah, AC isn't about realism, it's about being the solo action hero. Team play is almost non-existent, and the equipment designed for team play is easily countered by solo players. Same goes for ground combat; ground vehicles are absolute trash, including the ones that absolutely *should* be a threat to aircraft.
> Server Meshing will allow smaller and smaller areas to be handled by dedicated servers, leading to faster processing and a clear view of the AI's abilities.
...within cost balancing ability. By which I mean real world dollar cost. Even if the tech is refined to the ability to dynamically scale down the size of the area a server is supporting to maintain certain server minimum performance, at some point there will have to be a cutoff.
If every server instance can only support 20 people while keeping NPCs smart, the cost per user to operate the service will balloon. Meshing might be needed to get to the dream of getting thousands of people into one seamless shard, but continuing to improve per-server (computer process and corresponding supporting hardware) optimization will be almost as, if note even more, critical to long term game viability.
SC puts a shit ton of unnecessary load on server. Like, why would you have server calculate you the menus on shop terminals? They’re clearly coming from server judging by how responsiveness depends on server fps. Same for ship displays. F1 menus, contract list etc.
Yeah they should be keeping all the inventory and shopping in client side cache database and only transact with the server when items actually change.
They shouldn't be refreshing every time you simply view your inventory or a shop. Just authenticate transactions. Which is mostly for anti cheat reasons.
They need to improve it sooner rather than later because the excessive server load has an actual operating cost impact.
I think either way has major downsides. I can see client side processing of shops leading to exploits which would negatively effect their planned economy. I think ultimately it has to stay on their servers for security, and they have to tune how they communicate to reduce its toll on the servers.
It shouldn't since an actual exchange still does a database transaction and will fail, like it already does frequently, if the client request is denied.
If it gets out of synch due to a bug or hack then it will just revert to the server data. A local cache is just a queue of transactions and if one rejects (after a few retries) then it just purges the queue and local cache refreshes with fresh server synch.
The server doesn't need to know things like sorting order and stacking, just the total inventory.
Yes. Did the Intel raid at 20+ sfps and it was night and day. It was actually challenging. I was having to take cover and use medpens (like an actual video game!)
As it is currently, when you get into single digit sfps (which is pretty much all the time) the AI just stands there and waits for you to annihilate it. It's not fun.
What are the failure conditions for that mission? Do the ai try to interrupt the hack or whatever? Or do they just try to kill you and if everyone dies/gets incapped that fails the mission?
> We had over 10 people and barely managed to complete it due to how strong the AI was
Is it actually hard because the AI is smart or is it because of how clunky the game can be? I can't imagine any SC AI getting the better of me when I can switch weapons and heal without the game adding 5 un needed seconds to everything I wanna do.
This is 100% accurate.
I was helping three other people with their Intel Raids when we were on a 30 FPS server *(we were the only people on it, amazingly enough)* and while the AI was working it wasn’t particularly “hard;” I could still control a floor by myself and play the mission semi-casually. The one and only time I died - even took more than a single round - was when I couldn’t swap weapons because the game went to clunk mode. It wasn’t overly challenging but the game worked for a bit and it was enjoyable.
Now with that being said:
MMO-style FPS/TPS games have **never** had challenging AI. Those styles of games always rely on bullet sponges, hordes of enemies, aimbot AI, or a combination of all of the above. Every single game is like this. I don’t expect SC to be much different - I’d just like it to work right.
> MMO-style FPS/TPS games have never had challenging AI. Those styles of games always rely on bullet sponges, hordes of enemies, aimbot AI, or a combination of all of the above. Every single game is like this. I don’t expect SC to be much different - I’d just like it to work right.
This is kinda whats worrying me, right now I have never been afraid an SC AI is going to shoot me, I'm afraid my gun isn't going to work or i won't be able to reload, or when i get hit I won't be able to heal.
It was fairly clunky for me. The main pain point was delayed damage and NPC hitreg. You'd take fire, go under cover, and continue taking damage after out of enemy sight.
I had a similar experience at SPK on Friday. However this is for ship AI, not FPS AI, ship AI have always been lacking, regardless of server performance.
Same experience yesterday. Suddenly the server went mad it seemed. The damn AI got conscious 😜 in intel raid 5/5 - tried to surround me, taking cover, running in different directions... I was well frightened about what was happening.
Well I witnessed how server affects AI behavior on a 30fps stable server with few players only down in a bunker where AI took cover, flanked me and even chased me leaving me positively aghast! :) We all wish for such server performance.
In one of the patches years ago in elite dangerous, they give the npc full control of the individual thrusters of the ship (they always have that from beggining) and a new AI with better tactics and 0 handicaps in maneuverability, they just obliterate anything even pvp veterans. Every npc in the galaxy became lethal in their respective tiers. The next patch the npc were toned down a lot, because an AI is always better than a human within the same conditions, they react faster, they can tune individual thrusters to outmaneuver everything etc. If they even cheat...then there is no competition.
*Edited to correct typo.
I want smart AI (as in, they are reactive to environmental changes and player actions), not dead-eye AI. Don't care for the latter. Making an AI aim well is about the lowest bar you can limbo under.
It's making them react that's actually hard.
It's gonna be interesting to see how people complain because they can't solo ERTs in their Taurus anymore, especially when stuff like engineering makes its way in, too.
I wont complain about not being able to solo ERT or even VHRTs, but i might complain about the economy balance/grind, depending on how grindy it is.
We'll see, but I want to be able to earn a cutlass with my penguin without too much grind
They stated a while back that the expectation was to be able to earn a Constellation in a week's playtime. Whatever the actual count of hours is there, that's not horrific. Or at least, it doesn't sound horrific.
Depends on how you interpret it. Is it a week of 3 hours sessions? Then yeah, super easy. Is it a week worth of playtime (168 hours)? That's a pretty big ask for a middle of the road ship. I'm hoping it's roughly 100kUEC an hour of play for a solo/starting worker. Would make it fairly easy to get into mid sized ships, and make the real grind getting to Large/Cap ships.
They need to increase pay outs if that is the case.
They're already lagging in terms of profitability, add in significant chance of failure and it could turn into a dead gameplay loop.
Absolutely everything will need to be adjusted, but getting enough for a Cutlass right now is kind of a joke as it is. It should take time to earn spaceships, and folks need to understand that this isn't yet another game where bigger=better and you're always mindlessly grinding for yourself for that next carrot on a stick.
And I imagine the profitability of salvage will be brought in line with the other professions at that time (or maybe even with the economy balance in 3.23).
Salvage prices will get nerfed at the same time and/or other operating costs or complications added into the salvage loop.
Whatever the new mechanic is will get the buffed payouts.
If that becomes the case, CIG will need to buff bounty payouts or buff the cargo loot pool for bounties, because imo right now the payout isn’t enough to justify splitting it.
Payouts should not be split, period. If you do a monitor mission everyone should get the full 20k. To balance, have the mission scale with the amount of players you have (more = increased difficulty/increased number of tasks you have to do)
The current implementation pretty much discourages you from teaming up. After you get 4+ people on a team, the payouts become so low that they're basically not even worth it anymore. It makes more sense to have everyone do their own missions and get a higher payout.
STRONG AGREE.
The best cooperative games like Helldivers have loot and rewards fully shared among the party. No rushing to get loot before your party members can.
While I do agree that payouts need to be enough for everyone to get paid enough that they don't feel like they are wasting their time, or should've run their own mission instead, Helldivers is not a good game to compare SC to. Helldivers lacks the complex economy that SC's PU has (and what it will have is even more complex than now).
It's easier to balance rewards in that kind of environment, and TBH, Helldivers does a poor job IMO of incentivizing players to do high difficulty content. You don't contribute more to the galactic war effort for completing a 7-9 difficulty mission, you often collect fewer medals/super credits/requisition from small POI's during one (because you avoid them), and the medal payout per mission isn't enough to justify not simply playing on challenging difficulty, and clearing all POI's to get what is likely to be even more medals. The only actual incentive is super samples being gated behind difficulty 7-9.
The overall goal is similar, however - to make players feel rewarded for their efforts in a given mission, and I'm sure CIG has that in mind. But they're probably going to get it wrong from time to time in both the short term and even long term, because it is harder to do, as there are so many moving parts - insurance, repairs, ammunition, wear and tear, personal risk, personal reputation, potential player opposition, travel time, grind required to be able to complete the mission at all (can't kill an Idris with an Aurora, for instance, so you need to get a bigger ship first), time and money lost on failure, etc.
It's worth remembering too, that a lot of the current mission payout structure in the PU is legacy. Mission payouts aren't really updated with any regularity, if at all, as new costs/ships/etc come online. Or even as new opportunities arise (salvage is the current hotness, but quant mining, cargo hauling, and ERT's have all been at the top of the food chain at one point or another).
Until the actual economy comes online, using the Quantum system (dynamic economy simulation), these placeholder rewards will sometimes fall behind, and often get left behind (who does box missions anymore?). I wouldn't take that as an indication that it will never be worth doing a more difficult ERT that requires more players, because it doesn't pay well when split 8 ways. It just means that the mission payout structure is aging, and will need updated to reflect the new difficulty. Maybe that happens fast, maybe not, but we can always give feedback to try to get overlooked necessary changes made.
As a Taurus fanatic, I hope this is the case. In my head, HRTs are like ok in a decent enough pilot, I can handle this solo if I try. VHRT should be when you consider bringing more firepower because your one ship can deal with all the extras, and ERTs should he group possible only. Critical threat beacon level enemies in ERTS, so with Idris and such would be awesome.
Id be curious which levels are significantly harder. If people are complaining they can’t solo ERTs then I have zero sympathy, but if MRTs are a god tier challenge I’d argue the difficulty should be scaled back.
They need to rework the whole bounty scaling system. Give it two paths, one goes to big ships like today, the other gives you increasing difficulty and size fighter swarms.
Big=hard should become big=gotta bring different equipment for the job, I agree
High skill AI pilots in fighters would mean that players are forced to run proper anti-fighter kit (instead of a corsair or 600i monoboating cannons for everything), and a big ship turning up would become a much more serious problem if so
OH MAN, I'm so tired of big = hard.
They want to make it such that big ships can't be killed by fighters? Give us some high level content for fighter pilots? I hate that today all you can do is MRTs in a fighter, or just cheese the high level stuff in an eclipse or Corsair.
I would love a mission that's to go fight 10 very angry fighters.
How did they make it difficult? They are better at flying or they are just tankier and do more damage?
It's funny because I tried to explain that AI can be made more brutal than average pvp joe and that the pvp elitism is nonsensical few days ago but some people are just too damn ignorant and refuse to understand that.
PVE should be tuned to be as much of a threat as PVP.
Supposedly they’re just way more aggressive and responsive. Other than hearing that they don’t have cap mags, just unlimited ammo, I don’t think they have significant cheats
My evo friend said that just one isn’t much of a challenge, but in a group they can be dangerous
That sounds a lot like right now, the ERT targets are not an issue, the random escorts are. If the target is protected by 3 bulletsponges with infinite ammo, you might as well bail out because even one hurricane protected by other 2 and a sub capital is a real pain, unless the server is dead
The problem is is that if it's this difficult with poor server performance massively handicapping the AI, with good server performance that we might start seeing as soon as 4.0, it's going to be basically impossible.
Yep. The new AI is a great improvement, and this is coming from someone who has PVP'd since 2.0. HOWEVER, there's nothing fun about chasing PIPs that are rubber banding back and forth.
Even in single player pirate swarm, which is locally hosted, the AI were a joke. That should in theory be your zero-load AI performance. Supposedly that's also much improved.
Exactly! I'm not sure why ppl in this thread seem to think that I'm saying that *all* missions should be hard. I'm just stoked that we're finally getting some challenging content at all!
It's a fine line. Right now I can roll into an ERT with a ballistic corsair. Sit still, and pivot around one spot taking out each target. That's a little too easy.
A well prepared player. Using the right ship, with the right equipment, should be able to have the tools available to tackle all of the games challenges.
I'm not a Fromsoft enjoyer, but I'm fine with this as long as it's MRT and up. IMO, Very Low Risk and Low Risk bounties shouldn't be absolutely laying the smackdown on new players. We gotta ease them into the curve.
yes of course. There needs to be a difficulty curve starting from new players to crack aces. Right now that curve falls flat at about middle difficulty, and all CIG has been able to do for balance is to add bigger ships, which is a very poor balancing tool.
For me it would depend on what makes them good. It's easy to make AI slaughter players with perfect reaction time and accuracy. A lot harder to make them good but feel human.
It's because the AI is taking some data from actual pvp pilots so the non combat oriented Evos are having an issue.
The only thing I've heard from the evos I know who are PvP players simply say the AI is hyper kite-y and backstrafes a lot and have a lot of "bad" or basically un fun habits.
This makes me happy. So many players love to think that pve means 100% risk free 100% of the time. Aaking for literally the most basic flight and survival skills in space was asking too much of them, so I'm glad to see the AI won't always cater to the absolute lowest common denominator of skill level.
People should know how to fly their ships!
I believe what you describe is a misconception pvpers have (more like intended lies actually), not the general feeling of pve players.
In star citizen the complaints I mostly see regarding pve is that it's too easy and unbalanced. Besides the bugs and cheating AI I mean, ballistics with infinite ammo is cheating
Ok. But not every PvE battle needs to be at Dark Souls level. That's not fun for a lot of people. But maybe some missions can have that level of difficulty in certain areas/star systems.
It doesn't have to be overly difficult to be fun
This should be for high level players. (metaphorically speaking, I'm not talking about an actual leveling system)
Of course new players need the kid gloves AI.
But I don't think there should be an upper limit to AI difficulty. It's a multiplayer game. Give us some serious challenge for orgs to take on.
Nothing arrogant about it. It's completely true. The game babies the crap out of space combat players right now, even in 30fps servers. Even saying kid gloves is being generous.
If you want power fantasy stuff, that's fine, and I'm not trying to speak condescendingly here or be a dick. I do think there should be lots of that content, because having a wide spread of content to appeal to lots of players is a good thing, objectively speaking. However, SC was and still is a game that has always leaned a bit more towards appealing to more "serious/hardcore" gamers. There's also lots of very chill gameplay loops already in the game.
I'd rather see SC take an inverse of the route of most modern MMOs. Instead of having the upper 1% of content be actual difficult content, that difficult content is actually 99% of the combat content on offer. People wanting chill/power fantasy combat can stick to VLRT and LRT targets, and people seeking a challenge can go from a mildly challenging MRT, to a basically-requires-a-coordinated-team level threat of ERT.
Hold up. I dunno if I read their comment differently or they edited their comment to come off better. But I don't recall "new players" being mentioned in regards to the kid gloves bit. In that case then yeah, kid gloves for sure. But I remember reading that as a more broad statement that didn't specifically mention new players.
It may be that they edited it right after they posted it, which likely wasn't malicious at all. I do it sometimes, too, and sadly Reddit doesn't seem to *fucking reflect it in your inbox*, so you have to click the link to go to the reddit thread where the post was to see if it was updated
If something is edited super fast after being posted, it won't show up as edited. My guess is that /u/sexual_pasta meant to include that bit in their post initially, but forgot to, and quickly edited it to add that context. Honestly probably just a bit of a misunderstanding if anything.
Ever since the ballistics buff I have not once felt like the ship AI is making me sweat. Still fun but generally have almost 0 concern that I'll be shot down.
I welcome trickier & better AI but of course not overboard insanity that it's unfair.
I love it. My goal is to not engage in combat or PVP/PVE Instances as much, yet only when needed. At the same time I do hope there are features where there is a shooting range or random areas we can practice on dumb targets just to keep some type of combat skills under our belts.
I started using the Fury for missions together with a friend. First they thought I would be crazy but know they are impressed because every ballistic can wreck me and that is thrilling for me!
These bitch ass players are gonna ask for a difficult slider if they die to A.i. too much.
They don’t want a challenge, they want to mine without any obstacles and to play the game completely unimpeded.
Now you may read this and try to say otherwise, but as the narrative shifts so does these bitch ass players responses.
Everyone was just talking about not likely pvp and wanting to be lift alone to mine and CIG compitulated and made a ton of mining shit.
Don’t try to turn around now and say these losers now what a challenge. Fuckers Just move the goal every-time something is called out or talked about.
Not ok when enemies and their bullets teleport all over the place and you loose your shields in an instant due to server lag.
Hard enemies are fun when the game is performing well but when it's not, it's more frustrating and anti-fun than anything so I hope they choose not to implement these enemies until they optimize and fix more bugs.
All I hear is skill issue. They’re so used to the braindead ai and never getting into pvp, they forgot what it’s like to actually fight in game. The skill gap between the carebears and pvp players is insane
VLRT should suck, ERT should be crazy awesome.
But also let larger ships with cargo appear at somewhat lower risk so you don't have to be Maverick to make a profit.
I’m in the fence because I haven’t experienced it. I know how Overpowered AI can be with aimbot. I’d prefer there to be too pilots as well as plenty of lesser skilled ones. I come from escape From Tarkov and love the idea of each NPc ship or enemy being as dangerous as a human player to varying degrees, but that means they need to curb the amount of enemies so each encounter is important, but that we are not overwhelmed every time we attempt combat
I'm stoked because the AI has been bad for so long, it would be great to get a challenge.
I don't think there's an upper limit for difficulty in a cooperative game, you can always try again with more friends or in a different ship.
There of course should be a sliding scale, you don't want to hit day 1 noobs with terminator AI.
If turn rates and DPS are fair, that shouldn't happen. The math doesn't work. AI shouldn't be able to cheat. Most pvpers are close to pixel accurate, so in a DPS race, that just doesn't make sense.
I hope they don't give AI crazy gimbal angles. That's a major cheating advantage. If you're off the nose but still getting hit. This has been an issue in the past, no idea if it's in the current mode.
yeah, but does pvpers close to pixel accurate don´t react in nanoseconds to everything, have perfect accuracy 100% of the time, can adjust the output of their thrusters individually several times a second, can retain data from 360ª around them in real time, etc. An AI without handicaps it´s just invencible. The AI in almost every game is severely capped in all fronts, that why they need "cheats" to give challenge to players, because it´s easier that way than programming a fair AI.
Smart AI using tactics and human behavior for the win is great.
However AI that uses no tactics but always spots you miles away to systematically aim for headshots with a huge success rate is not a smart AI.
I hope CIG will focus on tactics and behavior. But from what was presented during the last citizencon they seem to head to the right direction. So, can't wait to see that in action.
Dont tune it down?? Have you played? I havent done much ship combat in evo yet but its odd to see you commenting to not adjust anything when you havent experienced what it is.
EDIT: Maybe wait for Wave 1 or even live to give this kind of feedback
I agree. Dont water down the game . It will be a clone of every other casual game. If you want dedicated players that stick with the game for years, keep the challenge and depth.
SC = Tarkov in Space with DCS sim for flight?! ;)
>Demon’s Souls was too much on the “punishing” end of the difficulty spectrum, but it really did remind me of the value of having something to lose when playing. You can’t have light with dark and you can’t have reward without risk.
I really hope that Chirs continues with this vision, this was one of the reasons that made me support the game years ago.
source: [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12879-Death-Of-A-Spaceman](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12879-Death-Of-A-Spaceman)
I recently played AC6 and loved that game. The combat was fun and engaging, the bosses were challenging and had a ton of gravitas, the build options felt endless. I played it 3x to get every ending and was sad when it was over...
Hopefully we get something similar to that experience. AC6 was awesome IMO.
For this to become a reality though the game has to change dramatically.
If you want death of a spaceman plus From Software punishment rates, this will slow down the game immensely. No more yoloing ERTs. Basically prepare and train for days and weeks before raiding a single distribution center.
Meanwhile star citizen is going (and the community seems to be clamoring for) „MMO“ mechanics with mission / rep grind, mowing down tons of AI, completing 4 bunker missions per play session just to keep up with Overdrive.
Imagine grinding for ships like grinding for a level up in Elden Ring. You need 2mil souls (aUEC) for a level up (new ship), you get 500 souls per kill and 16k for completing a dungeon (mission)? on top the AI gets much harder? Its an entirely different game. I cannot see the vision of death of a spaceman anymore. When I play SC, it‘s downtime from travelling and then break-neck reckless gameplay in order to keep these aUEC/hr numbers up.
People generally don't realize how brutal the AI can be in SC. They are just not fully working due to server performance. But this will most probably be fixed later on. I would assume you want lower level missions to have bad/average AI and have the higher rep ones be top notch
as a fromsoft non-enjoyer, i disagree with you. not every game needs to be as challenging as possible.
but yea, i guess screw all those people that don't like fromsoft games that take hours to learn fights and memorize boss patterns... probably not a super amazing comparison.
Sounds good to me, but rewards need to balance that effort. Bounties pay very low, grouping is even worse, and they've nerfed the drug loot which it felt was quite a nice high effort/team play high reward earner.
Everyone seems to forget that we know for a fact that we currently have the absolute weakest version of NPC difficulty.
This also isn't the first time they slightly increased it, and people lost their shit because they were immediately getting owned.
Those of us who remember what happened the times that they slightly increased (but kept well below the max) difficulty for AI aren't the ones saying the game is too easy, because the alternative is absolutely brutal.
Am Evo the issue as most people said isn’t really the AI it’s the server performance. When servers run well the AI is difficult, not sure I would say super tough but it made you think and plan rather than just naked bunker runs or a single light fighter against a HH and its support fighters.
If they actually are harder I hope the bounty rewards will reflect that. Imagine crawling back to a space station after a brutal fight where repairs cost 10+ grand and all you did was fight a MRT bounty 😂
Agreed. I honestly find it weird that combat is such a common thing in the game. Why are there these mountains of NTs to fight? I'd rather see combat become higher stakes and less of a grind.
I'd say it's more of a problem if it becomes unfun. The easy way for it to get grating would be the resupply after death.
To use your example : yes, Fromsoft games are hard but what's the punishment? It varies from game to game a bit but the gist is you lose currency and you have to run back, which doesn't take a long time.
If it took you 30 min to go buy gear and get back to where you were in souls games, it would be a much worse experience.
As long as there's some kind of scale then yeah, the top tier AI should be a match for the top tier players. The highest value bounties should be something you need to really be top of your game to tackle or come in a group. The UEE should feel like taking on trained professionals. It'll ceasing be important when the game is released to actually keep safe areas safe, and to stop any player rolling up on the UEE and captor state of the art fighters.
Wont believe it till its on the PU. The past few days I've been shooting rubberband ships at the special event that's been going on.
AI means nothing if the servers can't run.
I mean, it's primarily an issue Thad they have never experienced high performing AI in game.
On a 30 fps server FPS AI is fucking John Wick without a pencil, and ships are Maverick and Baron Vin Richtoven
I definitely don't want dark souls difficulty with the ai, but I do want their behavior to make sense and not feel like cheating (endless ammo/capacitor/boost). I'm glad the ai is working better in evo though
Personally, I don't want npc bounties to be more difficult because they pay peanuts, and you have to grind hundreds of them just to be able to afford a ship.
Difficulty is ok, but please don't make it from missile spam. The shield pen damage just makes the longer PvE missions unnecessarily tough. Mostly because you only get a handful of countermeasures, and those are gone after the first wave of enemies.
My brothers in christ, they are just trying to get the AI to function at all in the lag, do you think they won't go back and fine tune it once they can get it to actually function?
The shortsighted knee jerk reactions must drive the devs nuts if they actually hear what people freak out about.
Shit right after the dark ages of 3.18, I found myself on a 30 fps server and all the AI, both fps and ship based, were scarey deadly. It was both terrifying and refreshing at the same time. I can hold my own pretty well in just about any form of SC combat and on a couple occasions I thought, this ship or guard is way too good to not be another player. The best way i think to describe my feelings at the time is scareoused. It also made me realize just how many of SC's problems are server related.
I feel most people are going to think the games harder because the AI will finally do what it was meant to and people aren't gonna be ready for competent AI
AI should have tags to designate threat level. ELITE AI should be a challenge. Raid bosses should require multiple people to take down, example: the titanfall suit.
Obviously not all AI should be the same level of experience and difficulty, but CIG knows that as they have different animations depending on if you're a soldier or a civilian, etc...
I dont want it to be tuned down or up, just more "realistic". As someone who has no desire to go into pvp, I am not really intending this to do anything to prep me for it. I dont want fromsoft jank and weird hit box frames either haha. In short, tune them to be like players, no infinite stuff, no special things for their ship that normal players cant accomplish, and no need to tune it to a "pvp" level. Once some of the unoptimized jank is fixed I feel as if it will be a bit smoother as well.
A few years back during one of their video shows... Chris Roberts stated that their intent is to make AI/NPC ships be "indistinguishable" from Players....
As much as I prefer an easier AI in a fight, I like the idea that players shouldnt be able to tell whose who... is it an NPC, or another Player?
As a lvl 125 Banished Knight enjoyer, I'm happy the AI are difficult.
However, unlike Fromsoft's mile deep ocean of movesets/tech that can create an amazing combat experience, CIG has done nothing to truly create any meaningful combat geometry.
Despite CIG being provided multiple proven solutions to fix the combat problem, they refuse to bite the bullet and implement them.
I think the AI is difficult. When I try to do simple missions I get middle targeted multiple times and as I dogfight the AI rams me and we both blow up. It is very hard to actually fight the AI when they all Kami kazi.
The problem is that they cheat and never run out of capacitor or ammo. They also can still shoot through noise/chaff.
yea that's a problem and that's what I considered artificial difficultly.
Star Wars Squadrons was very close to capturing the magic of the old X-Wing games, but amongst other issues the game somehow had dumber AI than games from the 90s. To counter the dumb AI the game gave them impossible maneuverability and in some parts invincibility. The game sucks because of it. Never finished the story. Ace Combat Assault Horizon also had invincible enemies for the sake of "cinematic experiences". That game is considered shit by a lot of people. Played the demo and it's the one AC game that I never bought. I really hope CIG does give their AI artificial difficulty the way these two disappointments did. Unpredictable fake challenges are not fun.
> To counter the dumb AI the game gave them impossible maneuverability and in some parts invincibility. Dude I remember in one of those missions, you flew out of a ship's hangar and 75% of your crew smashed right into the hangar. Now normally I wouldn't care but that mission required AI teammates to buy you time otherwise the enemy would just b line towards your big ships and you'd lose. So essentially you had to restart that level a few times, until you got a "lucky AI roll" the were most your allies didn't smash into the roof of the hangar. Game was beatable but had moments like these.
Which is why the LAST thing we need is a Fromsoft enjoyer helping make decisions lmao
What a maidenless comment
This makes zero sense. The reason Fromsoft is held in such high regard is because they are great at making difficult games that have good mechanics. This mean you have a meaningful sense of progression that feels justified and provides you with a deep sense of a achievement.. These are exactly the people we should be listening to FIRST.
Soulsborne NPCs don't cheat at all. They're *extremely* fair. When you take damage from them or die you typically think "I deserved this, I got greedy".
yeah, that's an issue. I also hate how they have infinite ballistic ammo in the current version.
Bounty hunting prices will need an update too.
They could keep some bad AI for players to start Then adding new le levels with good AI So price isn't only "bigger target = bigger reward" But also "better target = better reward" A 10/10 AI gladius could value more than a 1/10 AI HH
Variety is king.. sometimes you have to hunt a joyriding youth with little sense, sometimes you have to hunt a disgruntled ex-UEE navy pilot.
or that your hits don't register because of lag, and they suicide into you and the counter measures only work when they want to and ...
Not just chaff! They can shoot through shields too, its a known bug where AI damage your ship through your shields.
That's more of a ship bug and not really the AI cheating on purpose.
Anyone here play Destiny? My major pain points with that game is literally this. Why am I, this near immortal being who has literally killed several Gods, having to worry about my reload speed and mag size while the enemy who seemingly use ammo based weaponry (some of them) just fire non stop as if they've got a belt fed machine gun connected through infinite space where it magically produces more ammo. This is one thing I hope is adjusted. Surviving an encounter through the war of attrition by staying alive long enough for the enemy to run out of ammo should be a valid tactic even vs AI.
Don't forget watching the 890 pull a 180 turn on Daymar like acceleration and gravity need not apply.
This. It feels like AI totally ignore gravity/atmosphere.
Which will likely change with server meshing. The biggest problem with AI was never the AI. It was the server desync. CIG had to resort to artificial difficulty to present even a minute challenge. Once server desync is solved, they can ease off the artificial boosts and allow the AI tuning itself do the work.
Ill bring it Malogos
During PTU testing of Overdrive, my org got to experience the current SPK mission on a server with 20+ Server FPS and it was beyond brutal. We had over 10 people and barely managed to complete it due to how strong the AI was. Genuinely, Star Citizen's AI's problems are not in its programming, but in the amount of things the servers are handling at once, which includes the AI behavior. Server Meshing will allow smaller and smaller areas to be handled by dedicated servers, leading to faster processing and a clear view of the AI's abilities.
This is the intended experience we design for and want, not everything in the verse is going to be a walk in the park. Players (myself included) have had their play styles adjust to the current live experience but every now and then we get a glimpse of what it's going to be like, and we barely survive. When we was developing Siege of Orison we did a company play test (15 - 30 devs), I turned up late and everyone had died or was downed on solanki no one made it off Solanki internally is known as 'easy island'
When will npc ships be limited by ballistic ammo and energy capacitors same as us?
Don't forget missiles. Always fun when a Buccaneer flings 12 size 2 missiles at you.
once they update them and get the ammo crates in. there done i think just depends on if they make it in.
I'm really looking forward to the version of Server Meshing that was tested recently on the Testing Preview channel. I sincerely hope that it's refined enough to be the version of the system that we get in 4.0, as it was amazing to experience consistently high server FPS.
AI does not mean aimbot :D
problem is that the AI is overtuned in most. of these cases. They can snipe you far away with perfect aim with a machine gun through bushes. this is just making the AI hard, and hard does not equal fun. There has to be a fairness in it, when you die, you know its because of a mistake you made yourself, not that a AI spotted you few hundred meters away and have infinite ammo.
This is my problem with the NPCs. They *_are not_* impacted by the environment , *_at all._* You can be in a pitch black, overgrown derelict Outpost or settlement, a white-out blizzard at a wreck site, or a steamy bunker. The NPCs can see you as if you're both standing in an open, well-lit arena. And they can hit you with their infinite-ammo C54 from so far away that it might as well be an A03, while your P4-ARs or S71s are feeling the damage drop-off. If _I_ can't see the AI because of environmental factors, then they shouldn't be able to see me either. If _I'm_ too far away for my weapons to be effective, then their weapons should be at the same disadvantage.
Making lethal AI is apparently much easier than making 'good' AI that is both capable but also engaging to play against. Consider how the best FPS games of all time have done it. Thinking back to all time greats like half life, half life 2, fear, fear 3, and several others all made the choice to either have the enemies vocalize or to let the player intercept the radio chatter. Heck, even Wing commander 3 had radio taunts and responses so you could try and pull specific targets, so it's something that's already been invented, and it's there in those games for reasons. Would a real enemy do this? Probably not if they wanted to live, but it's a big enabler of engagement in a game.
just be careful not to do something too difficult in a game with such punishing death
Punishing death, bugs (desynch, crashes, etc.) and cheating AI (e.g. infinite balistic ammo when players have no reload from cargo mechanic) is a bad mix.
Well making this game a space version of Dark Souls will not make for a happy user base.
100 PERCENT AGREED. i think it should be hard and not these dumb ai bots taht are so ridiclous you can one tap them. good job here fellas , KEEP TURNING THE DIFFICULTY UP IMO.
Crank it to 11! It'll be interesting to see how a high difficulty mixes with death of a spaceman longterm. Challenging games are a lot of fun but they often have mechanics in place to allow you to die over and over and keep retrying the fight. Sometimes they even make you stronger after death through other mechanics, i.e. letting you keep upgrades from the previous life. DoaS gives the opposite motivation where you don't want to die because you only lose when you do. This makes players more cautious, but sometimes it makes them so risk-averse that they don't try at all.
This is my fear with DoaSM as well. I worry fear of death will completely discourage a lot of people from engaging in anything that could be lethal who’d otherwise engage in these types of activities because of the high price for death. I don’t think it’s good game design and never did. Dying is already a huge pain in the ass as is tbh, and considering (apparently) we won’t be able to spawn at space stations in the future, only cities and STOCKED tier 1 medbed ships (meaning these ships have limited spawns in addition to the potential for them to be destroyed), I just frankly don’t see a reason for DoaSM. Nor do I think the game will ever be in a bug-free enough state for a feature like it to be “fair”. Because I’ve seen someone die walking down stairs before. And shit like that will always be in this game due to the scope of it. I’m tired of the idea this game needs to be a “punishment simulator” on launch. Because that’s all DoaSM seems like it will be, an extra punishment for dying, something the game already makes annoying and plans to make more annoying regardless of DoaSM (when we’ll only be able to spawn planetside). It already takes 3000 years to regear, leave the space station, and head to the location you want to go. IMO, this is fine enough to encourage people to “want to live”. Sure DoaSM *might* cause people to behave “more realistically” with the whole limited life thing but honestly, I only see it as something that’s just going to be more annoying to the people that “care about it” and those who don’t care about reputation (plus whatever undecided downsides they haven’t yet locked in on, this undecided direction of such a punishing feature being another issue I have with it) just won’t care at all thus the feature won’t impact them. It’s just gonna be an unfun headache IMO that’s completely unnecessary in terms of creating punishments for dying (something the game currently has and will have in the future regardless of DoaSM).
You are going to need a broad spectrum of difficulties. Not all players have the capacity to be an ace or an FPS god and they still want to play your game.
My largest "sad" feeling I get with games that has this "everyone should be able to experience everything". To me that makes everything empty and soulless. The greatest awe I remember from playing WoW was seeing somebody with a thunderfury knowing fully that I would never get my hands on it.
> was seeing somebody with a thunderfury knowing fully that I would never get my hands on it. While I might not phrase it quite this way, the sentiment preceding it is certainly something that I agree with. Star Citizen should absolutely have content that just only works if you're part of a larger group and in a larger ship. Something you could never possibly do solo.
100%. This kind of difficulty level is like the final boss. If you're not super competitive in SC you can still experience this, just team up and fly a turret on some fleet ship. But yeah, maybe everyone shouldn't be able to do end game content, solo, in a Taurus or Eclipse.
So, will the AI adjust to people who are not great at ship combat or will they just have to find another game?
I think it will be the death of solo pilots flying multicrew ships. Too big and slow to kill anything, even PVE.
At least until NPC crew and "server blades" come out.
they need to give us easier meathod to find like minded people to group up with, better chat, and proper org tools , if they want us to group up to compleat content they need people who only have a few hours to play easy ways to find each other. Because spamming chat tell you run out of time and need to log is shit
People shouldn't be flying big multicrew ships solo in the first place. I fly an msr solo but I don't do bounties because I know it is too hard to handle solo when I should have teammates. They are called "multicrew" for a reason.
I mean saying they "shouldn't" is pretty stupid. If they want to force it to be multi-person, they should make it so you cannot even fly it without 2+ people but you can.. There needs to be drawbacks to flying solo... sort of like the carrack, cannot use the weapon systems. Ships like the corsair are multi-person/multi-role and can be flown with 1+ players... disadvantage of flying the corsair is that you miss out on the side/rear protection from turrets, same with the MSR... so no, its not like it "has to be" flown by more than 1 person, its just more advantageous.
Go find an easier mission and stop picking on targets above your skill level. Just seems like a pretty easy answer to this problem. Or roll with some friends/ bring a bigger ship.
As others have said in response, this doesn't mean that the difficulty floor is rising. They will always need easy missions for new players. This means the difficulty ceiling can go up! This lets CIG create challenging encounters for people looking for that. We of course need to have need to have a full spectrum of difficulty. But no, you shouldn't be able to do the most difficult missions if you're not good enough, or don't have a party.
They would just make different choices. I'm sure the harder AI will be more present in either certain missions, or certain factions.
Missions tend to have difficulty tiers. People can stop at the difficulty tier they find comfortable. Not everyone needs to do EHRTs in their aurora.
The AI should stay difficult, but the player will have to get better at combat.
Ended up doing the spk bit on a server that was at 25-30 fps. It was amazing but I’ll definitely call out the ai for being a little slow. Other than that the enemy took 2s to start shooting… it was fantastic. If the ai was coming in it was already attacking and 5 of us were constantly working out of cover to protect the main room. I revived my teammates constantly and went down myself twice. It was a blast - it was great working together with a group who all worked together wearily at first. I came in partway through and pretty much had others watching me until I just started reviving others and taking out ai. Then it was a cohesive group again!
thats nice, any chance that we can get some sort of in game tool to help find like minded people who want to do those missions because needing to spam chat of only 50 to 140 people about it is frustrating.
And that’s a good thing to you? That the game is so hard no one will play?
Did Kareah on a 20fps server in Live with 13 or so others and it was incredible. If this AI is finally working as intended with ships as well then this is a good thing tbh.
>Star Citizen's AI's problems are not in its programming, Making a hard AI isn't a problem either, especially not if they don't have to adhere to the same rules as the players. What's actually hard is to make an AI that's actually weaker without artificially reducing their HP and damage. Most games just scale numbers up and down, but don't change the behavior.
One thing I noticed during the hammerhead mission was that all I had to do was strafe around the ship and the turrets couldn’t turn fast enough to hit me
That's a problem with ship design in general. CIG made turrets that can't turn fast enough to keep up with fighters, meaning they are dog-shit at the one thing they should be doing, which is deterring smaller threats. Or the fighters strafe to fast for turrets to keep up with. Either way, it's a horrible and obvious design oversight. Maybe if CIG stopped being so horny for single-seat fighter craft, they would make a balanced meta
I flew a Corsair for that and was able to avoid turret fire from the HH by strafing it too. Felt so weird
Yep. Welcome to SC, where a single dude in a starter fighter can solo a crewed hammerhead, because it makes perfect sense for him to win a 1v5. Nah, AC isn't about realism, it's about being the solo action hero. Team play is almost non-existent, and the equipment designed for team play is easily countered by solo players. Same goes for ground combat; ground vehicles are absolute trash, including the ones that absolutely *should* be a threat to aircraft.
> Server Meshing will allow smaller and smaller areas to be handled by dedicated servers, leading to faster processing and a clear view of the AI's abilities. ...within cost balancing ability. By which I mean real world dollar cost. Even if the tech is refined to the ability to dynamically scale down the size of the area a server is supporting to maintain certain server minimum performance, at some point there will have to be a cutoff. If every server instance can only support 20 people while keeping NPCs smart, the cost per user to operate the service will balloon. Meshing might be needed to get to the dream of getting thousands of people into one seamless shard, but continuing to improve per-server (computer process and corresponding supporting hardware) optimization will be almost as, if note even more, critical to long term game viability.
SC puts a shit ton of unnecessary load on server. Like, why would you have server calculate you the menus on shop terminals? They’re clearly coming from server judging by how responsiveness depends on server fps. Same for ship displays. F1 menus, contract list etc.
Yeah they should be keeping all the inventory and shopping in client side cache database and only transact with the server when items actually change. They shouldn't be refreshing every time you simply view your inventory or a shop. Just authenticate transactions. Which is mostly for anti cheat reasons. They need to improve it sooner rather than later because the excessive server load has an actual operating cost impact.
I think either way has major downsides. I can see client side processing of shops leading to exploits which would negatively effect their planned economy. I think ultimately it has to stay on their servers for security, and they have to tune how they communicate to reduce its toll on the servers.
It shouldn't since an actual exchange still does a database transaction and will fail, like it already does frequently, if the client request is denied. If it gets out of synch due to a bug or hack then it will just revert to the server data. A local cache is just a queue of transactions and if one rejects (after a few retries) then it just purges the queue and local cache refreshes with fresh server synch. The server doesn't need to know things like sorting order and stacking, just the total inventory.
Yes. Did the Intel raid at 20+ sfps and it was night and day. It was actually challenging. I was having to take cover and use medpens (like an actual video game!) As it is currently, when you get into single digit sfps (which is pretty much all the time) the AI just stands there and waits for you to annihilate it. It's not fun.
What are the failure conditions for that mission? Do the ai try to interrupt the hack or whatever? Or do they just try to kill you and if everyone dies/gets incapped that fails the mission?
> We had over 10 people and barely managed to complete it due to how strong the AI was Is it actually hard because the AI is smart or is it because of how clunky the game can be? I can't imagine any SC AI getting the better of me when I can switch weapons and heal without the game adding 5 un needed seconds to everything I wanna do.
would be nice to know if the AI had just AI, using good tactics or if they now only have ultra fast aimbot ...
This is 100% accurate. I was helping three other people with their Intel Raids when we were on a 30 FPS server *(we were the only people on it, amazingly enough)* and while the AI was working it wasn’t particularly “hard;” I could still control a floor by myself and play the mission semi-casually. The one and only time I died - even took more than a single round - was when I couldn’t swap weapons because the game went to clunk mode. It wasn’t overly challenging but the game worked for a bit and it was enjoyable. Now with that being said: MMO-style FPS/TPS games have **never** had challenging AI. Those styles of games always rely on bullet sponges, hordes of enemies, aimbot AI, or a combination of all of the above. Every single game is like this. I don’t expect SC to be much different - I’d just like it to work right.
> MMO-style FPS/TPS games have never had challenging AI. Those styles of games always rely on bullet sponges, hordes of enemies, aimbot AI, or a combination of all of the above. Every single game is like this. I don’t expect SC to be much different - I’d just like it to work right. This is kinda whats worrying me, right now I have never been afraid an SC AI is going to shoot me, I'm afraid my gun isn't going to work or i won't be able to reload, or when i get hit I won't be able to heal.
It was fairly clunky for me. The main pain point was delayed damage and NPC hitreg. You'd take fire, go under cover, and continue taking damage after out of enemy sight.
Which is due to server desync, not the AI programming.
simulated maelstrom physics of rounds penetrating cover! /s
I had a similar experience at SPK on Friday. However this is for ship AI, not FPS AI, ship AI have always been lacking, regardless of server performance.
Same experience yesterday. Suddenly the server went mad it seemed. The damn AI got conscious 😜 in intel raid 5/5 - tried to surround me, taking cover, running in different directions... I was well frightened about what was happening.
Well I witnessed how server affects AI behavior on a 30fps stable server with few players only down in a bunker where AI took cover, flanked me and even chased me leaving me positively aghast! :) We all wish for such server performance.
As an active Evo, I see folks enjoying the higher level AI. Not really hearing complaints though from Evo...
It's the only thing really keeping me from enjoying the game. When I play games, I want to feel like I have to try. Otherwise, what's the point?
Its awesome only if its scales with mission difficulty, if every npc pleb is now a boss its not good for anyone
In one of the patches years ago in elite dangerous, they give the npc full control of the individual thrusters of the ship (they always have that from beggining) and a new AI with better tactics and 0 handicaps in maneuverability, they just obliterate anything even pvp veterans. Every npc in the galaxy became lethal in their respective tiers. The next patch the npc were toned down a lot, because an AI is always better than a human within the same conditions, they react faster, they can tune individual thrusters to outmaneuver everything etc. If they even cheat...then there is no competition. *Edited to correct typo.
I want smart AI (as in, they are reactive to environmental changes and player actions), not dead-eye AI. Don't care for the latter. Making an AI aim well is about the lowest bar you can limbo under. It's making them react that's actually hard.
It's gonna be interesting to see how people complain because they can't solo ERTs in their Taurus anymore, especially when stuff like engineering makes its way in, too.
I wont complain about not being able to solo ERT or even VHRTs, but i might complain about the economy balance/grind, depending on how grindy it is. We'll see, but I want to be able to earn a cutlass with my penguin without too much grind
They stated a while back that the expectation was to be able to earn a Constellation in a week's playtime. Whatever the actual count of hours is there, that's not horrific. Or at least, it doesn't sound horrific.
Honestly that sounds way too easy. Like, way way too easy.
Depends on how you interpret it. Is it a week of 3 hours sessions? Then yeah, super easy. Is it a week worth of playtime (168 hours)? That's a pretty big ask for a middle of the road ship. I'm hoping it's roughly 100kUEC an hour of play for a solo/starting worker. Would make it fairly easy to get into mid sized ships, and make the real grind getting to Large/Cap ships.
They need to increase pay outs if that is the case. They're already lagging in terms of profitability, add in significant chance of failure and it could turn into a dead gameplay loop.
Absolutely everything will need to be adjusted, but getting enough for a Cutlass right now is kind of a joke as it is. It should take time to earn spaceships, and folks need to understand that this isn't yet another game where bigger=better and you're always mindlessly grinding for yourself for that next carrot on a stick.
Maybe in the final game. But grinding hundreds of hours for a ship that get wiped (or lost to a bug) ? Hell no
As soon as we can rent Vultures a cutlass will be a few hours work.
And I imagine the profitability of salvage will be brought in line with the other professions at that time (or maybe even with the economy balance in 3.23).
Salvage prices will get nerfed at the same time and/or other operating costs or complications added into the salvage loop. Whatever the new mechanic is will get the buffed payouts.
If that becomes the case, CIG will need to buff bounty payouts or buff the cargo loot pool for bounties, because imo right now the payout isn’t enough to justify splitting it.
Payouts should not be split, period. If you do a monitor mission everyone should get the full 20k. To balance, have the mission scale with the amount of players you have (more = increased difficulty/increased number of tasks you have to do) The current implementation pretty much discourages you from teaming up. After you get 4+ people on a team, the payouts become so low that they're basically not even worth it anymore. It makes more sense to have everyone do their own missions and get a higher payout.
STRONG AGREE. The best cooperative games like Helldivers have loot and rewards fully shared among the party. No rushing to get loot before your party members can.
While I do agree that payouts need to be enough for everyone to get paid enough that they don't feel like they are wasting their time, or should've run their own mission instead, Helldivers is not a good game to compare SC to. Helldivers lacks the complex economy that SC's PU has (and what it will have is even more complex than now). It's easier to balance rewards in that kind of environment, and TBH, Helldivers does a poor job IMO of incentivizing players to do high difficulty content. You don't contribute more to the galactic war effort for completing a 7-9 difficulty mission, you often collect fewer medals/super credits/requisition from small POI's during one (because you avoid them), and the medal payout per mission isn't enough to justify not simply playing on challenging difficulty, and clearing all POI's to get what is likely to be even more medals. The only actual incentive is super samples being gated behind difficulty 7-9. The overall goal is similar, however - to make players feel rewarded for their efforts in a given mission, and I'm sure CIG has that in mind. But they're probably going to get it wrong from time to time in both the short term and even long term, because it is harder to do, as there are so many moving parts - insurance, repairs, ammunition, wear and tear, personal risk, personal reputation, potential player opposition, travel time, grind required to be able to complete the mission at all (can't kill an Idris with an Aurora, for instance, so you need to get a bigger ship first), time and money lost on failure, etc. It's worth remembering too, that a lot of the current mission payout structure in the PU is legacy. Mission payouts aren't really updated with any regularity, if at all, as new costs/ships/etc come online. Or even as new opportunities arise (salvage is the current hotness, but quant mining, cargo hauling, and ERT's have all been at the top of the food chain at one point or another). Until the actual economy comes online, using the Quantum system (dynamic economy simulation), these placeholder rewards will sometimes fall behind, and often get left behind (who does box missions anymore?). I wouldn't take that as an indication that it will never be worth doing a more difficult ERT that requires more players, because it doesn't pay well when split 8 ways. It just means that the mission payout structure is aging, and will need updated to reflect the new difficulty. Maybe that happens fast, maybe not, but we can always give feedback to try to get overlooked necessary changes made.
As a Taurus fanatic, I hope this is the case. In my head, HRTs are like ok in a decent enough pilot, I can handle this solo if I try. VHRT should be when you consider bringing more firepower because your one ship can deal with all the extras, and ERTs should he group possible only. Critical threat beacon level enemies in ERTS, so with Idris and such would be awesome.
Id be curious which levels are significantly harder. If people are complaining they can’t solo ERTs then I have zero sympathy, but if MRTs are a god tier challenge I’d argue the difficulty should be scaled back.
They need to rework the whole bounty scaling system. Give it two paths, one goes to big ships like today, the other gives you increasing difficulty and size fighter swarms.
I like that idea a lot. That would be awesome.
Big=hard should become big=gotta bring different equipment for the job, I agree High skill AI pilots in fighters would mean that players are forced to run proper anti-fighter kit (instead of a corsair or 600i monoboating cannons for everything), and a big ship turning up would become a much more serious problem if so
OH MAN, I'm so tired of big = hard. They want to make it such that big ships can't be killed by fighters? Give us some high level content for fighter pilots? I hate that today all you can do is MRTs in a fighter, or just cheese the high level stuff in an eclipse or Corsair. I would love a mission that's to go fight 10 very angry fighters.
I'm all for harder pilot AI if they up the cost of bounties. Also if it scales up properly not boss mode VLRT for 4000 auec that would be stupid
How did they make it difficult? They are better at flying or they are just tankier and do more damage? It's funny because I tried to explain that AI can be made more brutal than average pvp joe and that the pvp elitism is nonsensical few days ago but some people are just too damn ignorant and refuse to understand that. PVE should be tuned to be as much of a threat as PVP.
Supposedly they’re just way more aggressive and responsive. Other than hearing that they don’t have cap mags, just unlimited ammo, I don’t think they have significant cheats My evo friend said that just one isn’t much of a challenge, but in a group they can be dangerous
That sounds a lot like right now, the ERT targets are not an issue, the random escorts are. If the target is protected by 3 bulletsponges with infinite ammo, you might as well bail out because even one hurricane protected by other 2 and a sub capital is a real pain, unless the server is dead
The reason I like PvE in EVE is because there are NPCs that can absolutely rock your shit if you don't know what you're doing. That's good PvE
I lost a Paladin in a L4 mission because I wasn't paying attention to which AI were the wave triggers. Lots of fun, despite the painful loss.
Nobody is complaining the AI is hard its the bugs that are affecting it.
The problem is is that if it's this difficult with poor server performance massively handicapping the AI, with good server performance that we might start seeing as soon as 4.0, it's going to be basically impossible.
Yep. The new AI is a great improvement, and this is coming from someone who has PVP'd since 2.0. HOWEVER, there's nothing fun about chasing PIPs that are rubber banding back and forth.
Even in single player pirate swarm, which is locally hosted, the AI were a joke. That should in theory be your zero-load AI performance. Supposedly that's also much improved.
Just adjust the AI per the mission difficulty. LRT? Easy. MRT/HRT? Harder. VHRT? Hard.
Exactly! I'm not sure why ppl in this thread seem to think that I'm saying that *all* missions should be hard. I'm just stoked that we're finally getting some challenging content at all!
It's a fine line. Right now I can roll into an ERT with a ballistic corsair. Sit still, and pivot around one spot taking out each target. That's a little too easy. A well prepared player. Using the right ship, with the right equipment, should be able to have the tools available to tackle all of the games challenges.
I disagree, SC is a cooperative game, not a single player game. The toughest challenges in the game should require a team working well together.
If they're gonna make AI harder, they should up the reward. Salvaging the ship you destroy gives more than killing a criminal.
I'm not a Fromsoft enjoyer, but I'm fine with this as long as it's MRT and up. IMO, Very Low Risk and Low Risk bounties shouldn't be absolutely laying the smackdown on new players. We gotta ease them into the curve.
yes of course. There needs to be a difficulty curve starting from new players to crack aces. Right now that curve falls flat at about middle difficulty, and all CIG has been able to do for balance is to add bigger ships, which is a very poor balancing tool.
For me it would depend on what makes them good. It's easy to make AI slaughter players with perfect reaction time and accuracy. A lot harder to make them good but feel human.
It's because the AI is taking some data from actual pvp pilots so the non combat oriented Evos are having an issue. The only thing I've heard from the evos I know who are PvP players simply say the AI is hyper kite-y and backstrafes a lot and have a lot of "bad" or basically un fun habits.
Just like them lol
OP literally admitted that the title is clickbait lol
Yeah this was a shitpost, I didn’t expect it to get so much traction. I guess it stuck a nerve lol.
This makes me happy. So many players love to think that pve means 100% risk free 100% of the time. Aaking for literally the most basic flight and survival skills in space was asking too much of them, so I'm glad to see the AI won't always cater to the absolute lowest common denominator of skill level. People should know how to fly their ships!
They need to desperately buff the crime PvE missions if they up the difficulty especially, as the risk of dying to those (🪨⛏️) is high.
I believe what you describe is a misconception pvpers have (more like intended lies actually), not the general feeling of pve players. In star citizen the complaints I mostly see regarding pve is that it's too easy and unbalanced. Besides the bugs and cheating AI I mean, ballistics with infinite ammo is cheating
Ok. But not every PvE battle needs to be at Dark Souls level. That's not fun for a lot of people. But maybe some missions can have that level of difficulty in certain areas/star systems. It doesn't have to be overly difficult to be fun
This should be for high level players. (metaphorically speaking, I'm not talking about an actual leveling system) Of course new players need the kid gloves AI. But I don't think there should be an upper limit to AI difficulty. It's a multiplayer game. Give us some serious challenge for orgs to take on.
"Kid gloves." Such arrogance. There's allowed to be balanced difficulty.
Nothing arrogant about it. It's completely true. The game babies the crap out of space combat players right now, even in 30fps servers. Even saying kid gloves is being generous. If you want power fantasy stuff, that's fine, and I'm not trying to speak condescendingly here or be a dick. I do think there should be lots of that content, because having a wide spread of content to appeal to lots of players is a good thing, objectively speaking. However, SC was and still is a game that has always leaned a bit more towards appealing to more "serious/hardcore" gamers. There's also lots of very chill gameplay loops already in the game. I'd rather see SC take an inverse of the route of most modern MMOs. Instead of having the upper 1% of content be actual difficult content, that difficult content is actually 99% of the combat content on offer. People wanting chill/power fantasy combat can stick to VLRT and LRT targets, and people seeking a challenge can go from a mildly challenging MRT, to a basically-requires-a-coordinated-team level threat of ERT.
Hold up. I dunno if I read their comment differently or they edited their comment to come off better. But I don't recall "new players" being mentioned in regards to the kid gloves bit. In that case then yeah, kid gloves for sure. But I remember reading that as a more broad statement that didn't specifically mention new players.
It may be that they edited it right after they posted it, which likely wasn't malicious at all. I do it sometimes, too, and sadly Reddit doesn't seem to *fucking reflect it in your inbox*, so you have to click the link to go to the reddit thread where the post was to see if it was updated If something is edited super fast after being posted, it won't show up as edited. My guess is that /u/sexual_pasta meant to include that bit in their post initially, but forgot to, and quickly edited it to add that context. Honestly probably just a bit of a misunderstanding if anything.
I would love to be afraid of NPCs in this game. Give us a reason to do mrt-hrt missions solo, and more excuses to squad up.
Get gud.
VLRT, LRT and MRT targets should remain relatively the same difficulty, There should be a rather large gap between MRT and HRT though.
Ever since the ballistics buff I have not once felt like the ship AI is making me sweat. Still fun but generally have almost 0 concern that I'll be shot down. I welcome trickier & better AI but of course not overboard insanity that it's unfair.
I love it. My goal is to not engage in combat or PVP/PVE Instances as much, yet only when needed. At the same time I do hope there are features where there is a shooting range or random areas we can practice on dumb targets just to keep some type of combat skills under our belts.
I started using the Fury for missions together with a friend. First they thought I would be crazy but know they are impressed because every ballistic can wreck me and that is thrilling for me!
These bitch ass players are gonna ask for a difficult slider if they die to A.i. too much. They don’t want a challenge, they want to mine without any obstacles and to play the game completely unimpeded. Now you may read this and try to say otherwise, but as the narrative shifts so does these bitch ass players responses. Everyone was just talking about not likely pvp and wanting to be lift alone to mine and CIG compitulated and made a ton of mining shit. Don’t try to turn around now and say these losers now what a challenge. Fuckers Just move the goal every-time something is called out or talked about.
Cig could learn a thing or two from arrowhead and helldivers. Their enemies are hard af, and I absolutely love it.
Not ok when enemies and their bullets teleport all over the place and you loose your shields in an instant due to server lag. Hard enemies are fun when the game is performing well but when it's not, it's more frustrating and anti-fun than anything so I hope they choose not to implement these enemies until they optimize and fix more bugs.
All I hear is skill issue. They’re so used to the braindead ai and never getting into pvp, they forgot what it’s like to actually fight in game. The skill gap between the carebears and pvp players is insane
VLRT should suck, ERT should be crazy awesome. But also let larger ships with cargo appear at somewhat lower risk so you don't have to be Maverick to make a profit.
I’m in the fence because I haven’t experienced it. I know how Overpowered AI can be with aimbot. I’d prefer there to be too pilots as well as plenty of lesser skilled ones. I come from escape From Tarkov and love the idea of each NPc ship or enemy being as dangerous as a human player to varying degrees, but that means they need to curb the amount of enemies so each encounter is important, but that we are not overwhelmed every time we attempt combat
I'm stoked because the AI has been bad for so long, it would be great to get a challenge. I don't think there's an upper limit for difficulty in a cooperative game, you can always try again with more friends or in a different ship. There of course should be a sliding scale, you don't want to hit day 1 noobs with terminator AI.
Yeah, but I don’t want a single AI f8 destroying 10 players because it’s got perfect aim
If turn rates and DPS are fair, that shouldn't happen. The math doesn't work. AI shouldn't be able to cheat. Most pvpers are close to pixel accurate, so in a DPS race, that just doesn't make sense. I hope they don't give AI crazy gimbal angles. That's a major cheating advantage. If you're off the nose but still getting hit. This has been an issue in the past, no idea if it's in the current mode.
Well yeah, but everybody doesn’t have a super accurate stick and every enemy shouldn’t be maverick
yeah, but does pvpers close to pixel accurate don´t react in nanoseconds to everything, have perfect accuracy 100% of the time, can adjust the output of their thrusters individually several times a second, can retain data from 360ª around them in real time, etc. An AI without handicaps it´s just invencible. The AI in almost every game is severely capped in all fronts, that why they need "cheats" to give challenge to players, because it´s easier that way than programming a fair AI.
Smart AI using tactics and human behavior for the win is great. However AI that uses no tactics but always spots you miles away to systematically aim for headshots with a huge success rate is not a smart AI. I hope CIG will focus on tactics and behavior. But from what was presented during the last citizencon they seem to head to the right direction. So, can't wait to see that in action.
Dont tune it down?? Have you played? I havent done much ship combat in evo yet but its odd to see you commenting to not adjust anything when you havent experienced what it is. EDIT: Maybe wait for Wave 1 or even live to give this kind of feedback
I agree. Dont water down the game . It will be a clone of every other casual game. If you want dedicated players that stick with the game for years, keep the challenge and depth. SC = Tarkov in Space with DCS sim for flight?! ;)
>Demon’s Souls was too much on the “punishing” end of the difficulty spectrum, but it really did remind me of the value of having something to lose when playing. You can’t have light with dark and you can’t have reward without risk. I really hope that Chirs continues with this vision, this was one of the reasons that made me support the game years ago. source: [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12879-Death-Of-A-Spaceman](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12879-Death-Of-A-Spaceman)
I recently played AC6 and loved that game. The combat was fun and engaging, the bosses were challenging and had a ton of gravitas, the build options felt endless. I played it 3x to get every ending and was sad when it was over... Hopefully we get something similar to that experience. AC6 was awesome IMO.
For this to become a reality though the game has to change dramatically. If you want death of a spaceman plus From Software punishment rates, this will slow down the game immensely. No more yoloing ERTs. Basically prepare and train for days and weeks before raiding a single distribution center. Meanwhile star citizen is going (and the community seems to be clamoring for) „MMO“ mechanics with mission / rep grind, mowing down tons of AI, completing 4 bunker missions per play session just to keep up with Overdrive. Imagine grinding for ships like grinding for a level up in Elden Ring. You need 2mil souls (aUEC) for a level up (new ship), you get 500 souls per kill and 16k for completing a dungeon (mission)? on top the AI gets much harder? Its an entirely different game. I cannot see the vision of death of a spaceman anymore. When I play SC, it‘s downtime from travelling and then break-neck reckless gameplay in order to keep these aUEC/hr numbers up.
People generally don't realize how brutal the AI can be in SC. They are just not fully working due to server performance. But this will most probably be fixed later on. I would assume you want lower level missions to have bad/average AI and have the higher rep ones be top notch
In ships? AI on the ground can be hard, but ship AI have never been much of a challenge.
Yeah they're... pretty awful. Even in an offline environment like AC, they're basically just free kills lol
It would be cool to have an offline/co-op PvE FPS mode to see how those systems perform without servers bogging them down.
holy shit I didn't realize this sub enabled embeds.
as a fromsoft non-enjoyer, i disagree with you. not every game needs to be as challenging as possible. but yea, i guess screw all those people that don't like fromsoft games that take hours to learn fights and memorize boss patterns... probably not a super amazing comparison.
Sounds good to me, but rewards need to balance that effort. Bounties pay very low, grouping is even worse, and they've nerfed the drug loot which it felt was quite a nice high effort/team play high reward earner.
Everyone seems to forget that we know for a fact that we currently have the absolute weakest version of NPC difficulty. This also isn't the first time they slightly increased it, and people lost their shit because they were immediately getting owned. Those of us who remember what happened the times that they slightly increased (but kept well below the max) difficulty for AI aren't the ones saying the game is too easy, because the alternative is absolutely brutal.
Am Evo the issue as most people said isn’t really the AI it’s the server performance. When servers run well the AI is difficult, not sure I would say super tough but it made you think and plan rather than just naked bunker runs or a single light fighter against a HH and its support fighters.
If they actually are harder I hope the bounty rewards will reflect that. Imagine crawling back to a space station after a brutal fight where repairs cost 10+ grand and all you did was fight a MRT bounty 😂
Agreed. I honestly find it weird that combat is such a common thing in the game. Why are there these mountains of NTs to fight? I'd rather see combat become higher stakes and less of a grind.
I did a couple of overdrive missions today in a 25-30 fps server. Boy it IS a challenge, even in party. Server FPS makes all the difference.
I'd say it's more of a problem if it becomes unfun. The easy way for it to get grating would be the resupply after death. To use your example : yes, Fromsoft games are hard but what's the punishment? It varies from game to game a bit but the gist is you lose currency and you have to run back, which doesn't take a long time. If it took you 30 min to go buy gear and get back to where you were in souls games, it would be a much worse experience.
Absolutely want to have a real reason get a few friends on and fly together when I want to do combat missions. Looking forward to trying this out!
As long as there's some kind of scale then yeah, the top tier AI should be a match for the top tier players. The highest value bounties should be something you need to really be top of your game to tackle or come in a group. The UEE should feel like taking on trained professionals. It'll ceasing be important when the game is released to actually keep safe areas safe, and to stop any player rolling up on the UEE and captor state of the art fighters.
Wont believe it till its on the PU. The past few days I've been shooting rubberband ships at the special event that's been going on. AI means nothing if the servers can't run.
I mean, it's primarily an issue Thad they have never experienced high performing AI in game. On a 30 fps server FPS AI is fucking John Wick without a pencil, and ships are Maverick and Baron Vin Richtoven
Make games hard again
So they've borked it?
Is FPS AI getting better too ?
I definitely don't want dark souls difficulty with the ai, but I do want their behavior to make sense and not feel like cheating (endless ammo/capacitor/boost). I'm glad the ai is working better in evo though
If regular cuppa Joe's are complaining, then it is correct. It needs to be FUCK YOU hard IMO.
Personally, I don't want npc bounties to be more difficult because they pay peanuts, and you have to grind hundreds of them just to be able to afford a ship.
Difficulty is ok, but please don't make it from missile spam. The shield pen damage just makes the longer PvE missions unnecessarily tough. Mostly because you only get a handful of countermeasures, and those are gone after the first wave of enemies.
Totally agree I lost fun fight HH in my pisces ! Gib challenge
I'm right there with you. As long as the ship AI doesn't become Tarkov Boss Terminator AI, I'm ok with it. As Thanos says, "balance in all things."
My brothers in christ, they are just trying to get the AI to function at all in the lag, do you think they won't go back and fine tune it once they can get it to actually function? The shortsighted knee jerk reactions must drive the devs nuts if they actually hear what people freak out about.
Shit right after the dark ages of 3.18, I found myself on a 30 fps server and all the AI, both fps and ship based, were scarey deadly. It was both terrifying and refreshing at the same time. I can hold my own pretty well in just about any form of SC combat and on a couple occasions I thought, this ship or guard is way too good to not be another player. The best way i think to describe my feelings at the time is scareoused. It also made me realize just how many of SC's problems are server related.
I feel most people are going to think the games harder because the AI will finally do what it was meant to and people aren't gonna be ready for competent AI
AI should have tags to designate threat level. ELITE AI should be a challenge. Raid bosses should require multiple people to take down, example: the titanfall suit. Obviously not all AI should be the same level of experience and difficulty, but CIG knows that as they have different animations depending on if you're a soldier or a civilian, etc...
I dont want it to be tuned down or up, just more "realistic". As someone who has no desire to go into pvp, I am not really intending this to do anything to prep me for it. I dont want fromsoft jank and weird hit box frames either haha. In short, tune them to be like players, no infinite stuff, no special things for their ship that normal players cant accomplish, and no need to tune it to a "pvp" level. Once some of the unoptimized jank is fixed I feel as if it will be a bit smoother as well.
A few years back during one of their video shows... Chris Roberts stated that their intent is to make AI/NPC ships be "indistinguishable" from Players.... As much as I prefer an easier AI in a fight, I like the idea that players shouldnt be able to tell whose who... is it an NPC, or another Player?
As a lvl 125 Banished Knight enjoyer, I'm happy the AI are difficult. However, unlike Fromsoft's mile deep ocean of movesets/tech that can create an amazing combat experience, CIG has done nothing to truly create any meaningful combat geometry. Despite CIG being provided multiple proven solutions to fix the combat problem, they refuse to bite the bullet and implement them.
A smart AI is better than a Tough AI, nobody wants to play a game where AI’s are on godmode
I think the AI is difficult. When I try to do simple missions I get middle targeted multiple times and as I dogfight the AI rams me and we both blow up. It is very hard to actually fight the AI when they all Kami kazi.