[Possible bug] Bailing (or lack thereof)
Hey guys,
Over the past days I've shot up a good number of ships (100+). Bails: 0.
In the manual I read that bailing was redesigned but I didn't expect 0 bails.
I checked the known bugs and it said that bailing can cause random CTDs so I know there's some issue with it.
Just wanted to report it and let you know.
Thanks!
Stealth
The bailing chances were severly reduced, because NPCs bail now also against NPCs. Apart from that you can adjust these settings in the custom difficulty menu.
And as far as I can see, in 1.1 the bug in the bailing should be fixed.
You can certainly increase the chances of bailing if you want to. Pull up your XTC configuration menu (you'll need to assign a hotkey to access it first, I use shift+tilde). Select "Difficulty" and then choose "Custom." Now you can see a looooong list of options that you can adjust however you like!
If you want more bails, look for these settings:
NPC Fight Skill (lower it!)
NPC Morale (lower it!)
(and further down):
Bail equipment remaining (raise it if you want more valuable bailed ships)
Bail hull percentage (raise it!)
Bail chance (per ship type) (raise it! Raise it for all of em! Raise it to 100%! LOL)
I am currently playing with the bail chances for all ships set to 100% (just conducting an experiment, after all, I am a tester!), and the result is nowhere near 100% bailing in actual combat. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the bottom line is that if you raise these values (along with lowering the morale and fight skill), then you WILL see more bailed ships in combat. You'll find them floating around too, because as Tricky said, they bail sometimes when fighting each other. Now, that's easy money.
You don't have to set yours to 100%, of course. Just double or triple the numbers there (most are 1%-3% or something, depending on what global difficulty you have set) and experiment with the results for a while. No one is going to punish you if you set it too high. If it makes the game more fun for you to be able to loot 2-3 ships after every big fight, then crank them up. It's your universe, and it really does revolve around you, despite what the manual says.
Sam's stuff: >> A simple sector map for XTC <<
(Sam Redstone's Long-Rang Missile Mod, or SRLRMM, coming sometime after the next XTC patch... meanwhile, I'll be thinking of a better name for it...)
That is because of the NPC-morale - if the NPC-morale is higher than a random value, the pilot will not bail... no way to reflect this in the real percentages, as it's randomOriginally Posted by Sam Redstone
... perhaps 100% means about 60%.
Ah - and there are ships, which never bail
Must say I pulled up my bailing chances up to 33% (M5, M4, M3, everything else has a far lesser chance) and I do find fighting "leftovers" from time to time. Its a good way to make early money, but it also feels a bit like cheating if you set those settings to a too high chance.
@Captain Data - Welcome to TXU! Glad to have you aboard.
Actually, I've been giving it some thought. It seems to me that it's much more realistic for pilots to try to save their own lives by abandoning their ships instead of choosing to die pointlessly in a horrible nuclear fireball, especially since XTC has added Escape Pods. Think about it, which would you choose? Giving up your ship and flying an escape pod to the safety of a warm space station... or dying? I know which one I would pick. So I'm personally going to leave the bail chances turned way up for a while, unless it gets annoying. It may make one aspect of the game too easy (raking in early creditsss) but it's not unrealistic or unfair by any means. If you outgunned someone and held his life in your hands, I think you're absolutely entitled to his ship. It's just up to him whether or not he wants to give it up, and I think it's a bit unrealistic if 99% of the people in the universe are suicidal, you know?
One word of caution: just don't shoot the ejected pilots afterward. Not only is it in poor taste, but I've discovered that even Pirates who bail are suddenly considered law-abiding members of their own race once they eject. I lost an entire rank with the Boron for zapping a Pirate who ejected. I figured he was still a Pirate and still needed to die, but the Royal Boron Navy seemed to want to give him a second chance...!
@Trickmov - well, the NPC Morale is also a setting that can be adjusted. I have mine set to 25% currently. Still, even with Fight Skill and Morale at 25% and bail chance at 100%, the actual odds of any ship bailing seem to be about 20%. And in most of those cases, there is enough weapons fire already in the air that the ship is blown apart right after it bails. Basically, it all means that even f you dial everything up, you still won't see more than about 1 bailed ship for every 10 that you blow up. Personally, after doing this for a few days, it "feels right" to me. It just makes it seem more like these NPC pilots are real people who want to go on living, see their families again, etc. Other players can adjust the settings however they want, of course. But this is working for me (and the creditsss don't hurt).
The only thing that would make it more interesting and realistic is if there were AI salvage ships that were always cruising around looking for bailed ships that THEY could claim. Wouldn't that be cool? Finders keepers!
Sam's stuff: >> A simple sector map for XTC <<
(Sam Redstone's Long-Rang Missile Mod, or SRLRMM, coming sometime after the next XTC patch... meanwhile, I'll be thinking of a better name for it...
Nah, they just wanted the chance of putting him out the airlock themselves...
Hm... don't know what's going wrong there - in my tests (with unchanged morale value and bail chance 100%) they bailed indeed at about 60% - otherwise I had set this differently during development.
Perhaps you`re shooting them down too fast - this script is signal related. Two signal attacked don't come in in always the same frequency - thus best behaviour is to shoot the ship down to the set hull percentage, wait a while and shoot again.
Hmm, I had no idea about this "signal" that you're talking about. So taking it slowly really does make a difference, in other words. Each hit on the hull (after a set threshold) has a chance to send this "signal," but only if they're spaced far enough apart that the signals don't overlap? So smaller damage and more time between shots increases the bail chance? This is all a lot more complicated than I thought.
I usually have some turrets firing at the enemies, in addition to my main guns, so they would just chew up the hull without regard to any sense of timing. There should be a new turret command, "Chip away at hull."
One thing I'm concerned about is whether the "Morale" of pilots spawned by missions is set independently of the XTC Custom Difficulty settings. Since all of the ships I'm shooting at are spawned by missions, that would mean that my changes to NPC Morale aren't really doing anything.
One more question for you, Tricky, if you don't mind: can the bail chances be set above 100%? I know that some of the difficulty menu options work this way, because if you set the global difficulty to "hard," some things are set to 150%. I was just wondering if setting bail chances to 200%, for example, would double the chance compared to 100% (thus offsetting morale and random chance), or would it do nothing, or would it break the game, or what?
I don't personally want to set mine any higher than they are now, but I'm just curious.
Sam's stuff: >> A simple sector map for XTC <<
(Sam Redstone's Long-Rang Missile Mod, or SRLRMM, coming sometime after the next XTC patch... meanwhile, I'll be thinking of a better name for it...
No, the ships spawned by missions go through the EquipLibs as well, meaning they get the same variety of morale-values as all other ships.
And no, the bailing chances can't be set to a value higher than 100% - the morale value is something out of the calculation - and for all other things 100% means already all that is possible (if the morale value wouldn't be, it would mean every ship would bail (assuming you have no problem of overlapping signals)).
P.S.: Yes, the morale value in the settings has an effect, iirc - but better ask Sartorie about that... I am not so common with those libs
Last edited by Trickmov; 08-01-2011 at 08:24 AM.
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