wow, i leave for a week and theres 2 updates.... cant wait to actually have a challenge when capping. (and some extra cash!)

It's more than a challenge. All three teams COMBINED have a grand total of 2 caps so far.

Getting from s17 to s18 only requires you to fight off a wing of furies. Simply use rockets. Dont use the hollow roids, just go straight to s18. Im glad the ubber trade route is harder.
Now we just need furies in s15.

-homestar

Just had a team of eight try and cap about 6 times and fail miserably. There were two humans defending which made it impossible, this is haaard guys.
The only way to ahieve this is to have no human defenders and a large team on your side, otherwise forget it.
This, combined with the uber bots in S19, makes the game a bit polarised. You either trade or Pirate, with no options to do anything else on your own. Shame.

Any midnight shift workers wanna form a team and try to cap?

Heh, see, that's the problem. While Gold and Blue can muster a skilled cap team in peak hours, we Serco NEVER EVER EVER have more than four vets on, often less. Heck, I can count the times in the last six months that the game's seen a Serco majority online on one hand. One... Two...
What I'm saying is that the system does help defense, but it tilts capping ability heavily in favor of teams with a lot of vets on at any given time, e.g. Gold or Blue. Then again, that's the intended purpose, to make the relative strength of a given team the deciding factor in a cap's success or failiure.

And my point was again?

About s17....umm is it fair that the bots just SIT at 11 gate? I never make it more than a few meters before getting torn apart.

s19?
Did I miss something?

Here's what I propose for 3.2.10 as an experiment with respect to the new AI: Every setting that the devs have increased shall stay increased...every other setting shall be restored to 3.2.0 levels......OR the AI has to get less ferocious. However, special ships shall remain available in sector 18.

I have managed to do it,

but I needed 1 hour to do 2 traderuns.

With the alligning of the roids though, I can never find my way based on the background, Im bad in things like that :(

A way to do this is, aiming for the gate and boosting untill you are at about 4-5 km out, turn around and fend off the wing (tripple gemini work like a charm). Allign the roids (can be tricky finding the hollow one, when you were chased the entire way ;)). And boost like somebody is tailing you.

But I can tell you that when pirates are on, I wont even dare doing this route. And I would love those bots getting a cut on radar range, 1000m -1500m is more then enough in my opinion.

cheers

Actually, I disagree. Capping only takes 3 players now. Us blues did it today and were very sucessfull. I'm not telling how to do it though :)

i really like it now =)

I know how, it involves a lot of Goa'uld technology though! ;-)

3 ppl if you move the turrets, nice job.

So capping is nothing more than a cheating arms race....sad...very sad.

it's more distract and cap rather than fight and cap... I hate that.

Actually, we didn't move any turrets, thank you. And we still have to fight. We just take most of the bots out of the picture. But quite often one or two will be annoying and go to kill people. It's not cheating! It's just using good dodging skills to annoy the bots into submission! If you think there's no fighting now, go ask red. It was pretty much even, with 4 blues and 3-4 reds, and there was PLENTY of fighting.

While I haven't witnessed a cap attempt yet (silentsuicide's shenanigans aside), my first impression is the same as ctishman. Getting a red group together is very hard. Getting 3 reds together to cap is considered organized for us. The current nation cap stats are 6/0/3. I expect that zero will stay that way for a while.

I used to think of flag caps as little missions that an individual could take on if there wasn't much going on on the server. Now that they're Uber missions there's one less thing to do when the servers are slow. I'm not saying I want the old flag caps back (I haven't given it enough time), but I wich there was another "little mission" alternative to take its place. So what if Nytemayre capped the hell out of Gold at 5am, at least he had something to do then.

Forgetting my 5am cap sprees (:D), I used to round up newer players to help me cap when it was quiet, but not exactly dead. This would get them combat and cap training, give them a sense of purpose and usefullness, get them to identify with their nation and have some pride in the Serco. I got a bunch of reds actually excited to be red (no small task).

Now, don't even think of taking a newer player into enemy territory; it'd be useless. "So what?" you say?

Well....what are they gonna do now? Lets see...there's trading (oooh exciting)....or piracy....or....yeah. Thats it. There's nothing to do anymore, which could be _very_ bad for the community. This affects older players a lot less, but as a newbie, I'd be pretty tempted to start just killing people left and right for lack of a legitimate outlet for my agression (flag capping).

EDIT:
I understand that capping will be going away, and the def bots are for uber-n00bs' own good. The problem is that this game just lost an entire dimension as far as I'm concerned. If missions or some other activity are being added RSN, then I can deal with that, but it doesn't look like we'll be getting a new activity besides killing Janelle's "nick of the week" any time soon. Therein lies the problem. We've succeeded in turning a CTF/FPS into a straight up death match game. Thats not progress.

Ok, a couple of things.

CTF was always supposed to require a team of players working together and coordinating their attacks. (at least 5 players, maybe more like 8). It was not supposed to be something that happened every 5 minutes, with people picking up both flags single-handedly and mosying to and fro. Ideally, it was supposed to give a purpose to the varied types and strengths of the different ships, and give players a reason to work together for some common goal. Of course, it's pretty simplistic, so it's not a very exciting common goal.. but I felt there was a need to put *something* in there, until we built missions and the like.

Second of all, reaching the outlying "secret" sectors was supposed to be very difficult as well. Not something that one would attempt alone. Again, something that a number of players would do together, some flying escorts, some flying heavier trading-oriented ships. Again, this didn't pan out.. all the bots ended up getting stuck in some crevice or being confused about how to fly, and everyone became used to 11->18 being a milk run.

I was pretty sure the new defense bots were too powerful when we put them in. But, I left them that way to see what people would do. The complaints about "exploiting the AI" are completely valid, but that's kind of the point. I *want* people to exploit the AI, so we can see what they do and make smarter AI. Much like the situation when the original defense bots were first introduced, and the most popular tactic was for the first player to fly off into the sunset, trailing the bots, while the others took the flag uncontested. You guys reveal the flaws in what we're building, and identifying and fixing/improving those flaws is what this Test is all about.

That said, I think we will be toning down the defense bots. I think they definitely need a respawn delay, and I'm not entirely sure about some of their other frightening aspects. However, we also need to make them behaviourally smarter in order to create a more balanced arrangement.

Also, assuming that the game doesn't find a new way to explode in the immediate future, our priority now is on new feature development once again. So, hopefully we will be seeing some new Things To Do in the not-too-distant future.

W00t! Missions? :D

WOOT! The devs once again prove they know *exactly* what they are doing!

God I love this game ;).