TL;DR: lategame content not lategame enough for my 20 years of on/off gametime bittervet-ass!

A bit more than a year ago they used to throw everything and the kitchen sink upon jumping into the "nest" sector.

This was changed due to complaints regarding their difficulty, adding an event where popping the dent brings all the rats that are on the wormhole into the "nest" sectors would be cool (specially if they kept shooting after the dent exploded instead of just... wandering off at a snails pace).

They could stay around the wreck to guard/pick at the tasty giblets for ten minutes (leaving 5 minutes for a solo pilot who wants to bring in an XC to scoop a small window before the giblets despawn); they're pirates afterall!

This would greatly increase the farming difficulty but hey they're "supposed" to be "lategame" content and currently they're a bit too... easy/fomulaic to the point where it's a little ridiculous.

Furthermore if they don't get cleared within ~48 hours the game could spawn an additional unrat connie in the mix further... solidifying the infestation. (this was definitely suggested before and I could probably reference a thread but... eh fuck it it's simple enough why bother)

The latos unrats should also have bomber rags in the mix and send 3~4 fighters at a time instead of the current 2 fighters, this would further force cooperation to take it out as it stands it's relatively easy to solo the only real difficulty is the time it takes to whittle the connie down after busting the shields which generates a few additional spawns which are... again extremely easy to manage for a solo dent.

The suggested changes would still make them possible to solo with subcaps or capships but would make it significantly harder for solo capship pilots. moreso than a lone rag doing bombing runs until the dent explodes.

Furthermore they should rush to the sector exit when damaged beyond 25%.

As it stands removing them is formulaic and... yeah way too easy.

Granted these changes are implemented the spawn frequency of the even could be lowered to 12h making larger windows where the spacelanes are open to newbs/people who fly XC's without asking for scouting/escorts.

it doesnt matter how many escorts are dispatched at a time if they are tethered to the trident or area. we will still be able to stretch them to the extent of their movement until they stop moving and wipe them out.

both unrats and levi have this same problem now effectively, im sure it was done to solve some form of abuse, like players pulling them into deep space or whatever but.. the side effects make them easy targets.

so yea, cutting the leashes and may be having a unique set of unrats per system brac/odia/sedina.. so as many as three can exist at a time with their regular 4 to 12 hour window. ;)

Since ya got me going, the levi queens need to lose the tether too, the "easy" solution is to make them them specifically aggro player capships and to ignore npc player capships that would make for a better leviathan all around.

giving them a couple unknown sector guardians per queen and tying the leviathan shield regen to the central queens again would... go a long way too but i'm getting ahead of myself here.

Ever since all these whiny mobile newbs and capships the game's gotten... trivially easy (outside of pvp interactions which I'm unfortunately a little starved of at the moment)

all this granted it doesn't break exploit mitigation "features" or other stuff but yeah that's a tall order.

Ever since all these whiny mobile newbs and capships the game's gotten... trivially easy

The tether stuff wasn't added because of mobile newbies, it was because people were simply dragging all the NPCs away and then killing the unrat trident. We knew this "solution" was dumb and simplistic at the time, and wouldn't last long.. and, well, it has proven that out.

We certainly haven't made the game any easier because of mobile people? Not that I recollect. If anything, the opposite, now you can get a hundred NPCs to aggro on you at once in the Unknown System.

Anyway, there needs to be more complex defense logic for NPCs protecting a given object. Something that factors in quantity of defenders, distance, prioritizes attackers based on relative damage, etc. I have some ideas, but.. it's probably not going to be simple.

the levi queens need to lose the tether too, the "easy" solution is to make them them specifically aggro player capships and to ignore npc player capships

So, to be clear, you're saying to aggro on player-owned capships where the player is currently in command, but ignore player-owned capships where the player is not in command?

Or by "NPC player capships" do you mean true NPCs (not owned by any player) that come in during various Skirmishes and such?

npc player capships yeah I mean player caps that aren't controlled by the player.

I figure having them ignore npc player capships would help with exploit mitigation since otherwise someone could draw aggro with a disposable goliath and space em that way with the turbo command. (then again queens have pcb's with and npc caps have simulated powercells it probably wouldn't work as well as I think it would but I can't really test it since they're tethered)

thing is there's still turrets but even when the capships filled to the gills with alt gunners it's still not trivial to bust shields unless the player in question is running multiple capships and an half a dozen alts.

anyway fixing the central hive isn't really in the scope of the suggestion I just went off on a tangent. Between the queens doing just enough damage to bust shields and their PCB there's enough difficulty there for a solo pilot that it's not quite as trivial as the unrats. (it's definitely in need of some changes but yeah one thing at a time!)

now back to the subject at hand.

The best solution I can think of for preventing exploiting the crap out of npc aggro would be to spawn additional waves if the initial wave doesn't get shot at enough or something to that effect making it more difficult to "break" the unrats by just running around the debri field until they get stuck and/or spacing them with with a single spaceboat.

If you don't have any issues spawning more shit in an otherwise already "congested" sector then the solution is probably just to throw more unrat fighters into the mix.

You know the constraints and probably the potential exploits better than I do; a good place to start would be to increase the fighters that get sent from 2 to 4~5 and giving them full aggro instead of the staring contest they seem to enter when they're about 1000m off. (they're extremely vulnerable to most missiles when they do this so they just... end up dying without getting a shot off).

Anyway I don't want to defend my shitty assumptions too much but there was a lot of complaining in regards to the unrats around the time it got changed I thought that was the reason I never would've thought it was because of exploit mitigation because from my perspective they went from being somewhat difficult to trivially easy.

another potential solution might be to make the unrats only chase for a small amount of time 2~3 minutes and have them jump out and back in to bring them closer to the dent again.

All that to say, they're currently way too easy and it takes about 10m to take out the nest with a solo trident without cheezy bullshit and you're probably going to know the best way to make them challenging whilst mitigating potential exploits that would arise from changing the mechanics.

Scotia wants more unrats because he wants to baloon the size of the size of your item database - don't trust him! :P

Jokes aside making the "deep" greyspace wormholes (pelatus<>sedina) more dangerous definitely gets a +1 from me in general the old unrats used to sit directly on the wormhole and since they existed when npc convoys weren't nearly as frequent they were more dangerous despite the lack of pcb's, so effective in fact that you couldn't send a moth through latos>sedina without dying and as I see it it should be that way. Ever since they started targeting mines dropping any sort of mine essentially stops them in their tracks that's another "exploit" to consider since I'm on the subject of unrats being a bit... trivial these days.

Okay, that's useful feedback.

I don't know exactly what we'll do. We do need to generally improve Defense behaviours by NPCs, for purposes well beyond the Unrats (to be more usable in a lot of new circumstances with Persistent Events and so on).

Anyway, we'll take a look and see if we can improve on some aspects of the unrat system and make that a bit more fun.

We're juggling a bunch of large, difficult infrastructure projects right now, but I'll try to jam something in between if I can.

"Ever since they started targeting mines dropping any sort of mine essentially.."

yep, the tu defense is pretty good.. but.. if thats taken away then tus have no further purpose in the universe other than tricking new players. mines basically fell off a cliff one fateful day years ago and have never returned.. and possibly never will. there used to be a lot of mine gameplay, now theres zero.

its basically the cost of a base goliath, so it should be effective.. and it is. let it be.

Why dont we quit trying to nerf the hell out of the existing stuff and free the devs up to make newer stuff? Just a thought.