The Evening ScAv Report, 1/25

ScAvenger001

Spaceman
I have two bugs and some interesting stories. Chronologically:

Interesting story #1
Mission: in-system escort for merchant Orion in Troy.

So, I burn out to Regalis to pick up my charge en-route to another jump point. Orion jumps in, objective list says "defend from pirates." First two pirates start heading my way, I go and intercept. While I'm engaging one, the other is blasting the Orion. Right about the time I defeat the first pirate, I hear a lot of other weapons fire. Turns out a pair of Broadswords, two militia Talons (aside: are they supposed to have talons as well? I only remember gladii from previous versions), and at least three hunter demons had arrived and were tearing up the other pirate. After he went boom, another two pirates arrived and decided to take a crack at the Orion in spite of the full squadron of heavy fighters defending it. I wish I'd gotten a screenshot of them being swarmed, but they simply didn't live long enough for me to get a good angle.

Story #2 (possible bug?) I got a patrol mission in Troy that left me knee-deep in kats. Two dralthi and a gothri (that's knee-deep to a Tarsus with two mass drivers). Are they supposed to be able to get to Troy at this early part of the game? Troy's six jumps behind Perry and the Blockade Points. This is not a major issue, I just thought it was a little peculiar. Anyway, I got eaten alive despite heroic efforts and liberal use of missiles. That'll teach me to accept missions that say "possible capship contact".

Bug #1: news
Currently in the news listing are one mention of a merchant defeat in War, a couple of "freelancer helps the cause" messages, and seven(!!) "Barren Lands" messages. Someone should probably look into putting a damper on that sort of repetition.

Bug #2: Nephilim? :eek:
I saw a mission to rescue an ejected pilot under attack from Nephilim. I accepted the mission and, sure enough, there were a pair of steltek fighters labelled "Nephilim" shooting at a floating chair. After that I decided I'd seen enough and should probably report it.

note: all of the above happened in Troy. I'm still pretty close to the start of the game, I haven't taken any campaign missions yet. I haven't even bought a jump drive yet, because I'm saving up for a centurion.
 
thanks for the info

I haven't seen any Kats...and there shouldn't be any unless you started the game under an earlier version of Privateer (for instance the 0.9 release) and copied it into the new savegame dir)
 
maybe they just jumped over pretty fast...i'll have to take a closer look.... there are definitely kilrathis in various unknown places... perhaps one was nearby...
 
I'm not sure about how the game handles rules for spawning new ships for missions, but these were spawned as part of my patrol mission rather than jumping in randomly. Does that make a difference?

Speaking of which, what are the rules for spawning new ships for missions? I'd assumed that certain systems just had certain groups that were local to it, but so far I've seen merchants, hunters, militia, regular Confed, retros, pirates, kats, and steltek/nephilim, and I haven't even left Troy yet.
 
I don't think flightgroups are spawned for patrol missions. They aren't really for any kind of mission, rather missions are created based on what's there already.
 
there are patrol missions that spawn ships

generally the flightgroup is named Shadow or Patrol_Shadow if they were specifically spawned by the mission and not otherwise present in random encounter


we tried *very* hard for 1.0 to redesign things so that *only* the people who should be near troy are near troy... if there are other oddities and it's not because of missions then I'm really at a loss... I spent hours tweaking the constants to get it so that kats stayed near teh top right of the map...retros the bottom... pirates the Farris and humboldt quads... like so--but also gave them free sway to wander around and kill each other
 
I really didn't think there were even active nephilim... they would use steltek ships if they were active...but I don't know how those bugs worked in there (literally bugs! get it!)
anyhow I'll have to look at it...guess this means a pre4 build at some point
 
Yeah, I noticed they'd been removed from the faction alliances list, that's why I went out of my way to take the mission when I saw it.
 
ScAvenger001 said:
(aside: are [militia] supposed to have talons as well? I only remember gladii from previous versions)
Sure, there were plenty of militia talons in the original.
 
I tried to address most of your concerns (couldn't find or reproduce the tractor thing)
same url, 1 number higher (instead of a pre3 it's a pre4)
go get 'em tiger

this is only a bug fix release
 
"It's still a little peculiar that I should be able to get a mission that includes kats (much less bugs) while I'm still at troy."

I got them all the time in the original, usually scout, attack or defend base missions, usually 1-3 dralthi, rarely 2 dralthi and a gothri. They also said in the mission "scout for kilrathi presence, kill kilrathi, defend base from kilrathi etc" while in troy. That is normal.


Rushifell
 
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