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Post by laughingman on Apr 9, 2013 18:23:41 GMT -5
Have we figured out which of those apply to the achievement?
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Post by contributor on Apr 9, 2013 18:38:49 GMT -5
I know I crushed a Narvidian Hive that did not count as a hive and that's consistent with it's AI as it never tried to run.
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Post by laughingman on Apr 9, 2013 19:42:03 GMT -5
I see, well that changes things quite a bit. I had figured that Narvidian Hives were the primary targets of that achievement.
How hard is it to actually catch and capture a proper hive/hulk then? I thought they generally popped up with ridiculous levels and escaped more or less automatically.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 9, 2013 20:52:44 GMT -5
You can catch up to a hulk. You just need a quick ship with many engines and bridge upgrade, pilot officer with spice, and pilot skill at about 3000% of your lv.
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he
Curator
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Post by he on Apr 10, 2013 5:02:14 GMT -5
I lost patience testing bounty hunting for aliens. There does not appear to be a noticeable difference between 1 stealth and 6 stealth for running into aliens.
There seems to be a big difference between 1 stealth and 10 stealth, giving 150 to 200% of turns to alien ratio. (N = 3, base turns seem to be about 1 in 1500 to 2500)
Tested on insane. No patrols or Alien vet.
Also, no hulk had been more than 2x my level on insane; up to level 54. Luck?
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Post by Deleted on Apr 10, 2013 22:15:31 GMT -5
Stealth doesnt help you find aliens. if you want to find aliens, either survive long enough and they'll find you, or do dead planet patrols early in the game with a vet and high tactics.
You say you havent encountered a hulk more than 2x your lv. How many hulks are we talking about? 1?
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he
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Post by he on Apr 12, 2013 3:11:03 GMT -5
4 :
Mysterious
2x damaged
1 space hulk
3 were encountered before level 3, the highest level found was 108 when I was level 54 on insane.
One I found while blockading xeen prime before turn 100.
One was level 1, when I was level 3.
Two were found between cadar utf and de valtos prime.
One was in some red sector.
All different captains, all on insane.
Haven't caught one yet. Made a new Captain in a fully tricked out honor of javat and I am just waiting now, staying under level 5 to maximize my chance to actually catch one.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 12, 2013 14:05:45 GMT -5
You're very lucky.
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he
Curator
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Post by he on Apr 12, 2013 19:25:55 GMT -5
Seeing the high level ones first might have been better; they would have crushed my hopes sooner.
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Post by captain0tyras on Apr 12, 2013 22:35:53 GMT -5
Have we heard from Cory why aliens become harder to find? My insane captain just found his first alien. A hull 99 Nyo-guh-something. In year 349 of his long long career.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 13, 2013 9:17:32 GMT -5
Aliens don't become harder to find. They become harder to find for patrol because patrol itself gets harder and harder as time progresses
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Post by captain0tyras on Apr 13, 2013 19:23:19 GMT -5
Awesome. That was the first alien I "hunted". Second one I"ve seen in half a dozen games. One more question.
This "sliding" difficulty... how quickly does it slide? 350 years in and nothing can touch me. Even that Alien was a flawless fight.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 13, 2013 19:35:22 GMT -5
Don't understand the question.
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Post by contributor on Apr 13, 2013 20:23:21 GMT -5
@captainotyras I think your asking about how the game difficulty level goes up. It only affects certain things, not including enemy captain difficulty, at least not in terms of their level. I'm not entirely clear though on how it affects everything though. Does anyone have a link to thread that explains this? I looked once but proboards search feature is terrible.
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he
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Post by he on Apr 14, 2013 3:59:57 GMT -5
I've been modeling difficulty/enemy levels as a normal distribution centered around player's level in points * difficulty% with an upper bound of PLIP * Difficulty + ClockLevel.
It seems to work out quite nicely.
Normal distribution = bell curve (we doubt it is a normal distrbution in the game, but it is convenient to think of it this way.)
PLIP = sum of countable skill & experience points (everything in determining Level without dividing by 6)
The points calculated are then allocated between Ship type (which is strongly bounded by player level, you won't see stronger enemy ships until your level is high enough), and enemy captain attributes (skills & AI brains ; nicer ships generally have dumber captains and lower levels; but a low-level smuggler AI can kick yer butt.)
This means staying at a low level in a really good ship renders you untouchable. Further, by design, most of the AIs are weak against high warrior+high crew. So if you aren't touchable, either you aren't allocating all your exp, you are on a low difficulty, or you have a boarder+high crew ship and haven't encountered the dangerous-to-boarder AIs yet (torp/snipers, terrox AI, and rammers). Low difficulty means you will never see certain AI types, and also means enemy ship type doesn't grow as quickly (making them less dangerous, but also making pirating less profitable.)
Excessively detailed speculation:
The difficulty clock represents an upper bound of the distribution, with maximum level being: Yourlevel*Difficulty%+ClockLevel which gives some number of points based on that number.
The points are then distributed among the Enemy's features: Level, Ship, AI Type, etc.
The ship types enemies can appear in are strongly bounded by the player's level (not the points allocated) and are only slightly influenced by # of turns. That is, you won't see powerful ships until your level is high enough - at level 1 the most powerful ship (aside from aliens) is the pirate skylift. This holds true for 15000 turns on insane.
For those with programming background I think it is something like:
avgLevel = CharLevelInPoints*DifficultyRating
maxLevel = avgLevel + ClockLevel
result = RandomNormal[float] from 1/avgLevel TO maxLevel/avgLevel
AI_Points_To_Allocate = CharLevelInPoints * Difficulty * result
So, for a captain that has 100 skill+attribute points (about level 8) on hard at turn 2000 you'd get enemy captains with 100*1.25=125 points (level 12) being spent on average with an upper bound of 125+54 = 179 points (level 21) allocated. This seems to match my play experience.
Aliens represent a special case and follow a different rule,with an upper bound that appears to be 2-4x higher than the normal upper bound.
Impossible difficulty is a further skewing of the distribution, with the mean appearing to be your level + 5 making the early levels much harder. I don't know if this is a flat +5 or scales, as I haven't kept anything alive past level 10 on impossible yet. I've been having too much fun seeing how long I can survive without trading. Impossible is the pirate's dream.
Now, difficulty seems to skew the distribution to the right, making ships lower than your level less likely than would be predicted by a symmetrical distribution such as the normal distribution and there seem to be an inordinate number of ships that hover around levels 1-5 on the low end (we don't see a smooth distribution of ships from 1 to YourLevel just as we don't see a smooth distribution of ships from YourLevel to MaxLevel). This makes me believe that there are series of "luck" rolls that help determine ship level and partitions the distribution into bins.
The help guide also hints that the extra difficulty granted to enemies by things like weapons is distributed equally among several factors, one of them being captain level. I have also noticed that nicer ships tend to have lower captain levels. Thus some of the oddities in level distribution may be due to the point allocation algorithm.
This is all just speculation and I'd be very interested in knowing how close I came to the truth of the matter.
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