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Freelancer-Sirius-Revival / FLSR

The main mod files of Freelancer: Sirius Revival for the game "Freelancer".
https://fl-sr.eu
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Fleet encounters do not spawn as expected in their respective zones #967

Open Caenen opened 3 days ago

Caenen commented 3 days ago

A handful of players spontaneously gathered to take on the Rheinland Military fleet zone in the Frankfurt system yesterday. However, depite the number of players and enemy fighter encounters spawning en-masse, no fleet would spawn naturally. To trigger a fleet, we had to use a workaround where one player had to fly a >5K away from the others, and leave and reenter space to prompt a spawn that way.

Fleets can definitely be encountered if they are the first encounter you come across in the zone. I suspect this is down to the "buzz" arrival type, given my previous local testing of fleets and encounters. Changing this needs to be tested and the particular spawn chances of the zones (5:6 fleets versus fighters) rebalanced depending on what happens in the test. This gives the players an engaging coop-challenge for the time being.

erikroe commented 3 days ago

The chance for a fleet to spawn is actually kept low. This isn't a surprise; this is intended.

Caenen commented 3 days ago

The rarity of the encounter in-game is incidental because of the arrival type - the weighting for fleets versus fighters spawn is 5:6, but unless the first encounter you run into is a fleet you will NEVER run into a fleet unless you leave and return, or exploit a quirk in re-entering space when you re-select your character to roll the 5-in-11 dice for a quick, guaranteed and unimmersive way to spawn a fleet.

I just did some testing: Removing the buzz arrival type in favor of cruise like most encounter have will solve this issue, and, as long as the player manages to clear the area, Fleets have the expected chance to show up to the combat zone. Tuning down the chance (say, 1 in 10 empty-space encounters is a fleet instead of 5 in 11) then gets the proper rarity behaviour.

This may not be the only possible way of solving this, but it's the easiest I can verify to work right now.

erikroe commented 3 days ago

Change it accordingly for the other encounters too

Caenen commented 3 days ago

Change it accordingly for the other encounters too

By that you just mean that I should not forget about the fleet encounters other than Rheinland, or are there any other encounters I forgot about?