AI ships jump away without pilot at the helm

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Beanstalk
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Joined: Sat Sep 29, 2012 11:00 am

AI ships jump away without pilot at the helm

Postby Beanstalk » Sat Sep 29, 2012 11:05 am

Title says it all; in my case it was particularly frustrating because I tried to prevent them fleeing by teleporting crew to the enemies cockpit...
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Matthew
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Re: AI ships jump away without pilot at the helm

Postby Matthew » Sat Sep 29, 2012 11:15 am

Did they have crew in the piloting room fighting your men? As long as there is someone in the pilot room, no matter what he is doing the ship can jump. Same applies to your ship.

If the enemy pilot room only had your men, then that's a different issue and I'll look into it further.
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Beanstalk
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Joined: Sat Sep 29, 2012 11:00 am

Re: AI ships jump away without pilot at the helm

Postby Beanstalk » Sat Sep 29, 2012 12:44 pm

That might have been the case; I assumed that the helm works like the other stations, in that they don't count as manned if the crew is busy fighting intruders.
You may want to either change that for consistencies sake, or point it out in the tutorial.
Derakon
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Re: AI ships jump away without pilot at the helm

Postby Derakon » Sat Sep 29, 2012 8:57 pm

One thing that would probably help would be if there were some visual indication that a station is manned. Say, outline the room (or the station icon) in green or something. A lot of people are getting caught out by this "cockpit still counts as manned even if the pilot is getting his face smashed in" thing because it's simply not intuitive and there's no way to tell exactly what's going on.
Zauron
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Re: AI ships jump away without pilot at the helm

Postby Zauron » Sat Sep 29, 2012 9:05 pm

Derakon wrote:One thing that would probably help would be if there were some visual indication that a station is manned. Say, outline the room (or the station icon) in green or something. A lot of people are getting caught out by this "cockpit still counts as manned even if the pilot is getting his face smashed in" thing because it's simply not intuitive and there's no way to tell exactly what's going on.


While I agree its weird and tripped me up too since other stations are not considered manned while combat is going on (though I understand the balance reasons that caused the devs to do this), but I'm curious - does it show the little man-head icon above the power bars as being filled in and white/green/yellow while the pilot is being hit? That's the "official" indicator of whether a station is manned or not, so if that's working than technically there is an indicator of whether or not a station is actually manned beyond looking at the characters on the ship itself. I may be wrong but I think with level 3 sensors you see the same icon on the enemy ship? Or only the power bars?
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UglyMug
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Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2012 8:09 am

Re: AI ships jump away without pilot at the helm

Postby UglyMug » Tue Oct 09, 2012 6:01 pm

Actually,in a situation where a cockpit gets boarders is sort of this strange situation where the helm counts as being "half-manned". That is, you lose the pilot bonuses to evade, but you can still evade and jump. So basically the helm counts as being unmanned, but the helm works differently than other stations in that it fails to work at all if you don't have someone in the room (even if that person is fighting off boarders or putting out fires.)