Subset Games Forum

Enemy ships seem to have implausible warp-out powers. Two situations:

1) Right near the beginning of the game, I was fighting an enemy ship and got them to the "we're trying to flee" stage. They warped out when my ship was maybe 60% of the way to having a full FTL bar. That implies that they had maybe a level-5 engine to my level-2 (2x vs. 1.25x) -- and of course they also had a fairly significant weapons loadout in addition to that. I can't say this situation is impossible but it does seem pretty improbable.

2) Later, I had another ship pretty well locked down -- regularly hitting the cockpit with a Burst Laser 2 (it only had one level of health), so that it spent at least 75% of the time red. Somehow it still managed to jump out...and while I can't swear to it, I'm almost certain that the cockpit was red when the jump occurred.

I'm also almost certain that when my cockpit is red, I stop making any progress on making an FTL jump. Certainly if I remove my pilot from the cockpit then progress stops. So are the enemy ships playing by different rules here? Having a ship run away is frustrating; it's doubly so if they're cheating to do it.

Their timers are significantly shorter than yours. If the way their system worked wasn't any different, then they'd either always escape immediately when they wanted to (engines were charging the entire fight), or they'd never escape (since it takes so long in early fights to charge). But they still obey the same rules of engines + piloting.

The "jumping with broken pilot" has been a common complaint and is likely a but that I'm going to look into.

I see your point about escaping immediately...but I think they still shouldn't be allowed to warp out faster than their engines would normally allow a warp-out. Let's say for example that the "enemy is fleeing" system starts a 20-second timer, and when that timer runs out, they warp out. Let's also say that their level of engine would require 50 seconds to charge for FTL under normal circumstances. If the enemy ship decides to flee after 15 seconds of fighting, then they should still have to wait the remaining 35 seconds for their engines to charge, not the shorter 20 second timer. Conversely if the fight's been dragging on for two minutes already and they decide to flee, then they only have to wait 20 seconds.