Subset Games Forum

It seems that since the update when I jump into an asteroid field I get hit by twice as many asteroids and the enemy ship is not hit at all.
Two shield bars used to be enough to survive indefinitely in asteroids if you had no enemies. Now it is not. They come in volleys of 5-6 asteroids in fairly quick succession and usually one or two get past the shields, depending on how many miss.
I've sat there with two boarders on an empty enemy ship after killing their crew...shield systems were destroyed on the enemy ship, but it was never hit once. No asteroids came. Meanwhile my ship was slowly worn down and destroyed by constant asteroid hits.

My theory is that a new bug was introduced which causes the 1/2 of the asteroids that used to spawn as attacks against the opposing ship to instead spawn as additional asteroid attacks against the player ship.

Has anyone else experienced this?

I haven't seen this, and I've played 4 games with the patch (including the beta, which I assume was the same code). I've been in asteroid fields in all 4 and I haven't noticed a significant difference, at least in terms of the amount of damage. I'll pay more attention, but I think you ran into a run of bad luck.

Update: I found an asteroid field that is working normally...seems like this only happens sometimes, and maybe not new in the new patch.

It seems to be a property of the location - backing up my continue file before entering a "bugged" asteroid field seems to result in it being "bugged" every time I go there.

Some fields being worse than others may be as designed - just strange that the enemy ship doesn't get the same treatment as the player ship.

I could post a continue/profile where this happens if there is an easy way to do so...gotta play more and see how common it is.

I had an asteroid field yesterday with twice as many hits. This was on 1.01, so not related to the upgrade. Whether this is a bug or by design remains to be seen.

I believe asteroids are just a statistical occurrence. Sometimes you'll get volleys of them purely by chance, equally, sometimes so will the enemy.

I've expierenced the evil asteroids just once, but it nearly ripped me apart. Laser-heavy enemy, managed to get his weapon down and hoped for my drone and asteroids to finish him while I repaired, but I think he took 1 asteroid while I had two shields and got quite some hull damage. I think this was just random though, since it never happened again.

Kestral B wrote: I've sat there with two boarders on an empty enemy ship after killing their crew...shield systems were destroyed on the enemy ship, but it was never hit once. No asteroids came. Meanwhile my ship was slowly worn down and destroyed by constant asteroid hits.

Enemy ships do get treated the same (I always try to focus more on their shields in an asteroid field and generally just let the asteroids do the work).
However I'm (almost) 100% sure, from what I've seen, that once you win against an enemy ship either from them surrendering, or from you cleaning them out in a boarding action, then the enemy ships stop getting hit by asteroids at all.
This is probably to stop your boarding parties from getting sideswiped by an unsuspecting asteroid which takes out the last bit of hull of the enemy ship - If you destroy an enemy ship with your crew on it, its entirely in your control (and thus your fault), but if an asteroid takes it out after you've already won... well, maybe the devs decided that would be just a bit too unfair!

Starbug wrote:

Kestral B wrote: I've sat there with two boarders on an empty enemy ship after killing their crew...shield systems were destroyed on the enemy ship, but it was never hit once. No asteroids came. Meanwhile my ship was slowly worn down and destroyed by constant asteroid hits.

Enemy ships do get treated the same (I always try to focus more on their shields in an asteroid field and generally just let the asteroids do the work).
However I'm (almost) 100% sure, from what I've seen, that once you win against an enemy ship either from them surrendering, or from you cleaning them out in a boarding action, then the enemy ships stop getting hit by asteroids at all.
This is probably to stop your boarding parties from getting sideswiped by an unsuspecting asteroid which takes out the last bit of hull of the enemy ship - If you destroy an enemy ship with your crew on it, its entirely in your control (and thus your fault), but if an asteroid takes it out after you've already won... well, maybe the devs decided that would be just a bit too unfair!

Some clarification is needed:
You're right, they stop getting hit, but the asteroids don't stop flying past the (now inactive/invulnerable) enemy ship, right? In this case there were no asteroids flying past the disabled enemy ship, while I was getting pummeled.

My experience is that asteroid patters are not truly random...for a given location they seem to hit in a certain rhythm which seems to repeat. In this sector the rhythm still repeated, with consistent volleys each of the same intensity.
I think that the most likely explanation is that two random repeating volley patterns are generated for an asteroid field when it is placed during sector generation - one for the player ship and one for the enemy ship (if there is one) in that location.
Probably they are generated independently, so it's possible for one ship to have a very intense bombardment while the other gets few (or in this one case, literally zero) hits.
And, of course, in cases where it's the player ship having an easy time and the enemy getting blasted no one will likely notice or complain.

From looking at the XML of the thing, all asteroid fields appear to be equal.

Some variance in that may be hardcoded, however.