I took the chance and updated to 1.3 over the weekend, seemed like a messy update but, no issues in singleplayer so far so it's all good. But why add even more factions when the AI is still not working properly? Honestly, if factions don't react to each other, it's all just clutter. The only time when shots are fired in this galaxy is when the player shoots at someone or someone shoots at the player. Everyone else just ignore each other, even though some of them are apparently at war. There's really no point in adding more and more factions if you can't fix the AI. If your fridge don't work, stop putting more beer in it. Fix the fridge first!
The whole new update is a disaster. I cannot do side quests and it makes me angry. We are playing on small dedi for friends, and I am afraid of leaving the starter planet, because people say their ships just disappear in space. Previous issues I reported were not fixed with this update. And having all of this as a background I really do not care of new factions system, decals or skill modifiers...
I think they are testers for soft config defined factions maybe? The unknown factions thing seems a bit pointless when I keep getting spammed with rep gain messages from all the supposedly unknown factions that hate me slightly less for staying away from their territory which probably isnt on this planet anyway As for ships doing wierd stuff - ships on planets seem messed up as well. Earlier I flew away from base in an SV and when I came back my CV that was perfectly aligned with and parked on its pad was instead twisted with its ass up in the air and nose half buried in the pad and basically under going space engineers clang style twitching.
I mean, the point of factions is to add more story, exploration and antagonist / allies to the players. Though I would love to see them interact with each other more, that's not needed. And they may never interact with each other, from what Taelyn has said, which is sad but not a reason not to keep adding content to the galaxy.
I actually use NPC spawners in survival quite extensively to populate my bases and add troops to patrol around them, sometimes my troops jump into combat as well and it can be very useful when they do. I've also seen a Kriel CV attack a Zirax drone in space, but then ignoring the second one. And that's the thing, the AI is clearly there, it just doesn't work properly. It's like NPCs have trouble detecting and reacting to other hostile NPCs. Now imagine how lively the galaxy would be if that was fixed. Your allies would actually mean something.
As I understand it, faction NPC/PVs/drones attacking each other is considered a bug and gets stamped on. What I want to know if what happen when one day inter faction hostility is actually allowed and all these myriad of hacks that were probably done to prevent such hostilities now have to be found and reversed... fun for the poor sod new hire who gets dumped with that mess on day one!
So they intentionally limit the AI to be dormant? That's really an odd decision. I can see how that makes sense for PvP where players take center stage and AI factions are just background filler but, it makes for an utterly boring galaxy in singleplayer. It only becomes apparent in the late game but, late game content is exactly what this game is lacking. It comes back to the original question, why add more factions then? Sure, it adds more enemies and allies but, what's the point if your "allies" would just happily sit and spectate as you fight all those enemies alone?
