My understanding is that some classes of ships are categorized as "Orbital Patrol Vessels." For example, it seems that the Zirax "Kiuvera Cutter" is one example. The mechanic of these ships seems to be: it will attack you, and you can fight it. But it is designed to be pretty much NOT lootable? Well, I suppose if you leave the NPC core in it, you could at least go around it and loot crates and treasure chests. But if you zap the core--even if you place your own core--they despawn, apparently fairly rapidly. I'm kinda struggling to comprehend how anyone imagined that this enhanced game play or what benefit to the Empyrion Galactic Survival experience this was intended to afford. Could anyone clarify for me? Given I don't see what positive effect it has on gameplay, it strikes me as a fairly terrible game mechanic, and I'd recommend strongly against keeping it in your game. Or at least make it easy to just turn off, if it is not already.
Orbital Patrol Vessels are regular patrol ships. They possess no special traits, aside from tracking the player to the last location seen and engaging in combat. They also do not self-destruct or despawn when killed. If you leave the playfield, cored OPVs will be wiped. You can loot or salvage them up until they are wiped. This is separate from SDS ships, which are summoned by space POI when you attack it. Those will warp away if you remove all their weapons; or self-destruct if cored. They only appear in response to a space POI of the same faction being attacked by the player and are not meant to be looted or salvaged since you could sit at the POI and just keep farming reinforcements. The Kiuvera-class cutter is the most common, weakest and least valuable ship to be summoned by the Space Defense System specifically because it can be easily destroyed without wasting huge amounts of ammunition (unlike an Imerat-Class Destroyer, which can also be summoned). There are also Freighter OPVs. These do not look for the player, and will usually either ignore or run from an attacking player. If disabled, they will start an unreliable 5-minute timer, at the end of which the ship will self-destruct. Sometimes it won't self-destruct, sometimes it'll self-destruct early. In either case, you can loot or salvage whatever you want from it until it triggers.
For clarity, do you mean OPVs (Orbital Patrol Vessel) which goes around in space? Or PPVs (Planetary Patrol Vessel) which flies around on planets? Because that cutter I think is used as both. It also exhibits similar behavior to what you describe when it's spawned as a PPV and as SDS (as described above).
I'm relieved as it sounds like maybe something is not functioning as intended. Chartizi system on the Anvil Season 6 server; Mamuiarom space sector. I first entered this sector maybe a week ago, but probably just a few days ago (my base is in a UCH sector close to the star in this system). It is a fairly heavily populated sector in terms of ships, space stations and asteroids. Pirates, Polaris and Zirax presence. From memory, the first time I entered the system I was in a scout miner CV with nothing but ant-drone weapons and very light defenses (constructed out of solar panels and cargo extensions, compact shield and only 12 5.8mm turrets). I exploited what I could and fled at the first sign of threat. It may have been either that visit or the second visit when I poked at one of the Ice locations (I guess technically they are POIs). That spawned in a small swarm of something which shot at me a lot and popped a couple modules before I managed to get away. I do not think that that swarm was Kiuveras, more like drones, but they seemed to be hovering in the area between two of these Ice POIs and did not pursue or move around like drones. Maybe they are sentries? I do not recall for sure if the Kiuvera were present at this point or not. I fixed my damages and flew home and continued working my way toward a proper CV. I did visit the system at least once more and I think it was that second visit when I noticed the presence of 4 to 6 Kiuvera cutters. Their behavior seemed to be that of a regular sector ship: they were present when I arrived, they moved around passively, and if I got close to them they acquired the exclamation point. Being a returning player I resolved to return to this sector with my first combat-capable CV and have an easy first engagement with these ships. Some days later I returned in such a CV: all steel hull, proper shield, plus boosters, 5 Imperial particle beam turrets and 3 125mm rockets. So in sum: these Kiuvera did not seem to spawn in response to me attacking a POI; unless my getting close to the "Ice POI" is what actually triggered their presence and then they simply stayed around long-term. Of note here: I have returned to the sector now, as I type this response, and there are once again 4 to 6 Kiuvera cutters in the sector (this is despite me having destroyed three of them yesterday, so they have replenished). They seem to be normal space sector spawns (is "OPV" the term for that?), not SDS. Maybe they "are" SDS ships but are not functioning properly (not disappearing when the sector is empty)? Or they are OPV ships and are not functioning properly (de-spawning the way only SDS ships are supposed to). Based on your description it seems that it must be one of those two. Now comes the descriptions of what took place when I had engagements with these ships and what prompted me to make this post. Having built my low tier Combat CV I returned to fight these ships. I kited one off by itself and the Imperial turrets quickly knocked out his generator. There was second one about 7km distant but I remembered from past experiences that disabled stuff sometimes de-spawns unpredictably when you get too far away from it, I decided to risk it and try to loot/salvage it. When I got inside the core was still intact. The ship was drifting. I blasted the core. It "de-spawned" before I could put a core in it. I say "de-spawned" because there WAS a strange animation / particle effect when it disappeared, something like the one that is used for ship warping. Maybe it didn't de-spawn but actually warped away as you describe for SDS ships? I repeated this process for two more of them, and managed to get my core placed on the 2nd and 3rd ones before they de-spawned. In one case the game crashed and when I relogged the ship was just gone. Based on your description, it sounds like the intended design is reasonable. The only ships that are supposed to be effectively impossible to loot are the ones which respond in defense to space station attacks, the "SDS" ships; not a bad design, and probably necessary to prevent "farming" of them, not to mention large junkyards of such ships piling up in sectors. I take some issue with the what you describe as the intended settings for the OPV freighters, but given those ships are of fairly low value it is not a huge issue; nonetheless, I will explain my objection. To me, timers of anything less than 30 minutes are an insult, and setting the OPV freighters to "an unreliable 5 minutes" is an inappropriate setting for a game like Empyrion. Empyrion is not an arcade game. It is an open-world, crafting/construction, sand-box. My preference would be that Eleon changed their source code so that the absolute MINIMUM timer for any entity which was intended to be lootable was 30 minutes. Based on conversations with other players, I know I am not alone in this opinion. The only people I've ever encountered who defend these sorts of short "de-spawn timers" are people who seem to think that a default minimum of 5 minutes is going to have a substantial impact on server performance compared to 30 minutes. That may be the case; but based on what I know about data structures, I doubt it is likely to be detectable outside of enormous battle scenes, and my prompts that empirical evidence be sought to establish what "reasonable" minimum de-spawn times should be have seemingly been ignored or dismissed. In any event, if it is only the Freighters that de-spawn in a brief time window, and everything else (except the SDS) ships are "INTENDED" to be persistent enough to allow total exploitation of the wreck, then the intended design is not one I can complain about, more than I have. But it sounds like something is not working as intended. There are ships behaving like normal space sector ships ("OPV?") in their passive behavior, persistent presence, and respawn pattern. But when disabled, and efforts are made to exploit the wreck, they de-spawn as if they wers SDS ships.
Those sound like space defense ships. They warp out if they are disarmed and self destruct if they are disabled.
These ships are seemingly always present in the sector. Warp out, warp back in: still there. Kill two, warp out. Come back a day later, total count restored to 5. Maybe they are SDS ships, but are SDS ships supposed to function like that?
I'm confused, because Vermillion said just above there that "SDS ships, which are summoned by space POI when you attack it. Those will warp away if you remove all their weapons; or self-destruct if cored. They only appear in response to a space POI of the same faction being attacked by the player." He did not say it explicitly but, the gist of his response to my original post is that, these ships do not regenerate unless a POI is attacked by a player. Correct me if I'm wrong but, my understanding is: OPV ships: can be looted, are always present in their sector (depending on seed I suppose), will eventually regen (depending on session/server settings). SDS ships, which cannot be looted and are basically a "waste of time" seemingly intended to make attacking POIs more of annoyance, are presumably only supposed to appear in a sector if a player attacks a space POI, as Vermillion indicated. If SDS ships are always present, or stay permanently once they are spawned in (by whatever means), or regen when they are destroyed, then I am back to the state of my original post which is to protest the game mechanic for being a very poorly conceived one.
OPVs are supposed to regen, but they do not. More or less, yeah. Intended to make a completely static space POI more of a challenge, a POI which is easily overwhelmed with player CV turrets.
This system would work a lot better if the SDS ships that 'responded to the threat' were randomized. Maybe you get lucky and no SDS ships respond at all or maybe you get REALLY unlucky and a 3 dreadnaughts show up. The uncertainty would add a level of danger to attacking perceived soft targets. It wouldn't be that hard to dynamically populate a list of SDS ships with a weighted average base on the type, difficulty, and playfield of the POI calling for help, then just grab one at random.
That's uhh... exactly how it works. There's a chance that the POI won't call for help. If it does call for help: Based on playfield level/difficulty it uses a points system to calculate what ship/ships/space drones (from a list) are summoned and in how many waves (if there's too many points for a group's summon limit). More points will mean stronger ships; though you can also get a single strong ship instead of 3 weaklings. For vanilla, it includes space drones and each entry for that faction's normal OPVs. For reforged, it includes space drones and a custom set of SDS-only OPVs with steel hulls, T1 weapons and weak shields.
