So you attack (got attacked by) the toughest ship in the game with a starter multi role cv? Maybe try a dedicated combat ship. Seems you are just salty as you were not paying attention to the playfield and got wrecked. I understand you said you were just minding your own business but these ships do not just appear, they have regular(ish) flight paths. They do not just appear out of nowhere. Also, it is not like you got attacked with no chance to respond soon as you got into the playfield (not that you mentioned that exact case) as you were NOT in your pilot seat. Sounds like a case where you did not pay attention to the ships on the playfield and got ganked. I personally have fought these with a C9 ship with no aux and no quantums and killed them. At least 4 times. These ships are very easy (although time consuming) once you play the game enough and study how the ships fight and where the weal points are.
You have to understand the context of what you're doing. You're in an uncharted (by us) galaxy full of various races, species, and factions that we know nothing about. That's the context of a new player. You go out exploring and you tread lightly because you have no clue what any ship or POI is capable of. It wouldn't be much for survival if everything was curated and tailor made so you only ever encounter something you're already prepared to fight. I'm aware I've complained myself about difficulty spikes in this game. But I've since come to the conclusion that it's pretty on point for the context I detailed above. You picked that ship because you like the features, but those features aren't what you need. Or you aren't playing like you ought to when flying a ship like that. You've taken a loss, now use this experience so you don't lose any more to the same thing. What can you do different to prevent this? - Check detector frequently, especially when warping in blindly to a new location. - Upgrade to a T2 shield. - run away when the enemy ship completely dwarfs yours (seriously, the Tianlong is massive anyone can see that) - maybe sneak in and find a safe area to park your explorer, then go clear out the dangerous stuff with a proper combat ship.
This happened to me as well. I had taken down several other ships in the sector and was in the process of looting one of them and one of these nasty things showed up and tore my vessel apart before I could even get out of the ship I was looting. By the time I made it back on board my own ship, it had been blown out and the core destroyed. It's a CV of my own making that isn't on the Workshop yet but I don't think I built something so pathetically weak. IMO the Tianlong is simply grossly overpowered. And since people appear to be asking the question - I was playing my encounter out in vanilla.
The Zirax attack Terrans on sight with whatever sees them. It isn't a matter of being fair or open minded, the fact is that all patrol vessels move in fixed patterns relatively slowly. Once you've sighted then, they remain on your map and you can track their motion. Whenever you come into a new system you need to survey it if you don't want to get bit this way- it's happened to pretty much everyone at some point or another. If it feels unfair, give yourself admin privileges and use the m command so that you know where everything on the map is from the beginning or ents to see a list of everything on the playfield. Many people have already pointed out that this ship can be killed if you're in the right CV with the right weapons and you're willing to run away occasionally; it's not OP, it's challenging. Personally, I don't harass patrol vessels and am paranoid about them killing me just this way- as they have in the past. It always happens when I let my guard down ... isn't that what happened here? Didn't you guys let your guard down? Would you have stuck around if you saw it coming? How is this any different than getting bitten by spiders while you drill out an ore deposit with your drone?
No. Given that my experience was the first time I'd ever even heard of the thing, I wouldn't have known whether or not I needed to rush back aboard my own CV, or that my CV would stand no chance of fending it off until I could get back and run. I can hit F5 to drop the drone and kill the spiders and go back to what I was doing without much of a problem. This patrol vessel afforded no such opportunity. Which I think is the main issue. It was introduced into the game with little if any fanfare and is beyond the usual power level of the rest of the ships the game can throw at you. So it would be more equivalent to drone mining on Akua and suddenly being set on by 10 overseers that came out of nowhere.
Except that you can see those overseers from 8+km away on your detector, and they move at half your speed, and they will run away from you as much as they run towards you, and there's only one really powerful one, and it's really really big, and it likes to crash into asteroids. That gives you almost 2 minutes of warning before it would even come within render range assuming you're using a detector with only a 8km scan range. Pretty sure CV detectors have a much longer scan range than 8km in space.
Aren't Overseers the big, 2-block tall Legacy spider-centaur dudes that usually show up deep inside Legacy bases? https://empyrion.fandom.com/wiki/Overseer I didn't know ground mobs showed up on radar, much less at 8km out. Never seen one floating in space or crashing into asteroids tbh. Or is there also an OPV called the Overseer? Edit: Never mind, I guess you're making an analogy here. Edit2: Thinking about it, it would be actually extremely cool to have an on-foot short-range radar that shows enemy troops and creatures and stuff. Maybe as a hand-held device of some sort?
Overseers as in the Legacy creatures. Obviously you can't see those or anything else walking on land from 8km away. Remember, my analogy is that you're drone mining underground. You'd never see something on the surface coming that way and I think it's a pretty apt comparison with the Tianlong coming up on you out of nowhere while you're away from your ship looting your other kill. The main point I'm trying to get at here though is that even if I had seen it coming, I wouldn't have had any reasonable way to know what a "Tianlong" was when it had just been introduced to the game. Yes, exactly. The legacy guys on the ground. And to be clear, I have in fact been ganked by overseers while drone mining underground, but I was still able to respond to that by disengaging the drone, jumping into my ship, and turning the tables on them. With the Tianlong patrol vessel, no such opportunity was afforded once it showed up in range. The attack strength of the ship tore my shields down in too little time to even attempt a response. It would have been different had I gone chasing after it while in my CV. I'd at least be able to run away from that.
As I understand it, I think the point they're driving at is that it is up to the player to maintain a vigilant watch for approaching OPVs by pinging the radar every two minutes or so. Ideally, you can spot any enemy ship before it gets into attack range. You can spot them at 8km, but they can't shoot you til about 2km. So that should be 6km of breathing space between radar contact and being fired upon. What I understand is, they are saying that if it does get close enough to attack, then that's on you for not being aware of it until that point. Seems a bit callous, but I get their point. Personally, I remain wary of any potentially hostile ship, especially ones I have not seen before. Seeing any sort of hostile approach should prompt the player to ping the radar, and figure out what it is. And if it's not a ship you recognize as being able to defeat, then you should be prepared to flee from it. Personally I'm never too far from my command seat and ready to flee at a moments notice, so your mileage may vary on that tactic. I guess the safest bet is to assume that any enemy ship can kill you, and you need to be ready to run when they appear. Which I understand is often easier said than done, especially when one is in the midst of looting another ship, for example.
My point was the analogy needs to take into account scanning. Your average weapon range on planets might be about 100 meters, so for the analogy to be accurate, you should be able to see those overseers coming from 800 meters away if you ping your detector in between drone mining, far outside the range they are a threat. As for players not knowing how dangerous a Tianlong is, I mean besides the fact it's the size of a dreadnought and covered in turrets, I am not sure how the game could communicate to players that it's a threat. Ideally level would, but level doesn't mean anything anyway for ship to ship combat and has no bearing at all.
Granted they didn't do a full blown announcement of the Tianlong but I wouldn't say 'little if any'. It's a ship that has been in the game for 2 years, it's not a new one DEV BLOG - Announcement: Version 1.5 + brief prospect of 2021 | Empyrion – Galactic Survival - Community Forums (empyriononline.com) It's also worth noting that there are more ships out there with a similar strength. Now the values I've entered are the attack values that are a good guilde line for OPVs, but it doesn't provide the overall picture of them. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. Tovera: 13.7K Tesch Resetter 12.7K RFS Berserker 13.9K ARC Mantaray Drone 12K Titan - 19.6K Eradicator - 26.2K Tianlong - 20.5K
If an entirely unknown ship is approaching you should be wary. That's just what it's like being out in space. If there's no faction tag and the name is red, it's hostile. (Warlord faction, which is the default always-hostile faction.) You were out of your ship looting. That's letting your guard down. See below, you can detect ships from very long distances. Yes, vanilla is 24km. Off topic, but the eradicator is stupid easy and that number means nothing in this case. Unless I'm completely mistaken, the eradicator only has four plasma turrets, only two of which can hit you at any given time. Everything else is lasers, so if you have any decent hull armor, you'll barely get scratched unless you really want to spend the entire fight picking off all the turrets. For a ship that carries so many ultra loot boxes and an advanced core... it's basically free loot as long as your ship has manual rockets.
Which is why i said it doesn't provide the overall picture My point was the Tianlong is not in a class of it's own, there are similar ships out there. Have the wrong type of ship go against the Eradicator or perhaps you don't know how best to go up against those kinds of ships and you'll suffer a similar fate.
I think we're seeing a clear case of selection bias here. I'm pretty sure all of us have at some point been wiped out by an OPV during some playthrough. The last time I ran into a similar situation my starter CV got reduced to a starter windshield by one of Escarli's Tresari monsters. I quit the game for three days. But I came back, because at some point I accepted that space was unfriendly and recovering from unexpected large setbacks is part of the fun. But nobody that had that same situation and said "Eff this game!" and uninstalled it is here talking about it. So yeah, we should be having a discussion about if sectors of space should be categorized by their potential threat level so that players can make informed decisions for the level of risk they want to take, or if we want space to remain a dice roll.
Not trying to be callous (reasonable people come to different conclusions) but I've been bit by overseers while drone mining Zascosium - working with the drone means you can jump back into your poverty SV to cool down without needing to run back up a hole filled with lava. The game does what it does and we can pound sand or adapt- in my experience accepting that makes the game more fun. It's still the best $10 I ever spent in a Steam sale and these guys keep dropping new code & content- that's pretty cool and, in my experience, unique. The patrol vessels are a form of grinding CV predator ... they're designed to kill ships and the player dying is incidental. If they were all risk-free encounters any given one is only a challenge once or twice. The unlimited ammo and ignore block limit ships are a handicap to continue to challenge players who are able to adapt/learn from the whole dying and loosing everything thing. If the AI for these things gets better I'm all for rebalancing to make it so humans stand a chance, right now you can kill 'em if you spend enough time at it. You only need to take the hit from not paying attention to the PVs to learn why you need to pay attention to the PVs The underlying info of what the dice can roll up for you is in the playfield yaml ... having a helper app or cheat sheet generator might be a good idea, but at some level you have to wonder why the Zirax have decided to publish their fleet movements- that serious chutzpah!
Monsters lol the syphon doesn't have a shield which is as it should be and the glaze has a rather exposed core
tian long is a endgame battleship around 150 vanilla turret ..... unless you can hide from it's turret behind a rock.... you'll need a end game battelship to kill it ... and i advise you to take a pvp endgame warship from workshop for that, not a pve ship from the starter bp. npc ship are dumb, they dont have any IA, they just move forward randomely ... they cant dodge, cant turn to face you, be smarter and find their weakest angle .... then stay here and destroy it. the tianlong have a angle where there is less turret that can shoot you, but still lot of it.
I did, twice. Sometimes you gotta rage quit a few times. I'm not trying to be an ass to the guy. I get it. I've been where he's at plenty of times. What I've said aims to be objective and helpful. If it sounds rude and uncaring, oops. I'm nicer about blowing up player's ships than the Tianlong, I can claim that much. lol
