Too Many Crates [SP]

[Psychophobe]

It has been a good few months since I last played VoidExpanse, but with the news of version 0.15 I downloaded the new one and cracked into it, and was actually surprised how easily I got back into it and enjoyed it from the outset, again!

First stop - I noticed and liked a LOT of the improvements, and the conversation details, and buying fuel from traders was a nice touch.
But I have found an odd quirk that when flying around the map, I come across jumps with turrets, and the turrets have been busy taking care of various in-system and visiting pirate/hostile craft and blowing them up.

This in itself is fine, but I often find turrets with upto 6+ crates floating around them, as they've killed pirates/hostiles before I've got anywhere near that part of the star system!

EDIT:
To elaborate my reason for this to be improved- if I'm on a low level (~ <12) and find a turret with a bunch of crates, each crate has 2-3 items in it, of varying value and quality but I can easily get a ship full of trade-able items just picking them up and scavenging, I can repeat to get lots of money and almost no risk (as turrets help kill new hostiles, create more crates, etc.), some players may love this but I think it throws off the balance and inhibits exploration.
/Edit

So...

To avoid making the  (especially early) single player game too easy, could you add a condition :

1) That they don't drop crates when the craft is destroyed by a turret.

OR

2) That if killed by any non-player event (turret, collision, sunshine, etc.) that craft only have a much smaller chance of dropping a crate (10% of standard chance, or something like that)

OR

3) with any craft as the number of crates within a given radius (say 50m) increases, the chance of new crate drops from a craft death decreases, until some factor such as 10 crates within 50m of a blast means that there is a 0% chance of a new crate.   


If you have reasons not to pick a suggestion from above I'd be curious to read.

Keep up the amazing work!
Cheers!
 

[djs4000]

I definitely agree that the crates are an issue, but I'd like to see it fixed with the ai. Pirates should retreat if they are under attack by turrets and have little health (say 50%). This would also eliminate the cheesy tactic of kiting pirates to a station and then letting the turrets do most of the damage while getting in a last shot (this makes the game too easy). You could also have npc's (pirates and traders) pick up crates floating around (this could be cheated by just deleting the crate after the the grappling animation rather than adding the items to the npc's inventory).

[Psychophobe]

Yes,  I agree - the AI in the game does seem very suicidal when it comes to turrets.

And (if balanced) having ai ships pick up crates as well would be pretty cool I think, but would probably take a lot of conditioning (such as overfilling the hull and what they do with inventory stuff they can't use, etc)

[Lurler]

Good idea, OP!
We will have it put in place with the next update

[Psychophobe]

Hi Lurler
forum states: "User Lurler has blocked your private message"

but yes, you can use the quote, that's absolutely fine!