Enemies jumping away on Hard AE

[Bloody_Lemon]

This thing was bugging me for a while, I'd like to know if there are people with matching experience as me.

After AE release I play solely on Hard and noticed that the amount of ships that jump away before I can disable them in one way or another is substantially higher than my previous runs on Normal in the original version. So I was wondering - is it common AE thing or Hard mode or boost or simply better engines on Hard mode.

To me this change feels hugely annoying on Hard mode where the scrap rewards are already lowered and it feels like the game is punishing you further if you have invested in defensive capabilities more.

Any thoughts?

[cretin]

i dont play stealth so much (so no scanners in early sectors) and only 14 games in hard/ae now but i think its the engines yea.. but since i noticed that i focused all non-boarding ships on cockpit disabling, since they dodge too much to reliably disable them, often using hacking for it now

[project_mercy]

It's a combination of things.

• Their base evade is higher, so you miss more, making it more difficult to disable.
• They generally have slightly better systems (like engines), so they charge faster.
• Your reduction in scrap generally means you're down in weapons from normal.
• The NPC rigger ships now have more defensive drone options (shield+ drone, anti-combat drone, etc) which are overly cheap (which means they get stacked) and are prone to being very defensively minded. These are regularly also the rebel ships that instantly attempt to flee.

You can somewhat compensate by MC or hacking. If you hack the engines you can stop the charge. If you MC the pilot, you may be able to stop him jumping. But yes, it's a bit harder. If the ship is about to jump, and your engines are charged, just jump. You won't get the scrap, but you'll save yourself the double jump (if it was a rebel ship).

Me. I attempt to avoid rebel sectors on Hard. I personally just find the Rebel and Engi riggers to be unsatisfying encounters in AE. They're either complete cakewalks or total frustrating blast fests where you end up getting bored and jumping away.

[Twinge]

AFAIK, enemy FTL charge is all timer based and is not dependent on their Engines level. This can be quite a long time (e.g. no-fuel fights, where the FTL is charging to avoid stalemates) or very short.

In Hard Mode, one very important difference is the rate the enemy FTL charges when they're running away from a fight. It feels roughly twice as fast as it was in Normal; I'm not sure if other FTL charges have been sped up or just when they're running away. This means it's often important to tag their Piloting before they're too hurt to ensure they don't get away.

[RAD-82]

I've noticed a change in the AI where they actually send extra crew to repair damage faster rather than just leave the pilot to do it on their own.

[stvip]

To me it seems the enemy gets a partial FTL charge with time, such that the rate is still slow (but probably faster on Hard than Normal) for enemies who attempt to jump immediately, but much faster for those who have been fighting for a while. The game does track something called "Stalemate Timer" (accidently sending the output to the console on Linux), and I'm guessing this is related.

[shadowcrust]

I was playing the Osprey with level 1 artillery beam, which takes 50 seconds to charge. Met a rebel foward scout, which immediately started charging the FTL drive. Most parts of the fight, the scout's cockpit was red, but for some seconds it was repaired to orange and *exactly* at the point where the artillery beam was fully charged, the scout jumped away - the beam even made a line on the now empty enemy ship screen, but didn't prevent the ship from jumping.

Based on this, I agree with Twinge that the (immediately) fleeing enemy has a fixed time before it jumps, regardless how long their FTL drive had time to actually charge. I don't know if this is the same for enemies deciding to jump out of a bad fight, but I think they jump away quite a bit sooner than 50 seconds.

[RAD-82]

Most rebel ships that flee have a 40 second timer.

No fuel events appear to have 80 second timers.

Not all ships have timers. I believe those ships actually use their engines.

I have no idea if Hard actually alters these times.

[shadowcrust]

Now that you mention the 40 seconds, it could be that I already had upgraded my artillery beam (have done so pretty early), which would corroborate your measurements. I guess I should write down these observations instead of posting from memory...

[TomHiddleston]

It seems like this is actually a common phenomenon on the Hard Difficulty setting in the Enhanced Editiontime card calculator