Enemies fly backwards while shooting

[Vorgus]

For my first char I went with freelance and I found that when I went into combat with pirates, they seemed to be able fly backwards and for the most part fly faster then me, able stay just out of visiable area of the screen so I had to use the little nav screen in the lower left to shoot while they had no problem shooting me. I was able to out run them when running away, but when trying to catch them, even with L5 engines, i couldn't unless I ran first and then turned around and went after them.

then I got a mission to get some "data" from the race in the system above and found the same problem, plus they always seem to have way more fire power plus always being out numbered at least 4 to 1. I was doing good to kill 1 ship before getting killed every try. I tried going in light on weapons hoping the game would spawn something I could kill, but not dice.

Another anoyance is what good is have a com option if every group/race is going to start shooting first, ignore your attempts to hail and then become even more enemy when you have to start shooting back or get killed,.... which seems to end up happening anyway .

For my second char I went with science and notice that you get the same max 16 cargo pods though it says freelance gets the most cargo space. Science also gets better engines, shields and armor

[Steve]

For the first two issues at least, 1.01 will feature smaller groups of ships and they will be slower.

Up till the current release, I've had the "feature" that almost all alien fleets matched your ship's speed. Originally with extremely slow projectiles it was an enormous advantage to be faster than other ships. Obviously that is no longer true.

[Steve]

I completely modified all alien ship speed calculations in 1.01. Alien fleets are no longer simply a random 10-15 as they were in every single version up to this one.

Science gets really poor weapons, freelance characters do far more damage. Limiting the cargo pods might be a good idea but first I would need some help in implementing a barter system in the alien communication system scripts, or something else that would make cargo more valuable.

If a race is simply going to shoot at you, avoid them for a while and their attitude will slowly improve until the point they will talk to you again.

[Vorgus]

If a race is simply going to shoot at you, avoid them for a while and their attitude will slowly improve until the point they will talk to you again.

Is there a simple way to tell which races will always be delt with from tactical? For example, I could see pirates as always being hostile, repeatedly trying to talk and leave when the shooting starts would be a waste of time. But I could also see cases where you have dealings with them, so always distorying them when they show up would be bad.

[Steve]

None of the races are always hostile except for the Tafel and the Pirates. The other races even if they are programmed to be hostile and to attack you will not do so until you communicate with them.

Of course after you have returned fire that race no matter who they are will always initially start firing at you when you meet them again, unless you leave them alone for long time and their attitude improves from time passing. If you run the debug version of TLC (starflighttlc-debug.exe) you can see the actual numerical value of alien attitude. When it is below 20, that is the only condition when they are instantly hostile before hailing.