Watchtower ships not attacking?

[baneofcows]

Hey all,

I just started the mod, and have played through to the start of "The Stars Have Eyes." (Great opener, by the way.) I seem to be having the opposite issue as most w/r/t Watchtower ship aggression – that being, they don't attack at all.

Every time they've shown up after the initial encounter that starts the mod, I've been able to do fly-bys of the ship groups without getting attacked, and they haven't responded to me destroying them. I don't have any mods installed that affect space enemy AI except maybe Royal Galaxy. I do have Dynamic Universe installed as a level scaler. I've attached my plugins.txt just in case.

Just wondering if anyone else has run into this. Thanks!

 

[baneofcows]

Been investigating this further today, and it looks like what's happening is that some of the Watchtower ships don't immediately aggro. If I fire on them, they'll start up normal combat behaviors. But it means I get the first shot, which often decides the conflict before it really starts, given that I'm running an endgame ship.

Notably,

Spoiler

attacking a major hub

seems to reliably get the attention of several drones, but destroyers and other ships will still stay out of the fight until I attack them.

 

[Lostinwhere]

I've been having something similar happening. Not all the time, but quite often, Watchtower ships won't aggro until I attack them first. For example, I just destroyed one of the minor arrays linked to Upsilon. That caused a Battleship to grav jump in. However, it just sat there until I literally bumped into it. Then it decided to start moving and open fire. Vanilla enemy faction ships have been behaving the same way for a while. Sometimes they attack immediately like they should, sometimes they just sit there. The interesting thing is, we're both running three of the same mods, Darkstar Astrodynamics, Dark Universe Crossfire and Dark Universe Overtime. Here's a copy of my plugins.txt.

 

[baneofcows]

Hm. Overtime does mess with the space mission structure a bit. Maybe it changes spawn behavior?

 

[Lostinwhere]

Possibly, and Crossfire adds in many space encounters. We'll have to see if the admins spot any possible mod conflicts.

 

[twolargepepperoni]

Thank you for your reports, I will open a ticket to investigate.

Do the issues persists if one or both of the mods mentioned are disabled temporarily for testing purposes?

 

[baneofcows]

I just tested with both mods disabled, and the issue persisted. I destroyed an array and several ships jumped in, but did not attack immediately.

 

[Lostinwhere]

I did some similar testing last night. I made a save while near a minor array in the Rivera system. With all mods active, I destroyed the array and a drone and a Corvette jumped in but just sat there. Then I disabled Dark Universe Crossfire, Overtime and Darkstar Astrodynamics one at a time. Same bacic results. Whatever two to three ships jumped in, just sat there. Even when I attacked one, the other one or two wouldn't react until I attacked them. But like I said, I've also been seeing this behavior with vanilla enemy ships. Not consistently though, sometimes both Watchtower and vanilla ships aggro like I would expect them to.

 

[twolargepepperoni]

Thank you both for the information. If this is present in vanilla ships too, it could point to a possible engine bug - I have opened a ticket regardless and keep an eye out for this in case we can reproduce it or come up with a workaround. If there are noticeable reproduction steps for this, that would be appreciated too. I made note of the array hub tactic.