Ravien

They are a hazard and lower difficulties will spawn them closer to the core. I think they help add some much needed progression and danger to the world. It only takes about 10,000 titanium and 50,000 credits to get them to stop hunting you in naonite territory. You can also dodge torpedoes or shoot them down with PDCs.

Had this happen a lot when using the "change sector" command to jump between my ships in different sectors.

That's actually kind of funny. ;D

That is correct. In defensive mode, your turrets will target torpedoes and fighters that are in their firing arc as priority. They will fire on torpedoes even if they are out of range (which is smart). If there's no torpedoes or fighters in their firing arc, then they will fire on enemy ships that are in range just like auto fire mode. You can still set turrets to regular auto fire or manual mode, like before. You can see it in action in the video I posted above.

Yup. They're just for flavor, for now. You can fight them though.

Yup. Mining lasers created before will be broken.

Damage is how fast it will break the rock. Efficiency is how much of the ore you'll actually obtain. As an example, let's say an asteroid has 1000 iron ore. If you completely mine it out with a mining laser that has an efficiency of 50, you will only get 50% of the iron. So 500 iron. If you mine it out with a mining laser that only has an efficiency of 25,you'll only get 25% of the iron. So 250 iron. If you use a mining laser with a higher damage, you can mine out the asteroid faster.

By early game in my original message, i meant just leaving the starting sector. Tough to use point defense with 0 credits, a few thousand iron, and no components or weapons other than the starting pair of chainguns and mining lasers. Perhaps point defense should be the default weapon. You should not be facing torpedo enemies near the starting sector. You can easily mine and find enough materials and credits to purchase some point defense. They only cost about 20k each.

They are called tractor beam upgrades now.

In late game I don't think their damage would scale as well, so you do sacrifice raw damage to use them most likely.

Awesome! Thank you!

Awesome changes!

Thanks everyone! Glad you liked the video. :D Type the following command into chat and you'll get a new button in the upper right you can click on and use all kinds of debug and admin commands. The "guns guns guns" command under the player tab will give you a random assortment of turrets of the tech level of your current sector. Note that you'll need to type that command in every time you log into the game or you enter a new ship. I suggest copy-pasting it for convenience. /run Entity():addScript("lib/entitydbg.lua")

Not too long. You can see the fighters gradually being destroyed, probably one every few seconds on average. No idea. Did not test it! I don't know what the max damage is, but the torpedoes I showed in the video were from an equipment dock I think about 150-200 from the core. They can do considerable damage even at that stage of the game. Torpedoes take 4 seconds to reload.

I made a video showing off some of the features of the upcoming combat update. First time making this type of video so don't expect anything super professional.

I made a video previewing some of what's coming in this update. My first time making a video of this style but it was fun. Hope someone enjoys it.

A dev (or mod?) mentioned that better faction warfare/claiming territories is in the works. Obviously nothing is certain but it's probably not too many major updates away.

I think persecutors shouldn't spawn in a sector where you have a ship powerful enough to prevent them from spawning, even if you yourself are piloting a drone or weaker ship. I hope this is fixed.

Were these persecutor pirates that spawned on you giving you a message to the effect of "Ah HAH! We found your weak little ship! Prepare to die, weakling!"? If so, that means you were still too close to the core. I found that with an extremely weak ship, if I go into territory that has more titanium asteroids than iron asteroids, I've gone too far. Anyway, yes, dodge them to give you a chance to jump out, or equip your ship with like 4 PDCs and they should be able to take out most torpedoes, giving you a chance to jump out. Insane difficulty is, sadly, not quite tuned for the early game. It gives a flat modifier to enemy ships everywhere in the galaxy, instead of tuning early game ships to be easier while late game ships to be harder. This is probably a problem with overall difficulty in general and not specific to torpedoes. Try to take on a pirate 1v1 head on and you'll get destroyed even without them using torpedoes.

Sometimes larger turrets do not fire larger projectiles. It would be awesome if for example capital size plasma cannons fired larger plasma bolts. Thank you for the update, loving it so far!

Are you playing on the beta branch? A new "search and rescue" event was added. Maybe that is it. Check your mission log, anything there?

PDCs work very well but you have to put a few of them on and don't turn your ship quickly otherwise they won't track well. I suggest full coverage. Testing in creative, 12 PDCs spread out over the ship were able to shoot down all torpedoes except ones that had wild trajectories.

Hopefully!

Equip more PDCs (Point Defense Chainguns). You'll probably want ~8 on a larger ship, but I'm just guessing here. Set all PDCs to the new defensive mode. They will automatically prioritize incoming torpedoes. When a torpedo is incoming, try to steady your ship so your PDCs can aim at the incoming torpedoes easier. PDCs have a high turn speed but it's not instant. They will have trouble tracking torpedoes if your ship is turning. With that said, I don't think that a torpedo should be able to one shot a ship with 4.5 million hull through shields, even on the highest difficulty. It's possible that particular pirate ship had some really lucky scaling on its torpedoes. Leave your feedback on this in the beta forum so it can get sorted out. :)

Some very good suggestions there.