Pirate Upper/Universe Limits

I haven't had it crash my system yet, but I do run a fairly big rig. Probably in multiplayer it should be limited.

I don't think it should be limited (except for "hard" engine limits) in single player. Just ruins a lot of potential fun. Calling down thousands of pirates is pretty amusing.

I'm torn on this one. On the one hand, it is extremely damning if another player calls down a massive pirate fleet on your homeworld. Even with a fully decked out starbase, it would eventually succumb to a large enough pirate horde. And that's assuming the game will still run after you make the call.

On the other hand, it's fun that it's so damning. In single player I like to abuse it. At least don't take away the ability for us to mod it so that we can abuse it some more.

If somebody has 200,000 credits just "lying around", then they've already won the match. Either you(generic you, ie, this person's opponent) are BM for not surrendering, in which case "just punishment" comes to mind, or they're BM and regardless of how and what you nerf they'll find a way to ruin your experience some other way.

Honestly, I think this is a non-issue.

I completely agree with Will the Great.  200,000 credits is a lot, and if you have that much then you can support a fleet that will win anyway.  But frankly, caping the limit would be a lame move.  It might be ok, however, to make it a game option, "Max Pirate Fleet Size".  Then have the options be "Small" "Medium" "Large" "Massive" "Unlimited".  This way people with bad computers can stop complaining if their game gets dominated by pirates.

Or option number two is that a fleet of this size doesn't rest until either they are all dead or they've destroyed every planet in the star system.  This way the fleet would eventually get widdled away to nothing or it would force everybody into conflict to defend themselves from a monstrous force (making the game much more interesting).

that does seem interesting..... having to ally with your next door neighbor who you have been trading blows with all game JUST to fend off the pirates.

yeah that would be funny

One thin ive noticed though with pirate raids

They all seem to stop at attacking the first planet they come to, they dont trash it and move on like you'd expect

As an alternate, perhaps being able to send new pirate missions sooner (eg Double cost if it's at half the normal time)  by paying a premium there might be a way of compromising so it's less likely to crash, but can still put all that extra money to good use.

My rig is nothing to scoff at in terms of performance.  I may have worded it incorrectly since I finished so late last night - it wasn't necessarily a crash, it was more of a hang followed by non-response/praying I hit CRTL+ALT+DELETE properly.

Either this is a desync issue with large numbers of pirate ships at any one time or due to pirates in multiple galaxies continuing to multiply and not get rid of themselves.  Or it's simply a fact that a "fleet of that magnitude" (if I may borrow the term) simply is a performance hog as it's spawned all at once.  It could also be a crash for any various reason.

I'd hate to argue for a hard cap, but it's quite easy to amass a very large fortune as TEC (logistics upgrade) with multiple trade ports and star bases in every sector raking in the credits.  Paying off the pirates to hit a target (3 per 15 minute raid) has actually made me less likely to engage in certain border clashes as it's often times cheaper to use them.  Top it off with dropping 3-4 star bases in a sun all with max level trade ports and it makes it even easier.

All I'm really getting at - This system might need a tad bit of touch up before release next month.

Well, it would really help performance wise if they enabled Sins to take advantage of multiple cpu's.  The game would not slow to a trickle on large maps.

you mean it doesnt already? Strange

Sins is multithreaded, but the process limits execution to only one core.  If you have another core, then it will run texture loading on that core.  However, late game you'll see 100% effort on core 1 and basically 1% effort on core 2.  I suspect they designed the game this way because it should work with all cpu architectures and because programming for multiple processors is difficult when different teams of threads depend on information that they are computing.  If not handled correctly, this can lead to what is called a race condition....

Anyway, Lots of pirates = lots of fun/lots of panic.  I am all for it!

I think that whenever a pirate raid wipes a gravwell clean, if it has enough vessels it should jump to a random neighbor gravwell to attack it, maybe having the original target with a greater chance of being picked. The more gravwells are attacked in a row, the greater the chance of attacking just anyone should grow.

Or option number two is that a fleet of this size doesn't rest until either they are all dead or they've destroyed every planet in the star system.  This way the fleet would eventually get widdled away to nothing or it would force everybody into conflict to defend themselves from a monstrous force (making the game much more interesting).

That  would be awesome. Opening pandora's box as they say

yeah

It's NOT MULTICORE? WTF!?

Well, if the problem is summoning thousands of pirates such that it cripples machines, perhaps bounties at such a level should hire capitals or extra-strong capitals (stats scaled by 3x or whatnot). Reduces the unit spam, but can keep the same oomph.

About the multicore, it's been brought up a lot over the years. This dead horse has been beaten. The answer that we have is that the game is bottlenecked at the RAM, not the CPU. Scaling it to more than one core means a significant redesign, which doesn't fit into the 10$ a pop budget of the mini-expansion.

Dead horse or not. It needs done. If Sins II (provided its coming sometime) is going to be purchased by me, it damned well better have multi-core support. Chances are I could run this game just as well on a 3.0ghz P4 3.5gb ddr2 3200 NVIDIA 7650GT WinXP system as it's running on my W7 64bit 8gb ddr2 6400 striped raid 7200rpm/32mbcache sata drives with a 9800GT w/ 1gbddr3 and 3.0ghz 6000+ AM2 dual core proc.

That. Is. Not. Right.

Sins is not multicore becuase multicore processors were not standard (Not even for high-end gaming machines) when the engine was made.

I like the idea of massive pirate bounties bringing capitals

Perhaps, above a certain limit (perhaps 20,000) it brigns 1 capital ship for every 3000 credits? and one super-capital for every 10000 or so

That'd be nice to see pirate Kol's. I tried to do that with the map editor, but it didn't work.

And it makes PERFECT SENSE, too. I mean if another star nation is shelling out 50,000 credits for a pirate raid...

By god there needs to be some damned CAP ships in there!

lol, if you want Pirates with capital ships you need to get mods, Distant Stars is a great one.

Sins is not multicore becuase multicore processors were not standard (Not even for high-end gaming machines) when the engine was made.

Have you ever looked at the resource monitor while the game is running?  Sins is running one process while utilizing 19 some threads.  The threads are all running on the same CPU core though.  They avoided multicore support because it complicates some of the algoirthms the game uses.  When programming for multiple processors, you run into issues where threads from different cores are trying to access/write to memory in the wrong order.  If this happens, then the game would most become buggy.  Forcing single core execution is the easiest way to avoid these problems.

 

Dead horse or not. It needs done.

Yes it does.  It really should have been done for Sins in the beginning.

Hiring pirates for a proxy war is great and adds realism and fun to the game. I paid about 30,000 credits and it did look pretty crowded.  I wondered if I was nearing a cap and I guess not - I rather like the idea of capping the number of small ships at some level then adding costly caps from the buying race when it goes up more - they just dropped off the space truck, see.

I was wondering what they would do if they wiped out the grav well but haven't seen it yet - wiped out the planet, but the rescue fleet was the last ones standing.

Still missing those missions from AI players.

When the game was in production Strong Single core systems like mine with an OC'd 4.2ghz were still the gaming rigs of the day. Now my machines starting to be outdated, but I'm almost done with my core I7 machine and will be OCing her to 4+ also.

Im on the fence about the video card though, my 8800 gtx ultra is still holding its own against anything I can throw at it so I may wait for this Next generation of card to upgrade.

bah it lagged and doubleposted.