Skilled NPCs OXP

The pirates and bounty hunters of the spacelanes can easily challenge an inexperienced commander. But once you're climbing the Elite Rankings and buying that iron ass, you might find them starting to get a little too easy. This OXP improves their combat skills so that you don't get too overconfident.

Download

For Oolite 1.77, download Skilled NPCs 1.1 and install in the usual way.

For Oolite 1.79 or later, download Skilled NPCs 1.2 and place the OXZ in your AddOns folder.

Difficulty

You won't necessarily need a full iron-ass to deal with the new pilots - but you will need to know how to fly your ship. Still, without basic combat equipment such as ECM, beam lasers, and injectors you'll find it even harder to survive than normal. Even a fully-equipped ship won't keep you alive in the worst Anarchy systems, unless you earned that Elite Ranking.

Configuration

In its default configuration, this OXP replaces some but not all of the pilots with trained pilots at various levels of skill. The best will probably be as good as a Competent or even Dangerous player, and there'll be more than one of them. If they're still not tough enough for you, the difficulty can be increased on a sliding scale from 0 to 10 (0 is the default and still a noticeable change). This can be done either by editing the OXP script directly, or by using OXPConfig (2.2.4 or later). Each step up will give a significant increase in difficulty - by step 10, all pilots will be as skilled as Oolite can make them.

Compatibility with other OXPs

Only ships with a standard role ("police", "trader", "hunter", "pirate", "escort", "thargoid", etc.) will be upgraded. Ships added by OXPs with a different role will not be upgraded unless this setting is modified by the player, and ships given a trained pilot by a different OXP will not have their pilot replaced here.

You can set a "skilled_npc_role" property in script_info, and the value of this property will be used instead of the ship's role to decide what accuracy boosts to apply (therefore, in general it should be a standard role). If set to "off", Skilled NPCs will never change the ship's accuracy, regardless of the selected configuration.

In version 1.2 or later, only ships with auto_weapons set will ever have their accuracy changed.

Quick Facts

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Version	Released	License	Features	Category	Author(s)	Feedback
1.2	2014-04-12	CC-BY-SA 3.0	Mechanics	Mechanics OXPs	cim	Bulletin Board thread