This just started recently, after I began experimenting
about with some mods I noticed that for some reason when in a battle allot of
my ships just sat there not doing anything. Even if they were getting attacked
they would just sit there and not fight back. After looking into it a bit more
i noticed that it wasn’t just my ships, but every ship I encountered (militia,
pirate, enemy) just refused to auto attack anything at first.
What’s stranger is that it doesn’t last, they do auto-attack eventually about
20-30 seconds later but this delay is really annoying and has spoiled some of
my best games. This only seems to affect frigates though, my capital ships and
fighters still attack fine and since I’ve only experimented with it in a few
early-stage games I’ve not been able to see if the cruisers are affected
too.
Thinking that it was just the mods responsible for this I naturally removed
them, but the problem persisted. Eventually I even reinstalled the game and
still the problem remains. I am at a loss as to how to solve this issue, i know
it sounds like only a minor annoyance but its impact on gameplay has essentially
stopped me enjoying the game altogether. D=
I have a hypothesis on why this happens:
Based on my (very limited) understanding of how the game works and several
assumptions I think that ships pick their targets for auto-attacking by
performing a "scan" (for lack of a better word) of all ships in their
designated attack range, and based on a number of factors pick one of these
ships and make it their target. If this assumption is correct it seems
to me that this "scan" process would have a number of triggering
events, like "upon entering gravity-well" or "another ship
arrives in gravity-well" and for some reason these trigger events aren’t
being triggered, so as a fallback some kind of timer elapses that starts the
"scan" process every 30 seconds say, and that’s why these ships only
"detect" enemy ships to auto attack after a delay (waiting for the
timer to elapse). I hope I'm wrong though because if I'm right then this problem can't really be fixed. =S
