I dedicate this thread to what'sherface, the escort quest npc who didn't survive

Oh what'sherface, if only you had stayed back behind that door, and didn't run into the hoard of enemies that just happened to spawn five feet from your friend's house. Then, maybe you'd still be alive.

I still remember all those times you'd walk ahead of me and jump into spike pits, and run in front of me while I was trying to keep the enemies at a distance while I shot at them. You really didn't have any sense of self preservation. I wonder why.

Was it because you were lost for so long without your buddy? I would think then that the sight of their home so close would then instil a sense of hope, or some sort of determination to jump over all the enemies in the same spot on the ground, and run back into the safety of your friend's home.

Bit you didn't do that. Instead, you screamed 'somebody help me!' After you ran into the center of a pit of monsters. At this point, that sounds like a non-sequitur...



OK, I think I'm finished. The point is, npcs should run away from enemies, especially if they don't have weapons. A* should be enough to tell them where to jump/hide to, and barring that, there should be some obvious mechanic for telling them to stay. (There might be one, I just don't remember seeing it in game anywhere.)

Wait, is there a smart npc ai mod? There are plenty of things that could be done to the pathfinding, as well as some basic pid algorithms, or even bayesian networks, that could make the ai seem much more lifelike.

 

I know there's a mod that makes ENEMY AI smarter, but I don't think I've personally found one that handles NPCs. Although that means little; surely SOMEONE has made an NPC ai improvement...

 

This qualifies under the trope "Too Dumb to Live".

 

I'd be happy if they'd just jump over lava pits instead of happily walking through them, to be honest.

 

This. Since I walk ahead I can take care of any enemies before they touch my escort, but whenever there's poison or lava around escorts seem to make it their goal in life to kill themselves in it.

 

There is a mod out there that makes NPC's invulnerable to acid/lava etc. pits. The mod author fully acknowledges it doesn't actually solve the problem but at least they won't die stupidly.

Also, I think I've noticed Frackin Universe somewhat altering NPC's smarts......somewhat.

 

RIP in pieces what'sherface. you will be missed.







not

 

Planet with big village on one side, big glitch fortress on the other. 6 escort quests from the fortress. Zero survived. Two by deciding to teleport between me and a full volley of archers, two deciding to teleport into the swarm of monsters I'm trying to kill, and the other two somehow locked themselves on the other side of a door with a bad guy there. How did they even do that? I don't know.

...and yet it's STILL better than Hylotl escort quests.

 

this is why i stopped taking escort missions in general. the ai is just dumb. and it sucks that there's no way you can heal your escorts????????

also what's wrong with hylotl escort missions???

 

I once escorted three NPCs across a very long flesh biome, during the night. Spikes, birds, hemogoblins... I tried fighting off every threat before the stooges could reach them, but far too often they'd run up and try to get in front of me and get hurt. Still, they were alive, and I could see the town entrance on the edge of the screen. There was a poison pool between us, and I didn't want to take any chances, so I drained it.

And then, just before I managed to suck up the last dredges of the poison, all three of them jumped off the ledge, and I could only watch in disbelief as the poison sapped away the last few hitpoints they had. Bam. Three failed missions.

Ugh.

 

Oh, they never survive. They do their darnedest to kill themselves before being brought back. I'd go so far as to say there's special coding in place to make them a danger to themselves.

 

I realized after I typed that it wasn't Hylotl escort missions in general, it just happened to be the one little Hylotl house that I'd been recently running quests for that lived down near the planet's core. I hadn't been to a proper Hylotl planet yet so I didn't realize that's not how all of them were. Either way, running escorts from one side of the planet to the other is one thing, running them from one side to another side then down through the winding monster-filled tunnels to their friend's house deep underground is something else entirely.

On the bright side, the quests did get vaguely tolerable once I realized I could just bring some crew down with me (Outlaws, generally) and counter the stupid AI with equally stupid AI that also happens to have a larger health pool and the ability to defend itself. It managed to distract the billions of birds orbiting the planet's surface from the squishy vulnerable hostages long enough to dispatch them. So at least there's that.

 

>inviting crew members to help you on a mission


even with weapons and armor they somehow find a way to stand in a pool of acid and drown to death

 

They could drown in a cup of water. How's that for a drinking problem?

 

If you're trying to "farm" escort quests for crewmembers and other rewards, you can set up a teleporter network. Unless things have changed since the last time I did an escort quest, escort NPCs seem to be able to teleport with you as long you don't leave the planet itself, like beaming to your ship or another planet's teleporter bookmark. I did this when I was running escort quests from my home planet's Glitch Fortress to my base near the planet's core.

Also,

You can heal them with a staff that has the Healing Zone secondary, or stick them in a pool of healing water. You can also use the Force Cage secondary of the Ferozium Staff to protect them since you can trap them inside the cage, and it will prevent most enemies from hitting them since the cage acts like a solid wall.

 

I bypassed this problem by having 3 teleporters all on the same planet. Each one was located directly next to the spawn locations for stuff and I could just teleport between them. If you leave the planet entirely when you have an escort it can screw up the mission, but if you teleport between points on the same planet it seems to work out okay.

Also it's unfortunately just not really that simple to fix the AI on these NPCs. A lot of the systems that run NPC actions are really heady and hard to work with.