I am liking the current alien behavior in my test game that I'm doing on the beta server. When set to aggressive, the aliens truly are aggressive.

I had SD surrounded with an Alien Trader sitting over dock in a loaded MC. What does he do? He takes out a sector next to SD and replaces my single fig with 1400 something of his figs. That's right - over 1400 offensive figs. He goes back to dock and sits for a minute. Then hits another sector I had figged next to SD and lays 600 more figs and then returns to dock. With his MC depleted of figs, it was easy for me to kill him as I only had 250 figs on my CFS (I was just starting out in the game, which is 5 days old).

Had I let the alien live, I'm sure he would have had SD surrounded himself. I am liking the fact that aliens can hit players figs in open space and replace their figs with their own.. In the current public version, the only time they deploy figs would be in their own homespace.

Also, I no longer get spammed by aliens/Ferrengi entering sector and retreating without hitting figs with one exception - if the align/Ferrengi do not have any figs on their ship, they will retreat. But instead of finding another way around, they will go back into the sector and retreat again. The shields on their ship prevents them from surrendering their ship when doing a retreat in a fig-less ship. I would love to see what happens if an alien/Ferrengi tried to retreat from a fig sector without any figs/shields on him. If a player did that, he's likely to be podded in "Surrendering the ship". As for the Alien in a fig-less ship, he truly should find another way around rather than run into my fig again. Maybe that can be looked at.

Overall, I'm glad to see Gold Aliens finally are becoming more aggressive and more active outside of their homespace. I'll do some more testing with the aliens and report my findings later.

Oh, the one thing I did notice is destroying a port with an Alien still on it. I would see an alien dock at a port, so I would blow it with the Alien still on it. Somehow he re-appears in sector after the port is blown. I don't even get a "Alien Trader lifts off from Port" prompt or something like that. He just appeared. Should the alien be blown up along with the port like a player would be?

If an Alien has no figs left I wanna be able to tow him around Like I would with a trader.

My pet feragie

I didn't think of that. I HAVE encountered aliens with no figs several times, mainly from them attacking me and running out of figs as a result. But I doubt you can tow one - lol. Too funny.

Thanks for the updates on current Alien behaviors. Some of that is unexpected, so I'll work on it. Aliens should not be returning to a sector unless there's something substantial that the alien can achieve by doing so. If the alien has zero figs, after he retreats, he should not reenter the sector. I'll try to reproduce that and see what's happening there.

That's a total oversight on blowing a port under an alien. I'll have to look to see if you can blow a planet under an alien. Should be able to do both.

I'm pretty sure there is no special handling of a defenseless alien retreating. I'll look at making that more consistent with player logic.

I think the idea of towing aliens sounds cool, but it might be pretty tricky programmatically. Unless it's trivial, I don't think it's worth doing.

Don't worry about towing an alien...Kewlie was just kidding around there - lol.

Anyways, thanks for looking into blowing ports out from under aliens. It can be helpful if the alien has me out-figged 2 to 1 and I need to kill him so I can get past him. So blowing a port from under him would be a cheap way to do it, especially if the port is not upgraded.

You should also look into how many figs an alien deploys. If I lay one fig and he takes it out and lays 1400 figs of his own, I think that is a bit of overkill. Think about how many sectors that can have single figs and with that kind of fig deploying behavior, an alien's ship will be depleted of figs in no time if he lays like 500-1000 at a time. With the exception of their homespace area, I don't think they should deploy any more than 100 figs per sector.

I was surprised by the number of figs being deployed. It was more than I intended. I actually did want fairly large groups, since the goal is to do damage and not to control sectors (currently they have no AI to benefit from territory control beyond Homespace), but I didn't intend for the alien to deplete its own fighters. There should be balance there. That needs a bit of work.

Yes, it does. Let me know when the next build is on the beta server and I'll post back on how they deploy the figs. I'll continue testing and post any other reports I come across.