Well, I don't know if it has become outdated or left behind, but I'd be happy to offer my ship's services - feel free to send me a tell/msg to see if I'm online!

I can't help with the experience measurement thing though...

It's not necessarily the damage so much as the fact that if you get hit once, you automatically get hit again and then die because of chair-crippling. Our tentacle-farmer was 1400 odd hp btw.

Assuming an average crew, what hull strength would you recommend to take on dragons?

This probably isn't the right place to be asking for advice, given its more about ideas for improving aetherspace. My suggestion would probably be to just try them, they're tougher than all other creatures bar tendrils, and it seems as though they aren't regularly hunted so you're not going to get an easy answer. If you can comfortably kill every other type of creature without breaking a sweat, you're probably in a good position to try dragons. If not, keep practicing.

Anyway, given that the big arena announce was made in March, I wonder if there's receptivity to another big aetherspace report in the next few months? I'm a little hopeful about the boil on Avechna... though I don't really know the details. Still, the last time something like that happened a gnome aethership had crashed into the side of the mountain, so maybe there's more aetherchanges to come!

Sure, sorry to hijack your thread.

Hull strength? Infinity+1. One of the big problems with aetherspace hunting is that ships can't tank aetherbeasts at all, because they hurt modules and hull, and just repairing the hull allows you to barely keep up with the weakest of the creatures. You want small ships, because they have the speed to move around quickly.

Personally, I think bigger ships should be made (much) faster, and aetherbeasts weakened a notch so that having a big ship actually becomes good, instead of bad.

My crew and ship are not up to tendrils (me, an experienced empath, two semi-newbie combateers, 12-room ship) but here's an example of the essence gains from some easy to middling aethercritters. I'm an elfen demigod with a harmony blessing; there were three others in the crew (no demigods).


Some comparisons, hunting under the same circumstances:


Clearly, aethercritter experience is off by almost a decimal place somewhere. It's worse than I thought.

How's the treasure for aetherhunting?

Hm. Those essence numbers for hunting aren't divided up among 4 people, are they? As I remember it, aetherspace mobs are equal experience no matter how many crewmembers you have, and you can call a whole lot of them consistently. Dividing that cave-fisher by 4 (and keep in mind you can have a larger crew) gets it down to 338 essence. Before travel-time trying to find more fishers.

You're also missing the numbers for things like dragons, it seems.

While I completely don't buy the argument that you should multiply by four because of not splitting the experience up amongst the crew (the comparison is invalid: you can't aetherhunt by yourself, but you can hunt by yourself, and when you hunt in groups in theory you should get more targets per unit time by doing so, but aetherhunting "in a group" is what you need just to get the number you're getting), even if you did, these numbers are still way too low.

I explained why there's no dragons and tendrils numbers here.

Aetherspace -used- to split experience which is why I posted on a solo swarm of gorgogs that I alone killed. I'd prefer hard base experience without blessings, but that's an awesome start, so thanks Lendren! It does look like experience was reduced by 90% or something or maybe it is splitting amongst crew members again. The swarm of gorgogs I killed was just over 800 essence and I wanna say 807, split 4 ways it would be roughly 200 each and 5 ways even less. We'll have to try varied crew size on the same creatures for more comparison data.

For me harmony is base, I always have it up. But the important thing is I have the same blessings and race in both sets of numbers, so the proportions should be the same. I agree about checking if crew size changes it; but I can't do much with fewer and can almost never get more, so it'll be hard to tell for certain.

Heh I understand harmony can be base personally, but we need to establish the actual base. Also, elfen have harmony Domoth, but Soj can just change that off for testing purposes. If you go out again and want to get the true base experience, you'll have to burn harmony blessing and ask Sojiro to switch the elfen bonus (unless you're a changeling of course).

Or just compare the prime mob xp to their offering value and make the same division.

I am a changeling, but Shiri has the idea I was trying to convey, that the point is the ratio between aethercritters and other critters. Go kill a cave-fisher and count the essence, then multiply all my numbers by (your cave-fisher value)/(my cave-fisher value) and you'll get the same numbers you'd get killing the same aethercritters.

In flying around and mapping, I notice that mob attacks work the same in reverberating a portion of module damage to every module in the ship.

I really think this penalizes large vessels, because every hit beyond the first one absorbed by the shield means that I have 10 modules to repair to get back to full operation (ie, 10 grid balances excluding healing the hull) whereas a ship with only the basic modules might only have 3-5 modules to repair.

I'd still like aetherbeasts to have a choice of attacks to use against ships, some doing hull damage, some targetting a single module, and some doing minor damage to maybe 2 modules at random. I think this would also help with some of the 'unkillable' claims for high level creatures too - it makes it a bit more feasible to try to survive one or more hard hitters if they occasionally do something other than whack down your hull strength.

Hmm, from what I've seen, sometimes they hit the hull, sometimes they hit one module hard, and sometimes they hit everything a little.

Ah, that's interesting. Maybe I've just been unlucky then... I'll have to wait until I can find people to go hunting proper with to see them in action. And you're right about not many being interested in Aetherspace - no responses to my recruitment message at all!

Edit: Sorry, you are quite right. I had a closer look at my logs:

The Aetherforest of Avaerin reels as a noxious, many-winged gruul shreds deep rents through her hull. - 640 damage
The Aetherforest of Avaerin shudders and shakes as a noxious, many-winged gruul rips apart her hull. - 320 damage
The Aetherforest of Avaerin shudders and shakes as a noxious, many-winged gruul swiftly shears through her hull. - 106 damage

My bad. (Hopefully that's a wonderful change for bashing as well!)

Edit again:

Further to this, it looks as though there is one attack which does normal hull damage, one which does double hull damage, and one which does 1/3 hull damage. Not sure about the effect on modules, but for the Ethereal plane hull damage looks like:



Very cool change!

Hmm, preliminary tests show shield modules still don't affect hull damage numbers at all. Their purpose must be solely to reduce module damage, but beyond the first hit I'm not sure how much of a difference they make.

But in terms of experience coming into the game, the comparison is still valid-- if you took a group of 5 bashing, you'd be making less based on the numbers you already posted based on fishers versus gruuls once mob-spawn-rate is taken into consideration. Which is, I think, why they made the numbers the way they did.

A group of five people who killed the same number of creatures per hour as a single member of that group would kill, and who all died simultaneously so no one could save the others if anyone died, is a group of five people who are extremely terrible at bashing. I don't think it makes sense to balance aetherspace against that standard.

But you're still wrong even basing your argument on that ridiculous analogy and that inapplicable standard. The numbers still don't work. Even multiplying by five isn't enough to make the numbers comparable based on risk (even setting aside the investment issue).