Wormholes

Every sleeper ship has a prefered enemy sig radius. The official name for the AI is "AI_ShouldUseSignatureRadius".

After doing some testing I found out that sleeper frigates (inside C3s and C4s however there's a good chance it is the same with all sleepers) ignore heavy drones. Every once in awhile a frigate would yellow-box me and go for the heavy drone, but wouldn't even shoot 1 bullet before it was back on me.

I tried using mediums inside a pulsar and the same thing happened. Mediums in a non-pulsar however got chewed up.

Just an interesting tidbit.

Wot is this?!? A post, with usable information, authored by Keith Planck??

This must be a sign. The end is nigh. Good post btw.

I don't think the algorithm is as simplistic as this to be honest. I've had Fighters attract sustained aggro (admittedly not from everything in site) when there have been fewer people on field, and I've had tiny drones instapopped by a new spawn. Other times the Sleepers couldn't care less about Fighters.

There is definitely some weight to drones attracting aggro when they are already damaged - if I pop some drones and one of them has significant armour damage you can be sure it'll attract aggro.

My guess is that sleepers prioritize fighters and fighter-bombers harder then normal drones.

What I've noticed with drones is that, in general, sleepers will only attack them (more than fleetingly) when they are first launched/engaged. That is to say, I only ever lose drones in the minute (or less even) after they are launched. The sleepers will shoot them for a little (if they even switch to begin with, which isn't always the case).

I'm personally of the opinion that sleeper aggro works on a basis of total threat where threat accumulates over time and various types of attacks on the sleepers have specific rules for threat generation. For example, say you are running a site with a carrier, some ECM support (in the form of a scorp or what have you), and some dps. In my experience, initially the scorpions will take full aggro and will keep aggro a lot of the time, but after about 5-8 minutes, the sleepers will start swapping between the carrier (who is providing RR) and the scorpion, and after about 10 or more minute, they will start swapping between the scorp, carrier, and the dps ships.

So I think that aggro may work like this. You warp into a site, everything has aggro. Certain types of module attacks, like ewar have a base amount of threat that they add when you use them, but that amount added each cycle dimishes over time as you are on grid till it hits a minimum amount. Logistics has a similar threat profile, but it has a lower base threat and lower a slower decrease as well. DPS modules have the lowest base threat but also don't have any decrease over time. When something new warps into the site, it's also maybe likely that threat either gets completely reset (I don't think so), or the new ships gets an average threat level given to it (based on the current threat levels of ships in the site) plus a certain amount (given the tendency of sleepers to shoot new ships in the site).

Then, on top of aggro, there is probably some sort of formula that is used to determine what ship the various sleeper groups will primary -- based probably on things like sig or armor amounts--i.e. if you're under 40% armor left, your threat increases for each period of time you're under that amount or something similar. (This is based on the fact that I've experienced situations where a ship will be primaried for almost the entire duration of a site if it's not tanking easily or is slowly breaking).

Now, that's just my opinion based on the experience I've had with sleeper aggro. Could be wrong, and pretty much all of my experience is from C5 WH's as well.

I'd actually be interested in seeing what happens if you're being primaried by sleepers (particularly if your tank is breaking) and then store your ship in a carrier's SMA and then reboard it once your session change is over. Will they start shooting you again or just ignore you for a while?

Sure, all I was trying to say is that while sleepers probably do base their attacks on sig size in some part, it's not the only reason and thus your post is somewhat misleading and to understand when they will attack your drones you need to understand sleeper threat.

I sorta started rambling though, I tend to do that, sorry lol.