Behavioural Inconsistencies, station-assigned Ships

[Scoob]

Hey all,

So, I'm getting a bit confused regarding what's expected behaviour for ships assigned in certain roles.

For example: I assigned some S-Class Fighters to Defend my Station. As a result, they became subordinate to the station. Nice. Initially, they patrolled around the station with the little "police light" icon showing. However, after some time, random Fighters started randomly following random Freighters (M-Class) assigned to the Station. Randomly. This irked me, so I changed the Fighters to "Protect" the Station instead. This lead to them being kicked out of the Stations Subordinate list, not as tidy, but they went back on patrol - where I needed them.

Later in the game, I have some Corvettes now. I assigned them to Defend the Station and they did just that. Unlike the fighters my two Corvette Wings have been patrolling around the Station for days without issue. They have the little "police light" Icon and they NEVER follow any of the station-assigned freighters. Perfect.

I have two Corvette wings, of three ships each patrolling around my station. Exactly what I want. I gain more Corvettes over time and I assign these into wings too and have them Defending the station as its subordinates. Checking my station just now, I notice that TWO of the Corvette Wings have wandered off, each wing having attached its self to one of the two assigned Freighters. Why they've suddenly decided to do this now is a mystery. It's also TOTALLY AND UTTERLY WASTED effort, as they're never even remotely near their target ship. Ever. Pointless.

So, why the seemingly random behaviour? I've had the same two M-Class Freighters working for my station for a couple of game days now, and suddenly the behaviour of the assigned Corvettes changes to uselessly follow these freighters. Why? I assume somewhere hidden in the code is something that wants two ships / wings protecting the station while others are allowed to be useless and hopelessly try to follow assigned freighters?

This is one of the things I really hate about X4, the behaviour that's FORCED upon us all the darn time. No, we cannot choose what wares a freighter picks, whether it buys or sells. Nor can we decide what a defending Ships duties are. It's all picked for us by an incompetent AI. Why? PLEASE PLEASE expose this functionality to the player via the UI, the game desperately needs it. Time and time again I get frustrated as the "don't worry, I'll handle all that fun for you" dumb AI removes gameplay from the player and screws things up.

Basically, my single station has gone from a nice, neat little set up with ships patrolling around it as I desire - and NEED, Xenon, Kha'ak and SCA pop in and hassle it on a regular basis - to ships randomly wandering off for zero useful reason.

If station-assigned ships attached themselves to Freighters - ideally only when explicitly ordered to - and actually stayed in formation with them properly, then that might be of some use. However, trailing along often several sectors behind. Utterly pointless.

What do people think? We need more control rather than having this plain broken AI behaviour forced upon us.

Edit: to add insult to injury, the Wings of three Corvettes don't even stick together. In one wing, the leader is pottering around the home sector, where's the two subordinate Corvettes appear to be trying to chase down one of the freighters.

Scoob.

[LegionOfOne]

All that behavior is 'normal'.
The Station Manager has various fleets of defense ships at his disposal. Single ships are like fleets.
Once he has 'enough' fleets for the Station's defense, he will start assigning the rest to protect the Station's Traders (a bit randomly, and they protect Traders from too far, true).

The best fix I found : organising the defense forces into one or two big fleets, with as many sub-fleets and sub-sub-fleets as necessary.
That way, the mega-fleets never stray far.

Then, manually assign escorts to the traders that you want to protect, if any.

Edit : and not to insist, since I already suggested the mod to you in another thread, but my Mules never get followed by station defense ships

[Scoob]

Edit : and not to insist, since I already suggested the mod to you in another thread, but my Mules never get followed by station defense ships

Good to know!

I did re-read the description of your Mules mod and, perhaps I didn't understand it fully, but can they operate as normal profit-making Freighters for a station? I currently have opportunities to sell my stations produce at very near to max consistently, but the current vanilla freighters really aren't very effective, due in part to lots of time waiting.

Edit: Prior to 2.0 my station-assigned Freighter (both S and M-Class) worked great, though any station-assigned Defence Ships still largely failed to keep up with any Freighters, needless to say.

Scoob.

[LegionOfOne]

Yes, you can use Mules to buy from NPC stations, or sell to NPC stations.

You have to be careful though : they don't care about prices or profits at all, to be able to calculate trade routes as efficiently as possible, and because they are mostly meant to handle internal supply between your stations.
So it is better when the wares you sell are made from raw resources without buying anything from NPC factions, that way the sale price is pure profit anyway .

The addition of warehouses, in the same mod, can make selling to NPC factions much easier.
Set up a warehouse to buy all the wares you want to sell.
Set the budget to 1 credit, so no regular trader (yours or NPC) will sell to this warehouse, only Mules.
You can then allow foreign trade on the station and watch NPCs come and buy.
I believe they need to 'know' your trade offers, so a warehouse near a Gate or highway is best.

You can also set up Mules to sell the wares from your warehouse to NPC stations, even if foreign trade is disallowed on the warehouse, by setting a NPC station as Target.
(In the same way, Mules can bypass trade restrictions when buying from NPC stations, although I'm not sure if that works when the station has no budget... probably takes it from your wallet.)
The money will be paid to the warehouse if it is the commander, and the money will get transfered to you automatically when the warehouse's budget is above (2x original budget), so 2 credits .

Each Mule can only target one NPC station though, so it is easier to sell mostly to NPC Shipyards, Wharfs and Trade Stations, but it can be done.
Mules can make great smugglers too, if you make illegal wares. They have a setting dedicated to it !

[Scoob]

Ok thanks. I think Mules will be very useful once I'm a little later in the game, but for now I want to ensure maximum profits you understand

Scoob.

[Scoob]

Observation regarding "Defend" behaviour...

Two Wings containing three Corvettes each sees them ONLY patrolling around the station.

Two Wings with the first wing having Six Corvettes and the Second Wing having three Corvettes sees the second wing assigned to follow stations Freighters.

So, Wings are not counted as a single unit, there size matters. I'm guessing that a single wing of SIX ships satisfies the AI requirements for station defence, as does two wings of THREE.

I will likely make a single Wing of nice Corvettes, though that offers worse coverage in the case of multiple invaders.

I still wish we could assign a Ship / Wing of ships and explicitly say what we need it to do. It might be that ZERO ships are needed to stay and protect the Station, or all of them. It should be up to the PLAYER, not an AI.

Scoob.

[LegionOfOne]

I still wish we could assign a Ship / Wing of ships and explicitly say what we need it to do.

For once I can recommend a mod that isn't mine
Try the Patrol option of the DragonCommands mod, it works great.

[Scoob]

Thanks, I appreciate the recommendation.

I've not used many mods so far as I was trying to keep a clean save for testing, however, it was getting to be a bit too much like work, so now I'm happy to use mods. Though I do maintain two game instance - easy with GoG - so I can run a vanilla game easily if needed.

Scoob.