[MOD] Faction War/Economy Enhancer v5.5

[Rastuasi]

SO, is it normal behaviour of factions to not react to Xenon attacks? There is a random Xenon V Destroyer in an Antigone Sector killing all ships and attacking a station since quite a time and the 3 Destroyers in the neighouring sectors just happily stay on patrol in their own sector and dont help out. Its weird.

That's an issue with vanilla, not sure how much mods can do for that.

[Mysterial]

SO, is it normal behaviour of factions to not react to Xenon attacks? There is a random Xenon V Destroyer in an Antigone Sector killing all ships and attacking a station since quite a time and the 3 Destroyers in the neighouring sectors just happily stay on patrol in their own sector and dont help out. Its weird.

Hard to say, but if they really only have 3 destroyers flying around, then it's probably not a bug. The AI won't empty every last ship in all their sectors trying to fight. There are some left on reserve for local issues. It would be a worse problem if the AI lost its entire military defending one sector or station.

[Max Bain]

Hi, I am not 100% sure if this comes from your mod, but I guess so.
My error log is showing more than 100k of error lines and most of them look like this:

Code: Select all

[Economy_Verbose] 11195.20 #FL#;11195.198;Started;FactionGoal_Hold_Space<inst:8d9a7a>;(paranid) FactionSubgoal_Recon<inst:514de65> in: 0xf2e Empty Space (Litany of Fury IX);null;null;Empty Space;paranid;null
 
[Economy_Verbose] 11224.39 #FLS#;11224.389;DefendArea_ShipBuilt;[md.FactionGoal_Hold_Space.Start];XEN Raiding Party P;0x51074aa;EXH-765;Tharka's Cascade XV;xenon;Emperor's Pride VI 

[Economy_Verbose] 11244.26 #FL#;11244.259;Started;FactionGoal_Hold_Space<inst:105c2a>;(teladi) FactionSubgoal_DefendArea<inst:5943506> in: Company Regard 0x114f ;null;null;Company Regard;teladi;null

Is this from your mod? I think after a very long game the log will have more than a million lines and make trouble.
If its not your mod, sorry to bother you.

[Mysterial]

That happens in vanilla if logging is enabled. Possible it would be at less frequency in vanilla because the AI reacts less frequently, but they aren't my log lines. The log always grows endlessly anyway and you shouldn't have it enabled if you're just trying to play and concerned about performance. The log size shouldn't be particularly relevant, however, only the frequency. It's not like the game keeps the whole thing in memory.

[SMoOoVEeR]

I dont know if its related to this mod, but I would guess so:
Split factions seem to be incapable of claiming neutral, adjacent sectors, even though their agressivness is high and they have spare builders, lot of battleships and so on, they dont claim neutral sectors somehow. I kept a sector Xenon clean after they almost got overrun for a few days and there are trading ships and fighters patrolling but nothing is built there. ALso, weirdly, there are some L traders in the neutral sectors idling around looking for trades. Maybe there is some issue with them thinking the sector is still theirs somehow? I am cleaning out newly appearing Xenon Def stationons regularly, but they just keep appearing and are built so fast, its incredible.

[Mysterial]

I have seen that issue once before but haven't identified any cause as of yet. It's possible the AI just hasn't realized the sector is safe; it doesn't assume so just because ownership changed. If you see any obvious Split scouts it might help to escort them around. If their scouts can stay alive long enough they should update the faction's knowledge of enemy forces. If they are allied with you they should also consider your force strength, so stationing a fleet there may also improve their view. Of course, it's possible there's another reason (bugged or otherwise) but it might help.

[Max Bain]

I think you already know this, but just in case:

There are two values that might be related to their expansion. The one is BaseAgressionLevel and the other one is BaseAvariceLevel (both in factionlogic. I think the last one is more important for expansion than the first one but I havent tried them out yet.

[SMoOoVEeR]

I think split have both on a high lvl, avarice and aggression. I have a pretty strong fleet stationed in the neutral sector and there is even FRF police roaming around.
It might actually be due to the gamestart which was the Split on losing side one and FRF actually isnt kind of allowed to expand on itself but only Zy is maybe?
There are oppressorfleets of Zyarth coming in as I am saving the pathway to the FRF sectors atm.
However, even more strangeley, Zy is now building new factories in a Xenon sector next to the neutral sector at FRF, there are 1 neutral, 1 Tel, 1 Xen sector between this sector and Zy main sectors in which Zy started to built.

Another thing: FRF has 2 sectors left, one with Shipyard/Wharf and one with an EquipmentDock. These to are separated by the neutral sector I protect/secure. FRF is now starting to built a new EquipmentDock in their Wharf sector.

Also, I found a built storage in the before mentioned neutral sector beloning to FRF, but without any plot attached, weird.

I will attach a savegame if any of you wants to take a look.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RqHANQ ... sp=sharing

[SMoOoVEeR]

Is it also this mod which enables Xenon to replace lost stations immediatly? I destroy one factory/defence station and in less than a minute there is an new one coming up and miners coming in. I think thats too fast, especially meanwhile other factions duly take their time to do similar and/or, like FRF in my case, not being able to claim sectors at all.

[Mysterial]

No, that's vanilla. I'm pretty sure the wreck has to go away before it'll get replaced, but that's still not a lot of time. Xenon stations take a long time to build, though.

[hufflazon]

I activated the War and Econ AI mods in my current game (~48 hours) because I was hoping to see the AI use its fleets a little more intelligently and I'm really pleased with the results so far.

I did run into a little weirdness. First, I saw a whole fleet of HOP Behemoth Sentinels (5 of them) pop into Second Contact Flashpoint and then through the gate to True Sight. I was afraid something might be going wrong with the mod so I flew over to take a closer look.

ANT has partially occupied True Sight for awhile in my game but I've never seen any ANT capital ships there. Now they had a huge fleet, Nomad, several Behemoths, lots of smaller ships, attacking stations. This is exactly what I hoped to see from the War mod. Awesome!

Flying around a bit I managed to locate one of the HOP Behemoth Sentinels and flew over to it. I wanted to scan it, thinking maybe it was SCA or something, but I'm -30 with HOP so my turrets started firing. As soon as I hit it the ship changed to ANT and a nearby HOP station started firing at it.

I read through the changelog and this forum thread pretty thoroughly and I'm not seeing anything about faction ships being able to disguise themselves. Just one person way back there mentioned a ZYA fleet of Argon ships. Wonder if something similar was going on there.

[Mysterial]

Flying around a bit I managed to locate one of the HOP Behemoth Sentinels and flew over to it. I wanted to scan it, thinking maybe it was SCA or something, but I'm -30 with HOP so my turrets started firing. As soon as I hit it the ship changed to ANT and a nearby HOP station started firing at it.

There is a stealth assault behavior that can be used somewhat rarely. They should break cover on their own once they are about to begin attacking. That they were still disguised while in range of an enemy station is a little concerning, but it's possible they just picked a dumb staging position for a different target.

[hufflazon]

There is a stealth assault behavior that can be used somewhat rarely. They should break cover on their own once they are about to begin attacking. That they were still disguised while in range of an enemy station is a little concerning, but it's possible they just picked a dumb staging position for a different target.

Ah! That's cool. The one I found was cruising along beside the highway so it could have been headed anywhere. Lots of HOP stations still in that area.

Thanks a bunch for this mod. It already seems to be making a huge difference in my game.

[Mr.Freud]

can FE be used with 4.0 beta?

[Mysterial]

I don't have time to investigate right away, but I'd be shocked if it completely worked out of the box.

[Max Bain]

Hi Mysterial,

as you might have seen, I created a thread about OOS vs IS combat behaviour (see this thread viewtopic.php?f=146&t=431670).

Yesterday in my tests I had very bad OOS vs IS behaviour. A fight which took over 30 minutes IS was lasting just a couple of seconds OOS. Today I made more tests but without any active mod and was surprised, that the results today were looking way better.
So my conclusion was, that one or more mods must be responsible for this behaviour. I knew that yesterday I had FE War module active because its not a balance changing mod (at least I was thinking this).

I made several new tests now and I could isolate the Faction Enhancer War module and VRO which have an effect on OOS combat balance speed.

I made four test runs with each mod activated and deactivated and stopped the time until all my ships were dead.
Here is my save game if you want to try it out yourself (I always started to stop when my fighters travelled about half the distance to the K - so about 10 sec after loading - dont forget to teleport out of sector before battle begins):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dgkhx0bz1ta5m ... ml.gz?dl=0

Here are the results for OOS:
(21 Elite and 21 Novas vs a Xen K and several dozens S and M ships)

FE War Module off
VRO off
Duration 3:30

FE War Module off
VRO on
Duration 2:00

FE War Module on
VRO off
Duration 1:10

FE War Module on
VRO on
Duration 0:50

In sector the battle lasted over 12 minutes


Conclusion: The FE War module is speeding up OOS combat significantly while not touching the ship or weapon balance at all.
I understand that VRO will also change OOS combat because it changes each module and each ship value, but still I think the other direction would be better where OOS combat would take longer instead of shorter (ccompared to vanilla).

Maybe if you can speed OOS up, you can also slow OOS down and improve OOS compared to vanilla?

[Mysterial]

Given how limited low attention combat is, at best you're going to get reasonably accurate combat duration or reasonably accurate results, not both. My priority is the latter.

That said - I made a bunch of AI improvements for chasing, mostly intended to give them a chance to stay on fleeing targets, since in vanilla a ship fleeing small craft in low attention almost always escapes even though that is much more rare when the player is present. It's possible that causes more firing time in general combat. They are tweaking low attention combat parameters again in 4.0, so I will eventually do another pass on it.

[Max Bain]

At least in my tests the results were not better but worse than vanilla. In the short time of the test battles the ships could not do the same amount of damage as in the in sector battle. In fact they could not even scratch the target while in some tests the K got destroyed while fighting in sector. In vanilla OOS in most battles I could do at least significant damage to the K.

Sure this could be because of 4.0, but I think it was worth mentioning. I am testing with the parameters right now and it is possible to change a lot into the direction of IS combat results.

[Mysterial]

The current version of the mod isn't reliably working in 4.0 so it's a completely invalid test in that case.

[Thecrippler]

I just come back to this game after long break and i notes this mod and VRO is causing too much fps drops in 3.30