[MOD] Faction War/Economy Enhancer v5.5

[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

[Mysterial]

I have updated the mod to support the 4.0 beta. This time the same download will support either 4.0 or 3.3.

There are no gameplay changes from the last version, it's just a compatibility update for now.

[Reaperxvii]

Hey Mysterial!

so in my game the split aren't really doing anything, The have a few fleets that consist of one panther and 1 resupply ship and some fighters and thats it, they don't build any ships in their XL ship yard and largely just patrol their own space.

They also had ALOT of Buffalo's at game start and seem to have very few now, all other factions seems to be working well but the split just aren't doing anything.

The game start is the one that gives you the Player HQ and this is all on 3.3

[BlackRain]

Saw this error in the log

Code: Select all

[=ERROR=] 264506.54 Multiple matching nodes for path '//do_for_each' in patch file 'extensions\faction_fix_pack_econ_ai\aiscripts\lib.find.sectors.inrange.xml'. Skipping node.

[tn44]

Hey I am on beta 4.0 and I have run into what might be a bug. I had a save where the xenon were running absolutely rampant, which is probably fine it happens sometimes, but the TEL shipyard is currently clogged by two planetary support ships that I've been told are part of the faction catchup module. They have been sitting inside the L and XL fab bays on an order to 'recycle' for over an hour and I can't get any ships built to help the TEL fight the Xenon off anymore. So maybe something is broken here? They should just be delivering supplies and leaving right?

[Mysterial]

Recycling hanging is a vanilla bug (although obviously more likely with this mod since it causes more of it). You'll have to wait for Egosoft to release the next beta patch. Sorry.

[tn44]

Oh ok thanks, that's fine then. Just wanted to let you know in case it was related to the mod.

[Mysterial]

Updated for beta 5. There are still no (intended) functional changes.

[scrab21]

Can you add an option to player ships to attack enemy satellites? when they drop you can't do it unless you do it for yourself

[warjager]

Got problem with the 4.5 beta (surely with 4.4 too, but since it was auto updated in a old save, cant know for sure) . The game freeze 5 min after loading my game when the war module is turned on. Catchup, economy and eco balance is ok, only the war module make the game freeze. Dont know why, cause its the fist time the game does it, never had problem with FE before. If it can help, i'm 5h hour in this game until now.

[Osbot]

Got problem with the 4.5 beta (surely with 4.4 too, but since it was auto updated in a old save, cant know for sure) . The game freeze 5 min after loading my game when the war module is turned on. Catchup, economy and eco balance is ok, only the war module make the game freeze. Dont know why, cause its the fist time the game does it, never had problem with FE before. If it can help, i'm 5h hour in this game until now.

It's not doing it to me. Newest update for mod + patch5.