[X3LU] Mayhem 3.21b

[WuDeN]

I've done the same thing and I'm having so much fun. I'm also a turtler lol I just wish I could increase the number of buildable factories in a player owned sector (I don't suppose you've run into that variable ? Can't find it) and to reactivate the tractor beam.. Although smashing asteroids together doesn't interest me I like the notion of being able to move an asteroid to my sector.

Also the Saturn complexes.. I figure a way to balance them out is just make them super expensive. (Sorry @Joubarbe lol I know this is breaking your heart haha)

You sure can change the sector stats to edit research/factory limit et cetera. Look here

Code: Select all

$sector = [Unknown Sector Gamma]
$sector-> set local variable: name='mayhem_secStatsPeople' value=100
$sector-> set local variable: name='mayhem_secStatsResearch' value=100
$sector-> set local variable: name='mayhem_secStatsBreakthrough' value=10
$sector-> set local variable: name='mayhem_secStatsSupport' value=15
return null

You can make a quick script like this (from inside the game or Xstudio) and manually run it in game. The number of factories is mayhem_secStatsSupport, the other ones should be self explanatory. It's similar to what I've done myself to have a "capital" sector (where I then apply the super-sanctuary ascension reward) that's completely self sufficient for ship building and basic needs. Research especially stays super slow if you confine yourself into 1-3 sectors (which is my plan: one for ship building, then 2 smaller ones for weapon building and marine training, and then have fun for a while influencing and participating in other races' wars before really waging wars of conquest of my own when I'm ready to, basically, end my game), so it isn't super "cheaty" (although it still is quite different from Mayhem's basic concept).

For asteroids if you really want an asteroid on a specific sector that has none you could simply use Cycrow's cheat package: otherwise Mayhem is supposed to have those asteroids placed in a way you'll really want to use a jump beacon to make the trip shorter for your agents, and the Plutarch system kind of makes that concept moot. Same goes for the Saturn Complexes: they would make the sanctuary mechanic completely pointless. If you make them super expensive you just... postpone it, but sooner or later you'd have little to no use for the sanctuaries, they are just two opposite approaches at the logistics game.

Nah too much. I've done enough editing already. Any more and I think it's going to lose essence. I love the difficulty, just wanted more features and a slower pace is all.

On a sidenote I highly recommend (on top of all the other compatible LU mods listed) is this graphical overhaul not sure if you guys know about this or if I'm behind heh. But works beautifully so far.
http://sfx.thelazy.net/games/preset/4570/

[Pax Empyrean]

I often use SA when I want an empire trade agent. What would be the difference? If I do this, it must be clear for everyone.

It would be very poor performance to make Empire trade agents synchronized with each other, so I'm not sure the benefits of DAs would apply. Hence my question: why not SA? And maybe I'll improve or rewrite them.

I might be missing something here. It is my understanding that SA will only drop their products off at the sanctuary or stations that need them within their home sector, but will acquire inputs from any station within specified jump range. Is there a way to configure them (or my other sanctuaries, presumably) so that station agents will drop their goods off at other sanctuaries on an as-needed basis?

[Joubarbe]

So what you want is an agent that takes a product from your stations and distribute it to the Sanctuaries in need of that product? If so, you want an additional layer of automation that would need a few other options that would be quite hard to implement.

What would be easier to do is to make SAs look for all your sanctuaries and stations instead of only local ones (homebase sector). So it would take products from its homebase factory, then distribute across your empire. That would not be the default behavior though.

[elvin-nsk]

What would be easier to do is to make SAs look for all your sanctuaries and stations instead of only local ones (homebase sector). So it would take products from its homebase factory, then distribute across your empire.

I use SA on Solar Plants, and they do exactly as you just said: they took cell and distribute it across entrie empire. They doesn't feed non-local sanctuaries, only stations, and it seems they have priority for local sanctuary, as I noticed.

[Joubarbe]

You're right, they do distribute to all stations, then local Sanctuary if no stations found, then they sell if the Sanctuary doesn't want it.

EDIT: fixed description:

The Station Agent software allows a ship to manage the wares of its homebased factory. The ship will first acquire needed resources either by fetching them from any of your factories or any of your Sanctuaries, or by buying them from NPC stations, then it will distribute products to any of your factories or the Sanctuary local to its homebase. If none found, the Station Agent will sell the products to NPC stations. Import and export thresholds from both the factory and the Sanctuary are regarded in the process.

[Pax Empyrean]

So what you want is an agent that takes a product from your stations and distribute it to the Sanctuaries in need of that product? If so, you want an additional layer of automation that would need a few other options that would be quite hard to implement.

What would be easier to do is to make SAs look for all your sanctuaries and stations instead of only local ones (homebase sector). So it would take products from its homebase factory, then distribute across your empire. That would not be the default behavior though.

Yeah, that SA behavior would be one way of doing it. Just add a check to see if other sanctuaries want the good (import/export restricted) after checking local factories and the local sanctuary, and only have them sell to NPC stations if none of your factories and sanctuaries want it.

Another way, and what I was thinking of, was as a DA setting. SA don't really have (or need) much in the way of customization in their behavior, whereas DA already have what I'm looking for in the "Factories in Sector" setting. An empire trade option would just expand the list of acceptable targets to sectors and sanctuaries in other sectors owned by you within the sanctuary's jump range, rather than just a single sector's factories or sanctuary. Use import/export limits on factories and sanctuaries to determine whether each one is a viable target for a resource run.

Another unrelated thing that would be cool is the ability set DA and SA access to my stations independently. As I understand it, "Station is open to your traders" allows or denies both, right? I've been using SA for my mines, but my DA Energy Cell distributors keep running over and dropping off energy cells, leaving my SA unable to drop off their Energy Cells and pick up ore/silicon. I could set up couriers and disable DA/SA trade entirely, or just use nothing but SA for in-sector station management, but couriers are still a hassle I'd like to avoid and I'd like to be able to us both SA and DA without them getting in each other's way. Rather than having DA and SA synchronize, just telling one or the other to ignore the station would be sufficient to prevent DA/SA delivery collisions and less work for you and the CPU.

[Joubarbe]

Now:

The Station Agent software allows a ship to manage the wares of its homebased factory. The ship will first acquire needed resources either by fetching them from any of your factories or any of your Sanctuaries, or by buying them from NPC stations; then it will distribute products to any of your factories or any of your Sanctuaries, with priority given to local and nearest ones. If none eligible found, the Station Agent will sell the products to NPC stations. Import and export thresholds from both factories and Sanctuaries are regarded in the process.

[Pax Empyrean]

Now:

The Station Agent software allows a ship to manage the wares of its homebased factory. The ship will first acquire needed resources either by fetching them from any of your factories or any of your Sanctuaries, or by buying them from NPC stations; then it will distribute products to any of your factories or any of your Sanctuaries, with priority given to local and nearest ones. If none eligible found, the Station Agent will sell the products to NPC stations. Import and export thresholds from both factories and Sanctuaries are regarded in the process.

This makes my day.

I'd still like to be able to set up DA to acquire goods from any of my factories/sanctuaries within sanctuary jump range rather than having to set it up on the SA side, but I can definitely work with this. You're the best, man. Thanks.

[Joubarbe]

If I do that, SA will have no purpose anymore. I kinda like the fact that Mayhem forces you to use all the available agents, or at least gives good reasons to do so.

[Joubarbe]

if you've got four DAs and four jobs that need to be done, and you set the limit at 4 per job, the AI will throw all four at whatever thing happens to be highest priority. If you set the limit at 1 per job, they will each have one working on it all the time. [...] It sucks seeing 3 freighters making a trek to a distant ore mine, each one loaded up with 20k E-Cells and only being able to dump 12.5k.

I can't reproduce these two behaviors. If someone has a savegame, that'd be cool.

[Pax Empyrean]

If I do that, SA will have no purpose anymore. I kinda like the fact that Mayhem forces you to use all the available agents, or at least gives good reasons to do so.

I would still use both. As an example, I could set up cheaper, smaller TS as SA with a restricted range of travel that keeps them working in-system, while using larger, more expensive DA to move goods between sanctuaries. Just the ability to have distinct intra-sector and inter-sector traders and TS that are suited for each task would make them both worth using, even if they have identical functionality.

If you want them to have distinct and complementary roles to incentivize the use of both, you could have SA just deliver to and from their own sanctuary while giving DA a setting to target all sanctuaries within jump range. It would play well into the idea of having bigger ships for your DA, and also give DA and SA distinct roles along the lines of what their names suggest, handling logistics at the station level vs the dock level. Having a setting for DA to only move stuff between sanctuaries would also prevent the problem of DA/SA delivery collisions, since they're each keeping to their own distinct spheres of responsibility. It mean more traffic in general though, since SA wouldn't be delivering to other factories. Or maybe they could? However you'd want to do it, really.

Having it set up that way would encourage diversifying your sector station compositions a little, since that would mean less DA traffic without requiring an unmanageable mess of delivery/acquisition orders to keep resources balanced between sanctuaries.

[Kadatherion]

On a sidenote I highly recommend (on top of all the other compatible LU mods listed) is this graphical overhaul not sure if you guys know about this or if I'm behind heh. But works beautifully so far.
http://sfx.thelazy.net/games/preset/4570/

Hmm, thanks for mentioning that reshade. I've tried a couple others in the past, but wasn't ever really convinced: not nearly game changing as ENB/Reshade can be when applied to other popular games, plus a notable performance hit in battles because of all the glowing projectiles to post-process (which is usually CPU intensive, and X3's performance bottleneck has always been the CPU). But I'll give it a try nonetheless

EDIT: Yep, it's not for me in this case too. Performance wise it didn't seem bad at all, and some sceneries with the new bloom effects are indeed very atmospheric (and the explosions, simply beautiful), but X3 is a game with way too much UI browsing for such an extremely bright preset. The UI itself ends up emitting light beams (it's even worse than the usual glow most reshade/sweetfx presets create), it's gonna burn my eyes after a while. And here and there the brightness can be blinding in certain sectors, or when exiting from a jump gate.
But it's indeed one of the best I've seen for ambient: if only it weren't for X3 being sooooo much UI intensive it'd be a must have for me as well.

[Fureimuu]

Is the new battlegroup option making them jump through the gate? REALLY? WANT 277 NOW!!111

[Joubarbe]

No, actually, they do not jump at all. They can potentially cross the entier universe to go to their target, and you may see a lot of Battle Group ships in different sectors. I really don't know what are the consequences, playing a game with that option on right now (but it's going to be on the next version, it goes well with chaotic expansion).

[Fureimuu]

It will be interesting to try, but invasion frequency and delays need to be tweaked accordingly. Finally OWPs will become viable against something besides random pirates and OCV.

[Joubarbe]

Yeah, that's the lazy me throwing gameplay options to you. You do what you want with them, they're all off by default of course. Having more replayability is always good.
If I had time, I would seriously consider removing the "clean wars", and do an whole destruction thing, with smart rebuilding. But that's not gonna happen.

[amadeok]

Hi,
My scanned ships do not appear in the production tab at my sanctuary. Do i need the resources for them to appear?

[Pax Empyrean]

Hi,
My scanned ships do not appear in the production tab at my sanctuary. Do i need the resources for them to appear?

Research the blueprints at your research stations after scanning a ship to get the blueprints.

[Kadatherion]

You can't change the enemy faction of the main plot. I'll look into this bug.

Hey Joubarbe, that bug with a rescue mission happened again to me just a while ago, this time with the anti-Teladi corp., but this time I spotted what causes it. The mission is regularly "open" in the companies menu (I didn't notice it last time, as it disappears from that menu once you have begun doing it), and you get the first trigger even if any other ship in your property lands on the station were the people to rescue are. Both times it must have been one of my UTs coincidentally landing on such a station just while the mission was ready to be taken.
At that point, the mission script doesn't seem to really care about the actual people spawned (regularly) in the cargo hold of the other ship that landed there: it's enough for it that the playership, even if empty, then lands on the station were the people to be rescued ask you to bring them.

Shouldn't be too hard to fix then, you just need to make it check for the playership and not just any player owned one. Naturally this would force the player to do rescue missions personally instead of having the chance of doing them remotely like other standard passenger missions, but given how the company plot works, one wouldn't want to inadvertently get stuck into a plotline with a chosen enemy he... well, didn't actually choose

[Joubarbe]

FYI, there's always a changelog of the upcoming patch on the first page. Already fixed.