[X3LU] Mayhem 3.21b

[temetvince]

Is it me or it looks a lot cooler to have all the trackers on screen? (the HUD-style thingy around objects)

Is there a way to do this for when using the 3d camera to look at other ships? Often, I'll watch battles from other ships but can't tell what's going on because the trackers only show up when looking at my player ship.

[Joubarbe]

That would be good indeed but I don't see any way of achieving that, sorry!

[temetvince]

That would be good indeed but I don't see any way of achieving that, sorry!

Dang it! Thanks for the update, though.

[temetvince]

How do you get/keep a satellite network? My Explorer Pirate Kestrels deploying sats are getting blown up, and when I finally do manage to get some sats then pirates and xenon go through and destroy them. It's too early to tell whether I'm making headway in this war of attrition, but I'm open to suggestions to ease the pain.

In addition, Explorers ignore my blacklisted sectors, which doesn't help their life expectancy.

[Fureimuu]

I usually cheat when it comes to satellites. I increase their range considerably, and put them 50-70km above or below the middle of the sector. And even then some random patrols find them and destroy at times, but not as often. Other than that - no idea.

[temetvince]

I usually cheat when it comes to satellites. I increase their range considerably, and put them 50-70km above or below the middle of the sector. And even then some random patrols find them and destroy at times, but not as often. Other than that - no idea.

I usually cheat as well, but this playthrough I thought I'd play legit. I'm regretting that decision. If it's too annoying then I'd rather find a better way to cheat and remove the player property in sector rules entirely, as bluntly this satellite network thing just isn't fun. Mayhem 3 will give a reason to explore again, but I'm curious if maintaining a sat network will be as tedious there as it is in 2 after the initial novelty of exploring wears off. That would dampen some of my enthusiasm for 3's procedurally generated universe, as I'll just resort to cheating again by placing sats everywhere by script.

I like the idea of exploring and having some difficulty maintaining a satellite network, but the current implementation is off putting to say the least due to the problems I'm having automating the task (which could totally be my fault, not the mechanics). Maybe I should learn to script/mod and write my own explorer software, but it feels like a big undertaking.

EDIT:
So I had a Sirokos M6 lying around, and I thought, hey, maybe using jump drives and having extra shielding will allow me to deploy sats with greater survivability than the speed of the Kestrels. I equipped her with an Emergency Retreat Drive and 17 Jumpdrive Cores and promoted her to the position of Advanced Satellite Deployer. Even though she had a Quantum Jumpdrive Extension, she refused to use it (probably due to a lack of satellites in the sectors). First thing she did was jump into a sector and charge a Pirate Galleon head on (it was between the jump gate and the center of the sector). This resulted in a net loss of over 4 million credits.

The only option my brain is coming up with is to periodically mass produce and configure cheap m5s as sat deployers, who will in turn continually get destroyed, with the hopes that all my manual effort will eventually win the war of attrition and get a decent satellite network up and sustained. The alternative to this madness is cheating, which is honestly sounding like the only viable option unless I want to babysit this task for the entire game. Or I could just give up on caring about seeing the universe in realtime and only put sats in certain sectors- which is probably the way to go considering I'm eventually going to make a race my rival anyway.

[Hector0x]

Is a big satellite network that crucial though? I rarely used the autoexplorer and placed most sats myself. Maybe the first half of the game even only in sectors which had certain NPC factories or frequent loot drops. Eventually i achieved coverage over most friendly sectors and some hostile ones but this took a very long time. A permanent network didn't even feel that helpful at all as i'd already disabled bailing at that point and didn't need to trade with others that much.

I often used them tactically during military operations, to keep vision over the enemy for half an hour or so. Strategically you can also get invasion intel without sats.

To maintain a network its important to kill all enemies which have aggro on you. If you just jump out they go after your sats. But some random enemies will also always search and destroy a bunch.

[garr71]

Hello, is there any way of automating ship claiming? Either a claim script, or can someone tell me what i could edit to make the claiming distance be a few Km instead of 40m?

[Fureimuu]

I guess you are not supposed to have your satellites in hostile sectors ...

Hello, is there any way of automating ship claiming? Either a claim script, or can someone tell me what i could edit to make the claiming distance be a few Km instead of 40m?

Not in the spacesuit, but you can use salvage software, it has 5 km range iirc.

[XenonArchitect7]

Is a big satellite network that crucial though?

I agree, having a big satellite network is not necessary as your empire grows. I also go around in the early game and place all the satellites manually, all in sectors belonging to races I will eventually make enemies out of. Salvage is good at first, but once your Mayhem game has been running for a while there is just so much trash everywhere (more abandoned ships than you could possibly claim) that salvage becomes irrelevant. With MLCC and jumpdrives, you almost never lose a ship in combat so you never need to replace your ships. Once you become powerful enough and start building your own ships, you can stop salvaging entirely. It doesn't take (too) long to become self-sufficient in Mayhem.

Keeping a network running and replacing lost satellites is a futile task. Why is everyone resorting to cheating to achieve this? So you can keep salvaging ships? The manually-placed satellites from the beginning of the game will likely be in good locations (high above the sector or off to the side) so they won't get destroyed anyway. Auto-explorers place them in the center, which is the worst possible place since they will almost always be found and destroyed. Once you have two shipyards running nonstop, I'd say salvage isn't even worth your time anymore. So let the satellites die. You will already have a fleet and since you never have any losses from combat, there isn't a constant need to endlessly salvage.

[Fureimuu]

It doesnt matter where you place your satellites, if AI wants to they will use that slow-ass M2 to take it down 100km away from the sector's center. Back in the days of 2.2.* advanced satellites were extremely hard to come by, also the ascension "Have 150 advanced satellites" comes to mind. The game already had enough micromanagement, dealing with satellite replacement was too much.

P.S: you mostly lose the ones placed in conflict areas, the ones that suffer most from pirate and xenon invasions.

[Edna]

That ascension quest was easy to cheese, since it didn't check how many sats were in a sector. Meaning you could simply drop a load of satellites in a Xenon sector, get the ascension and let the Xenon mark their territory in your logs.

[Fureimuu]

The main problem was acquiring them.

[Joubarbe]

[Fureimuu]

So I am making things up then? Every time I started a new playthrough I would start looking for adv satellites right away, but 2/3 factories I checked were empty or had sub-10 available. Besides that, ascension used to be non-restartable, if you failed it it was gone.

[Joubarbe]

Sorry, it's Mayhem 3

[Hector0x]

3.0 question. Will mining stations release their asteroid on destruction now? Since all conflict will function similar to the old dirty wars minerals would run out pretty fast without some sort of asteroid respawn, wouldn't they?

[Joubarbe]

The scanning mission is spawning new asteroids if needed. Destroying a mine does not spawn an asteroid.

[devorrio]

Hello, this is my first post and I am asking for help. I am not sure if this is the correct section. I've tried googling it but couldn't find my problem or anyone experiencing the same issue.

I've installed Mayhem following these steps:
- x3 terran pack from gog.com (setup_x3_terran_war_pack_3.4_(17049))
- LU + LU patch to 1.7.2
- LU soundtrack
- Mayhem + mayhem graphics

My problem:
At some stations I cannot dock. At 50% of the stations my ship is running around in circles, flying back and forth until it can dock. At some stations I cannot dock at all even if I left it on SETA for 5 min. It is running in circles. It seems to me that certain stations are to close to other objects (gates or other stations) or the "avoidance bubble" is way to big. I already tried generating and deleting 2 galaxies because of this problem. I am not sure if anyone is experiencing it or is it because I've installed something wrong.

If anyone has any idea, please, let me know, I love this mod.

Thank you!

[Edna]

Do the station in question have the required docking slots available? Like, are other ships of yours already docked or are NPC ships docked, occupying the slots?