Litcube's Universe

[Sirrobert]

Did you set your HQ to "overstock"?
But no, that will prevent Dock Agents from selling it. So yes, if you want to sell the stuff, do so from the SCH directly, with Station Agents.

So you're not supposed to sell your stuff from the HQ? What are the DA for? I think I'm missing something very obvious here...

You can use Sell Dock Agents to sell salvage that your Reaper Quickshuttle brings in.
You can use Station Agents to sell products.

You can also use a Courier to bring your product to the HQ, and then the Dock Agents will sell it.
It's just that Overstock will prevent them from selling it, that makes it easy to unload everything your SCH produce into your HQ for later use (ship building)

[albazeus]

Sorry but I'm more confused than before. I'll try to explain my problem in more details. I have an HQ with 4 buy DAs, 10 sell DAs and 10 FRs. My idea was: my FRs bring all my stuff from my SCHs to my HQ until the capacity of that ware is reached, then the sell DAs will sell what exceeds.
According to the wiki:

This capacity is the amount to which your Dock Agent pilots or Freighter pilots will adhere to when stocking the dock. Any amount over this capacity will be sold by your dock agent. Your Freighters will also not ferry any more than your capacity from the wares sources. More on this later.

The "More on this later":

When a ware is set to overstock, Freighters will continue to stock the ware despite the capacity settings. Additionally, Dock Agents will not sell wares set to overstock.

My understanding is:
If overstock is set to no, the FRs will stop at capacity but DAs will not sell the wares because they are needed by the HQ.
If overstock is set to yes, the FRs will stock more wares but the DAs will still not sell them because "Dock Agents will not sell wares set to overstock".
So my question is: in which scenario DAs will find wares to sell? As I said, I think I'm missing something really obvious. I'm just asking how this mod is meant to be played.

[Litcube]

If the ware isn't set to be stocked. It's in the loose list at the bottom.

[Sirrobert]

DAs will sell things that are over the set capacity, and not set to overstock.
They also sell everything that's not set as stocked at all.

You can get things in overstock by stocking them with a Courier, or by bringing them in as loot from a Reaper Quick Shuttle.
Or by using one of Joubarbe's submods: Internal Distribution Network

[Vayde]

Dock agents sell stuff not wanted/required by the dock. The items at the bottom of the main dock manager page.

Example: 1

I have an IRE SCH. I have a courier which picks up the IRE's and drops them at my HQ. As I don't want to keep them, they are not in the weapon section of the dockware manager but in the loose collection at the bottom of the list. As soon as my DA can make a sale of more than 20k he's off.

Example 2

I have a Chaff SCH. I have my chaff set to 1000 in the HQ dockware manger. If I use a freighter to maintain this level, he behaves according to the rules and keeps the HQ stocked at 1000.

My SCH produces way more than I use currently so I want to sell the excess from my HQ with my DA. So I use a COURIER to collect the chaff from the SCH and drop it at the HQ. Couriers just loop a set of instructions and do what they are told. Once the HQ gets to 1000 the rest is excess and the DA sells it.

So in summary, the freighters you are using are behaving as intended.

The HQ is working as intended.

You are simply using the wrong tool for the job.

[albazeus]

Thanks for the replies. I think I get it now. I now have couriers that fetch all my shields to my HQ. They are not efficient though, because they visit stations that don't have wares.

I'm still a noob at this game, so pardon me if I say something stupid but I think that FRs and DAs do two very different jobs, therefore should not be tied so tightly.
IMHO there's should be 2 capacities:
- Max Capacity: the current capacity, FRs will ferry wares from 0 to this capacity
- Min Capacity: DAs will sell any amount over this capacity.
So you'll have:
- Min Cap < Max Cap : normal operation, keep Min Cap amount of ware, the rest is sold.
- Min Cap >= Max Cap : nothing is sold
- Min Cap = 0 : everything is sold

This is just an opinion.

[WildDoktor]

I'm having 2 issues with a mammoth I picked up: it won't dock to any shipyard (so I can't trade or even sell it), and it won't jump!

History:
After a bit of a learning curve, I'm finally doing a full first playthru of x3ap Litcube. (It's actually my first full playthru of any of the X games.) Things are going pretty well; I've currently got about 28 traders (all but 5 are UT; the 5 STs will upgrade today) and about 250M cr's. Still lots to learn!

But:
I picked up a Mammoth at some point (several game hours ago); bought it off somebody for like 1.2M cr (a steal!) and repaired it. Problem is, it's "broken", as I stated above.

First, I command it to dock at a shipyard, and when it does I cannot trade...it's like it isn't docked.

I docked it at Earth to buy it a jump drive, and it wouldn't dock. So I docked there with my player ship, transferred to the mammoth, un-docked and re-docked manually, and then I was able to trade. Cool; so I bought a jump drive and a quantum jump gate extension and some other stuff, set auto-jump, transferred back to my other ship, then ordered the mammoth to dock at another shipyard, but...

Second: it won't jump. I can't order it to jump because it somehow doesn't know it has a jump drive. I do have 50k energy cells when I check freight...I bought those somewhere, somehow...can't now remember where or why trading worked.

Now: I can't seem to dock it anywhere, even manually, and get it to trade. So I can't even sell it.

Anyway, just wondering if anybody's had this happen and if there's a fix for it.

I'd just have it self-destruct in Nova territory, but I've dumped a bunch of money into it and don't really want to lose that.

[Joubarbe]

People already had problems with Mammoths that are sold in space, via a mission. It's likely a broken ship, meaning an old reference from X Vanilla that is no longer valid in LU. When a ship reference is broken, a Mammoth appears. It's often a sign of a problem. But I don't know which one exactly in that case.

[dizzy]

@albazeus
The Dockware Manager is complicated as it is, adding 2 limits per ware and then explaining the rules to everyone seems like not much of a gain. What exactly are you trying to achieve that can't be done with the current system?

[Vayde]

@WildDoktor

Old vanilla bug still not worthy of being patched out.

When accepting a deal from an NPC I always apply the rule, "If it looks to good to be true, it probably is"

[Joubarbe]

Can be applied to real life as well.

[Litcube]

I can't find the offending ship ID. Anyone have any ideas?

[WildDoktor]

Thanks for the replies about my broken Mammoth!

memeics, just so you know, your 4 year old "Space Opera" is why I decided to try modding AP with LU; I even accomplished the IEX mod with LU1.7.2! I'm working thru your #3 opera now. Thanks so much for doing that way back then; I'm benefiting from it now!

Litcube, what can I say...you're a genius and you have my total and utter respect. (Along with Egosoft for starting this whole thing in the first place!)

If the "offending ship id" was aimed at me, then the id is: YTLQD-32(TL).

[Joubarbe]

Could you provide a savegame where I can see this Mammoth?

[WildDoktor]

sure; I just dumped all the freight and sent it off to Nova's home; should only take it about 8 years to get there.

Is there a place to upload saves here? Or do I need to just share a google drive link with you in pm?

[Joubarbe]

Share it here please, it can be useful to others as well. Any host you like.

[WildDoktor]

Ok; let's try this:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Can you see the .sav file in that folder? I'm going to bed but will check back in the morning to see if you got it or not.

(I only included the .sav file; do I need to include more?)

[Joubarbe]

All good.

[Vayde]

Hi WildDoktor,

I've checked your save and the Mammoth is the least of your problems.

You're on game day 13 and the OCV has taken over the full channel and is about to break out into the universe. Phannon are at Nova stage and you have no fighting craft to slow them down.

Your current budget will need to be wisely spent, and quickly, to give yourself at least a slim chance.

Go buy a TL and do every mission you can to beef up the universe by adding more stations. Spend at least 2 thirds or the remaining budget on Freighters and get them trained up to UT's to start the money rolling in.

Concentrate your initial build missions in Argon space to get you rep up above 7 as quickly as you can, you need the docks sold in Legends Home.

Don't believe that Litcube is from Canada. He's really an Argon Noble masquerading as an earthling. Why else would the only other useful dock in the game cost more than his designs

Finally: Watch Dizzy's series and note that on episode 3 he's on game day 4 and has over a billion in the bank. He's a knowledgeable guy where this game is concerned and you would do well to emulate his game play as LU will chew you up and spit you out.

[WildDoktor]

Hi WildDoktor,

I've checked your save and the Mammoth is the least of your problems.

You're on game day 13 and the OCV has taken over the full channel and is about to break out into the universe. Phannon are at Nova stage and you have no fighting craft to slow them down.

Your current budget will need to be wisely spent, and quickly, to give yourself at least a slim chance.

Go buy a TL and do every mission you can to beef up the universe by adding more stations. Spend at least 2 thirds or the remaining budget on Freighters and get them trained up to UT's to start the money rolling in.

Concentrate your initial build missions in Argon space to get you rep up above 7 as quickly as you can, you need the docks sold in Legends Home.

Don't believe that Litcube is from Canada. He's really an Argon Noble masquerading as an earthling. Why else would the only other useful dock in the game cost more than his designs

Finally: Watch Dizzy's series and note that on episode 3 he's on game day 4 and has over a billion in the bank. He's a knowledgeable guy where this game is concerned and you would do well to emulate his game play as LU will chew you up and spit you out.

That's got to be one of the best replies I've ever seen!

Since this is my first playthru of any x game, I figured I'd just "let 'er ride" and let the chips fall where they may. My goal is to learn; as of last night I finally just started getting comfortable with *some* keyboard commands. I'm getting a little better at taking out Nova transport ships, but I'm still terrible at shooting down the fighter drones...even with my ship doing most of the firing!

At this point I have 38 UT and 2 ST, a TL, and a few other random ships. I've done several "build" missions and still trying to get a feel for those. I'm trying to keep Nova busy; currently their credit balance is 88m, they have 6 traders, 5 reps, 4 factories, 77 military assets, and an amta index of 523.

I'm literally only half way thru Dizzy's #3 episode, and want to next try my hand at saturn complexes, again just to get a feel for it.

So, I've got a *lot* to learn! I'll play thru this one till I get my butt handed to my by the ocv, then start over and do it again, and again. I'll get better, but right now...yeah; my broken Mammoth *is* the least of my worries!!

(BTW, it finally got to Nova's sector. I followed it, let them do some target practice on it, and took out a few fighters from a flank position. Then almost died as the Odin showed up and I couldn't figure out the key combo to jump out. )