XTC - CLS 2 Difficulties

[JJRSC]

Hey everyone. I thought I knew CLS fairly well - have a lot of CLS ships in my game working fine - but right now I have a couple of situations that have me stumped:

1.) I have a freighter that is supposed to bring energy cells from my complex in the Unk Sectors East of Zyath's Dominon to my ore mine in Aladna Hill. That's all. The pilot is a Logistician, ship has a jumpdrive & fuel cells (jumpdrive is enabled in the CLS2 menu), the CLS supply transfer thingy is set to 0%, but the guy won't budge. He just sits there in standby mode. Unless I give him all the commands manually, he just sits there, "standing by."

2.) Similar to number one... I have two freighters in Presidents End (Logistician level Pilots) that are supposed to jump to Antigone Memorial and pick up silicon from my TL (part of my Mobile Mining fleet) and bring to my factories in Pres End. The ships have jump drives, jump fuel, tansporters, jumpdrives are enabled in CLS2, supply transfer set to 0%, TL is loaded with silicon, all the settings are set up like the other 90 CLS 2 ships I have that work fine, but these two keep "standing by." Tired of manually commanding these ships to do their jobs b/c CLS2 isn't working. Can someone tell me what I am missing? Thanks a lot.

[ancienthighway]

1. Reset the supply conditions to default. 90% of the usage of CLS2 will work the way you want them using this setting. Check supply status in the station. It may be it's above the threshold for receiving more wares. Are there any enemies in sector? Aladna Hill is frequently visited by pirates passing through, although some Xenon or Kha'ak may be out of normal scan range and thus be missed.

2. Do you have transporter devices on the CLS ships?

[Timsup2nothin]

Enemies in sector make them idle, not standby.

So, step one. Let's start with the energy hauler. I'm picturing this as his waypoints:

1. Complex by Zyarth's, reload jump fuel
....... load e-cells, max cargo

2. Ore mine Aladana Hill, unload e-cells max cargo

Is that what you have?

If so, give him a jump and fly to station at the complex. When he arrives, COMPLETELY CLEAR OUT all his cargo except his shields. (By the way, do you have fight control software on board? If so, he may be on standby waiting for a place to get mossies or drones, which is why I never give them fight commands)

So, now he is at the complex and dead empty. Start CLS. If he cycles to standby, check his cargo to see what command he is waiting on. Did he process the refueling? Did he load the cells? Did he jump to Aladana Hill, unload, and THEN stop?

[fireanddream]

Not sure if related to your problem, but one trouble I had earlier with CLS external was that they won't buy <something> even if my waypoints were buy ware maximum price maximum cargo space. Turned out they were assigned to a homebase where I set all the prices at minimum, so the homebase price settings overrode the CLS settings.

Oh, and you could enable report and report analysis in your CLS setting, then go to your save folder for something like log010000.txt. It would tell you what exactly your CLS were trying to do. That's how I spotted my mistake.

[JJRSC]

Hey everyone, thanks for the replies… they were ALL quite helpful...

So, I went to my energy transport that I had homebased to my ore mine to go through all of the steps as Tim recommended. Then I thought about fireanddream talking about how the homebase setting screwed up his pricing - and while pricing isn't the issue here - I thought, "Why don't I just clear the homebase setting and see what happens?" So I did, and the energy transport works perfectly!

I'm wondering, maybe a homebase setting can mess with CLS 2 ships since you're really supposed to use CLS 1 with homebased ships? (Call me lazy but I have no clue how to use CLS 1 and am not that eager to learn. The couple times I tried it, it looked really different from CLS 2 and I figured why re-invent the wheel...)

ANYWHOO... on to issue # 2, my freighters that are supposed to bring silicon from my mobile mining fleet to my factories in Pres End. So I took out the homebase setting - nothing happened. So I start going through the diagnostic procedure Tim laid out, clear the cargo bay and restart, etc. I see the ship is loading the fuel... and nothing. I so jump it manually to the mining ships, figure I'll start it from there and see what happens. So it gets there and stops. Hmmmmm.

Then I remember ancienthighway asking me if my ships have transporters. Well, of COURSE they have transporters... I've done this before, I'm not an idiot. So I check the CLS freighters' cargo bays... no transporters. Huh. (The MMBS had a transporter, so I could manually transfer the silicon to my CLS ships, but I guess for CLS to work, the two CLS ships need to have their own transporters?)

So I got them both transporters and they both work fine now.

So, I guess it's official - I'm an idiot. But I'm an idiot whose logistics fleet is working now. Huzzah!

Thank you all for the help... couldn't have fixed it this quickly with your input!

[Timsup2nothin]

On transporters...the way CLS2 operates is:

My next waypoint is a ship. Is that ship docked? If so process the waypoint.

If not, do I have a transporter device? Note that it does NOT check the target ship. If yes, process the waypoint.

If not, skip to next waypoint.

So the transporter device that matters is the one on the CLS ship itself, and it only matters if the target ship is not docked. This can be useful if you only want your CLS ship to go after waypoints that are docked, and ignore them when they are flying around.

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On the homebase issue...I almost always have my ships homebased, because i set my property list to not show ships with a homebase and I usually feel no desire to look at my CLS ships, or root through them looking for what I'm trying to find.

The key element is WHERE they are homebased and what commands interact with the base settings.

Load and unload are stronger than buy and sell. I never try to load resources except from a ship or the homebase. Your cattle ranch may not want to give up those e-cells to some stranger. Similarly, I don't try to unload products except at the homebase. So to sell off extra e-cells from the cattle ranch, I use a CLS ship homebased at the cattle ranch, and to bring in extra beef for the ranch to sell I use a CLS ship based at the cattle ranch.

If I do use buys and sells they follow the same rule as the load and unload, plus NEVER buy or sell at the homebase. Those are load/unload exclusively, since there is no money transfer anyway. Then you have to make sure your buys and sells are priced appropriately in every way. If you want a CLS ship from your cahoona bakery to buy beef at your cattle ranch the price has to be set at something the cattle ranch will accept. If you say "buy at minimum" and your cattle ranch sells at average they will not make an exception for your guy. You also have to consider the settings at the homebase cahoona bakery, because they will not want their minion to pay a higher price than they have set.

Sticking to those simple rules keeps me out of trouble, for the most part.

[Triaxx2]

I suggest setting up the CLS hotkey. That gives access to all active CLS ships, so you can change settings if you have them hidden like Tim does. I use it so I don't have to track down where the ships are when I want to edit something.

[JJRSC]

There's a CLS hotkey? When did that happen? I had no idea.

Is there a hotkey in X3TC or is that only in AP? Thanks.

[X2-Illuminatus]

It's there since X3TC:

Global Administration of CLS MK1 and MK2

The global administration provides an overview of all your CLS-Pilots. Not only can you send settings to all the other pilots, but make changes to individual pilots.

There are two ways to start global administration. You can define a hotkey, and you can reach it over the 'General' menu in your ship-commands, once your ship is docked.

As with all hotkeys added by scripts/mods, it can be found in the Controls-Menu under Options -> Controls -> Interface -> Extensions.