[MOD] Hijack!

[pref]

Pref, I don't think this is a cheat mod - more that it fixes a feature I think Bernd announced in his boarding video

That said, well-spotted Goliath. Maybe this is a reason why it doesn't seem implemented in vanilla. Something like a timer sounds like a good idea. Whereas stopping the option to board a ship running "Exploring" (AKA move.die) would prevent a pirate player being able to capture NPC CVs built occasionally by shipyards.

Oh lol.. i stole his idea then - sorry

That sell loop problem is taken care of. Now such an attempt will hurt a bit.

@TSM: i checked boarding options quickly, and see no real conflict possibilities. The only possible problem i see that it clears the hints from the screen quite often - might happen that some of hijack's messages will be removed by boarding options (near) instantly.

If this is the case you should still be able to see if hijack started, because then the ship's faction will show 'enemy', with a smiley face - right after you initiate boarding.
Note that you must retarget the ship to get your target info refreshed on the skunk cockpit.

Let me know if there are issue, i might try to find a fix then. Boarding options is like vanilla, so many people use it

Regarding the video demo, i hoped it would be self explanatory - might be i failed with that. If yes, i can try to find a video editor and record a quick session. Maybe cubase works for that, never tried..

[pref]

@TSM, denison10: I uploaded some screenshots to the workshop page.
Let me know if it clears things up, or a vid is truly needed.

[BlackRain]

With this mod you can pull off a boarding operation without reputation loss, if you target an isolated ship and cripple its radar(s) before initiating boarding.

Conditions:
* No operational radar on the target
* No friendly ships within 20km with a functional radar
* No stations within 30km or the station's radar range (lower value used: same logic as with vanilla distress calls)

If this all checks out, the target's emergency protocols will commence: drone pad will be brought to a working state, and all available drones queued for repair will be equipped, increasing the ship's defence strength.
The crew will also get really mad at you, and wont forget easily - better succeed once started, as a failed attempt might leave you with a ship that will kill any of your assets on sight - and which might belong to an otherwise friendly faction.
Any further actions against it will result in reputation loss - the skunk can only jam the identification and comm signals while boarding is in progress and the radar of the target is defunct.

Selling hijacked ships to a shipyard friendly to the original owner will have some annoying consequences - the shipyard will turn on you for a while, and you will have to pay for the ship as well.
Ships can only be hijacked once.

Anyway, yarr.


Workshop
dropbox

What exactly do you mean by any further actions ? I am trying to use this but have yet to be able to successfully capture a ship without reputation loss.

I should destroy the radar dish first? Then initiate boarding? But then I have to destroy stuff on the ship and attack the ship to get its defenses down. So further action is necessary, or did you mean something else?

[TSM]

@TSM, denison10: I uploaded some screenshots to the workshop page.
Let me know if it clears things up, or a vid is truly needed.

looks good to me

[pref]

What exactly do you mean by any further actions ? I am trying to use this but have yet to be able to successfully capture a ship without reputation loss.

I should destroy the radar dish first? Then initiate boarding? But then I have to destroy stuff on the ship and attack the ship to get its defenses down. So further action is necessary, or did you mean something else?

I have uploaded some screenshots to the workshop hopefully it will be more clear.

Process goes like this anyway:

0. You can start boarding just to get the info if hijack could work. A hint will display in-range ship/station and radar count. Cancel the ops.
1. If found a clean target, destroy the radar on the ship. This will drop your rep a little, but this loss is inevitable (and intended).
2. Start boarding. A hint will be displayed, either saying hijack started, or if anything moved in range then you will be notified about that instead (in that case you can still cancel).

If hijack could start, from this point on right until the op is finished attacking the target or its XS/S/M escorts will not hurt your rep.

3. Get rid of the escorts if needed, board the ship.
4. Try to sell the ship to a shipyard that is friendly to the original owner if you dare


Either you destroyed the radar after starting the op, or there were friendly objects nearby which means you board normally.
That or there was a mod conflict or you foud a bug. If there is anything in log please let me know!

[pref]

@TSM: Unfortunately Boarding Options keeps spamming hints on the screen, and hides messages from Hijack.
Cant do much about it - BO clears any hints instantly, and keeps displaying the marine count.

A workaround would be to move my hints to the event monitor - i just hate when target data is hidden because of messages on the event monitor, wanted to avoid it.
Feedback/ideas welcome how to get around this best.

[TSM]

its a pity its not possible to give the Skunk a new scan mode like Pirating/Hijack with new commands for F button.

[pref]

XR UI cannot handle the game's needs unfortunately. All the messages/comms have to fight with eachother, you can only handle 1 incoming comm or 1 custom hint properly at a time.

I wrote to camus, maybe we can come up with a solution.

Vanilla now displays marine count after each round in detail monitor since 4.0 - maybe he can remove his display or tells me a way to mod it out without hurting the functionality of boarding options.

[pref]

Boarding Options should be compatible now.
Feedback welcome if there are any issues with this or other mods.

[birdtable]

Started new game, using this mod only thing have to switch from joystick to mouse to be able to target radar,, then back to joy.... still not boarded yet,, always some ship around and guns a bit weak to take out radar quick enough.. certainly adds some badly needed tension.... good stuff.!!!

[BlackRain]

Started new game, using this mod only thing have to switch from joystick to mouse to be able to target radar,, then back to joy.... still not boarded yet,, always some ship around and guns a bit weak to take out radar quick enough.. certainly adds some badly needed tension.... good stuff.!!!

I have edited hijack so that only factions friendly to another faction will care if I am boarding a ship and I am really loving it. I set up my shipyard in Lava Flow and have been acting as a pirate, capturing any ships that come through from any faction. Quite fun.

[birdtable]

This may be a dumb questions but since I have never needed to check before how do I define 20km and 30km ....
Yes to "pirate" ... very tempted to either use old galaxy or new HOL as base and use the other/old galaxy as a treasure trove .. options..

[pref]

I have edited hijack so that only factions friendly to another faction will care if I am boarding a ship and I am really loving it. I set up my shipyard in Lava Flow and have been acting as a pirate, capturing any ships that come through from any faction. Quite fun.

As soon as hijack triggers, your target becomes a 'friendly faction' member, and should be skipped by any other race as target. Not sure why you needed to edit anything, no other ships should interfere, nor should any station/ship care about what you do with the target (rep loss will not occur regardless of friend/foe settings of any of the involved races).

Or do you mean excluding neutral ships when doing initial proximity check before hijack starts?
I wasn't sure if faction relations are fine for that in vanilla XR initially. Won't that result in being able to pirate almost any 'foreign' faction ships?
Practically letting boarding happen without any penalty in most cases?
For ex being able to capture any Argon defence forces in a zone where only JSS has stations.
If it makes for a better experience i would implement it, but unsure about the consequences.

********

@birdtable: you can fly to your target and check any nearby ship/station's distance via targeting. Or just start boarding to get the initial status report of how many objects are in range and cancel out if anything is too close.
You can do that as soon as you can target the ship (from 30km? or perhaps 50?).

[birdtable]

Thanks pref ...All required info appeared on screen, sorted..

[pref]

Cheers, hope you'll have fun with it

Edit: regarding weak guns - you can use limpet mines for a quick solution.
Has the added benefit of the escorts not attacking the Skunk afterwards IF you let the escorts hit/kill the traitor drone.

The radar is often next to the boarding bay, so watch out for blast radius. But hijack will repair the drone bay anyway (and adds some drones to increase defence rating).

[BlackRain]

I have edited hijack so that only factions friendly to another faction will care if I am boarding a ship and I am really loving it. I set up my shipyard in Lava Flow and have been acting as a pirate, capturing any ships that come through from any faction. Quite fun.

As soon as hijack triggers, your target becomes a 'friendly faction' member, and should be skipped by any other race as target. Not sure why you needed to edit anything, no other ships should interfere, nor should any station/ship care about what you do with the target (rep loss will not occur regardless of friend/foe settings of any of the involved races).

Or do you mean excluding neutral ships when doing initial proximity check before hijack starts?
I wasn't sure if faction relations are fine for that in vanilla XR initially. Won't that result in being able to pirate almost any 'foreign' faction ships?
Practically letting boarding happen without any penalty in most cases?
For ex being able to capture any Argon defence forces in a zone where only JSS has stations.
If it makes for a better experience i would implement it, but unsure about the consequences.

********

@birdtable: you can fly to your target and check any nearby ship/station's distance via targeting. Or just start boarding to get the initial status report of how many objects are in range and cancel out if anything is too close.
You can do that as soon as you can target the ship (from 30km? or perhaps 50?).

I made it so the initial check would allow me to pirate ships without losing rep. Well, you can set Station to neutral and ship to friend. This way, you couldn't just hijack in a zone with stations but at least you could hijack a ship somewhere in a zone where there are no stations (for me in lava flow because there are always ROC ships running around and I couldn't hit up other ships like LEDDA industrial, etc)


Also, factions do have relations with each other (which could also be set and I can set faction relations between different factions). This is beyond the scope of "hijack" but its something I can do in CWIR which can affect this mod too. I only edited hijack for my own personal use anyway, not sure if others would like it or if it would work for you.


By the way I am on skype if you want to talk about it.

[birdtable]

Hi ... Using Hijack along with CWIR.... plus among others Boarding Options,

At the start a new game with cwir+Hijack I boarded a rahanas and then sold it but in the active missions it continued to display "obtain 5 cargo drones" in the end I tracked it down and re-boarded ,, but on the docking icon I could only get "info" ... recalled my marine and shot it to death.
Much later I found a Midar with around 130 scoop urv's ++ other drones, needed one and this was to good to miss, man what a balancing act after many failings I finally came out of the game gave myself 50 elites and tried again (was not going to destroy drone bay) at around 5 to 10% structure I despatched my boarding crew ... lost marines but boarded, the ships was mine, time to dock but only "info" was displayed ....
Not sure if this Hijack or other mods,, ... certainly have to pick your boarding locations more wisely.. ..... Have found very few locations to board where you are free of other ships/stations and still cannot target and destroy radar fast enough ,, but that could be me being a numpty.

Edit ..on further testing without Hijack (new game) the rahanas mentioned above had to be shot again as it still wanted cargo drones after being boarded and sold...

[pref]

Dont think it's hijack - i sold quite a few hijacked and non-hijackesd ships during testing, to check if penalties are working the way i want them when selling ships back to shipyard.
Every time the ship really got sold, also i could dock at hijacked ships to retrieve the MO (did not try anything else, but docking worked).

If you could check the log and see if there are any errors appearing there when selling ships it might help to get to the root of the problem.

I was also testing hijack with boarding options together - found no issues so far.

[eMYNOCK]

Cheers pref,

i am pretty much sure that the Hijack is causing my "problem".

After every Hijack (i only count destroyed Radar) i have several Assault URV on these Ships... others do not get them.

Is there any way possible to stop that "lucrative" Bug?

[pref]

URVs are intentional, this has a chance to block you to get bigger ships with drone bay intact (fulmekron for ex), even with an elite team.

For smaller vessels, if you have good enough marines, you get some extra URVs with the ship. When you reach that point, the price of drones is negligible in my experience anyway.
Plus the way combat drones are utilized, they haven't much effect on the anything.

I could change them to construction URVs to achieve the same resistance increase, but those drones do have a use so that would be a worse exploit.

Ideally hijack should need a pricey consumable (from pirates exclusively), that costs more then the drones on the ship - but economic balance is so off in the game, i did not feel the need to code that part.
Originally i thought about player having to deliver a stolen albion militrary ship (arawn or tara) to a pirate guy, after which one-time-use military and freighter grade hijack modules could be bought from that guy.
Sadly the amount of money thrown at you during gameplay makes this part hard to balance, and then what remains is that player has to fly to some dumb npc every once in a while to do a quick fetch mission to be able to hijack.

Or i could skip the BR increase entirely, but then a full noob team could get next to any ship without having to do any fight at all.