Some mafia boss hired NPC to block all my docking ports?

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lhartvik
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Some mafia boss hired NPC to block all my docking ports?

Post by lhartvik » Tue, 28. Nov 17, 21:26

Ok so in X3AP with bonus packs etc I have around 10 factories, and noticed that one of the factories was out of energy cells. Both CAGs were on standby and with no orders. I tell one of them to be a Commodity Logistics zombie and transfer energy cells from my power plant loop instead. Next time I look the factory is still out of energy cells and the CLS has also stopped with "CLS on standby".
Ok.
Something's wrong here. I check the other owned ship, the CAG, resting just outside the station with a full cargo hold of energy cells (and the factory is completely out of energy cells). So I go there to oversee the production myself, land, and get ready to lay off some useless station managers. However I stumble into the Landed ships list. FOURTEEN NPC Freight transporters just taking up space in my dock. Whyyy?? :evil:

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Post by Snafu_X3 » Tue, 28. Nov 17, 22:11

Did you look at the NPC traders to /see/ why? Chances are good that you're offering a (rare?) product at a low price, so they all come flocking to you; try raising that price.. alternatively you can always disallow foreigners landing rights..

FWIW your stations reserve a priority dock for /you/ to land, but I don't think that holds true for remote ships (CAGs, MORTs etc). So an easy quick fix is to temporarily transfer tothe Ecell CAG/CLS ship, dock & manually unload the cargo, then transfer back & reset the ship's CAG/CLS orders; this way you won't lose pilot training
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jlehtone
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Post by jlehtone » Wed, 29. Nov 17, 00:17

Snafu_X3 wrote:FWIW your stations reserve a priority dock for /you/ to land, but I don't think that holds true for remote ships (CAGs, MORTs etc).
I've been denied from docking when a busy destination station has had one of my ships docked or one of my ships incoming. In other words, player's personal ship cannot bypass the queue.


Traffic jams do occur. Like Snafu_X3 said, check that you are not making too tempting offers for the NPC.
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Triaxx2
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Post by Triaxx2 » Wed, 29. Nov 17, 00:23

I think if you can't get rid of them, if you add two new stations and change to the new complex hub, the ships just... "leave". Not sure though.
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Post by RAVEN.myst » Wed, 29. Nov 17, 02:21

@OP: Since you are using CAGs, you are already benefiting from their smart/aggressive price-finding capabilities, so trading with visiting ships would only compromise the prices you're getting - keeping that station open to "the public" is most likely not serving any useful purpose (there can be exceptions, of course.) When I set up a new station, the very first thing I do is to disallow other races docking there - only then I get on with setting prices, money transfer, etc., as I don't want to give NPC squatters any window of opportunity to pitch their tents, as it's harder to get rid of them than it is to simply keep them out in the first place (that said, I found a "Teladi Personnel Services Transport" or some-such docked at my Hub recently! Despite the fact that the place had been "authorized personnel only" since its acquisition days prior to that!)

Btw, the topic title tickles me! :D Old-school (pre-Internet) denial of service attack...

Snafu_X3 wrote:FWIW your stations reserve a priority dock for /you/ to land, ... . So an easy quick fix is to temporarily transfer tothe Ecell CAG/CLS ship, dock & manually unload the cargo,...
Even this can go off the rails sometimes - I've had cases (infrequent to rare), where I try to fast-dock within docking computer range, and instead of docking the ship starts performing a docking dance (indefinitely) - if I comm the station for docking clearance, I get a voice message starting with "Negative..." (I forget the rest - maybe coffee will help... :P ) I recently got this consistently in my current game while trying to dock at my Hub (Daye Poler needed dropping off there in order to set up a connection with that inactive gate in Heretic's End), which was at the time host to some 50 CAGs plus a dozen or more CLS2s, all constantly coming and going, and I had to keep trying for a gap to open in the docking queue and to slip into it before another of my freighters could cut in ahead of me.

I've also had this sort of problem with NPC stations from time to time (as jlehtone also indicated.) Sometimes, however, it doesn't look likely that it's due to overcrowding (say, only a couple of NPC ships docked, no nearby NPC traffic that could be inbound - should be plenty of parking available, right?) and I've found that only changing ships gets around it, unless I'm prepared to wait a REALLY looooooong time... (it's particularly annoying when the desired destination is required for a mission.)
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Post by Timsup2nothin » Wed, 29. Nov 17, 03:39

jlehtone wrote:
Snafu_X3 wrote:FWIW your stations reserve a priority dock for /you/ to land, but I don't think that holds true for remote ships (CAGs, MORTs etc).
I've been denied from docking when a busy destination station has had one of my ships docked or one of my ships incoming. In other words, player's personal ship cannot bypass the queue.


Traffic jams do occur. Like Snafu_X3 said, check that you are not making too tempting offers for the NPC.
Note that he did say your stations reserve a priority dock for your personal ship. Other stations do not, and can deny you permission...which is really annoying. But, as with all things in the X universe, this problem can be solved with a sufficient supply of tomahawks.
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Post by RAVEN.myst » Wed, 29. Nov 17, 03:50

Timsup2nothin wrote:But, as with all things in the X universe, this problem can be solved with a sufficient supply of tomahawks.
Subtle... :P
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RainerPrem
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Post by RainerPrem » Wed, 29. Nov 17, 05:45

RAVEN.myst wrote: ...

I've also had this sort of problem with NPC stations from time to time (as jlehtone also indicated.) Sometimes, however, it doesn't look likely that it's due to overcrowding (say, only a couple of NPC ships docked, no nearby NPC traffic that could be inbound - should be plenty of parking available, right?) and I've found that only changing ships gets around it, unless I'm prepared to wait a REALLY looooooong time... (it's particularly annoying when the desired destination is required for a mission.)
Hi,

each time I took the time to investigate the issue I found that one of my freighters was heading for exactly the same station. Canceling its task gave me a free docking clamp immediately.

cu
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Post by Cycrow » Wed, 29. Nov 17, 10:55

Timsup2nothin wrote:
jlehtone wrote:
Snafu_X3 wrote:FWIW your stations reserve a priority dock for /you/ to land, but I don't think that holds true for remote ships (CAGs, MORTs etc).
I've been denied from docking when a busy destination station has had one of my ships docked or one of my ships incoming. In other words, player's personal ship cannot bypass the queue.


Traffic jams do occur. Like Snafu_X3 said, check that you are not making too tempting offers for the NPC.
Note that he did say your stations reserve a priority dock for your personal ship. Other stations do not, and can deny you permission...which is really annoying. But, as with all things in the X universe, this problem can be solved with a sufficient supply of tomahawks.
actually all stations resevre a slot for the player.

however, it isn't specifically for the player ship, any player owned ship counts (which includes incoming ships).
so if you already have a ship docked or incoming, then you may not have a slot free for you

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Post by Thrake » Wed, 29. Nov 17, 11:19

Cycrow wrote:
Timsup2nothin wrote:
jlehtone wrote:
Snafu_X3 wrote:FWIW your stations reserve a priority dock for /you/ to land, but I don't think that holds true for remote ships (CAGs, MORTs etc).
I've been denied from docking when a busy destination station has had one of my ships docked or one of my ships incoming. In other words, player's personal ship cannot bypass the queue.


Traffic jams do occur. Like Snafu_X3 said, check that you are not making too tempting offers for the NPC.
Note that he did say your stations reserve a priority dock for your personal ship. Other stations do not, and can deny you permission...which is really annoying. But, as with all things in the X universe, this problem can be solved with a sufficient supply of tomahawks.
actually all stations resevre a slot for the player.

however, it isn't specifically for the player ship, any player owned ship counts (which includes incoming ships).
so if you already have a ship docked or incoming, then you may not have a slot free for you
Alternatively you can free more docking slots by ramming docked ships (you don't have to blow them up, it will just undock them).

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Post by Alan Phipps » Wed, 29. Nov 17, 18:49

"Alternatively you can free more docking slots by ramming docked ships (you don't have to blow them up, it will just undock them)."

As far as I know, docked ships become part of the station structure and are protected by its shields so you cannot keep ramming or shooting at docked ships without effectively ramming/shooting the station itself with all the rep penalties for a deliberate attack on it. Also you cannot blow up still-docked ships except by destroying the entire station. I think your docked ships were just leaving anyway.

... Unless things have changed ...
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Post by SirNukes » Wed, 29. Nov 17, 20:02

In general, there are two types of NPC traders: free traders and dock traders. The free traders will look to buy a good for average-1 price, and then sell for average+1, so if you have your trade ships flooding a market with cheap goods, these npc traders will get stuck for long periods of time failing to find an average+1 place to sell. This should clear out eventually, however, since they have a 2% chance per check to allow a wider range of prices (with a wait period between checks, so it will just mean extra long waits at docks).

However, you mentioned your npcs are Freight Transporters. Those are generally dock traders, and work by selecting a dock (normally a trading station), figuring out the list of wares they want to purchase for that dock, and looking to buy the wares for the dock price or up to the max secondary goods price, then selling everything to the dock. (Side note: they ignore player docks.)

At first glance I didn't see a way for the dock traders to get stuck based on cheap goods. However, it does look like they might lock up if the dock they are servicing gets destroyed, which the trader doesn't notice until after they buy a bunch of goods to fill their cargo hold. When the trader selects the wares it wants to buy for a new dock, it has two notable filters: it will ignore wares the trader already has in its cargo bay, and it will ignore wares the trader doesn't have room for in its cargo bay. When all dock wares get ignored by these and other checks (eg. illegal goods, dock being almost full, etc.), the dock trader script restarts its main loop to pick a different dock. If a trader has a full cargo hold during these checks, it looks like the script will just loop infinitely.

If your npc blocked factory is within a few hops of the war sectors and is offering cheap goods common at trading stations, that could explain why the npcs clustered at your station when getting locked up. If my interpretation is correct and this is your problem, the npc ships at your dock should be having their flight time getting reset every 15-30 seconds or so (when their main loop restarts), which you can check by pulling up an npc ship's info.

As far as I can tell, there is no way in the script to break out of the loop (without a patch or mod), short of blowing the ship up. You may be stuck dropping down a new complex hub to force undocking, as mentioned earlier.

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Post by Timsup2nothin » Wed, 29. Nov 17, 20:08

I think that dock traders can also lock up if you stuff their dock full of goods.
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Post by jlehtone » Wed, 29. Nov 17, 21:21

SirNukes wrote:In general, there are two types of NPC traders: free traders and dock traders. The free traders will look to buy a good for average-1 price, and then sell for average+1, ...
First, thanks for interpreting the Dock Trader mentality.

Second, the Free Traders and player's Trade Mk3 are similar, but am I right that Mk3 makes a trade run only if it sees source and destination simultaneously, while the NPC does buying and selling as separate actions and is thus much more prone to end up full cargobay of ware for which there are no decent buyer (within 9? jumps)?
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Post by SirNukes » Thu, 30. Nov 17, 06:31

Yes, the npc trader will buy blindly, and is generally quite simple. It somewhat randomly switches from buy mode to sell mode based on how full the ship cargo bay is.

The Mk3 is far more complicated, and its decision making is quite different. At a quick perusal, here are some high level notes on the mk3 routine for comparison. Forgive the verbosity.

First, there are two routines for picking a trade run: short and long. Short is used for lower level sector traders, long otherwise. The short script will look at factories in range, build a list of those with the lowest price for each ware (ignoring any above average), and then for each of those will find the highest price it can sell at at a station in range. The idea is to select the trade run with the highest profit per sector hop, though in practice it only considers one possible trade run per ware (can miss some high profit/hop runes), and the profit calculation is weird. If you are curious, the formula appears to be: {[min(amount of ware buyable at source station, amount of ware sellable at sink station) * (price at sink station - price at source station) + (amount of ware storable in ship cargo) * (price at sink station)] / (1 + sector hops from Here to source station + hops from source station to sink station)}.

The long routine is less exhaustive, and instead runs in a loop which randomly selects a ware, finds a station to buy at (for average price or less), selects a station to sell at for highest price, and calculates profit (no oddities in this calculation). Instead of comparing profits for different goods, this script will instead accept a deal if the profit is above a threshold; the threshold starts high and is gradually lowered as the ware sampling loop iterates and fails to find an acceptable deal.

So, as far as that goes, the Mk3 traders should only be buying goods if there is someplace to sell. However, going back to the main script that carries out the selected deal, there are a couple holes in it. First, if the station to sell at gets destroyed, the script returns to ware selection without selling off the prior wares, leaving the cargo hold potentially full without a way to clean it out. Second, if the trader arrives at the sell station and the price has fallen below the purchase price, the script will try to select an alternate station with at least an average price; if that search fails, the script returns to ware selection, again without selling off the prior wares. In this second case, the low level single-sector trader works a little differently, notably that it will stop working and send the player a message on a sell failure due to pricing changes.

A point in the NPC free trader's favor is that it shouldn't get stuck with wares in its cargo hold that it is ignoring, though it can take a while to offload them. The Mk3 may run into sell problems less often but its failures are more severe, needing player intervention to clean out its cargo. The dock trader has a similar severe failure, but it is less likely since it doesn't occur due to price changes, only station destruction. This all assumes I read the scripts correctly, of course.

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