[#152][5.10 HF2] (477240) ARG Beam L turret seems to charge Xenon I shields - Fix in a future build.

[barszcz]

Hello,

I seem to have encountered a bug. The situation is as follows: I am pretty early into my new gamestart. I have pushed some plots ahead and got Delilah's Swansong. I have noticed a Xenon I laying waste to Argon Prime, so I decided to bait it towards the ARG Shipyard to finish it off under turret cover. I drained some of its shields (ca. 40%), but when the I entered the turret range (ARG L Beam Turrets IIRC) it quickly recharged its shields. The fight was long and finally, after the most of Defence Platfoms died, the recharge effect was gone and The Xenon I died too.

Below you will find the save from the middle of the fight (unfortunately I do not have the save from beginning of the fight before entering turret range).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gPEz4L ... sp=sharing

In the save you are at the helm of Delilah's Swansong in Argon Prime with XEN I in front of you. Within 15-30 sec part of the ARG Shipyard will explode damaging the I's shields. Then you will see the insane recharge of its shields. Try damaging the hull - I wasn't able until the Defence Platforms were mostly gone and the recharge effect stopped.

To me it seems that the Beams were recharging instead of damaging the I's shields but cannot verify it.

The game is vanilla started in 5.0. I hope it is helpful.

barszcz

[j.harshaw]

Hi. Quickly checked, although didn't look in-depth. Verified that beams were damaging the I's shields but sustained total damage was not strong enough to defeat the shields' combined recharge rate. With a raw shield readout, ship's shields were noticeably flickering down and up again, but the drops weren't enough to impact the shield percentage display on the target monitor.

[barszcz]

Hi, @j.harshaw, thanks for checking.
Well if it's not the L beams then I do not know what it was. In my case the I was impossible to kill and regenerated the shields too quickly to bring them down with Delilah's Swansong. Even though it worked away from the station. Has anyone been able to confirm my observation or is it my imagination?

[sirprosik]

I posted about this on steam some months ago with a station with 400+ L beam turrets.
Gate defense station blocking xenon from the sector.
While in sight of the station I am unable to kill the xenon K/I at all because the L beams restore
the shields of the xenon ships. Only when out of sight or out of the sector either one probably
the shields are lowered and the Xenon ship is destroyed.

Plasma turrets work great to destroy both xenon ships and our own defending ships as well as
other faction ships that happen to get in the way which is why I prefer beam turrets for defense!!

[Katorone]

Hi. Quickly checked, although didn't look in-depth. Verified that beams were damaging the I's shields but sustained total damage was not strong enough to defeat the shields' combined recharge rate. With a raw shield readout, ship's shields were noticeably flickering down and up again, but the drops weren't enough to impact the shield percentage display on the target monitor.

Could I bother you to check this save? The Xenon K seems to have unnaturally high shield regen. (I saved right as my Fleet was joining in, so to see the effect it might be needed to disable the other Rattlesnakes' turrets.)

[JoeJinis]

Hello,

I just saw your topic.
I have this issue quite often ( 1/3 of my fights against Xenon ), their shield is damaged % by % until they decide at a random number to up to 100% in 4-5 seconds.
Then they get damaged again and repeat.
If I am far enough that doesn't happen :/

[Katorone]

This is what I've noticed as well in the save I linked. No terran beams involved, just a bunch of laser towers and commonwealth turrets.

I'm wondering if the boosted shield regeneration is caused by an anti-collision measure. In X3 you could win against any ship by just clipping inside it.

[Imperial Good]

I suggest capturing a video of the issue on a not modified playthrough (no third party mods, custom game start allowed) in case it is not reliably reproduced on different systems. Especially if you think it is related to clipping as clipping issues are difficult to reproduce reliably. This footage can also be used to roughly check if the recharge rate is outside natural shield recharge rates.

XEN XL shields do recharge quite quickly and continuously recharge. The raw data for them can be seen below.

Code: Select all

      <recharge max="123007" rate="550" delay="0" />

Assuming all XL shield generators are at maximum hull this means that a Xenon I will go from 0% shield to 100% shield in 224 second or 3.7 minutes. This is a lot faster than any similar sized ships in X3 which would take 20 minutes to recharge.

[Katorone]

In the case I've witnessed, it recharged in a few seconds.
I'll doublecheck if the issue is reproduced in the save I linked.

Update: it doesn't reproduce :-/
I'm not sure if reloading a save has the potential to "bump" colliding objects away. Or it could be something else entirely. I'll keep an eye out for this happening again, though screencapturing is not a workable option for me. :-/

[barszcz]

Hi,

I wanted to add this in Katorone's beta thread here
viewtopic.php?f=192&t=448378 ,
but it is locked now

Anyway, I captured a short video showing the recharge rate of the shields
https://youtu.be/q2ivUNpMpmg

You can see that after the station module explodes, it takes the I 10 seconds to recharge the shields from 90% to 100% while being still under fire. This amounts to recharge of at least (not counting incoming damage) 6150 MJ/s = 10% of 615000 MJ over 10 s instead of 2750 MJ/s = 5 * 550 MJ/s.

Save as before:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gPEz4L ... sp=sharing

Hope this helps
barszcz

[sirprosik]

Hello,

Here is a save from version 5.10 479084 latest on steam.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xlpwkid7hr0cu ... ml.gz?dl=0

Xenon K (ZAQ-596) is approaching gate to Hatikvah's Choice I.
Docked at Hatikvah's Choice I Scrap Processing Factory I is Delilah's Swansong (GKD-903) for testing.

With the stations Argon L Beam turrets (ALL turrets) enabled the K's shields will not lower while player is present!!!
If you disable (all turrets) on the station the shields of the K will be lowered as intended. With the K's shields lowered
re-enable ALL turrets for the station to see K's shields restored directly by the Argon L Beam turrets.

Thank you

[Imperial Good]

I have removed the solved title from this thread. There looks like a potential issue given that multiple different people all seem to have evidence of the behaviour now, including on video.

[JoeJinis]

Nice to have a "basegame" video of it
I can't do any becaus I have ships mods ( but no weapon mod ).
I don't use beam weapon myself, all my fleet ships have bolter/disintegrator/flak.
It's totally random, can't pinpoint something that will make to bug to appear :/

[MatthewK]

Let me contribute with a case that I've been observing myself.

I have a raptor near a xenon gate with a bunch of beam equipped Kyds. At one point I was trying to swarm a K with fighters and use plasmas on the raptor to kill it, but I visibly observed the more it was under fighter beam fire, the more quicker the shields were restoring - to a point where it was still regenerating while under plasma and flak fire from raptor up close.

If I were to guess, it looks like multiple damage pings from multiple beams in quick succession somehow screw the damage calculations. This seems to be related to beams in general, not just turrets.

I will try to isolate the scenario and provide save game next time I encounter a K in a similar setting.

[CBJ]

Please do. Every single report of this that we have seen so far has ended up being simply that the shields are recharging faster than the damage is being applied, so without strong evidence to the contrary, we are not going to investigate it further.

[XelSirko]

@CBJ, I think I caught a pretty good example of this. Problem may be happening specifically when beams/lasers are hitting XL shield generators.

Got a bunch of Laser Towers (Mk2) deployed next to a gate to Xenon sector, and a "K" with shut off engines hanging right above them.

See how fully-kitted rattlesnake barely decreases shields on it - they immediately regenerate; then about 30-40 seconds in the video, all laser towers get disabled and you can immediately see the difference. I re-enable towers around 1:05 and you can see how shield starts regenerating at ridiculous pace again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=149HU8AIBRw

This is pure vanilla steam install, no mods.

Save: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kSJvU- ... sp=sharing

[SerthVarnee]

Yeah I can confirm having the exact same issue with the laser towers just supercharging Xenon K and I ships. Only those two ship classes are affected though and in 2 out of 14 cases this issue did not occur.
The laser towers (MK 2 if it makes a difference) do damage to subcomponents like medium shield generators, turrets and engines just fine. They also damage the hull just fine. But the instant the shield generates just 1% they boost the shield up as XelSirko's video demonstrates.

I'm not sure if the towers can damage the XL shield generators once the shield is down. Haven't had the chance to study that due to the Xenon not behaving themselves during the tests.

[Alan Phipps]

@ SerthVarnee: A link to a further vanilla save showing the issue happening would be of far more use to the devs than an unsupported 'me too' post. Please help them if you can.

[SerthVarnee]

A fair request, but while the mods I have installed are quite limited, there are still mods installed. Given the fact that one of those is used to make sure I don't get my epilepsy triggered by long range scanning, I'm not really too happy about playing long enough on an unmodded save to be able to upload it here.

[CBJ]

If you provide a save that has just that mod installed but no others, and indicate the reason when you upload it, we should still be able to use it.