You've been duked?

[Deathifier]

The "Paranid" M7M can't dock at Duke's Haven anymore unfortunately. It wouldn't really matter anyway, as the Military transport unloads at most 10 marines before idling indefinitely... it's just par for the course at this point for an Egosoft game: badly designed, untested and forever unfinished

Yep, monitoring it in a test game had the covered M7M's loitering around the gate until something happened to them

The TP's should go and find more marines though, their code is one big infinite while loop which is basically split in two halves - being "if I have room, go find marines" and "if I am full, go unload", and there's an idle period at the start of each loop.
So it is quite likely the TP simply can't find any suitable marines.

I have a test game and some XXL Barracks up now, though so far they've only produced junk but we'll see how many per hundred marines are useful pretty soon.
I've also been observing the M7M behaviour (it's mostly as expected, and sometimes it does something bizarre), examining the code more (I think some of my probabilities are wrong, but in a good way - the odds are more in our favour, and having Lasting Vengeance Beta around is more useful than I thought), and figuring out ways to potentially jam up the broken system so we have a bit more control over what happens and when.

But if the XXL training barracks can't produce marines with a high enough skill I don't know how to get enough marines on any reasonable timescale.

Deathifier, since you've been looking into the script and it's fresh in your mind, have you considered making a fix as a Mod? It wouldn't help get the Steam achievement, but it doesn't sound like it would be too hard and it might be one step closer to getting an official fix released someday.

I suppose It can be done.
What would be the goal though? Fixing it so players can trigger the achievement is one thing, but that's kinda pointless without the achievement.
Making it function for day-to-day game sessions is more complex and it would be very easy to go from it doing nothing at all to constantly harassing the player.

To do it properly, or what I consider properly (i.e. something that the average player will see on occasion in regular play and that, unless otherwise provoked, might affect them very rarely) is actually a considerable amount of work.
If the dev's were agreeable to fixing it i'd consider putting the time in to do it properly however they've already stated that, essentially, this project is done and therefore the probability of future updates is almost zero.

[Hwitvlf]

If it's lots of work, then it's not worth it. What I was picturing is simply getting the script to work as Cycrow intended it. From what I gather, the main problem is that the M7Ms cover is not removed when returning home. Secondarily, the high Fighting skill requirement lowers the odds of success.

If no one is making any fixes for FL, it will certainly will stay in its current state. My hope is that every fix which the community makes will raise the odds that Egosoft would spend the time to release another official update.

[Midnightknight]

If the dev's were agreeable to fixing it i'd consider putting the time in to do it properly however they've already stated that, essentially, this project is done and therefore the probability of future updates is almost zero.

Same for me. I'm already busy doing many other things not related to X3, so getting my hands on the script understand how they works, remember how the script language works (Haven't done any script in X3 for more than a decade now) for in the end have a game still bugged to the brim isn't worth the time i would put on fixing the things. It's a thing to fix your own code, it's a lot harder when it's not yours and you have to understand what the author wanted to do.

Anyway, i guess increasing the number of marines Duke's heaven can hold is easy, lowering the marine requirement is easy too, making the M7M and TP script have the same prerequisite for marines would be easy too. But that won't help much, there will still be many things to fix in this script and if it's only to get the achievement it's pointless as they are disables the second you use script editor or a mod.

[Deathifier]

After more than 400 marines trained it looks like the Marine Training Barracks has a hard cap of 40 on fighting skill regardless of size and that going up in size only improves the average fighting skill of newly produced marines.
The other skills are even less useful as of every marine trained during the entire testing process (more than 600) maybe one or two marines had a non-fighting skill of one star.

So the player can't produce a supply of marines and therefore it relies on the handful of NPC training facilities.
I don't know what they produce although I suspect it is random.

The problem is with all the other design faults the player needs to stack up a very large number of marines, get them near Duke's HQ, get the TP's near the HQ, then turn on the flow of resources (marines, energy cells, boarding pods) to the HQ.
At that point it would be a case of waiting for the TP's to move enough marines to the HQ and for the M7M to pick everything up, reloading each time the random check in the idle code decided to send the M7M to a non-Duke's sector.

On review of the code and documentation, I think the actual odds of the M7M doing things are:
1 in 3 chance of idling to another sector.
If idling to another sector the max range is 2 jumps but it can also choose the current sector.
Thus, if the Hub is not a factor (i.e. it isn't connected to a sector near Lasting Vengeance), then if you don't have Lasting Vengeance Beta unlocked and owned by Duke's it is a 1 in 3 chance to stay in a Duke's sector (i.e. to stay in Lasting Vengeance). If Lasting Vengeance Beta is owned by Duke's, it is a 1 in 2 chance to stay in a Duke's sector.

However without direct control of when to start the flow of resources and the location of those resources it is going to be very difficult to get a suitable game state setup due to:
1. Even if a TP picked up 40 marines it can only unload 10, and the M7M has to pick those up before more can be unloaded.
2. The TP's have no jumpdrive and move slowly, so even if they had marines to buy you'd be fighting the random generator for a long, long time - esp. as the checks are extremely frequent (the longest between checks is if it goes to Lasting Vengeance Beta, as it takes a while to get there and then back to the HQ and the next check).
3. Even if you used the hub to shorten the TP trips, the NPC facilities still need to produce suitable marines and I suspect that also takes a long time.

To even attempt it without going insane you'd need a game with Lasting Vengeance Beta in it, you'd need to supply the NPC facilities (and clean out any unsuitable marines), and then you'd need to constantly watch the M7M's behaviour after the first TP arrives with marines, continuously saving and loading to keep the M7M from idling to a non-Dukes sector and resetting the cycle.


That all assumes that the boarding process actually works.
Which it does - if you script enough stuff onto the M7M at the right time it will pass all its checks and start a boarding operation.
It really likes to board the playership (it happened first time, and I have max rep with Duke's), which in my case was a M6.
It jumps to your sector, flies over near you, turns hostile, and launches its pods (I had forgotten to script in some shields for my ship...), boards the playership, and kicks you out in your space suit when they win, sending your old ship off to idle in sector now owned by Duke's.

The only problem - no achievement, not when the pods hit, not after after they win, and not after the M7M had decided it had finished boarding and was going back home and I got in a new ship and jumped around for a bit to see if there was a short delay.
Even in a modified game you still get the in-game notifications for an achievement (my message log has a bunch even though this became a modified game just after starting it) and there simply was no notification.

So not only is the scripting packed with flaws, the achievement doesn't even trigger if you do find a way around the flaws.

I think this is done and it's time to ask Egosoft to either fix it in a reasonable timeframe, or delete the achievement.

[Deathifier]

With patch 1.3 on the way I'm hopeful this was addressed however I can't see any mention of it and I'm not sure if achievements work in the release candidates.

I'm hoping the developers can let us know if it has been addressed or not.

[iXenon]

With patch 1.3 on the way I'm hopeful this was addressed however I can't see any mention of it and I'm not sure if achievements work in the release candidates.

I'm hoping the developers can let us know if it has been addressed or not.

I found your feedback for 1.3 RC1 here. You mentioned there:

I still can't get the achievement to trigger locally in a modified game though :/

Have you gotten it since then? I read some of your other comments but they had been posted before the 1.3 was released, so it's still unclear for me if it's possible to get this achievement.