[MOD] [TC/AP] X3 Rebalance Mod (XRM) - Total conversion - v1.30d (02.12.13)

[Erenar]

Ahhhh that is why... I thought it was for sale and was confused cos I had seen them in the distance hovering above planets' atmospheres.

I want to buy one :'( or I'll be tempted to alter mammoths so they can carry 80k... or 1m (but that's if i'm feeling weak when i open the editor )

[joelR]

@jack08

Dont you just love the internet?

Anyhow, I totally understand you. Whats curious though is how the game runs smoother after a reload. God only knows whats running in the background. Still its way better than TC in terms of performance.

You shouldnt be responding to me anyways!! Even some of us hardcore XRMers are eagerly waiting for Timelines!!

[paulwheeler]

Ahhhh that is why... I thought it was for sale and was confused cos I had seen them in the distance hovering above planets' atmospheres.

I want to buy one :'( or I'll be tempted to alter mammoths so they can carry 80k... or 1m (but that's if i'm feeling weak when i open the editor )

I'll add them somewhere to buy.

[Erenar]

lol Thanks, no rush though... more important things on your plate I suspect I'll test out whether a mobile mining base can do what i hope it can, dock TSs, in the meantime and use that storage space for HQ and associated construct placement.

[Master of the Blade]

I've been lurking this thread for a while waiting for the AP version of XRM. I think I need to stop lurking in order to say how awesome this mod is. Started with Xenon rogue, think, 'hey I've got a PX. I can take them pirates'. Then a Caravel arrives with a quartet of Blastclaws, who nearly tear me apart but I still emerge victorious, one having bailed. I then spend about half an hour leading the Galleon (plus escorts) who promptly turn up around the sector so I can claim it. At first I tried attacking it. That was when I met the Gauss Cannon. Now I want some. Then I tried evading, and had to pull out because the Pirates cornered me. Best fun I've had in X for ages.

Thank you, paulwheeler, for the opportunity to get my arse kicked so comprehensively!

[mr.WHO]

Hey Paul, I think that you forgot to update Marlin model for AP version - the new AP Marlin is way better than the XRM one that looks more like some kind of TP rather than M8.

EDIT:
If you lack the betty names for Terrans I think that renaming Shamshir to Katana Sentinel would be a good move.

[PRiME2007]

Was thinking about a way to fix those reputations to certain races in a creative way. How about adding a item to certain stations when you use the blacklist items listing device to HACK your reputation or IDENTIFY CHANGE item.

Basically a purchasable service to change or alter your identity, it could be made more expensive the worse it is or just be plain expensive to start with and what it does is sets your reputation back to a normal non-hostile state with that faction.

Maybe service costs a million? and is only available at certain pirate bases or something... ?

[paulwheeler]

Hey Paul, I think that you forgot to update Marlin model for AP version - the new AP Marlin is way better than the XRM one that looks more like some kind of TP rather than M8.

EDIT:
If you lack the betty names for Terrans I think that renaming Shamshir to Katana Sentinel would be a good move.

I didn't realise they changed it. Ill put it in the next patch.

[Erenar]

Was thinking about a way to fix those reputations to certain races in a creative way. How about adding a item to certain stations when you use the blacklist items listing device to HACK your reputation or IDENTIFY CHANGE item.

Basically a purchasable service to change or alter your identity, it could be made more expensive the worse it is or just be plain expensive to start with and what it does is sets your reputation back to a normal non-hostile state with that faction.

Maybe service costs a million? and is only available at certain pirate bases or something... ?

If there was a rep hacking device (which would not work in a simulated sense as reputation is how the masses see you, and if you had gained fame and then gone on a killing spree, people would hear about it and reputation would naturally drop) the cost should be more in line with XRM and be 1mill per 1000 rep needed to get from negative to neutral.

Best to just do nice things and please the people!

[nap_rz]

3 millions for a trade mk3... wow... talking about expensive... isn't XRM a bit too harsh for trading play style?

It's not just harsh for traders. Upgrading of ships, for example, and many of standard equipment /software is substantially more expensive then in vanilla. There are other changes, you'll pick up.

yes but re read again my post, if you choose gamestart that gave you a decent fighter ship, choosing to do combat missions with that 'free' ship will give you much easier money than trying to set up a trade fleet, this is in my mind what I called unbalanced...

edit, btw so ATF Bragi really missing from shipyard or is it sold somewhere?

another thing, anyone here that enabled MARS on all cap chips, do NPC cap ships really use them properly? I noticed the lack of MARS in their cargo/equipment list... CMIIW, again I forget how MARS work for the AI lol; before you tell me to enable it on all cap ships, I've enabled it properly...

[Nick 031287]

hey, some Advise, i been getting along pretty far into X3AP, got a few expensive an large complexes an stuff, but would XRM be worth starting over for?

anyone help me out?

[Valenzio]

hey, some Advise, i been getting along pretty far into X3AP, got a few expensive an large complexes an stuff, but would XRM be worth starting over for?

anyone help me out?

yes! more action in XRM then vanilla! Also you dont have to start over! use the cheat program and use it t remake your complexes in the same location and create all the ships you have.

unless you really like starting over.

[Nick 031287]

hey, some Advise, i been getting along pretty far into X3AP, got a few expensive an large complexes an stuff, but would XRM be worth starting over for?

anyone help me out?

yes! more action in XRM then vanilla! Also you dont have to start over! use the cheat program and use it t remake your complexes in the same location and create all the ships you have.

unless you really like starting over.

ok i may back up my saves just incase, but question i got the bonus pack installed will that cause any conflicts?

[Seraph Kaoru]

3 millions for a trade mk3... wow... [...]

Snip!

yes but re read again my post, if you choose gamestart that gave you a decent fighter ship, choosing to do combat missions with that 'free' ship will give you much easier money than trying to set up a trade fleet, this is in my mind what I called unbalanced...

The three million seems steep at the start of the game, but it becomes peanuts before long - XRM seems very much dedicated to slowing down the accrual of player funds, but you will get the ball rolling in a decent amount of time and be on the way to masses of easy money, sooner than you'd think. As for the claims that the difficulty is "unbalanced", here's how I see it.

If you do a combat mission, with the starting ship (assuming you start in, say, an M4 or an M3 rather than an M6 or above) you can probably earn a great deal of money very quick, yeah. However - once you get that payout from a combat mission, that's it. One payday.

You get no recurring funds from that mission, and you have to go do another to get paid again - not to mention, you have to do all the work yourself unless you start buying AI ships to help you (which, if they're fighters, are going to cost almost as much as a small freighter to outfit right in XRM, and if they're corvettes or higher, are gonna cost as much as several large freighters to outfit!)

Compare this to a freighter. A large freighter is going to cost you around seven million credits to outfit - assuming you get an expensive Super Freighter XL and outfit it with MARS and a jumpdrive and Trade Command Software Mk. 3. That's a pretty hefty investment - but once you set that freighter to running sector trader (or universe trader), for the most part, all he does is make money.

That is his entire existence. Every second of every game, he is working to earn you money, and he is getting better at it - all of this, with barely any oversight at all from you, the player. You don't have to fly the slow missions. You don't have to do much more than keep an eye on the ship (and possibly utilize one of the advanced scrips that lets you 'blacklist' dangerous sectors, so your traders stay out of them.)

How many combat missions can you fly before you get tired? Because long after you get sick of blowing up ships (and, considering that your combat rating will be going through the roof if all you're running is combat missions, you will likely start to find it more and more difficult to even do that!) your Mk. 3-equipped tradeships will still be tirelessly earning you money. Forever. Unless they get blown up.

That's the investment. That's the trade-off. Yes, it's expensive, but if you set the trader up in a lucrative sector, they'll earn back their cost within a day. I'm at around mid-game at this point and I've got a whole fleet of traders running various levels of trade software, and they were expensive to set up, but I make somewhere around a million credits every five minutes. And I don't have to run any combat missions I don't want to, because the money rolls in faster than I can spend it without me doing a thing.

Trade Command Software Mk. 3 is expensive because it is, assuming no interruption of your trader, an infinite money machine with zero further investment and effort, and 100% profits. It's mentioned in one of the opening posts by Paul, as well, that he has rebalanced and re-valued several ship components, but feels that these changes are intrinsic to the nature of XRM. If you really dislike it, though, it's an easy change!

[...]
another thing, anyone here that enabled MARS on all cap chips, do NPC cap ships really use them properly? I noticed the lack of MARS in their cargo/equipment list... CMIIW, again I forget how MARS work for the AI lol; before you tell me to enable it on all cap ships, I've enabled it properly...

I have enabled MARS on all capital ships, and as far as I can tell they use it even though the ware isn't installed. This is likely because to add the ware to ships' default load-outs would involve modifying files that other mods (like XRM!) really like to use often, and would thus introduce incompatibility issues with MARS. Your own ships are the only ones that need MARS installed to function - non-player AI ships will use it automatically, no ware required. My missile frigate is having the damndest time with the bigships, as a result.
~K

[Valenzio]

hey, some Advise, i been getting along pretty far into X3AP, got a few expensive an large complexes an stuff, but would XRM be worth starting over for?

anyone help me out?

yes! more action in XRM then vanilla! Also you dont have to start over! use the cheat program and use it t remake your complexes in the same location and create all the ships you have.

unless you really like starting over.

ok i may back up my saves just incase, but question i got the bonus pack installed will that cause any conflicts?

you will be fine. If worried use the plugin manager and XRM .SPK that way if there is a problem you can turn off the mod with 1 click of a button.

[nap_rz]

3 millions for a trade mk3... wow... [...]

Snip!

yes but re read again my post, if you choose gamestart that gave you a decent fighter ship, choosing to do combat missions with that 'free' ship will give you much easier money than trying to set up a trade fleet, this is in my mind what I called unbalanced...

The three million seems steep at the start of the game, but it becomes peanuts before long - XRM seems very much dedicated to slowing down the accrual of player funds, but you will get the ball rolling in a decent amount of time and be on the way to masses of easy money, sooner than you'd think. As for the claims that the difficulty is "unbalanced", here's how I see it.

If you do a combat mission, with the starting ship (assuming you start in, say, an M4 or an M3 rather than an M6 or above) you can probably earn a great deal of money very quick, yeah. However - once you get that payout from a combat mission, that's it. One payday.

You get no recurring funds from that mission, and you have to go do another to get paid again - not to mention, you have to do all the work yourself unless you start buying AI ships to help you (which, if they're fighters, are going to cost almost as much as a small freighter to outfit right in XRM, and if they're corvettes or higher, are gonna cost as much as several large freighters to outfit!)

Compare this to a freighter. A large freighter is going to cost you around seven million credits to outfit - assuming you get an expensive Super Freighter XL and outfit it with MARS and a jumpdrive and Trade Command Software Mk. 3. That's a pretty hefty investment - but once you set that freighter to running sector trader (or universe trader), for the most part, all he does is make money.

That is his entire existence. Every second of every game, he is working to earn you money, and he is getting better at it - all of this, with barely any oversight at all from you, the player. You don't have to fly the slow missions. You don't have to do much more than keep an eye on the ship (and possibly utilize one of the advanced scrips that lets you 'blacklist' dangerous sectors, so your traders stay out of them.)

How many combat missions can you fly before you get tired? Because long after you get sick of blowing up ships (and, considering that your combat rating will be going through the roof if all you're running is combat missions, you will likely start to find it more and more difficult to even do that!) your Mk. 3-equipped tradeships will still be tirelessly earning you money. Forever. Unless they get blown up.

That's the investment. That's the trade-off. Yes, it's expensive, but if you set the trader up in a lucrative sector, they'll earn back their cost within a day. I'm at around mid-game at this point and I've got a whole fleet of traders running various levels of trade software, and they were expensive to set up, but I make somewhere around a million credits every five minutes. And I don't have to run any combat missions I don't want to, because the money rolls in faster than I can spend it without me doing a thing.

Trade Command Software Mk. 3 is expensive because it is, assuming no interruption of your trader, an infinite money machine with zero further investment and effort, and 100% profits. It's mentioned in one of the opening posts by Paul, as well, that he has rebalanced and re-valued several ship components, but feels that these changes are intrinsic to the nature of XRM. If you really dislike it, though, it's an easy change!

[...]
another thing, anyone here that enabled MARS on all cap chips, do NPC cap ships really use them properly? I noticed the lack of MARS in their cargo/equipment list... CMIIW, again I forget how MARS work for the AI lol; before you tell me to enable it on all cap ships, I've enabled it properly...

I have enabled MARS on all capital ships, and as far as I can tell they use it even though the ware isn't installed. This is likely because to add the ware to ships' default load-outs would involve modifying files that other mods (like XRM!) really like to use often, and would thus introduce incompatibility issues with MARS. Your own ships are the only ones that need MARS installed to function - non-player AI ships will use it automatically, no ware required. My missile frigate is having the damndest time with the bigships, as a result.
~K

thanks for the long answering

another thing I can't find in my game, I've installed Salvage Claim Software and I can't find it being sold yet... anyone know where is it?

another thing, since I use NPC bail addon, I have this Nexus corvette floating on Heretic End with repair drones circling around it, I can't claim it, claim menu does not even appear on spacewalking method, is this normal and I have to use Salvage Claim Software for it?

[Grimshad]

I had questions that weren't answered in the OP before I mess something up.

Does Improved Races work with XRM and should I even be using it with AP?

Same question for Pirate Guild. Will XRM do what IR and PG do? Allow the races to dynamically fight, capture sectors, and rebuild?

Next thing is NPC bailing, is this built into XRM or should I be using the NPC Bailing mod?

Next is a salvage mod, does XRM have this functionality built in? or should I be using a mod that allows me to assign a universe salvager?

Last but not least... Universe Explorers .. yes or no?

Let me know if there is anything else I should or shouldn't be using.

Here is what i currently have turned on:
XRM part 1 and 2
XRM Hull Mid
XRM Cockpit Pack
Flat Square Map with Trishift
My own custom GUI
The AP Bonus pack
Economy and Supply Trader
No floating Icons
NPC Bailing Addon
Numeric Ranks
Rename Ships with Expression
Salvage Commands and NPCs
Ship Killed Notifications
Universal Best Buy/Sell Locator
Universe Explorers

[morikaane]

I can't claim it, claim menu does not even appear on spacewalking method, is this normal and I have to use Salvage Claim Software for it?

Salvage Claim Software does not work that way. You need to access it via the ship orders menu for your ship. I can't remember which particular set of orders its under (Salvage... i think) as Salvage Claim Software is too 'schoolboy' for me.

And... if that menu isn't popping up, if you know about it already, it probably needs to be made compatible with X3:AP. Something to do with the Command Slots if I am not mistaken.

Does Improved Races work with XRM and should I even be using it with AP?

I advise against it. There is enough going on in the universe in terms of conflict already. It would probably double the number of conflicts (fighting) and probably make things a little too crazy.

Same question for Pirate Guild. Will XRM do what IR and PG do? Allow the races to dynamically fight, capture sectors, and rebuild?

XRM does the dynamic fighting and rebuilding on its own... more or less. It doesn't do sector invasions though - only MBRR or IR do that as far as I know.

PG might work okay but I don't use it. I know Paul and a few others do, at least in XRM:TC, but I don't know what its like in XRM:AP.

Next thing is NPC bailing, is this built into XRM or should I be using the NPC Bailing mod?

No. Use the mod.

Next is a salvage mod, does XRM have this functionality built in? or should I be using a mod that allows me to assign a universe salvager?

It is not built in. Use the Salvage Command Suite or something. That should do everything you want.

Oh... and the list of mods you have... not sure about that square map one, if it changes the universe map or something, remove it. It will conflict.

M.

[Grimshad]

I can't claim it, claim menu does not even appear on spacewalking method, is this normal and I have to use Salvage Claim Software for it?

Salvage Claim Software does not work that way. You need to access it via the ship orders menu for your ship. I can't remember which particular set of orders its under (Salvage... i think) as Salvage Claim Software is too 'schoolboy' for me.

And... if that menu isn't popping up, if you know about it already, it probably needs to be made compatible with X3:AP. Something to do with the Command Slots if I am not mistaken.

Does Improved Races work with XRM and should I even be using it with AP?

I advise against it. There is enough going on in the universe in terms of conflict already. It would probably double the number of conflicts (fighting) and probably make things a little too crazy.

Same question for Pirate Guild. Will XRM do what IR and PG do? Allow the races to dynamically fight, capture sectors, and rebuild?

XRM does the dynamic fighting and rebuilding on its own... more or less. It doesn't do sector invasions though - only MBRR or IR do that as far as I know.

PG might work okay but I don't use it. I know Paul and a few others do, at least in XRM:TC, but I don't know what its like in XRM:AP.

Next thing is NPC bailing, is this built into XRM or should I be using the NPC Bailing mod?

No. Use the mod.

Next is a salvage mod, does XRM have this functionality built in? or should I be using a mod that allows me to assign a universe salvager?

It is not built in. Use the Salvage Command Suite or something. That should do everything you want.

Oh... and the list of mods you have... not sure about that square map one, if it changes the universe map or something, remove it. It will conflict.

M.

I don't understand, how could IR be too much and PG be good? They are both essentially the same thing, the difference is that IR takes care of all the races, and PG takes care of just the pirates. They both have racial wars, racial take overs, and some other same stuff.

I have been playing XRM for a couple hours now. I've noticed there is a lot of Kha'ak and Xenon attacks on Argon sectors, but they are pretty small. Will attacks like this lead to a sector take over? can races capture sectors in XRM?


I claimed a Kha'ak Fighter and as soon as I did 3 Argon fighters turns red and ran after it to destroy it. I'm guessing the races will destroy Kha'ak ships no matter who owns them?

[Nick 031287]

im officially fed up having to go through a MILLION addons an crap, why cant they just integrate everything????? i dont understand. they didnt even link mars mod with the Data file what gives??

why make addons? just put it all together please!!! i dont do very well with this.