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

paulwheeler · Post by **paulwheeler** » Wed, 21. Mar 12, 22:34

Well you seem to get different results to me and others here. I don't understand why your centaur is not using its main guns. Without them, even an M6 sentinel is outgunned by several fighters.

I have noticed that NPC AI vs Player AI tests are not consistent with NPC AI vs NPC AI tests. I have no idea why, but I'd imagine NPC AI are given a few advantages.

Make sure the ships have both fight command softwares installed. This makes a big difference to turret effectiveness.

Also, the results will depend on the hull pack you are running.

If I do as you want, then fighter vs fighters dog fights will be boring, point and shoot affairs like vanilla. There would be no point in evading as the bullets will never miss. It will totally take the fun and skill out of flying fighters.

Corvettes are not and never will be intended to outperform fighters in a dog fighting role. They are not fighters.

I am not going to make bullets larger.

swatti · Post by **swatti** » Wed, 21. Mar 12, 23:44

paulwheeler wrote:Well you seem to get different results to me and others here. I don't understand why your centaur is not using its main guns. Without them, even an M6 sentinel is outgunned by several fighters.

I have noticed that NPC AI vs Player AI tests are not consistent with NPC AI vs NPC AI tests. I have no idea why, but I'd imagine NPC AI are given a few advantages.

Make sure the ships have both fight command softwares installed. This makes a big difference to turret effectiveness.

Also, the results will depend on the hull pack you are running.

If I do as you want, then fighter vs fighters dog fights will be boring, point and shoot affairs like vanilla. There would be no point in evading as the bullets will never miss. It will totally take the fun and skill out of flying fighters.

Corvettes are not and never will be intended to outperform fighters in a dog fighting role. They are not fighters.

I am not going to make bullets larger.

AI cant use full turning-rate of corvettes. You can super-tune a corvette into oblivion and still AI wont turn it very fast. THIS is why corvettes dont use their front main-guns against fighters. Test it, god-mode a M6 and set it to kill fighters in Ocracokes Storm ^^
This is why i asked to turret all sentinel front guns, or atleast a majority of them.

This game has some VERY odd AI coding... Or just too much of any coding, bah, dunno...

Both fight-softwares installed. Do they affect accuracy too? I thought they only added commands? The turrets that can fire, certainly do so meaning "attack all" is on in every turret and once in range, they shoot.

My hull pack is "Middle" but it hardly makes difference. If fighters wont get any hull dmg, it only makes the M6 last a bit longer and still die.

Im not saying make the bullets 100m wide, im saying make em bigger, not over-sized.
The idea is that IF you are flying in a straight line, the turret would have 100%(or nearly) hitrate. Even AI will evade at some point.
Bullet size should SCALE with its speed. Like i said, ISR is near-perfect, use that as an example.

If you move, strafe, etc "evade" you wont get hit automaticly. So, skill involved will still play major role.

Corvettes are not the dogfighters, they are more like gunships. Sadly, their guns which they need to defend themselfs are nearly useless against fighters if this stays the way it is.

I wish i knew how to edit those numbers, i'd be happy to do some balancing. My goal is not to turn corvettes into gods but to give them an ability to fight back with same weapons used against them.
Tell me how to edit the bullet sizes and il prove that you can still have fun flying fighters and make corvettes a proper enemy against fighters.

d_ka · Post by **d_ka** » Wed, 21. Mar 12, 23:45

The main task of corvette class ships is their "anti fighter" duties. Comparing the costs, i think they are a bit broken. Of course, the MK or smaller versions of Corvets are not ment to fight mass of fighters, at least the heavier versions (M3), but a heavy fighter costing 1/3 of a corvette doesn´t reflect the whole story.
1. JD is not available for fighters in XRM - therefore the fighters have to rely on "carrier" vessel of any kind to be mobile.
2. The missiles in XRM are much more powerfull than in vanilla, and even a hit of one heavy missile means the end of a fighter, while a Corvete can survive even severall of them ( i´ve got used to fire "Hornet" missile to kill Xenon M3 at once, since i couldn´t hit any of them with the main guns of Appolox, or even Sirocco, sinificantly ).
But there are several points making these ships quite useless against the, specifically, M3(+) fighters:

a. Very few Corvettes have enough stearing to "persue" the agile fighters with their main guns.
b. Main guns can be equiped with powerfull CiG and others, but except Split ISR none of them are able to hit fast targets ( it´s the speed of the "bullet" i´m refering to ).
c. The turrets of most of Corvetts can be equiped mostly with useless "figher weapons", - useless, because even 8 PAC can´t do any significant damage to 75-125k shields of any M3! ( i haven´t tried the Chain Bolt Gun yet, but i highly doubt it´s usefullness ).
d. Compared to all "fighter" weapons it´s the Fragmental Bomb Launcher that can pound those big shields at best, but it´s, again, too slow to be able to hit a M3 fighter at all ( on the other side: i used to smash down any Xenon fighter patrol consisting of up to 4 Ls and 1 XL with my "Battle Claw Prototype" armed with 4 FBL (main) + 2 HEPT ( front tower )! That ship is great, but it has no JD, and if a single missile hits it ( especially a heavy swarm one, or Tomahawk, you are toast... ).

To make it short: The costs of Corvetes can be raised significantly if it´s up to me, but untill they arn´t able to take a battle with a single wing of M3 fighter patroll they miss their role on the battlefield completely, imho.

Jumee · Post by **Jumee** » Wed, 21. Mar 12, 23:54

if you raise corvette costs significantly and make them better vs fighters do you know what you will get? the class that already exists Anti-Fighter Frigates

d_ka · Post by **d_ka** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 00:02

Jumee: Anti Fighter Fregates are ment to hold against a swarm of fighters, and the ability of several of them to carry their own wings ( or evan a Corvette ) as support, makes them autonom anti fighter plattforms. All i ask is to give the Corvettes the ability to win against a single wing of 3 M3...

Just an example: I was evading any confrontations flying my Iguana Assault TP ( smuggler style ), and encountered a small Xenon patroll in Aguilars Belt. Now, OTAS Intelligence Sirocco appeared ( to save my a** - what a lucky me! ) and got chewed up by those Xenons. Not even a single point hull demage on the fighters, but totaly destruction of the Corvette within 1 minute, or less. You call it right? I say it´s broken

Jumee · Post by **Jumee** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 00:07

I guess my game has different balancing

as I don't seem to have issues like that, sure 4-5 M3+ can tale a corvette down but three M3's? haven't happened to me

Sn4kemaster · Post by **Sn4kemaster** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 00:12

d_ka wrote:The main task of corvette class ships is their "anti fighter" duties. .

No it's not......(unless its the sentinel version)

The main role of a corvette is to be a fast cheap escort for cap ships or when used in pack's the hunter of cap ships.....or a cheap but fast patrol ship, but then it must be escorted with its own fighter wing)

paulwheeler · Post by **paulwheeler** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 00:43

There is no true role for a corvette in the same way that there is no true role for a carrier or bomber etc. This is because the ai treats all ships as the same, with the same combat scripts and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Again a consequence on building on an engine that was not designed to do it. The original x:btf did not have M6s, M7s, M8s etc. and the ai has changed very little since that game.

All the ideas that have been put forward have been tried before. The cmod used to have bigger bullet hitboxes but it made fighters dull and dogfights were over in seconds. I give corvettes any more manoeuvrability and they become overgrown fighters. I give them more weapons or shields and they become tiny frigates.

You are all ignoring one important point, which luckily CWP does not - M6s have very large cargo bays and can carry lots and lots of missiles. This means they can easily take out wings of fighters if used correctly. Fill an ai controlled one with Cyclone missiles, set its missile firing probability fairly high and it'll eat fighters for breakfast.

Plus there's that little advantage of being able to mount a jumpdrive.

I challenge anyone to go back to vanilla corvettes and tell me they are better. They are slow, don't turn at all, have less weapons and shields, and have smaller cargo bays.

I have pretty much done all I can to make corvettes useful. Bring on Rebirth.

qwizzie · Post by **qwizzie** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 00:49

hi Paul,

Can you pls check the following text id's in yr textfile 7027-L044 :

<t id="1020903">{1000,1040}' {12,121}</t>
<t id="1021019">{17,16881}l {17,80138}</t>
<t id="1021506">{1000,138}' {17,16531}</t>
<t id="1021508">{1000,106} {1000,40005} {1951,340108}{1951,340114}{1951,340111}</t>
<t id="1021602">{1000,1097}' {12,103}</t>
<t id="1021714">{1000,106} {1000,40005} {1951,340108}{1951,340111}{1951,340114}</t>
<t id="1021924"> </t>

looks like some have either unnecessary symbols in them or missing a space in between and of the very last one i'm not sure it needs a space in there.

Thanks,

qwizzie

paulwheeler · Post by **paulwheeler** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 00:52

Those "symbols" are called apostrophes and are there for grammatical correctness. IIRC the "l" is to correct an egosoft spelling mistake.

And the last one is just a blank. Its all fine.

Scoob · Post by **Scoob** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 01:09

Hi Paul,

I've upgraded to v1.19 for AP - thanks for all your work getting this release to us!

One oddity I've enountered...

I've captured a Kha'ak Corvette and I asked it to move to "Argon Military Command" - which is a shipyard of course - in Argon Sector M148. I had a few other captures (bails) there to sell too. However, the Corvette is NOT in the Sell list, just the Equip list though I've sold other ships here just fine.

So, has something changed? I've sold a Kha'ak Corvette here previously in v1.18 just fine.

Worryingly I have a captured Kha'ak destroyer heading to a Paranid shipyard to be sold too - wonder if it'll ahve the same problem? I might try jumping the Corvette elsewhere to see if I can sell it anywhere.

Other than that, all's good so far.

Btw: thanks for increasing the hit-box length for fighter-class weapons such as the PRG. I've not tested it myself yet but it should help.

Cheers,

Scoob.

Jumee · Post by **Jumee** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 01:23

afaik you could never sell khaak corvette (atleast I remember a discussion like that in the vanilla forums)

not sure about the destroyer since there is no vanilla way to acquire it

qwizzie · Post by **qwizzie** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 01:24

ahh, thanks for clarifying that. i was doing some private mod merging tonight and stumbled upon it. During my previous mod merging (with 1.18 ) i got some invalid station names or stations with weird txt id names (which i totally blame on my own modmerge methode) so i was wondering if it could have been related with that specific textfile.

I just checked with scorpio's map and problem is solved now with tonight's modmerge ... must have overlooked something with previous modmerge.

Thanks,

qwizzie

Scoob · Post by **Scoob** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 01:29

Jumee wrote:afaik you could never sell khaak corvette (atleast I remember a discussion like that in the vanilla forums)

not sure about the destroyer since there is no vanilla way to acquire it

Really? That's odd because I've sold them in the past. I've played XRM (or SRM before it) as my main MOD along with a few scripts for an age and haven't encountered this before.

Gonna try selling the Corvette elsewhere and see how I get on.

Cheers,

Scoob.

Tiek · Post by **Tiek** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 02:46

Hi Paul,

Thanks for fixing that file!

I wonder if you plan to change the turrets of Megalodon with the models from Cadius as you did for the Oceanus and Aquata. The change would give a sense of uniformity to the Boron fleet

!

Thanks again.

A5PECT · Post by **A5PECT** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 02:48

Kha'ak ships becoming unsellable came with AP; it's the same script (or rather, MD file) that was used on the Xperimental Shuttle in TC.

Dinoff · Post by **Dinoff** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 02:56

quick question besides my annoying one about the song. what t file contains the ship descriptions for this mod? i am merging a mod for personal use and for the sake of compatibility the last thing i need is to get the names to work. any help on this would be great

d_ka · Post by **d_ka** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 03:15

@sne4kmaster: Perhaps i should have said "according to the Lexicon of the X Universe" the Corvettes primary duty is to counter fighters. And since we are within X scenario i think my statement is still valid

@paul: there is, of course, not even a trace of comparaion between vanilla and XRM Corvettes. The latter are very much improved and it makes fun to fly them, finaly! Also, one way or another, i ( mostly, lol ) used to manage to take out Xenons while flying a Corvette, but i also remember how many times i had to reload, and i won´t say my fighting skills are that bad. But, i wasn´t refering to the player ships, since sometimes you overestimate yourself, forgetting that 5-6 Xenon Ls ( or even some LX among them ) won´t be a picknik. But seeing all those encounters of AI vs. AI it doesn´t seem right that such good ships are beeing chewed up by quite an equal enemy, having not a slight chance to win. On the other hand, Corvettes have proved to be "Khaak killers" while using Mass Drivers in the turrets - in vanilla i used to hate those little bust..., while not beeing really afraid of Xenons ( only Qs ), in XRM its quite the opposite ( but then Khaak M8 knock on your door, and all you see is the "Game over" screen, at most - i often watched those things destorying a split M2 with couple of volleys - THAT was scary! ^^ ).
I hope you get my statements right, because one can´t actually compare vanilla with what you´ve achieved with XRM! Maybe it´s just me, but some kind of reliability concerning the ship duties is something i really like to have; i gave up using fighters as support ships, or as wingmen, since there is no fun in losing 5 x ? millions just to win a fight that one can easily end quite fast using a single M7.

Oh, and i´ve got two small questions, too:

1. Is the super high ammount of money you get for "fright scans" for pirates intended? I took 3 jobs, scanned about 10 - 15 ships each time and got totaly about 10 millions ( the missions were between 5-6% reward, while my eco/fighting status were very low, so were the standing with the Pirate faction ) ?
2. Are the pirate ships from their shipyards are ment to be purchasable?

Thanks in advance, and keep up the good work, just trying to help to improve the mod

nap_rz · Post by **nap_rz** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 04:16

paul, this is something I've asked before long time ago but haven't answered

why the hull packs do not just multiply the hull value by a single unified constant? can't we just have that kind of hull multiplier?

in case you don't get it, what I'm saying is that why the hull multiplier use different numbers for multiplying different ship classes? why not just multiply all hulls by 2 or 5 or 10?

can you give us that?

and oh wait, you said about overwriting the RRF script, do they include the vanilla RRF fix already?

btw what is AP SRST?

nap_rz · Post by **nap_rz** » Thu, 22. Mar 12, 04:57

d_ka wrote: a. Very few Corvettes have enough stearing to "persue" the agile fighters with their main guns.
b. Main guns can be equiped with powerfull CiG and others, but except Split ISR none of them are able to hit fast targets ( it´s the speed of the "bullet" i´m refering to ).
c. The turrets of most of Corvetts can be equiped mostly with useless "figher weapons", - useless, because even 8 PAC can´t do any significant damage to 75-125k shields of any M3! ( i haven´t tried the Chain Bolt Gun yet, but i highly doubt it´s usefullness ).
d. Compared to all "fighter" weapons it´s the Fragmental Bomb Launcher that can pound those big shields at best, but it´s, again, too slow to be able to hit a M3 fighter at all ( on the other side: i used to smash down any Xenon fighter patrol consisting of up to 4 Ls and 1 XL with my "Battle Claw Prototype" armed with 4 FBL (main) + 2 HEPT ( front tower )! That ship is great, but it has no JD, and if a single missile hits it ( especially a heavy swarm one, or Tomahawk, you are toast...

a. quite agree with that.
b. again I quite agree with that, however in some rare occasion CIGs can hit fighters

c. now I have to disagree,

8 PACs can't do significant damage to fighters? either they miss more than 50% or you are mistaking PAC with IRE or you play a different XRM than us

8 PACs will do significant damage to fighters if they can at least have 50% hit rate/rof
d. FBL is not anti fighter weapon.

as for general lone AI corvettes survivability and lethality against group of fighters, I can't really comment on that since in my game such scenario rarely happened (or I'm not there to watch), I usually saw corvettes are cruising in the middle of fighters wing and engage other fighters wing and I found them pretty balanced... and in my game bigger ships just own everything

egosoft.com

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