Where am I going wrong X3TC

General discussions about the games by Egosoft including X-BTF, XT, X², X³: Reunion, X³: Terran Conflict and X³: Albion Prelude.

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jlehtone
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Post by jlehtone » Sun, 4. Feb 18, 11:14

Joe McCracken wrote:
Aaaaaaand there I am docked at the pirate base, having autodocked myself into range of the laser towers. :oops:
LOL! I have done that SO many times!! Got to be fast and use that jump drive!
There is difference between autopiloted jump and manual jump: the autopilot stops the ship while the jumpdrive is charging, but if you start jump manually, then you can keep moving and turning to the end. Lets make it two differences: the autopilot refuses to activate if you are still next to a Station.

You can thus choose between (A) fly to the open and be sitting duck for several seconds, (B) initiate jump the moment the clamps detach, or (C) just dash out, preferably keep the Station as cover and use the Strafe Drive for extra dodging and velocity. (Every ship and spacesuit has Strafe Drive.)

There is also (D) sufficient number of Tomahawks, but that is for later game.


The name of the sector that has the Pirate Base ...
The race military hates Pirates. They hunt and destroy all that they find. That includes Pirate stations, even when the stations are in Pirate sectors. As result, Pirate Bases are frequently demolished. Those Bases do respawn after a while, but in random sector. In other words, Bases do "move around".


That said, my X3AP game has two suspicious "situations":

Very early on I did build a weapon Forge for a Pirate client. The Station is in Pirate sector and is clearly owned by a Pirate. As said, the race military does take interest. For several ingame weeks now Argon Cerberus, two Paranid Deimos, and their escorts have been camping around that Forge. The Forges shield is down, and it has taken some hull damage, but no further.

I have made deliveries to that Forge, but frankly, being in sector is unnerving.


The second case is more recent. A Pirate Base has "moved" into a Pirate sector. Lone Argon Cerberus was attacking it. Shields of Base down, hull at exactly 93%. Book example of an object set to be indestructible (a feature that is used to protect plot objects), but this Base is not part of any plot.

A lone M7 stuck in Pirate sector. Was there a book titled "How to train your Marines"? :roll:
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fireanddream
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Post by fireanddream » Sun, 4. Feb 18, 16:51

Sometimes ships stop attacking (pirate assets?) Oos.

I've seen the exact some problem. Three groups of race patrols attacking a pirate anarchy port but stop all hostile act once I jump out. I have a sat there, they stop dead in the water.

jlehtone
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Post by jlehtone » Sun, 4. Feb 18, 17:30

fireanddream wrote:Sometimes ships stop attacking (pirate assets?) Oos.

I've seen the exact some problem. Three groups of race patrols attacking a pirate anarchy port but stop all hostile act once I jump out. I have a sat there, they stop dead in the water.
A very good point about an another part of the game mechanics: IS vs OOS.

In sector (IS) we are personally there and see what happens, millisecond by millisecond. If a ship has turrets and is near "enemy", then those turrets will fire even though the ship does not actually run any "attack station" command. We, the observers, might mistake the fire from turrets as intentional attempt by the ship to attack a target. (The turret crews do have intention, unbeknownst to their captain.)

Out of sector (OOS) is all the other sectors than the one you are in. In them things are different. Ship positions are updated only twice per minute. (Once every 5 seconds, if you do look at that remote sector.) Guns do not fire individual bullets, nor consume energy. Ships do not have individual turrets either; all their installed guns are counted together.

Therefore, a ship that is ordered to stay on station does so, but lacking order to attack will apparently do nothing.
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SirNukes
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Post by SirNukes » Sun, 4. Feb 18, 19:36

jlehtone wrote:Out of sector (OOS) is all the other sectors than the one you are in. In them things are different. Ship positions are updated only twice per minute. (Once every 5 seconds, if you do look at that remote sector.)
The unwatched OOS update period is 1 minute. I used to think it was 30 seconds as well (and passed along some of that misinformation, having heard it elsewhere), but testing OOS combat a while back revealed the 1 minute intervals.

However, there are another couple quirks related to combat. OOS will update when you first look at a sector, and then on ~5 second intervals afterward. Movement distances are scaled by time elapsed, but combat damage is not. This means that you can rapidly open/close the sector view (eg. by bringing up some ship's info repeatedly) to trigger additional combat rounds and speed up combat resolution. It also means that an unwatched sector will carry out combat rounds at around 1/12 the rate of a watched sector, 1/~200 the rate of a watch-spammed sector (depending on how fast you press the buttons). Shields regenerate at normal rate in all situations, so in some situations a ship carrying out attacks in an unwatched sector will not be able to break the shields on the target.

An example application of this knowledge: when you get a message about a trader being attacked, one of the worst things you can do is to open up the sector view on that trader, since it will give its attackers a free round of combat damage that would otherwise have been delayed for a minute while the trader tried to jump or escape.

fireanddream
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Post by fireanddream » Sun, 4. Feb 18, 20:03

Wow that's really useful information here, does movement updates once every 1 min too? I sometimes order my ships to go idle (to get them undock) and immediately dock again. It doesn't feel like they take 6 seconds to dock?

And while we are at it, does anyone knoes if equipment breakage happens to non player ships IS?

Alan Phipps
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Post by Alan Phipps » Sun, 4. Feb 18, 21:01

"does anyone knoes if equipment breakage happens to non player ships IS?"

Yes it must because the player can break equipment on NPC ships. That is one tactic for negating defence by enemy marines (by hitting the unshielded enemy hull repeatedly to try to remove the life support). We also know that sustained use of IonDs can strip fitted equipment such as turret weapons on target ships.
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Timsup2nothin
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Post by Timsup2nothin » Mon, 5. Feb 18, 04:48

Even with strafe trying to dodge multiple laser towers in a TP long enough to charge the jump drive was a nail biter.
Trapper Tim's Guide to CLS 2

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Not a DiD, so I guess it's a DiDn't, the story of my first try at AP
Part One, in progress

HEY! AP!! That's new!!!

RainerPrem
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Post by RainerPrem » Mon, 5. Feb 18, 05:58

Timsup2nothin wrote:Even with strafe trying to dodge multiple laser towers in a TP long enough to charge the jump drive was a nail biter.
That's X3 for you ... But it worked?

cu
Rainer

fireanddream
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Post by fireanddream » Mon, 5. Feb 18, 06:31

Alan Phipps wrote:"does anyone knoes if equipment breakage happens to non player ships IS?"

Yes it must because the player can break equipment on NPC ships. That is one tactic for negating defence by enemy marines (by hitting the unshielded enemy hull repeatedly to try to remove the life support). We also know that sustained use of IonDs can strip fitted equipment such as turret weapons on target ships.
What I meant is does equipment breakage happen between NPC fights?

Alan Phipps
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Post by Alan Phipps » Mon, 5. Feb 18, 11:37

All I can suggest is to keep scanning ships while they are in combat and see. That should be an interesting and lively time for you while trying to keep close but avoiding getting involved in the firefight yourself! :D
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SirNukes
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Post by SirNukes » Mon, 5. Feb 18, 18:44

fireanddream wrote:Wow that's really useful information here, does movement updates once every 1 min too?
Yes. If you want it to update early to finish some docking, pop open the sector view real quick on the docking ship.

Timsup2nothin
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Post by Timsup2nothin » Mon, 5. Feb 18, 19:42

RainerPrem wrote:
Timsup2nothin wrote:Even with strafe trying to dodge multiple laser towers in a TP long enough to charge the jump drive was a nail biter.
That's X3 for you ... But it worked?

cu
Rainer
Took a few tries, but eventually. That was really the most stuck I've been in X3, ever. I couldn't get another ship to the station, so leaving in the Express was my only option, and I really wasn't sure it was going to be doable.

It didn't occur to me at the time...but I just realized...

I could have brought in some ships and spammed the towers with wasps to distract them while I made my getaway.
Trapper Tim's Guide to CLS 2

On Her Majesty's Secret Service-Dead is Dead, and he is DEAD

Not a DiD, so I guess it's a DiDn't, the story of my first try at AP
Part One, in progress

HEY! AP!! That's new!!!

jlehtone
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Post by jlehtone » Mon, 5. Feb 18, 21:08

Wasps, Fighter Drones, Tomahawks, ... wait for Station to spawn a Defend Station or Xenon Patrol mission, ... wait for race Military to find the place ...

... what is the value of the player's life?
The cost of admitting failure and reverting to earlier save?

fireanddream wrote:What I meant is does equipment breakage happen between NPC fights?
We have three types of ships: The PlayerShip, other ships owned by the player, and the NPC ships.

There would thus be 9 different "X shoots Y" pairs consider, if you could shoot yourself. Still, 8 cases.

We know that playership can damage NPC equipment.
We know that NPC can damage playership equipment.
You could fry your other ships to see if their equipment is immune to your shots.
They shooting your ship (It was a misfire, Boss!) is harder to conduct.
I think (but not sure) that my fleet has suffered equipment damage under NPC fire.

A question is, would you "as a dev":
* evaluate equipment damage for every hit
OR
* filter out some cases (like NPC vs NPC) and then evaluate for the remaining hits

Both approaches have merits.
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Hemmingfish
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Post by Hemmingfish » Mon, 5. Feb 18, 21:27

I'm pretty sure NPC ships don't suffer equipment damage outside of special cases like anti-boarding tech, otherwise you would notice ships occasionally missing weapons or shields that you bought them, or would expect them to have. It would also be possible to destroy a lot of equipment if you had an 8 PBE loadout or 8 ion disruptor loadout, which I've experimented with in the past when I cared about capture rate. Think of the system loss spam you get when getting gunned down by a Xenon with PBEs.

SirNukes
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Post by SirNukes » Mon, 5. Feb 18, 22:04

For what its worth, the obj file code for equipment damage (the ship MakeDamage function) has player checks wrapping notification calls, but not on the equipment loss itself, and I don't see any other ownership checks.

Thrake
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Post by Thrake » Thu, 8. Feb 18, 18:28

On the opening post: early missions earn you scraps. The higher your reputation though, the more $$$ you'll make for a comparatively similar mission. So if you want to make money faster (in a legit way) keep doing missions for a race and eventually you'll earn a couple millions for the average mission. Reputation can be increased from a number of ways so just keep minding your business and eventually you'll have cash flowing.

Personnaly speaking though I would be bored to death trading so I usually spend my time moving around in search for things to blow up. If you want fun long-term goals to strive for, there are some ships that can not be bought, more or less rare or hard to acquire, a treasure for the connoisseur (think xenon ships, or pirate capital ships, with experience you'll also find some less obvious ones like paranid Agamemnon or prototype ships,...). If you feel adventurous, you can try to clear a xenon system of any silicoid lifeform (don't expect to hold on to it though). You might also discover nice stuff just wandering around. I'm sure you can think of more while playing. It's a confusing experience but worth it eventually.

Good luck pilot :)

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