[X3LU] Phanon Plus 4.04

[ltdan81]

Finally got around to trying out the new version... haven't had a lot of time with it yet, but I'm liking what I'm seeing.

BTW, resetting Phanon is super easy...
Open Options\Gameplay\artificial life settings

If you have already beat Phanon, you will see that it is already set to "off"
If you haven't beat Phanon but wish to reset them, set this to "off" close the menu wait about a minute and you should hear a 'woosh' sound effect when cleanup is complete. save then turn phanon back on, wait about a minute and you will recieve the first message.

One small thing however, when I reset Phanon in my current game they evolved to generation 2 before they were done setting up generation 1 (I was them still setting up LT's in Sancuary of Darkness and still only had about half of their ships). Not sure if this is becaue of player's current level or if there is a global that is not getting reset, haven't noticed any other odd events yet.

They where quick to attack the sats in their sector, and I've caught some hunter patrols but they're not overly aggressive as they were before..

One thing I noticed is that there is only one "buy drones" command common for all ships and all generations... 14 drones is too much early on, but pitifull later.. I belive this could easily be changed so that $drone.count= 2*'Generation' and if Generation is higher that 4 or 5 make them Mk2...
Maybe even make the count random, because they seem to over use drones especially during the HQ blitz which cuts down performance.

Oh, capping ships is going to be much more challenging.
My first attempt for their M1, I set autopilot to follow just before he jumped and found myself in the middle of Sanctuary of Darkness. :-O
Checked on my ships still fighting in Depths of Silence and saw thet a Cobra had come to assist, Nice! But it auto jumped back to home as well.

I have a fleet that could squash them in a heartbeat so testing this is much more fun at this stage, although from what I'm seeing I think they would be an equal opponent starting out, except for the sat hunters, (can these be tweaked to only start hunting sats at higher generations?)

[Litcube]

thanks to their new emergency jump routines.

Oh neat. What changed there?

[ltdan81]

thanks to their new emergency jump routines.

Oh neat. What changed there?

They now use the Quantum jump extension and they jump back to Sancuary of Darkness rather than just one or sectors away...

However if they jump from SoD, they always go to Omicron Lyrae. Predictable, but can still be challenging as its a race to cap them before they reach the shipyard where they'll hide indefinitely.

[artisauce]

On day 3. Noticed a few things so far.

TL's like to get to work right away. Fighters don't have enough time to dock with it, and ends up trying to catch up to it by flying manually across the universe.

They don't attack your bases in Unknown Sectors/ those Y beta or Y alpha sectors. I wonder if Akeela's Becaon is then safe to place my factories?

I had the thought the traders will start to jump out if I tried to attack them. Nope, I can still ram them with my M6 all day long. Only the third attack do they send out fighter drones, but you can kill them with one good melee attack.

You can easily invade their stations. You just need to distract their sortie ships by personally "attacking" another. Is this not the case when they have more than 1 sortie ship?

Their M7M still tries to attack me even with no ammo. It's easy to deplete them by just jumping around the ship (jumping to jumpgates in same sector) all day until they run out. They have no weapons, they just come near and look threatening.

Salvage crew ships rarely use their jumpdrive. I constantly see them huffing around the sector, even when there's no abandoned ships or dropped wares.

On the plus side:

Their mining ops are quite fortified, and are actually difficult to deal with.

Phanon grows veeery quickly now. I sometimes have to dedicate most of my time just cull their trader ships.

M6 and up emergency jumps a lot more often now. Could be because I'm more forced than ever to attack them.

[ltdan81]

Escort fighters seem to always get stranded somewhere (not just the TL's).

Don't let down your guard, they're about to take it up a notch.

Just took out Gen 7... It was one epic battle for sure. This level seems perfect for late game, but IDK if I'd want to attempt a new game with this level. They don't seem as aggressive as the previous version so it might be doable, just not going to cash in on those rewards.

This last battle felt as intense (if not a little more) than fighting the OCV... Their ships may not be overtuned, but at the rate they replace ships in the higher generations gets crazy, in a good way. This last battle was drawn out since I would go cap their ships as I would see them E-jump to Omicron and I would give the fleet the retreat order to give their sheilds a break. I could tell that they were actually "buying" ships now as after a while the replacements finally stopped..

8th Generation should be up in a few hours... This has been a fun run, though charging the same sector every time is getting tedious, what ever happened to them choosing random sectors?

[Wanabe]

The only thing I was coming to hate was them going after my satellites, which is annoying without really adding much when it comes to actual gameplay. But now that you can turn the satellite hunters off I really can't find anything to complain about.

Yes I saw some posts about people not liking the sat hunters and it's such a minor feature I thought it'd be best to have some basic ability to easily turn the behaviour off. Glad you like it

Finally got around to trying out the new version... haven't had a lot of time with it yet, but I'm liking what I'm seeing. Smile

One small thing however, when I reset Phanon in my current game they evolved to generation 2 before they were done setting up generation 1 (I was them still setting up LT's in Sancuary of Darkness and still only had about half of their ships). Not sure if this is becaue of player's current level or if there is a global that is not getting reset, haven't noticed any other odd events yet.

Excellent. They probably evolved to generation 2 so fast because they get bonus cash depending on your trade/combat rank. That's something that happens in the original Phanon system aswell.

One thing I noticed is that there is only one "buy drones" command common for all ships and all generations... 14 drones is too much early on, but pitifull later.. I belive this could easily be changed so that $drone.count= 2*'Generation' and if Generation is higher that 4 or 5 make them Mk2...
Maybe even make the count random, because they seem to over use drones especially during the HQ blitz which cuts down performance.

The buy drones script is mostly used on their traders if I remember right. I haven't actually really touched on it but yeah I could possibly look into it. By default in LU each race can deploy I think 30 drones and then won't deploy any more in a combat situation unless some other script specifically tells them to deploy over that limit.

I have a fleet that could squash them in a heartbeat so testing this is much more fun at this stage, although from what I'm seeing I think they would be an equal opponent starting out, except for the sat hunters, (can these be tweaked to only start hunting sats at higher generations?)

Glad to hear that it's closer to being fair now. The satellite hunters are probably most effective in the earliest generation compared to later on so I'm not sure if I will do that or not.

TL's like to get to work right away. Fighters don't have enough time to dock with it, and ends up trying to catch up to it by flying manually across the universe.

Yes, I have seen this also but haven't really given it any thought so far. Not 100% sure about them waiting for the fighters to dock as that might be an extra opportunity to pop the TL.

They don't attack your bases in Unknown Sectors/ those Y beta or Y alpha sectors. I wonder if Akeela's Becaon is then safe to place my factories?

They should have the possibility of attacking any player station at random. However standard game complexes count as multiple stations so if you have one of those somewhere they're more likely to be attacked.

I had the thought the traders will start to jump out if I tried to attack them. Nope, I can still ram them with my M6 all day long. Only the third attack do they send out fighter drones, but you can kill them with one good melee attack.

I used to ram the traders all the time aswell as it's extremely effective. I thought about making each trader scan for nearby threats periodically but I was also thinking about the cpu limitations of X3 and decided against it. Rethinking it though I could probably try to come up with something to make bumping into their ships a little trickier. When I last played though I just used a bit of a house rule of not abusing that too often.

You can easily invade their stations. You just need to distract their sortie ships by personally "attacking" another. Is this not the case when they have more than 1 sortie ship?
Their M7M still tries to attack me even with no ammo. It's easy to deplete them by just jumping around the ship (jumping to jumpgates in same sector) all day until they run out. They have no weapons, they just come near and look threatening.

I did not put much time into testing possible exploits (or any exploits for that matter) with the sortie ships. I imagine this would still be a valid aspect to exploit even as they have more ships available to defend their assets.

When I made the M7M join combat I also had a think about them using the same logic as the Phanon M8's which cause them to jump out of combat when they're out of offensively used ammunition. My thoughts on this were simply that M7M have have a bit better shielding and could possibly serve as an extra bit of defense/distraction for their other ships even if out of primary ammo.

Salvage crew ships rarely use their jumpdrive. I constantly see them huffing around the sector, even when there's no abandoned ships or dropped wares.

Perhaps I should look at improving the salvager ships at some point. They will jump more often as they make more profits or when Phanon increases each generation though.

I am always a bit unsure especially about the mining ops as being an extra static potential target hard to know if it's easy to abuse or not. Also good to know about the possible exploits/flaws although I haven't specifically tried to make any of the exploits more difficult to pull off so far.

Just took out Gen 7... It was one epic battle for sure. This level seems perfect for late game, but IDK if I'd want to attempt a new game with this level. They don't seem as aggressive as the previous version so it might be doable, just not going to cash in on those rewards.

8th Generation should be up in a few hours... This has been a fun run, though charging the same sector every time is getting tedious, what ever happened to them choosing random sectors?

Starting a game with them being on generation 7 would be difficult I imagine. I will say if you attempt something like that don't build any stations until you are sure you can defend yourself against their fleets, you'd need to stick to more mobile forces for your economy for a while I'd imagine.

Can't quite remember when Phanon changed in LU to have their own sector from the older design of appearing in a random sector.

The ships Phanon can end up with in higher generations plus what they try to field is indeed quite something. Phanon basically do become less aggressive in higher generations as I've tried to set them up to make less hunter teams but of higher quality/numbers. Also perhaps next time I do some work on this mod I'll look at the predictable jumping to Omicron to make that slightly more difficult

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

[dizzy]

I thought about making each trader scan for nearby threats periodically but I was also thinking about the cpu limitations of X3 and decided against it. Rethinking it though I could probably try to come up with something to make bumping into their ships a little trickier. When I last played though I just used a bit of a house rule of not abusing that too often.

Since ramming can only happen in-sector, you would only need to enable such periodic checks on the phanon traders that are in the same sector as the player. This should make it scale pretty well I think, it's unlikely that there will be a huge number of phanon TS ships in the same sector as the player.

[ltdan81]

Just Wiped out the last generation... What a battle!

Had some serious lag issues, but it helped me identify the root cause of problems I've been having.

RoF on Bombers needs to be set to 0 (ZERO), appearently there's a conflict between RoF and the missle boat scripts. But all worked ok for me when I set my bombers to zero.

Secondly, RoF on all ships can't be higher than 40 without causing issues in big battles from what I've been able to test.

I noticed on the Phanon ships that I capped that the RoF was always super high and an odd number like 93%. And in this last battle there was no doubt that all the ships were that high (probably 100% for final gen?).

Other than missile lag, it was an epic fun battle requiring long range drone stikes to take out the bombers and subsequently drawing out their M2's with they had 3 or 4 juggernauts out of the 8 I counted. Not to mention the M2's I saw escorting miners and probably a few more on patrol and where ever they keep their reserves. lol

[artisauce]

Competition against the Phanon is getting fierce. They went ahead and installed a bloody Computer Plant in my Military Sector. My 3 Auster and my bran-new Austreus was able to handle any sortie ships that came by, but it was a bit weird since my ships' emergency jump was kinda weird, and they decide to emergency jump to the center of Sanctuary of Darkness... Sigh *Reloads* It was probably because I assigned them to attack the retreating ships.

I wish there was some way to hack Vashire stations to dock on them. Why waste a small-scale invasion on a a million-worth station when you can just clog their docking ports with some cheap M5's?

I also had a hard time finding their mining fleet. Satellite Network got nothing. Alright, check the pirate sectors. No? Alright, time to hack their network and find out where they're going. (This works for their dock agents as well, just check "owned ships" on their stations.) Oh, what the hell. They're best buds with the xenon.

Whatever the case, I'll probably have to stop farming for trade and combat rank if it's the case the Phanon are getting better because of it. Their Taipan is hard to deal with.

[Wanabe]

Version 3.03 released.

Since ramming can only happen in-sector, you would only need to enable such periodic checks on the phanon traders that are in the same sector as the player. This should make it scale pretty well I think, it's unlikely that there will be a huge number of phanon TS ships in the same sector as the player.

Yeah I was pretty much thinking that instead of actively checking for enemies on all their TS (which would be fairly costly but also account for more possible threats) they just check if the sector is active and then check the player range. An alternative method might of been hooking up signal_changesector to the playership somehow and then enabling such checks on the TS in the sector upon entering but I opted for the more simplified (to develop) option.

Just Wiped out the last generation... What a battle!

Had some serious lag issues, but it helped me identify the root cause of problems I've been having.

RoF on Bombers needs to be set to 0 (ZERO), appearently there's a conflict between RoF and the missle boat scripts. But all worked ok for me when I set my bombers to zero.

Secondly, RoF on all ships can't be higher than 40 without causing issues in big battles from what I've been able to test.

I noticed on the Phanon ships that I capped that the RoF was always super high and an odd number like 93%. And in this last battle there was no doubt that all the ships were that high (probably 100% for final gen?).

Other than missile lag, it was an epic fun battle requiring long range drone stikes to take out the bombers and subsequently drawing out their M2's with they had 3 or 4 juggernauts out of the 8 I counted. Not to mention the M2's I saw escorting miners and probably a few more on patrol and where ever they keep their reserves. lol

Glad to hear it was kind of an epic battle which also took a little bit of strategy. I also suffer low FPS quite a bit from missiles when they're active. Flails are the best for this. I've set the missile chance to 0 for M7M and M8 ships and also lowered the missile usage on all their ships a little bit. The highest setting for firing missiles previously have been 97% for the M1/M2/TL and next up would of been 61% for M7 ships. Now it's 45% max for M1/M2 and 41% max for M7.

Competition against the Phanon is getting fierce. They went ahead and installed a bloody Computer Plant in my Military Sector. My 3 Auster and my bran-new Austreus was able to handle any sortie ships that came by, but it was a bit weird since my ships' emergency jump was kinda weird, and they decide to emergency jump to the center of Sanctuary of Darkness... Sigh *Reloads* It was probably because I assigned them to attack the retreating ships.

I wish there was some way to hack Vashire stations to dock on them. Why waste a small-scale invasion on a a million-worth station when you can just clog their docking ports with some cheap M5's?

I also had a hard time finding their mining fleet. Satellite Network got nothing. Alright, check the pirate sectors. No? Alright, time to hack their network and find out where they're going. (This works for their dock agents as well, just check "owned ships" on their stations.) Oh, what the hell. They're best buds with the xenon.

Whatever the case, I'll probably have to stop farming for trade and combat rank if it's the case the Phanon are getting better because of it. Their Taipan is hard to deal with.

I like this post. Also, if you ever figure out how to commit to a full on docking assault on Phanon let us all know.

[artisauce]

Version 3.03 - 8th October 2015

Phanon chance of using missiles in every generation is lowered. M8 and M7M missile chance set to 0
Phanon ships retreating from Sancturary of Darkness now pick a random sector to retreat to. Retreating traders now also choose a (nearby) random sector
Phanon traders,miners and miner overseer now use the same 30 drone limit rule as combat ships when launching them in defense
Phanon TS can now check if the player is too close to them (if in a big ship) and will attempt to jump away. Their sensitivity to this increases each generation
Phanon TS that are in the process of retreating and have jumped away to another sector are allowed to attempt retreating again if they're being followed
Phanon salvagers no longer wonder locally between sector scans, travel between sectors less often as they increase in level, recheck what the closest ship/crate to them is and salvage that after salvaging each object and can jump to an object it wants to salvage if it is too far from its current position
Various minor tweaks to balance IE spending priorities and fleet configurations etc.
Fixed: In certain circumstances Phanon couldn't order more stations to be built when it wanted to build them because of a little bit of a priority mixup

What this update does for the Phanon is like what LU does for X3AP. Jumping traders will definitely make me rethink my plans on hindering the Phanon. Every ship I obliterated with my tri-formation jumped to Omicron Lyrae (from Sanctuary of Darkness) and became easy pickings to go after, so I'll also have to do more scanning with my sat network to see where they go now. I never really though about "following" TS's until I learned about that 'hacking' you can do to figure out where ships jumped to, but now that plan of attack is even less ideal. That's great! Time to invest in missiles.

Phanon has definitely started to become a problem again. I started my conversion to Terran ships again (those darn stats, I just can't pass up, even with the shorter weapon ranges. I haven't really planned a really ideal fleet yet, just a bunch of heavy destroyers) so I don't currently have a ready fleet. General infrastructure is in place (chaff, jump cores, 2 GB shields), but Infrastructure for terran heavy weaponry is still getting in place for mass production. It's so darn slow. Dock agents can only help so much with buying what I need.

Camping at their sector was quite hectic, but probably pissed off (and hindered greatly) the 5th and 6th generation. I didn't even try for the current gen, 7th. My ring of fire in their sector and at the outside sector takes care of most things that try to come through manually, so unless they're speedy M5's, they're not coming through without 100% damage to their hull.

I also learned they really hate jump beacons in their sector. This forces all of my attacks are coming from the debris-filled battlespace. Ain't that neat.

These lasertowers are also REALLY annoying my UTs. REALLY. Since most Phanon stations are based near the center, their laser towers have a good shot on any trader ship that quantum jumps to the center for that trade deal. They go in, then out... over, and over, and over. Message log completely stuffed with it. My UTs don't die at least, as their shield recharges enough, but it's darn annoying.

As for the dock war... maybe instead of blocking their docks with M5s... maybe... I should just... block every other station they would want to trade to. I mean, Xenon N's take one second to be made on the HQ.

Who needed UTs anyway? Just have one space on a equipment dock to mass-sell income hardware everyone once in a while.

Just an idea, that's all. Lag would be severe if I allowed such a plan to take place, but would surely cripple the Phanon's trading force. As for the mining... I guess... just mine everything before they get to it.

[dizzy]

OK I feel I should share my experience with Phanon Plus so far.

First, I tested it for about 30 game hours in a LUV + vukica's remap + more gamestarts + (of course) Phanon Plus 3.03. In about 4 hours game time (I barely had time to explore some of the new universe, maybe get about 10mil credits) and Nova Ltd announces me they took over from TandiTech. OK... that seems very fast. Their reports looked very threatening, army numbers increasing very fast and having over 40 traders around the time I finally got a Setanta and went Phanon trader hunting. Still, as much as I tried they seemed to barely feel the damage I was producing. I gave up on that game because I wanted to use IEX in LU and that only works with the vanilla LU map but it was an interesting, if challenging, experience.

Now I have a new game (about 20 hours in), normal LU map, IEX, Phanon Plus and Revelation Plus. TandiTech hasn't upgraded and I doubt they will very soon as I've been managing to successfully take down one of their traders every 15 minutes gametime on average. Their trader numbers aren't increasing almost at all now but army is so I'll have to take care of that somehow.

This makes me wonder what was happening with the LU remap version. That has a completely different map layout with many new sectors but it also has (from what I noticed) a lot more goods on the species docks and military outposts. Almost every sector was full with advanced satellites and other usually rare goods. It could be that Phanon Plus on the remap just take off very quickly and it's likely that if I continued that game I would have lost, like I said it seemed to me that against my better efforts I just couldn't slow them down.

[Wanabe]

OK I feel I should share my experience with Phanon Plus so far.

First, I tested it for about 30 game hours in a LUV + vukica's remap + more gamestarts + (of course) Phanon Plus 3.03. In about 4 hours game time (I barely had time to explore some of the new universe, maybe get about 10mil credits) and Nova Ltd announces me they took over from TandiTech. OK... that seems very fast. Their reports looked very threatening, army numbers increasing very fast and having over 40 traders around the time I finally got a Setanta and went Phanon trader hunting. Still, as much as I tried they seemed to barely feel the damage I was producing. I gave up on that game because I wanted to use IEX in LU and that only works with the vanilla LU map but it was an interesting, if challenging, experience.

Now I have a new game (about 20 hours in), normal LU map, IEX, Phanon Plus and Revelation Plus. TandiTech hasn't upgraded and I doubt they will very soon as I've been managing to successfully take down one of their traders every 15 minutes gametime on average. Their trader numbers aren't increasing almost at all now but army is so I'll have to take care of that somehow.

This makes me wonder what was happening with the LU remap version. That has a completely different map layout with many new sectors but it also has (from what I noticed) a lot more goods on the species docks and military outposts. Almost every sector was full with advanced satellites and other usually rare goods. It could be that Phanon Plus on the remap just take off very quickly and it's likely that if I continued that game I would have lost, like I said it seemed to me that against my better efforts I just couldn't slow them down.

Phanon getting to Nova in about 4 hours game time isn't normal from my own testing with the standard LU map. Without any player intervention they (on average) need a minimum of 24 hours gametime to advance to Nova (which is actually very similar to LUV Phanon Nova advancement time) but it's very variable game to game. I did a test game after installing Vukica's remap with Phanon Plus (version 3.03 plus a couple of unreleased but IMO irrelevant bug fixes) and this mod plus more game starts and your tweaks. I let my test game run for 14 hours game time and it was not yet at Nova. Manually running the Menu.PhanonCorpSpy script to check on them they appeared to be on track for a fairly standard advancement time to Nova.

Not entirely sure what happened with Phanon in that game. You did the right thing by starting over because in no time at all you'd have heaps of M7 M1 and M2 looking to destroy your stuff which would probably be quite bad.

Thanks for sharing your experience with this so far. Sounds like you're doing very good damage to Phanon in that game, you've probably got them safely contained for a good while with the trader massacre.

[dizzy]

Hmm, seems I was wrong, significantly so. They didn't upgrade in 4 hours but in 17, still, for some reason that felt very fast... Anyway, let me know if you need more information, here's a relevant screenshot from my message log, the last tanditech report and the message for the upgrade to Nova: http://i.imgur.com/FVUHBVI.png

[Wanabe]

Hmm, seems I was wrong, significantly so. They didn't upgrade in 4 hours but in 17, still, for some reason that felt very fast... Anyway, let me know if you need more information, here's a relevant screenshot from my message log, the last tanditech report and the message for the upgrade to Nova: http://i.imgur.com/FVUHBVI.png

Okay, 17 hours is still definitely very fast from the usual average that I've seen (especially with the player actively trying to hurt them which can have a very large impact) but I suspect that even though that is a bit of anomaly it might be "normal" in a sense. The last 10 games I tested to see how fast they advance (left alone without player intervention) the fastest time to advance to Nova was 1 day 2 hours with the slowest to advance in those tests being 1 day 12 hours. In older tests (which are no longer as useful to look at because too much has changed since then) I did see (rarely though) fast advancement times of 15-18 hours when most of the time back then they'd get to Nova around the 22 hour mark or so.

Anyway I'm fairly sure what you're seeing is likely just part of the variable nature of Phanon. There's a lot of randomness with what ships they pick, what wares they decide to buy/sell when trading, maybe they get lucky with the salvaging, lucky with mining, maybe they choose good profitable stations to build or maybe not. Sometimes Phanon build stations within the path of the OCV and would foolishly try to defend it with their single starting M1 when the OCV comes knocking. In my last game I also noticed a couple times Phanon hunters and their escorts got engaged by some pirates which did not work out too well for Phanon. Although that was witnessed while running Diverse Game Starts by solarahawk on the "Ruthless Buccaneer" start which has the player friendly with the pirates so that may have something to do with that occasional situation.

Unless there's some sort of bug that causes this to happen sometimes I'm not sure I can prevent "Super Phanon" from sometimes appearing in a game.

[Wanabe]

Version 4 released.

Pretty much just bug fixes for some stuff I've noticed and after my latest playthrough with Solarahawks "Ruthless Buccaneer" game start I had a change of heart on the default value of Phanon satellite hunters .

Depending on your current game the fixes relating to mining may cause Phanon to get a bit of a sudden payday within a few game hours if a combination of factors occurred which prevented them from being able to properly sell off their mined goods. I'm not sure how long they've been stockpiling resources in my game but to put it in perspective, my latest game is 4-07 long with Phanon in generation 3. After a few game hours they "suddenly" go from having 0 M2s at their disposal to having 1-2 M2s and an additional M2 Flagship.

[Wanabe]

Version 4.01 released.

[dizzy]

I've noticed 2 problems with Phanon Plus 4.00 Nova Ltd in the past 10 game hours, it's possible the issues exist in the original code too:
- I attacked a Nova Ltd Orinoco (placed it on the monitor first to be able to follow/track it after it jumps away), then it jumped away and looking at the "u" menu for it, it said it was in Xenon Sector 534 and was trying to dock with the Xenon Station; that makes no sense Xenon are enemies of all biological factions, they don't give Phanon a free pass
- when attacking the Nova Ltd mining group (TL + escort) in Guiding Star, a Kraken Response jumped near the South gate and started firing torpedoes at me so I was forced to jump away; as expected, it then set its eyes on the next and only thing I had in that sector: the advanced satellite at coordinates 0,25k,0; however, it just went near it and spent there the next 4 game hours, without damaging the satellite (although the satellite was showing the "red" flashing as if it's taking damage); I assume this was because it doesn't have any lasers but only missiles? in any case, all this was happening OOS, maybe the fix should be to not let Phanon M7Ms try to attack satellites if they can't destroy them; the stuck M7M provided a window of opportunity for me to hassle their home sector and destroy most of their fighter complement with a single M6, because the M7M was "busy" with the satellite and didn't jump to the HQ to help out

[Wanabe]

I've noticed 2 problems with Phanon Plus 4.00 Nova Ltd in the past 10 game hours, it's possible the issues exist in the original code too:
- I attacked a Nova Ltd Orinoco (placed it on the monitor first to be able to follow/track it after it jumps away), then it jumped away and looking at the "u" menu for it, it said it was in Xenon Sector 534 and was trying to dock with the Xenon Station; that makes no sense Xenon are enemies of all biological factions, they don't give Phanon a free pass
- when attacking the Nova Ltd mining group (TL + escort) in Guiding Star, a Kraken Response jumped near the South gate and started firing torpedoes at me so I was forced to jump away; as expected, it then set its eyes on the next and only thing I had in that sector: the advanced satellite at coordinates 0,25k,0; however, it just went near it and spent there the next 4 game hours, without damaging the satellite (although the satellite was showing the "red" flashing as if it's taking damage); I assume this was because it doesn't have any lasers but only missiles? in any case, all this was happening OOS, maybe the fix should be to not let Phanon M7Ms try to attack satellites if they can't destroy them; the stuck M7M provided a window of opportunity for me to hassle their home sector and destroy most of their fighter complement with a single M6, because the M7M was "busy" with the satellite and didn't jump to the HQ to help out

I definitely do want to have a look at making Phanon an enemy of Xenon at some point, possibly "near future" depending if any bugs or things that need general improvement come to my attention. This is vanilla Phanon behaviour that has not yet been changed.

Looks like quite the oversight (by myself) on how the M7M ships are handled in combat. I've modified the Phanon M7M combat behaviour to better account for that kind of situation. Thanks a lot for reporting that one. I've uploaded a new version with that change. If there are M7M ships currently stuck in a previous save game they won't realize this on their own, however.

[dizzy]

Ah I see, so it's vanilla Phanon behavior to be neutral to Xenun. In that case, one change that could be done (without the large number of repercussions that setting their actual relationship status would have) is to just avoid docking at Xenon station. That way at least they have no good reason to try to fly to a Xenon sector and worse, try to dock with their stations. Thus you'd be fixing a symptom, not the problem, but it should be minimal impact and it does. Additional bonus points: do not let Phanon setup stations in Xenon sectors.