[X3LU] Mayhem 3.21b

[Hector0x]

There is no denying that Mayhem 2 had a few additional features which got cut for 3. I can understand where you're coming from. In the end its just a game and you could also go back or play something else like improved races mod.

From my POV all the things you mentioned like defense platforms or Boarding are only 'gimmick' features. They can be fun and might often seem special or cool. But they don't really fit into the general concept of the mod or even go against it. Big problem is that only the player can effectively use most of them and they feel disconnected to the core gameplay loop. Its basically minigames.

The ultimate vision for Mayhem has always been this sandbox where the player personally builds his empire on a small scale, so that his actions actually matter. You are not just the fleet commander like in LU, you are the warchief who can make a difference in the frontline or by helping the industry at home. The AI was also supposed to play a bit more like a player and fight for territory.
This is the Mayhem concept in a nutshell. Naturally the mod slowly went more and more into this direction to create a single coherent game experience. Streamlining and cutting that which didn't fit in. Removing or replacing features due to reported bugs or problems. Not everything was perfectly planned and certain things got cut because something didn't work. Best example are the Terrans and their hardcoded relation with the ATF, so they got removed. I think there have been massive improvements with each Mayhem iteration.

Mayhem 1 only had the 1st basic version of the turf war but without any more content which was tailored for the new game environment.
Mayhem 2 covered this part and added every vanilla X feature in existence in some altered form to get lots of gameplay content. By doing that, here and there it strayed a bit away from the base concept in my opinion. When i read about tactics which are basically exploits like the defense platforms in front of gates i don't get where the fun is with these. Sure its necessary because of the OCV that only attacks the player. But the idea was that player and NPC are not much different, no?

Mayhem 3 mostly wanted to get rid of the jumpdrive and add NPC ship building with real resources.
To me the removal of the jumpdrive is a feature. Suddenly you have undefended sectors where the enemy also cannot bring forces in quickly. So concepts like 'attack' or 'defense' got a real meaning for the very first time. You cannot jump everything around so you need multiple fleets.
Additionally all these little stories unfold, when you just hop in a freighter and personally buy a load of Ore to finish building an important factory, evading pirates on the way home. Unlike LU, here your personal actions actually matter because that one load of Ore actually gets a lot of things done and matters a lot for your further progress. In any other mod it would just be another load of Ore that you don't even need because you buy stations with credits. So everyone can play his favourite gimmick features to grind credits and that gets called empire building.

But Mayhem has actual hands on empire building. Its one coherent game loop.

[arkcheung]

Never tried Mayhem 2, curious to know what are the cool things in M2 and were disabled in M3?

OCV came at you in waves and it was more directed at you rather than just being "out there". I thought it was more interesting and fun.
You could build and place fixed Defensive stations like they had in the original albion prelude. That was especially fun, as you could place one near a gate and essentially wall-off an area, or you could accept a combat mission and then simply park your ship behind one of them and watch it decimate the incoming enemies..
Ship weapons weren't so nerfed.. He said it was for performance reasons, but I never had performance issues. Tons of ship balance changes that imo have no benefit in the end to play.
You could do Marine boarding.. Very fun.
Gambling Cassino's. Very fun.
He removed a lot of elements.. such as the push-back effect of certain weapons. Not everyone liked those, but I did. Kha'ak weapons used to penetrate shields.. no longer.
Jump Drives totally removed from the game. I'm sure some like that. I didn't. That was no small nerf to the game. It completely upended things and to my knowledge, no one was complaining before.
Yaki's seem extremely inactive compared to mayhem 2.


The problem is that Mayhem 3 added quite a few new features that are quite nice and especially the dynamic universe creation. So it's nearly impossible to go back to Mayhem 2 and not miss that stuff.
Much of it didn't have to be removed though. I just think the author kept re-thinking what he wanted. From one perspective it's his game and it's free so who can complain with a straight face From another perspective, it is maddening.
Imagine the Mona-lisa being repainted by the artist 10 times over the same canvas while you were forced to watch.

Surprised to know M2 sounds more interesting than M3. And I have the same feeling with M3. I think M3 has great potential espeically with the random universe generation but after a few games I found it doesn't give me too much desire to replay it any more because of below reasons:

1. There is not too much challenge and special events for late game. Once you have a fleet led by 2~3 M2 ships you can beat anyone in the game. While the AI recovers really slow once they lost their starting fleet which makes the game even easier.
2. Most of the time you will just only research and build the same ships for every game since you have access to all the faction's technology right from the start of the game. It just feels not right to be able to research the Xenon and Pirate ships right in the start.
3. It's too easy to build the capital ships in big numbers with the dry dock perk. This is also one of the reason which makes the game not too much challenge.
4. The space economy and station is all simplified which is all about ship production or researches. I kinda still likes the commodity and space station varieties in vanilla game.
5. There isn't much diplomacy gameplay but there was nothing in vanilla so can't complain too much about it. The AI faction just starts war and ends war without obvious reasons.
6. Almost every outpost is the same except the perk selections. I won't mind if all the outpost has the same amount of worker slots but it would be ideal if the worker slots can be adjusted in different quantities. I should not complain that in current game every space has either ore or silicon to mine but it's just not realistic which makes the random universe not really random. I would like to see some of the poor space with more strategy value than economic value.
7. The empire management is too simple and easy without any risk of losing territory in the late game. Anyone who plays a grand strategy sandbox game would miss the stability, civil war, dynamic diplomacy relations, etc. in the Paradox games. I know it's only a dream but it's a good dream.
8. It seems the author is focusing on the balance but to me there is no real balance in any game even those best RTS games like SC. I prefer to have some imbalance things with some limitations or ristrictions.

It's a long list but it's because I realy love the atmosphere of X3 and got so excited when I played the Mayhem 3 the first time. Thanks to Joubarbe for making this excellent mod and I hope to see more new features to be added to Mayhem and maybe more modders to join so we can see this beautiful baby growing up.

[Hairless-Ape]

1. There is not too much challenge and special events for late game. Once you have a fleet led by 2~3 M2 ships you can beat anyone in the game. While the AI recovers really slow once they lost their starting fleet which makes the game even easier.
**I certainly couldn't beat anyone with 2-3 M2's. But I completely agree about the AI recovery/growth being silly slow. With all those systems and stations you'd think the A.I. would be vastly better. The A.I. is really stupid when you watch it closely, running streams of haulers through Xenon space etc..
2. Most of the time you will just only research and build the same ships for every game since you have access to all the faction's technology right from the start of the game. It just feels not right to be able to research the Xenon and Pirate ships right in the start.
**I agree
3. It's too easy to build the capital ships in big numbers with the dry dock perk. This is also one of the reason which makes the game not too much challenge.
**I completely agree. The dry dock is overpowered. Recurring maintenance costs for ships should be higher even with it. Easily changed in code though.
4. The space economy and station is all simplified which is all about ship production or researches. I kinda still likes the commodity and space station varieties in vanilla game.
**Once again, I totally agree. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to build a wheat farm and space weed station and sell weed to my friends. Useless nerf.
5. There isn't much diplomacy gameplay but there was nothing in vanilla so can't complain too much about it. The AI faction just starts war and ends war without obvious reasons.
**You hit at the heart of things here for me. While the favor system is an attempt at diplomacy, it's completely static in nature. The A.I. needs a PERSONALITY.. and it needs to act according to it. This would be the most extreme challenge for a developer, but ultimately the thing that gives it the most character and fun.
6. Almost every outpost is the same except the perk selections. I won't mind if all the outpost has the same amount of worker slots but it would be ideal if the worker slots can be adjusted in different quantities. I should not complain that in current game every space has either ore or silicon to mine but it's just not realistic which makes the random universe not really random. I would like to see some of the poor space with more strategy value than economic value.
**OMG what an awesome concept. It sounds so realistic.
7. The empire management is too simple and easy without any risk of losing territory in the late game. Anyone who plays a grand strategy sandbox game would miss the stability, civil war, dynamic diplomacy relations, etc. in the Paradox games. I know it's only a dream but it's a good dream.
8. It seems the author is focusing on the balance but to me there is no real balance in any game even those best RTS games like SC. I prefer to have some imbalance things with some limitations or ristrictions.
**Yes totally. Balance for one player is different for another. It is dependent on how you play, and isn't helping the game to keep tweeking it when there are so many other things that would spice up the game play.

[Hector0x]

I have something in the pipe that might be right up your alley. It covers pretty much half of your criticisms, including the AI brains and personality. Its been 3 long months of intense development and i'm closing in on the finish line. It will be next level sh*t and should be no more than a few weeks away. Stay tuned. This mod is definitely not dead yet.

[Ysengrin]

Well, that's a teaser !
Will we have to start a new game for this upcoming rebalance mod, Hector0x ?

[Betelgeuse97]

1. Strange; looks like an exploit. But because your only station in that sector was technically not destroyed by the AI, you don't lose ownership of your sector.
2. Sector monitoring for fleets is already in the game, and it's been updated so that docked fleets respond to threats in monitored sectors.
3. One of the key things of Mayhem 3 is that all the scripts are built for the AI in mind without specialty for the player. This means that the AI and player use the same features; in that case, it wouldn't change anything since the AI would place satellites far away. Since the AI and YOUR ships would do the same thing, your satellites will still get found and destroyed by NPCs that can see your satellites.
Satellites grant vision within a 150km radius, so AI that have satellites can see your satellites even if you place then at high altitudes.

1. Definitely a bug. Doubt it's worth fixing even though it's probably an easy fix.
2. First, you MUST go into the Fleet Management screen for the fleet you wish to respond, and you must add each monitored sector to the patrol list there, or else they will not patrol that sector or automatically respond there.
Once you do however, that fleet automatically moves to that sector when an enemy appears and then engages it. Unfortunately they are too stupid to dock back up when they are done if they were docked to start with, which is annoying.
3. Not technically true. The script that places satellites has separate code for A.I. placed satellites and player owned explorers placing satellites. You can easily change the code in one and not the other. I am annoyed also at satellite placement and may change it in my own code.

Didn't know about #3 involving satellites. Thanks for the clarification.

OCV came at you in waves and it was more directed at you rather than just being "out there". I thought it was more interesting and fun.
You could build and place fixed Defensive stations like they had in the original albion prelude. That was especially fun, as you could place one near a gate and essentially wall-off an area, or you could accept a combat mission and then simply park your ship behind one of them and watch it decimate the incoming enemies..
Ship weapons weren't so nerfed.. He said it was for performance reasons, but I never had performance issues. Tons of ship balance changes that imo have no benefit in the end to play.
You could do Marine boarding.. Very fun.
Gambling Cassino's. Very fun.
He removed a lot of elements.. such as the push-back effect of certain weapons. Not everyone liked those, but I did. Kha'ak weapons used to penetrate shields.. no longer.
Jump Drives totally removed from the game. I'm sure some like that. I didn't. That was no small nerf to the game. It completely upended things and to my knowledge, no one was complaining before.
Yaki's seem extremely inactive compared to mayhem 2.


The problem is that Mayhem 3 added quite a few new features that are quite nice and especially the dynamic universe creation. So it's nearly impossible to go back to Mayhem 2 and not miss that stuff.
Much of it didn't have to be removed though. I just think the author kept re-thinking what he wanted. From one perspective it's his game and it's free so who can complain with a straight face From another perspective, it is maddening.
Imagine the Mona-lisa being repainted by the artist 10 times over the same canvas while you were forced to watch.

Surprised to know M2 sounds more interesting than M3. And I have the same feeling with M3. I think M3 has great potential espeically with the random universe generation but after a few games I found it doesn't give me too much desire to replay it any more because of below reasons:

1. There is not too much challenge and special events for late game. Once you have a fleet led by 2~3 M2 ships you can beat anyone in the game. While the AI recovers really slow once they lost their starting fleet which makes the game even easier.
2. Most of the time you will just only research and build the same ships for every game since you have access to all the faction's technology right from the start of the game. It just feels not right to be able to research the Xenon and Pirate ships right in the start.
3. It's too easy to build the capital ships in big numbers with the dry dock perk. This is also one of the reason which makes the game not too much challenge.
4. The space economy and station is all simplified which is all about ship production or researches. I kinda still likes the commodity and space station varieties in vanilla game.
5. There isn't much diplomacy gameplay but there was nothing in vanilla so can't complain too much about it. The AI faction just starts war and ends war without obvious reasons.
6. Almost every outpost is the same except the perk selections. I won't mind if all the outpost has the same amount of worker slots but it would be ideal if the worker slots can be adjusted in different quantities. I should not complain that in current game every space has either ore or silicon to mine but it's just not realistic which makes the random universe not really random. I would like to see some of the poor space with more strategy value than economic value.
7. The empire management is too simple and easy without any risk of losing territory in the late game. Anyone who plays a grand strategy sandbox game would miss the stability, civil war, dynamic diplomacy relations, etc. in the Paradox games. I know it's only a dream but it's a good dream.
8. It seems the author is focusing on the balance but to me there is no real balance in any game even those best RTS games like SC. I prefer to have some imbalance things with some limitations or ristrictions.

It's a long list but it's because I realy love the atmosphere of X3 and got so excited when I played the Mayhem 3 the first time. Thanks to Joubarbe for making this excellent mod and I hope to see more new features to be added to Mayhem and maybe more modders to join so we can see this beautiful baby growing up.

1. I had a fleet consisting of approximately 2-3 M2s, and that wasn't enough to beat anyone (OCV included).
2. Agreed. I liked the intent behind the older Mayhem 2's maintenance system. Effectively, it forced the player to choose different ships each run if the player wanted ships that didn't cost much maintenance. But I think locking the player from researching a permanent enemy faction's ships isn't the right move (and I'd say that the player wouldn't need to research their ships at that point anyway when the player declares permanent war against that faction).

Stat randomizer on every fresh game start would work in theory, but not sure how this would play out in practice. Basically some way to break monotony on picking the same ships in every game is what's needed. Another option is that only a subset of blueprints (using randomization of course, but the player should always be guaranteed at least 1 blueprint per ship category) is available to research in every game, with other blueprints obtainable only by scanning or outright unobtainable.

3. This was why Hector nerfed the dry dock perk in his Rebalance Mod. Though Joubarbe officially nerfed it by having the perk apply only to capitals, capitals take up a lot of maintenance. I'd say Hector's nerf forces the player to have a soft cap on fleet size.
4. This goes back to Mayhem 2 crafting philosophy. Every kind of production was simplified a lot, including ships. This reduces the number of bottlenecks that can occur.
5. Hector has attempted to solve this problem in SWM3's warlord mode. I'm playing that right now and I should have more comments about this later.
6. Yes, I'd love to see this. Feels like a waste of worker slots when not all of them are used. I'd rather have all 3 agent slots (with 3 agent slots being reassigned to miner slots) and 7 miner slots operational than have only 3 out of 6 agent slots at work.
7. Agreed. Hard difficulty of the mod doesn't address this; the mod becomes too easy after getting through early and mid game.
8. That's been a problem since the dawn of time. Every time something comes out, more issues pop up. Fix those issues and more come up. Or maybe Chesterton's fence was violated?

[Hector0x]

Will we have to start a new game for this upcoming rebalance mod, Hector0x ?

Yes absolutely.

5. Hector has attempted to solve this problem in SWM3's warlord mode. I'm playing that right now and I should have more comments about this later.

To clarify for others. The latest SWM3 patch allowed the NPCs to declare war on you, but you could also sign peace deals with them. I introduced sort of a tension mechanic which gets raised by claiming sectors and eventually grows on its own. Tension could only be lowered during war and the idea was that by claiming territory you offend the existing factions so they prepare for war.
Warlord mode was just an optional extra challenge where this tension randomly rises even if you do nothing. Its like a doom clock that counts to the start of the next war with each faction. And you needed to manage it by releasing tension so that you didn't end up in too many wars at the same time.


But be assured that my new project won't allow the NPCs to declare war on the player. With that idea i had gone too far. An average user might just want to stay peaceful with all factions and only fight the Xenon. That wasn't really possible anymore.

So i scrapped this entire tension mechanic. But you can still have a peace agreement with hostile NPC empires. Unlike SWM3 this isn't based on a timer but actually embedded in the new strategic AI. So the faction really makes a decision if it wants to accept your peace proposal or not. This is based on how they're actually doing in the game. For example they want peace with you when they got no resources left, or a big OCV fleet is roaming around in their sectors.

[Edna]

I fully relate to Hairless-Ape when it comes to Mayhem 2 vs Mayhem 3. As much as the features of Mayhem 2 were considered buggy or broken, to me the Defense Platforms were definitely more than just a "Gimmick". Same with the Boarding, as those "mini-games" kept me busy for many hours, which effectively makes them not a minigame anymore, in my opinion.

I still dream of a "Best of Both Worlds"-version of Mayhem, that takes Mayhem 3's Empire Management, Mayhem 2's gameplay loop + fixes of the things that were criticized about Mayhem 2 (like the universe getting SWAMPED by bailed ships) and the fun stuff that Joub's LU Missions Reloaded mod added, like the moba-esque mission from Elena's Fortune to Hatikva's Faith, or the Arena station.

That being said, I've likely spent more time playing Mayhem 3 than with Mayhem 2, as the OCV waves in Mayhem 2 stressed me out, and LU felt like it was aiming for mass battles instead of any kind of strategic gameplay, with the OCV piling hilarious amounts of capital ships per sector and totally spiraling out of control if you SETA for a while (same with Mayhem 2, which literally punishes you for using SETA, unlike Mayhem 3).

One of my favourite things of Mayhem 3 will always be the Piracy Contract perk. It's ridiculously good in the early game, especially if there is a pirate base in your system. It especially made One-Sector-Challenges very enjoyable. I guess my biggest issue is with the constant attempts of Joub and Hector to try to balance things out in a way that you can't cheese anything anymore, since things like the Mayhem 2 boarding (after some time) and using defense platforms gave you GREAT advantages while the OCV on the other hand got more and more pesky if you don't min-max your gameplay, basically forcing you to create fighter-swarms.

[dunderhead327]

Jump Drives totally removed from the game. I'm sure some like that. I didn't. That was no small nerf to the game. It completely upended things and to my knowledge, no one was complaining before.

For me, this is the biggest problem with M3. By removing the range limitations imposed by needing e-cells to jump across multiple sectors, and forcing every ship to fly through normal space, the need for carriers is eliminated. Fighters can get there (anywhere!) faster on their own so there is no point building carriers rather than more fighters. M1s and M7Cs may be useful as cheap but fragile gun platforms, and can repair damaged fighters (which makes them tenders, not carriers), but that's about it. However, their ability to carry heavier weapons has, I believe, been nerfed since I last played (it's been quite a while), so even this may not be true. Any comments about the carriers, battlecarriers and cruiser-carriers in the encyclopedia should be taken with a large pinch of salt since they were re-balanced almost as soon as I wrote the descriptions.

Carrier play was one of the main reasons I picked up X3 in the first place. Now it's irrelevant.

Just my twopenn'oth.

[Ysengrin]

Maybe a tweak of speed and maintenance while flying could make carrier cheaper than m3 flying all over the place. And more weapons on them ? And the repair fonction seems usefull nontheless.

Hector0x, I need a fix of Mayhem 3, are you finishing your patch ?

[Hector0x]

Hector0x, I need a fix of Mayhem 3, are you finishing your patch ?

Yes, still at it. Hopefully just another week or so. Maybe sooner, maybe a bit later. I want to get this out too, but it needs to be mostly working

[Ysengrin]

I have a unusual request.
When playing Mayem 3 I almost never use SETA. I found it relaxing just to look at my ship in flyby view giving orders and thinking about where ti go next. Plus, there is much to do and think early on, so SETA isn't mandatory anymore.
But, I also know that a good 10x SETA can cut your framerate in half on this game, because every calculation of the simulation must be done 10 times faster by your CPU.

So, the point is : could genius modders like Joubarbe and you ( )make an inverted SETA that slows down time and thus increase framerate, something the player could use in huge demanding battles to have good FPS and more time to issue orders ?

[Cycrow]

Slowing down time would not actually increase the frame rate of the game. You cant render less than 1 frame at a time.

the reason SETA increases the CPU load, is because it'll run the update step multiple times per frame so each frame takes longer to process as a result.

[Ysengrin]

I already have made a few tests with a slow motion cheatengine on homeworld remastered and just cause 2 and the framerate is actually double when the time is slowed, i've to try it on X3 but I would like to avoid CheatEngine...

[Metallumere]

Mammoths seem to have been missing from the ship compendium and ship research options for several versions now, I only just found the culprit.
The script Mayhem.ImportShipPopReq.xml is set to start at ID 0, and immediately increment up before doing anything.
It never checks to see if the Mammoth even has a population requirement entry, and so it's always returned as being a disabled ship, even though an entry is there.

The fix is as simple as changing the script to start at ID -1.

[alexalsp]

9979

Code: Select all

<t id="0">26</t> <!--Argon Mammoth-->

Code: Select all

$id = -1

Code: Select all

load text: id=9979

$id = -1
$shipPopReq = table alloc

while $id < 500
inc $id

$shipPop = read text: page=9979 id=$id
$pos = find position of pattern 'ReadText' in $shipPop
do if $pos != -1
continue

$shipPop = string $shipPop to integer
$ship = get ware from maintype [SSTYPE_SHIP] and subtype $id
do if $ship
table set $shipPopReq ( $ship ) = $shipPop
end

set global variable: name='mayhem_shipPopReq' value=$shipPopReq

return $shipPopReq

[Hairless-Ape]

Enjoy the new Map Generator / Editor

viewtopic.php?f=94&t=449012

[Omni-Orb]

Thanks for keeping x3 interesting, its perfect the way it is, and you keep improving on it.
I hope we get to appreciate "old" tech and games more as a society, the games are good, the mods are good,
it's the culture of the new and our short lives that is pushing us in the wrong direction as a society creating more than we need at the cost of life.
If/when we get more time as a society and/or cure aging I hope we will appreciate all that we have made.
X3 is good. Litcubes mod is good. Mayhem is good.
Joubarbe I wish society was more like you

[Hairless-Ape]

Thanks for keeping x3 interesting, its perfect the way it is, and you keep improving on it.
I hope we get to appreciate "old" tech and games more as a society, the games are good, the mods are good,
it's the culture of the new and our short lives that is pushing us in the wrong direction as a society creating more than we need at the cost of life.
If/when we get more time as a society and/or cure aging I hope we will appreciate all that we have made.
X3 is good. Litcubes mod is good. Mayhem is good.
Joubarbe I wish society was more like you

As I understand it, I don't believe Joubarbe is working on this mod anymore. Currently, the Mayhem 3 mod is being 'extended' further by HectorX with the Zero-Hour mod. I would highly recommend it.
Cheers.

[Omni-Orb]

As I understand it, I don't believe Joubarbe is working on this mod anymore. Currently, the Mayhem 3 mod is being 'extended' further by HectorX with the Zero-Hour mod. I would highly recommend it.
Cheers.

Thanks, Ill look at it.
I started playthrough of mayhem 2 since i had so much fun 'breaking' it last time I played by using a rush research expansion tactic to research and build a fully equipped Excalibur before the first OCV wave.
I'm trying something similar this time although Joubarbe have placed heavy restrictions on expanding in the early game possibly because of it.