[script] Improved Races (r14 RC2 Available)

jjz- · Post by **jjz-** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 07:47

7ate, would it be possible to expand this to factions that are supposed to be warring? For example, the split and boron.

ThisIsHarsh · Post by **ThisIsHarsh** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 08:24

7ate9tin11s wrote:
ThisIsHarsh wrote:Forgot to mention about the ReadText in the menu I posted before, it's in the Community Menu, then both Xenon settings and Khaak settings, the new options for ATF/OFF have ReadText.
It looks like something is not installed or read properly in the text file...and perhaps this is the cause of the other problems too. I would suggest uninstalling it by deleting all plugin.ir.* files and setup.plugin.ir. Removing 8972-L044.xml from your t directory then re-installing.

OK, I'll fiddle around and see if I can sort it out. Noone else confirming ReadText errors so must just be my install.

7ate9tin11s wrote:I would be interested to see what the Xenon sector looks like if they think they need that to compete (Counterstrikes use the same number/type of ships as are in the sector in balanced mode)

Just tried going to that Xenon sector and as soon as the sector loaded all I got was a blank screen - could hear laser fire but screen was just black. Even looking at it OOS took a few seconds to bring up the sector map:

[ external image ]

There are a lot of xenon to be sure, but they are WAY outmatched by the volume of ATF!

7ate9tin11s wrote:Yes it is a bit over the top...I need to tweak the algorithm to combine/upgrade ships to minimize the numbers in a response force. By the way, are you using Balanced, Weak, or Strong responses? and which level of Xenon difficulty are you using?

Using balanced mode.

7ate9tin11s wrote:For combining I think it will be something like:
10 M5 -> 1 M3
10 M4 -> 1 M6
20 M3 -> 1 M7
Half of all M6 are already converted to M8 at: 1 M6 -> 2 M8
10 M8 -> 1 M7
5 M7 -> 1 M2

Well I'm not sure about your numbers there, but in general probably a good idea.

Wintermist · Post by **Wintermist** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 09:07

I liked it, as long as it would remain playable I don't mind a big force. It shows they mean business and intend to win. And if you spot that, you get a chance to tag along and join the fun.

Although, I'd like the ATF to also have to build up its force, so you'd know how large it is. Like you, I'm not fond of ships suddenly just appearing from thin... vacuum.

Perhaps ATF forces can build up depending on how many secotrs they own? This would be the most realistic way to handle it I guess. So if the Xenon or Kha'ak managed to beat down Terrans, they wouldn't have such a strong force anymore.

Man, this mod is really starting to look good.

And by the way, the reason I was interested in AL invasions as well was because it's easier and mroe compatible if it was all in one mod. And, you seem to think about how things should work pretty close to what I think too, so I'm really looking forward to where this mod is going.

StealthElement · Post by **StealthElement** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 09:20

THIS. IS. XENON SECTOR 472!

What the hell! Damn I want front row seats to that battle, provided I get to view it on a government-funded supercomputer purpose-built for calculating the meaning of life.

Anyway, suggestion-wise: This was sort-of mentioned before, but I think each time a sector is taken by the xenon/khaak/[insert evil zerging faction of doom here], the player should get a notification that should tell them:
A) Which sector has been taken.
B) How many sectors in total are now occupied by the faction.

It's nice and helpful for when you can't actually see the activity on your map, reassures you that the script is working as it should, and would make it exciting right from the get-go because you KNOW they're out there busily pillaging their way towards you as you build up your hopelessly ill-prepared little empire.

PS As has already been mentioned, the modular design of this mod is amazing. I love all the individual options, all the different combinations make it very easy to get it JUST how you want it. Yay for modular design and simple customizability!

Wintermist · Post by **Wintermist** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 10:22

Just installed this and I get ReadText thingy when viewing the Pirates and Yaki settings. There should be text and settings there. right?

someone else · Post by **someone else** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 11:50

just a though... how GoD takes this mess?

GoD is the responsible for fabs respawning... if Boron Sector 1 gets killed do GoD rebuild the fabs somwhere else?
It is WAR... things get smashed.

another interesting thing... can you remove the wrecks when they are too much? in a sector taken and then retaken and so on 10 or so times... there will be loads of station wrecks... maybe having a upper limit of 10-15 max station wrecks every sector?

(and maybe add 4-5 relevant ship wrecks to these sectors... like a Colossus Wreck and a K wreck in a ex-Argon sector taken by Xenons)

another thought... can you make xenons build more stations in their sectors? (depending on difficulty)

xenon Invasions at Insane remind me of the "feeling" of the new Terminator movie... (OMG we are all doomed! skynet will kill us all!!!)

7ate9tin11s · Post by **7ate9tin11s** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 12:17

Wintermist wrote:Just installed this and I get ReadText thingy when viewing the Pirates and Yaki settings. There should be text and settings there. right?

The pirates and Yaki improvements have not been released yet...I just put a placeholder message in so the next revision will not show the readtext error.

mr.WHO · Post by **mr.WHO** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 13:40

Kha'ak have taken 8, most notably Titan...since sector security prevents OFF counterstrikes to terran space Shocked

I guess it would be an USC job to protect Terran territory when ATF is away chasing Xenon

Kha'ak will randomly attack any sector half of the time and focus on sectors owned by 'unknown' race the rest of the time. This is to get them a foothold in the universe since most unknown sectors are sparsly or completelt bare of traffic

Good for me as I've builed my capital sector in unknown sector between Montalaar and New Income. 5 and 3 jumps away to two Xenon sectors and now looks like Khakk will be eager to visit me too

I guess I'll have to build more Lasertower factories. as 1 Factory and few LT per gate might be not enough. With my whole fleet patrolig Montraal-My unknown sector-New Income I think that I might be safe for a while

...too bad that I'm away from my PC with X:TC till the end of summer breake, but good thing is that I'll be playing with later/tested version of this script

Roady1976 · Post by **Roady1976** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 14:45

I do have one critsim with this script, which playing today has made me realise.

Whilst happly flying along in my M3 i keep getting jumped on by Khaak M3 clusters and scouts.
Now, i am in my eclipse and i can dispatch them easily enough but the thing that is bugging me is that they seem to just appear on top of me without any warning... they normally appear at a stargate, but for some reason they are using me as a spawn point.. which needless to say can be quite annoying, especially when i like to try and choose what fights i am involved in

Also (for the reason i am writing this post) i just had a Khaak Destroyer group spawn on top of me... needless to say i didn't survive

Is it not possible to force them to spawn at stargates like normal jump drives?

7ate9tin11s · Post by **7ate9tin11s** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 15:38

Roady1976 wrote:... just appear on top of me without any warning...

By default they will use their gateless jumpdrives to jump to enemies in the sector (including you!), makes for a really tough life if your in something smaller than an M7.
You can turn off p2p jumping in the options if you do not want them to instant-jump around. However, if you are unlucky enough to be the target of reenforcements that are jumping into the system you may still get a similar effect. Save often!

someone else · Post by **someone else** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 15:42

Is it not possible to force them to spawn at stargates like normal jump drives?

ever done Final Fury Plot? ever played X2 and X3Reunion? they jump on you until you are dead.

Khaaks are so powerful because they jump without gates, no Khaak has EVER used a gate from when they first appeared in X2.

if you do Patrol missions (in Vanilla) you can notice that Xenon, Pirates, Yakis seem to possess that technology too.

I'm not against Jump to point... (i use it too) but having Khaaks that focus on the biggest targets first and treat the player as a threat depending on its ship class is a good thing.

after all they don't know who you are.

7ate9tin11s · Post by **7ate9tin11s** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 15:53

r3 Final stability test run commencing...

New Features
Race Counterstrikes - Every race with a shipyard will now attempt to take back their sectors when they lose them to the improved races. There is a limit of 3 counterstrikes against a single race, and each race can only field 1 counterstrike against 1 unique race (ie split can attack Xenon and Kha'ak, but not Xenon and Xenon)

Notifications - You can choose to be notified of sectors taken over and counterstrikes that are starting. While the sector takeovers are a general alert given to anyone, you must not be an enemy of the station generating the counterstrike to get the messages.

Statistics - beta! - The menu will now show you a bunch of statistics on what is happening in the universe. It is not yet finished so some of the texts are wrong...it will be finished in the next revision, for now enjoy the massive amount of info

Counterstrike Compression - A counterstrike is now compressed into fewer, heavier ships after someones awe inspiring screenshots

Uploading once I verify counterstrike messaging and rules are working...

after all they don't know who you are.

That would be easy to fix

mr.WHO · Post by **mr.WHO** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 16:20

Notifications - You can choose to be notified of sectors taken over and counterstrikes that are starting. While the sector takeovers are a general alert given to anyone, you must not be an enemy of the station generating the counterstrike to get the messages

It would be good to have an info about the location from where the counterstrike is launched, in case you would want to join to help them (OFF wouldn't be a problem coz they launch from M148, but what about ATF and the rest of races that havea multiple shipyards? ).

Does the script spawn Carriers (and other hangar capable ships) with their fighter contingent inside ?

7ate9tin11s · Post by **7ate9tin11s** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 16:38

just a though... how GoD takes this mess?

GoD just gives up and takes the side of the Kha'ak, of course!

Honestly I am not sure how it is handled, I know retaken sectors slowly grow back and station and ship hulks go away after a while. I basically always test on insane mode though so it is not like there is much retaking of sectors

mr.WHO wrote:It would be good to have an info about the location from where the counterstrike is launched...

It already does, the exact message looks like:

From: Paranid Security

Paranid Assault group has been formed in Paranid Prime and will be attacking Kha'ak-controlled Priest Rings. Please assist if you are able!

mr.WHO wrote:Does the script spawn Carriers (and other hangar capable ships) with their fighter contingent inside ?

Xenon and Kha'ak invasion ships do, counterstrikes currently do not in an attempt to minimize the fighter spam. If the counterstrike should have alot of fighters they get more M7 ships instead.

Oh, r3 is up. Enjoy!

...I just thought of a possible bug too...I wonder if the Xenon can do a counterstrike against the Kha'ak...they do have a shipyard and the script is reeeeeally flexible

Test Run Results
Game Time: 6 hours (99% seta!)
Sectors taken:

6

1
MVP:

- Kept assaulting 18 billion and kept the Xenon advance at bay

mr.WHO · Post by **mr.WHO** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 17:33

Xenon and Kha'ak invasion ships do, counterstrikes currently do not in an attempt to minimize the fighter spam. If the counterstrike should have alot of fighters they get more M7 ships instead.

Would it be possible to have a counterstrike hangar capable ships in similar fashion to normal Vanilla military patrols, like:
M1 with docked fighters that are launched only if the M1 is attacked (or in case of counterattack force - when they arrive at targe sector to begin rampage

). This might prevent forming of a multi-sector long trail of fighters without banning the use of fighters.

Cronos988 · Post by **Cronos988** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 17:36

What I really would like to see in this mod is some kind of limit of military power of all races (Friend and Foe alike). What I mean is to eliminate the "whack a mole" approach of X3TC and make races actually beatable without having at least one sector left where every single ship respawns instantly.

Since you already have that token System, you could limit the amount of Tokens a Race has, and let them slowly regain based on Shipyards/military Outposts, Khaak and Xenon stations etc.

Of course, Khaak an Xenon would regenarte much faster than all other races because they need to be effective with considerably less sectors.

The standart respawning of ships can only be eliminated via the Jobs file I guess, but for starters you could limit the numbers of "strike Forces", so the forces trying to regain sectors by using the token System.

Are you planning on giving the races peliminary strikes or additional defence forces?

I was thinking about organising ships in small fleets, calles strike forces, with each fleet having its own token value, representing the battle value. Once a sector is attacked, ships with enough tokens to battle the threat are called from nearby sectors.

I know this sounds a lot like RRF but it is a little different: Races would only launch a defensive strike once with a limited force, thereby causing significantly less lag than the constant reinforcement of a Fleet.

You could do something along the line of defending a border sector with about the same token count as the enemy, searching for fleets about 2 jumps in each direction, and defending core sectors, especially those with shipyards, with a much bigger force.

In conjunction with the max token System, a race would be able to hold it's core sectors as long as it has tokens left. When the military gets strained to much, i.e. by loosing important outposts in border sectors, it might collapse eventually if the player does not help.

Roady1976 · Post by **Roady1976** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 18:02

I just tried the clean up function to clear out this massive convoy of ATF ships, but it didn't remove them.. i did see it working on the message bar.. but after 5 mins or more and the messages stopped.. the atf ships were still there.

But still loving this script tho

Antiochus · Post by **Antiochus** » Mon, 6. Jul 09, 20:15

Roady1976 wrote:I just tried the clean up function to clear out this massive convoy of ATF ships, but it didn't remove them.. i did see it working on the message bar.. but after 5 mins or more and the messages stopped.. the atf ships were still there.

But still loving this script tho

Yeah I was experiencing the same thing, I waited for probably an hour (left to go do errands) came back still tons of ATF....tons...

7ate9tin11s · Post by **7ate9tin11s** » Tue, 7. Jul 09, 04:09

Antiochus wrote:
Roady1976 wrote:I just tried the clean up function to clear out this massive convoy of ATF ships, but it didn't remove them.. i did see it working on the message bar.. but after 5 mins or more and the messages stopped.. the atf ships were still there.

But still loving this script tho
Yeah I was experiencing the same thing, I waited for probably an hour (left to go do errands) came back still tons of ATF....tons...

I found the bug, reproduced it, and determined just how large a bug it was

. r4 posted and it fixed the problem for me.

The error was a simple oversight in the upgrade script where I used a not instead of a !

The upgrade script will realize if you had a bad upgrade before and wipe out all generated counterstrike forces in the universe, this will take several minutes and you will see it look through almost every ship in the universe since the problem could have happened with a r2 fresh -> r3 getting all races to do counters in floods.

7ate9tin11s · Post by **7ate9tin11s** » Tue, 7. Jul 09, 05:00

Look, all official in an unedited post!

Just letting everyone know that these scripts are free to use in any mod or script package as long as the posting for said mod or package gives credit to this script and links to either this authorization post or the main post of this script found at:

Code: Select all

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=252509

For the lazy you can use the following script block in your post:

Code: Select all

[b]Uses[/b] scripts from [url=http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=252509][color=red]Improved[/color] Races[/url] by permission from [i]7ate9tin11s[/i]

which looks like:
Uses scripts from Improved Races by permission from 7ate9tin11s

Thanks, good luck, and happy scripting!