[MD] Litcube's Edited Missions V1.3

[Litcube]

Litcube's Edited Missions

Description:

Changes the generic missions (the one's at the stations). 3.0 compatible.

- Reduces the notoriety rewards of all generic missions. Generic only. Rewards are as per the explanation below, and the reason they were changed.
- Increases the time for assasination and build station missions dramatically (an hour to two hours for each)
- Station building missions will be completed if the station is built within 200 km of the navigation beacon
- Everything else is the same.



Installation:

Dump into your "director" folder. Delete the "3.01 Generic Missions.xml" if you don't want the follow ship, retrieve ship missions removed. I accidentally included this in the package, and Mizuchi dropped me a line about it. tldr: For vanilla mission offerings just delete this file.

Updated V1.3: 26th November 2010
- Fixed typo in constants.

Updated V1.2: 16th November 2010
- Build station distance set to 600 KM, for both Terran and Commonwealth sectors

Updated V1.1: 15th November 2010
- 3.0 patched missions.

----------------------------
Notoriety Reward Explanation
----------------------------

Race rank factor * difficulty level factor

I've implemented some of Alkeena's ideas. His math on the difficulty factor, for example. Any relations with race from -5 to 2 has a race rank factor of 1. Here's a chart showing the bonuses.



Here's a reference of what you'd get in Vanilla, unmodded, and an explanation as to why they're fubar:

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=257050

[Alkeena]

I'm all for slowing down rep gain but this rep function might need a little work...Some edge cases to consider:

Assuming:

Race rank * difficulty level

Consider:

0 Rank = 0 Rep Gain?

-1 Rank = Rep Loss for completing a mission....?

To be honest I don't even know if it's possible to accept missions with a negative rank; I've just never tried...Either way I might suggest that there should be some minimum cut-off just in case.

Maybe:

if (rank<2) rep += difficulty
else rep += rank * difficulty

----------------------------------------------------

As a separate matter, do you have any insights as to how to make it so that boarding a race ships utterly and completely tanks your rep? Boarding seems like too much of a money printer to me atm...

[Litcube]

I think it's in the mission code already that the missions aren't supposed to show up unless you're above 0.

Anyone else know if I'm wrong?

[Alkeena]

Bah, you responded before I could add my addendum...here it is again just so you might actually see it:


As a separate matter, do you have any insights as to how to make it so that boarding a race ships utterly and completely tanks your rep? Boarding seems like too much of a money printer to me atm...

[Litcube]

Not that I could think of in the mission director. Via scripting, it might be possible. I agree with you though. I'll look into it.

[Alkeena]

Oh also, although the rep rewards should definitely be lower I think some greater weighting should be applied to the difficulty level.

An 'Impossible' mission is, to my mind, significantly more difficult than a 'Hard' mission.

Maybe try an arithmetic series?

Function:

if ( rank < 2 ) rep += diffweight
else rep += rank * diffweight

where

diffweight = the 'arithmetic factorial' of the difficulty. So

Impossible: 7+6+5+4+3+2+1 = 28
Very Hard: 6+5+....+2+1 = 21
Hard: 15
Average: 10
Easy: 6
Very Easy: 3
Trivial: 1

This I believe far better captures the variance in difficulty levels. In your original function you basically only had to run 2 easy missions to get a payout factor of 6, the same as very hard and just shy of impossible; here we've upped it nicely to requiring you to run 3.5 missions to equal a very hard which still places you a fair distance (another 1.5 missions) from impossible rather than right next to it.

You could make the argument that the max gain of 10*28 = 280 is a tad high, but by the time you're hero of the federation that's really a drop in the bucket, so I'm not too terribly concerned about it. The real question is how does these figures compare to say an M3 kill? An M1 kill?
How about 100k of trading, or 2 million credits worth of trading? I feel that X3:R really had it's pacing just about right for me so the closer we can get to it the better--you just have to be careful not to overly nerf missions to the point that building a whole sectors worth of stations for a faction is worth less to them rep wise than buying just a few cycles worth of products generated by said stations...

[Litcube]

There is no IF statements in the mission director. There is a sort of a way to do it, but I left it out due to caution.

I will be modifying this, and I'll take your stuff into account.

Also, you *can* get a negative reward if your rank is -1, because -1 allows docking. Hardly any significant hit, but I'll fix it tomorrow.

[Alkeena]

Bah, I have a really bad habit of posting first and then editing extensively, apparently usually after someone has already replied :-\

Take a look at the [new] last paragraph of my last post.

[Litcube]

Yeah, it does require some tweaking, you're right.

An M5 kill is 10, and an M1 is 250.

[Carlo the Curious]

[Alkeena]

With ship kills being so high (relatively) I would strongly suggest two separate rep functions, one for 'kill' missions and one for everything else. With the kill missions you're effectively provided with fodder for rep rank and your mission is contingent upon killing them--there should be some rep boost from completing the mission but the majority of the rep gain can probably be left to the fodder that you're handed on a silver platter. It seems like the diffweight function I proposed above would be appropriate for these missions.

For non-kill missions where you aren't explicitly handed fodder for ranking though the majority of the rep gain should probably actually lay with the mission itself. Maybe just add an extra scaler to diffweight for these missions to boost the rep boost by whatever is appropriate to a given mission.

To be clear though, I'm not advocating that all missions should have approximately the same rep payout. Some missions would likely be inherently more important to a faction than others, for instance a combat patrol or a station building streak should probably factor more into their opinion of you than you just fetching a few ships...If you wanted to go really hardcore you might even add racial variance; Boron respect peaceful missions more than combat, while the split really only care about you if you can make things go boom...? Maybe even make the cash payouts the inverse of this relationship--they'll pay you well to do the stuff they don't like, that's what mercenaries are for after all, but that doesn't mean they have to respect you for it.

Potential Biases

Boron: Build
Split: Fight
Teladi: Trade
Paranid: ....Just kinda left with Think I suppose, and they do have some pretty nice tech; not quite sure of the feasibility of it with the available Think missions though...Maybe a mixed weighting of Build and Fight but not Trade given how insular they are.
Argon: Balanced, of course =)
Terran: No idea really, balanced I guess...

In any event, if you're interested in pursuing this they shouldn't necessarily be binary prejudices. So Boron shouldn't be all about Build and nothing else, just a healthy weighting towards it with a secondary tier of Trade and Think, and the lowest tier being Fighting.

Just a thought. =)

[Litcube]

Carlo, you're right. I've checked a few in there and I'm not sure how I missed some of these.

[Litcube]

Updated: 21st August 2009

[Litcube]

Also, you were right, carlo. Except I only found 15 of the 21. Text searches only turn up those rewards in 15.

[Alkeena]

This looks good. Thanks for putting it together =)