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Falcrack
Joined: 29 Jul 2009
Posts: 681 on topic
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 Posted: Wed, 4. Jul 12, 02:37 Post subject: |
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| Carlo the Curious wrote: |
| Falcrack wrote: |
| Oh I'd be fine with planetary output contibuting to the economy, provided that was actually the case where each planet produced X amount of goods per cycle of time and supplied them to factories and shipyards. Except that isn't the case. |
Some Terran sectors do actually have planetary supply (that's what the Lifter's you sometimes see off by the planets are doing). |
Are they really going off in the distance, filling up with wares, and coming back to unload their wares at stations?
Regardless, it still doesn't mean anything if the Terran fleets and ships are not reliant somehow on those deliveries in order to construct new ships or be equipped with shields and weapons. Merely window dressing.
To make it actually interesting for me, whether or not those ships successfully make deliveries should have an impact on the ability of the Terrans to make and outfit their ships, something it most certainly does not currently do.
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Coreblimey
Joined: 25 Aug 2010
Posts: 1165 on topic
Location: Sat in front of my monitor, silly! (North Shields UK)
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| Posted: Wed, 4. Jul 12, 15:11 Post subject: |
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| Falcrack wrote: |
| To make it actually interesting for me, whether or not those ships successfully make deliveries should have an impact on the ability of the Terrans to make and outfit their ships, something it most certainly does not currently do. |
Can you prove that statement?
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Carlo the Curious
Joined: 05 Mar 2007
Posts: 15512 on topic
Location: London, UK
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| Posted: Wed, 4. Jul 12, 16:29 Post subject: |
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| Coreblimey wrote: |
| Falcrack wrote: |
| To make it actually interesting for me, whether or not those ships successfully make deliveries should have an impact on the ability of the Terrans to make and outfit their ships, something it most certainly does not currently do. |
Can you prove that statement? |
Falcrack is correct - the AI doesn't care about equipment or resource availability when spawning/equipping ships. If you really want to prove it, you can delete everything from the universe and watch stuff spawn regardless (or just look in the code).
Personally, I'm fine with the way it works. Other opinions may differ  .
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Coreblimey
Joined: 25 Aug 2010
Posts: 1165 on topic
Location: Sat in front of my monitor, silly! (North Shields UK)
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| Posted: Wed, 4. Jul 12, 16:50 Post subject: |
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| Carlo the Curious wrote: |
Falcrack is correct - the AI doesn't care about equipment or resource availability when spawning/equipping ships. If you really want to prove it, you can delete everything from the universe and watch stuff spawn regardless (or just look in the code).
Personally, I'm fine with the way it works, I've never regarded X as an RTS. Other opinions may differ. |
I wasn't having a go at Falcrack, (although on reflection at looking at my stark question it now seems that way, even to me!) I was more curious (no pun intended) if it was actually true and if I was to say, destroy or board that particular ship, if it would have any effect on Terran resources.
Delete everything from the Universe! Then where on Earth (better make that 'where in space') am I going to land. 
As for taking a look at the code, no thanks. I can't tell my code from my edoc!
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If it doesn't work, give it a kick. If that doesn't fix it hit it with a hammer. If it still doesn't work, USE A BIGGER HAMMER!!!
Unknown Sector..... That's what you get for using Bing instead of Google! |
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Carlo the Curious
Joined: 05 Mar 2007
Posts: 15512 on topic
Location: London, UK
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| Posted: Wed, 4. Jul 12, 17:51 Post subject: |
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AI ship spawns are handled as a series of jobs which maintain between X and Y ships with specific orders. If there are less than X ships in a jobwing then the game just spawns some more.
The factories do need resources (except for SPPs), but nothing actually uses the end-product wares. AI traders may deliver them to docks, but once there they just decay if not purchased.
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Falcrack
Joined: 29 Jul 2009
Posts: 681 on topic
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| Posted: Wed, 4. Jul 12, 18:38 Post subject: |
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The main thing I guess is I would want X3 to have RTS-like mechanics in terms of unit and ware production. It wouldn't even have to have an incredibly huge variety of wares, though more is better and more interesting. An X3 where it is an extremely slow moving RTS because of the size and scale of the universe, and the length of time to produce wares, would be awesome. Even if I did nothing more than fly around and observe it would be cool, but it would be a lot of fun to interact with it even as a small cog in the machine, doing my part to aid one side or the other, or obtain a huge corporate empire and have a significant impact on it.
Basically, in any good RTS, resources are gathered, and x amount of resources are consumed over a given period of time at a factory/bunker, and out pops a unit. I would just want the same underlying principle to apply to both bought stuff bought by the player (which it pretty much does right now), and stuff the AI gets (which it clearly does not, relying instead on free spawning on a massive scale).
With a good civilian economy which consumes consume end products, its possible to have a nice, convincing economy even in the absence of war and cosntant ships being blown up, though I would like to see wars and conflicts in X3 where the various fleets fighting each other are a direct product of the economy, and intercepting trade ships, blowing up enemy factories etc has a measurable effect on war production.
I don't care for window dressing. If there is a ship in the universe flying around, I want it to be there for some functional reason (deliviering cargo, protecting a station/sector, etc), where my or other NPC interactions with it will have functional consequences, not just to fly around and look pretty.
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Coreblimey
Joined: 25 Aug 2010
Posts: 1165 on topic
Location: Sat in front of my monitor, silly! (North Shields UK)
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| Posted: Wed, 4. Jul 12, 19:21 Post subject: |
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| Falcrack wrote: |
| If there is a ship in the universe flying around, I want it to be there for some functional reason (deliviering cargo, protecting a station/sector, etc), where my or other NPC interactions with it will have functional consequences, not just to fly around and look pretty. |
I understand your point. I've seen ships jumping all over the Universe yet they don't have a single ecell in their cargobay. Now if they bought ecells then that at least would help towards keeping the industrial wheels turning.
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If it doesn't work, give it a kick. If that doesn't fix it hit it with a hammer. If it still doesn't work, USE A BIGGER HAMMER!!!
Unknown Sector..... That's what you get for using Bing instead of Google! |
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Carlo the Curious
Joined: 05 Mar 2007
Posts: 15512 on topic
Location: London, UK
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| Posted: Wed, 4. Jul 12, 21:25 Post subject: |
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| Falcrack wrote: |
| I don't care for window dressing. If there is a ship in the universe flying around, I want it to be there for some functional reason (deliviering cargo, protecting a station/sector, etc), where my or other NPC interactions with it will have functional consequences, not just to fly around and look pretty. |
They aren't just window dressing.
The vast majority of ships you see do have exactly the purposes you mention. Factories rely on AI traders to deliver resources & products, AI pirates blow them up, AI patrols defend them, etc. If no traders get through, the factory stops.
That only ultimately effects the player, of course - AI ship spawns don't care - but you could choose better examples to illustrate your point  .
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Alan Phipps
Moderator (English)
  
Joined: 16 Apr 2004
Posts: 10326 on topic
Location: Stonehenge, UK
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| Posted: Wed, 4. Jul 12, 21:33 Post subject: |
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Mind you, the real scenery-only ships can become annoying - eg all those NPC shuttles and prisoner transports etc that clog up any Player-owned Equipment Docks and Trading Posts typically set in Unknown Sectors and so with nowhere else for the shuttles to go. I suspect their scripts did not envisage Player-owned Docks etc. (Especially now that in X3AP you cannot set your stations as hostile to races.)
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brucewarren
Joined: 26 Mar 2008
Posts: 1556 on topic
Location: Not in Kansas any more, Toto.
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| Posted: Wed, 4. Jul 12, 22:15 Post subject: |
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Actually I think you can, just not directly and not individually.
The command on the station menu has been removed.
Use personal>advanced>global commands.
You set yourself hostile/friendly to a race then go to the station and transmit your friend-foe setting to the station.
There are options to transmit it to
"all reachable properties", "fighters in this sector", "transports in this sector"
and significantly "all stations in this sector"
Now if you've got two in a sector, that's unfortunate since I presume it'll
set both the same, but if you haven't it should work.
I've used this trick in AP to set a segaris station friendly to terran so their
NPCs would come and trade with it,
It worked too. Eventually. Just no ATF traders ever called 
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Alan Phipps
Moderator (English)
Joined: 16 Apr 2004
Posts: 10326 on topic
Location: Stonehenge, UK
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| Posted: Wed, 4. Jul 12, 22:31 Post subject: |
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@ brucewarren. Thanks that is a good point. However, I do have trading stations for doing sales to NPCs in that sector too. I want the trading TSs to come in-sector but not the 'fluff' TPs that then will not go away.
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Falcrack
Joined: 29 Jul 2009
Posts: 681 on topic
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| Posted: Wed, 4. Jul 12, 23:22 Post subject: |
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| Carlo the Curious wrote: |
| Falcrack wrote: |
| I don't care for window dressing. If there is a ship in the universe flying around, I want it to be there for some functional reason (deliviering cargo, protecting a station/sector, etc), where my or other NPC interactions with it will have functional consequences, not just to fly around and look pretty. |
They aren't just window dressing.
The vast majority of ships you see do have exactly the purposes you mention. Factories rely on AI traders to deliver resources & products, AI pirates blow them up, AI patrols defend them, etc. If no traders get through, the factory stops.
That only ultimately effects the player, of course - AI ship spawns don't care - but you could choose better examples to illustrate your point . |
Yeah I know factories do rely on NPC trraders, though the fact that the NPC trade ships do not sensibly equip themselves with jumpdrives to make trades faster and more efficiently irks me. Some have said that it would eliminate trade opportunities for the player, but I would welcome the extra competition that would come from competent NPC traders instead of seeing them do a conga line through the meat grinder of Xenon space. A little challenge is something I like in a game.
I just want the ships and races in X3 to ultimately rely on factory output for their existence (which they don't currently do), thus completing a product cycle which is complete except for what happens to the end products. Make it so that the production of those final products really has meaning, not just for the player, but all the NPCs and races in the galaxy.
If Rebirth is designed with that philosphy in mind, then all will be well as far as I am concerned. If not, if the end products are simply not used by anyone but the player, and NPCs are free to spawn in what they need outside of this production chain, then it might not be a game for me.
They could get rid of all the hospital ships and spacefly collectors as far as I am concerned, I would rather have the extra CPU power going into running ships that actually do stuff rather than are there merely to be seen (or possibly boarded).
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ajax34i
Joined: 08 Sep 2009
Posts: 521 on topic
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| Posted: Thu, 5. Jul 12, 14:52 Post subject: |
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| Falcrack wrote: |
| Yeah I know factories do rely on NPC trraders, though the fact that the NPC trade ships do not sensibly equip themselves with jumpdrives to make trades faster and more efficiently irks me. Some have said that it would eliminate trade opportunities for the player, but I would welcome the extra competition that would come from competent NPC traders instead of seeing them do a conga line through the meat grinder of Xenon space. |
That sounds good on paper but would be a disaster in-game; you wouldn't be able to compete at all. It would be like trying to argue with the Internet or trying to defend your twitter or Facebook accounts when the Internet notices you (for whatever reason) and starts spamming and DOS-attacking your sites.
The current UI doesn't let us find traderoutes easily. You can manually look, IF you have satellites, for one ware at a time, and you want to compete with 30-100 scripted NPC traders that insta-notice good deals and can almost-insta-deliver them via JD?
In any case, I would guess that most players get past the "oh I'm gonna manually trade" phase relatively fast, and pass the job to Mk3 traders. And at that point it's script vs. script - what's the point in making it more complicated and compute-intensive if it doesn't bring a lot of extra to the game?
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Falcrack
Joined: 29 Jul 2009
Posts: 681 on topic
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| Posted: Thu, 5. Jul 12, 17:22 Post subject: |
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| ajax34i wrote: |
| Falcrack wrote: |
| Yeah I know factories do rely on NPC trraders, though the fact that the NPC trade ships do not sensibly equip themselves with jumpdrives to make trades faster and more efficiently irks me. Some have said that it would eliminate trade opportunities for the player, but I would welcome the extra competition that would come from competent NPC traders instead of seeing them do a conga line through the meat grinder of Xenon space. |
That sounds good on paper but would be a disaster in-game; you wouldn't be able to compete at all. It would be like trying to argue with the Internet or trying to defend your twitter or Facebook accounts when the Internet notices you (for whatever reason) and starts spamming and DOS-attacking your sites.
The current UI doesn't let us find traderoutes easily. You can manually look, IF you have satellites, for one ware at a time, and you want to compete with 30-100 scripted NPC traders that insta-notice good deals and can almost-insta-deliver them via JD?
In any case, I would guess that most players get past the "oh I'm gonna manually trade" phase relatively fast, and pass the job to Mk3 traders. And at that point it's script vs. script - what's the point in making it more complicated and compute-intensive if it doesn't bring a lot of extra to the game? |
The point is not so much to make it more of a challenege for the player to find trading opportunities (though I would welcome the extra challenge), the point is that if NPC fleet and ship were made reliant upon production and wares from the economy, then the NPC traders responsible for carrying these wares would need to be far more efficient and less prone to suiciding themselves by picking nonsensical routes through Xenon space. If spawning of ships and wares were to be eliminated, and instead made reliant upon shipments by freughters for their use on NPC ships, then that makes it actually important that their freight actually arrives at the destination, and in a timely manner. As it is, it doesn't matter if they die in the Xenon meat grinder because it won't ultimately affect AI ship production or resupply.
The point of traders should not be, in my opinion, so that a freelance trade ship can buy at a super low price and sell at a super high price at a station the next sector over. I see trade ships more as a means to keep the economy moving and functional than as a way to enrich freelance traders.
I would advocate though that if NPC traders cannot use jump drives, the player owned MK3 traders should not be able to either. It seems ridiculous to me that my traders should be the only ones jumping around the universe trading, while none of the AI NPCs are allowed to do so.
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ajax34i
Joined: 08 Sep 2009
Posts: 521 on topic
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| Posted: Thu, 5. Jul 12, 19:41 Post subject: |
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| Falcrack wrote: |
| [...]the point is that if NPC fleet and ship were made reliant upon production and wares from the economy, then the NPC traders responsible for carrying these wares would need to be far more efficient and less prone to suiciding themselves by picking nonsensical routes through Xenon space. [...] |
But that's 3x times the work and 0x no fun.
First, complicate how the economy works by having it rely on actual freight being delivered, second, complicate the pathing and scripting of NPC flight AI because it now has to reliably pick routes and deliver wares, and third and finally make it the player's problem!!!
Because the player now has to watch for what the traders are doing, otherwise he loses the economy in his game. It's like having to save the Terran economy in the first 3-12 hours of the game, when you're poor and just starting, because otherwise GOD goes to lunch on the stations and you lose the few rare missile and weapon factories. Oh how much fun that is... not!
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