Loosing trade ships

[Xenon_Slayer]

Can someone please send me a savegame? The more player owned objects the better I suppose.

[pref]

I can try to advance the last save so that the event occurs again soon after reload, but i have more crew mod installed.
Is that a big issue?

[Xenon_Slayer]

It may be but I'll give it a try.

[pref]

Should i remove the mod before? Or that could make it worse?

[Xenon_Slayer]

I can force it to load. There'll probably be a few errors but hopefully not a change in the behaviour I want to look at.

[pref]

I tried for a few hours from the last save, but it did not happen again.
There was more then an hour playtime between the last save and the drostan attacks - probably it is dependent on ship positions in the sector and i don't remember what i did and how during this time exactly.

[IceBlood79]

I was wondering how I keep losing my wingmen. Few seconds later when I enter the highway I'll get a message from my wingman and he is dead already. Quite frustrating and this alone makes fighters useless. I hope Egosoft can find a solution.

[Len5]

Yeah. I think I'm gonna sell all my fighters or just let them die. They only seem to be target practice for pirates.


I noticed something else that costs me ships (fighters and CV's) without log entry for who killed them.
A small trader was bumping into a CV and taking its shield down to 0% and I got no warning of an attack and I guess if it was destroyed there wouldn't be an attacker mentioned in the log.
I'm not sure if this could also happen this way if I'm not in the zone. But it could explain it.

[Nikola515]

I noticed same thing with my CV too. I had Gigurum that was trying to trade with my CV but instead it was just bumping and taking it's shield off. Im not even sure if M size ships can trade with CV on first place. Also I was in area when that happened. I don't think that this is a case in off sector. Also off sector fighting is broken at this point. I had S size ships instant killing my XL size ships without fight. And I also just had small pirate party destroying my CV and took my stations HP to 92%. CV destruction was not even shown on log book but it was destroyed. Also that station was 100% finished and it had enough firepower on it to destroy anything. So in my opinion off sector is broken and this is worst thing since game was out....

[Night Nord]

A bunch of speculation why it's happening and why OOZ isn't broken as much as you think.

OOZ game logic seems to be very simple - it just creates an "aura" with weapons' radius (let's consider that OOZ fight with all weapons having a radius of a TT is a bug (and it's already fixed in the beta patch)). Once an enemy entity enters the aura it start receiving some amount of damage per tick. If there are multiple entities within aura, one one will receive (AFAIK) damage until it dies. I dunno if game choose which enemy entity to kill first by some kind of priorities (bombers first), but probably not (from what I can observe).

Damage dealt per tick depends on weapon's damage per second, weapon's turrets count (it seems that all turrets are accounted, no matter where an enemy is and if a particular turret may actually hit the enemy. And probably all turrets of the same type are also acting as a single aura with a single source), and various coefficients like DO combat strength in some complex formula.

Enemy entities also have their defense capabilities - ability to dodge some damage, based on ship characteristics, pilot skills and maybe somehow liked to what weapon is firing at the ship (i.e. it's easy for a fighter to dodge TT, but not that easy to dodge HitMA), I guess.

So resulting damage per tick caused to the particular entity is damage dealt by station weapons minus damage dodged.

For a fighters against station it means - fighters probably dodge most of a station damage until they are very close at which point they already dealing their own damage to the station. If there are missile-carrying fighters they are doing a lot of damage, I guess. Same goes for capships - they are like stations if fighting against fighters.

So they only option for a station/capship to stay safe is to destroy enemy fighters at long range. They only long range weapons they have are TTs and Plasma jets which are not effective against fighters (due to high dodge probability). Other kind of long range weapons you may fit on capships/stations are drones - they have quite a long radius and they probably have a high hit probability. Taking that drones are not lost in OOZ fights a station/ship packed with fighting drones (both heavy-hitters against enemy capships and light interceptors against fighters) will be able to hold it's ground against any foe.

In other words: use drones, silly. No drones - no weapons. Turrets are only needed against a player.

Again - this is my speculation based on what Ego had in X3 (with some extrapolation) and the game observations.

[Len5]

But drones won't stop other ships from bumping my ships to pieces, though.

Im not even sure if M size ships can trade with CV on first place.

Yes, they can. They move in from the side to the center of the CV.

[w.evans]

A bunch of speculation why it's happening and why OOZ isn't broken as much as you think.

OOZ game logic seems to be very simple - it just creates an "aura" with weapons' radius (let's consider that OOZ fight with all weapons having a radius of a TT is a bug (and it's already fixed in the beta patch)). Once an enemy entity enters the aura it start receiving some amount of damage per tick. If there are multiple entities within aura, one one will receive (AFAIK) damage until it dies. I dunno if game choose which enemy entity to kill first by some kind of priorities (bombers first), but probably not (from what I can observe).

Damage dealt per tick depends on weapon's damage per second, weapon's turrets count (it seems that all turrets are accounted, no matter where an enemy is and if a particular turret may actually hit the enemy. And probably all turrets of the same type are also acting as a single aura with a single source), and various coefficients like DO combat strength in some complex formula.

Enemy entities also have their defense capabilities - ability to dodge some damage, based on ship characteristics, pilot skills and maybe somehow liked to what weapon is firing at the ship (i.e. it's easy for a fighter to dodge TT, but not that easy to dodge HitMA), I guess.

So resulting damage per tick caused to the particular entity is damage dealt by station weapons minus damage dodged.

For a fighters against station it means - fighters probably dodge most of a station damage until they are very close at which point they already dealing their own damage to the station. If there are missile-carrying fighters they are doing a lot of damage, I guess. Same goes for capships - they are like stations if fighting against fighters.

So they only option for a station/capship to stay safe is to destroy enemy fighters at long range. They only long range weapons they have are TTs and Plasma jets which are not effective against fighters (due to high dodge probability). Other kind of long range weapons you may fit on capships/stations are drones - they have quite a long radius and they probably have a high hit probability. Taking that drones are not lost in OOZ fights a station/ship packed with fighting drones (both heavy-hitters against enemy capships and light interceptors against fighters) will be able to hold it's ground against any foe.

In other words: use drones, silly. No drones - no weapons. Turrets are only needed against a player.

Again - this is my speculation based on what Ego had in X3 (with some extrapolation) and the game observations.

Pretty much, except I don't see any OOZ drone launching code, so I don't know if that's even taken into account.

The whole OOZ code appears to be:

Spoiler

Show

<do_if value="this.ship.distanceto.{$target} lt ($FiringRange + $target.size/2.0)">
<!-- Get the strength in 'result'-->
<get_attackstrength object="this.ship" target="$target" result="$result" />
<!-- Apply the strength to target -->
<apply_attackstrength object="$target" attacker="this.ship" strength="$result * ($waittime)f" result="$isdead" />
</do_if>

so, as long as target is in range, get attackstrength (dps?) of ship, and apply on target until it's dead.

(thanks again to UniTrader for pointing this out)

roughly the same thing in the OOZ fighter and station scripts.

So, if I read that correctly, the first ship that fires wins as long as that first alpha strike is strong enough to completely destroy an opponent. If ships and stations have DOs set to defence, then they won't fire unless they're fired upon first, and that first barrage is often fatal. I've since set all of my station DOs and military ship DOs to offensive mode.

Big groups of ships have an advantage in that only one ship is targeted at a time. Big ships have an advantage in that their range is usually greater than that of small ships IF they fire first, but they'd probably fire at the lightly-armed faster ships first and get hit by the Drostan when it comes in-range.

Makes an interesting conundrum in the Plot, though, because while setting a Titurel smuggler fleet to offensive would give them an even chance of getting first shot vs pirates (certainly vs pirate fighter squads), they'd also then shoot PMC ships who might otherwise ignore them and get destroyed that way.

ps. don't know if this constitutes spoiler material. Please let me know if it does, and I'll delete the offending stuff. (Or would making the spoiler tagged area bigger be enough?) I'm rarely in here, so not sure how it works.

[Night Nord]

Pretty much, except I don't see any OOZ drone launching code, so I don't know if that's even taken into account.

It seems that drones are just accounted in the attack strength value, pretty much like they are accounted in the boarding resistance value. There is no real drone activity in other OOZ situations either (that's the whole point for drones - so you don't need to simulate them in OOZ).

We also don't know what hides under apply_attackstrength function.

ps. don't know if this constitutes spoiler material. Please let me know if it does, and I'll delete the offending stuff. (Or would making the spoiler tagged area bigger be enough?) I'm rarely in here, so not sure how it works.

"Please don't post spoilers" means - don't post plot details. It should be ok to post script excepts as an argument for your point, unless it's going to much into technical details I suppose (there is a special technical branch for that).

[w.evans]

It seems that drones are just accounted in the attack strength value, pretty much like they are accounted in the boarding resistance value. There is no real drone activity in other OOZ situations either (that's the whole point for drones - so you don't need to simulate them in OOZ).

We also don't know what hides under apply_attackstrength function.

Yeah, no idea how attackstrength is calculated. But it would make sense that drones would be accounted for in the calculation somewhere. I do have all of my ships carry at least 30 or so combat drones each. Nice if they're actually doing good OOZ since they're OOZ most of the time.

Hm, just occurred to me that I could splice in some feedback into that code to get confirmation. Could at least get numbers which could be compared.

"Please don't post spoilers" means - don't post plot details. It should be ok to post script excepts as an argument for your point, unless it's going to much into technical details I suppose (there is a special technical branch for that).

Thanks. Wasn't sure. Was criticized along with someone else on a different thread for posting in-code information a while back.