[X3LU] Phanon Plus 4.04

[artisauce]

Version 3.03 - 8th October 2015

Phanon chance of using missiles in every generation is lowered. M8 and M7M missile chance set to 0
Phanon ships retreating from Sancturary of Darkness now pick a random sector to retreat to. Retreating traders now also choose a (nearby) random sector
Phanon traders,miners and miner overseer now use the same 30 drone limit rule as combat ships when launching them in defense
Phanon TS can now check if the player is too close to them (if in a big ship) and will attempt to jump away. Their sensitivity to this increases each generation
Phanon TS that are in the process of retreating and have jumped away to another sector are allowed to attempt retreating again if they're being followed
Phanon salvagers no longer wonder locally between sector scans, travel between sectors less often as they increase in level, recheck what the closest ship/crate to them is and salvage that after salvaging each object and can jump to an object it wants to salvage if it is too far from its current position
Various minor tweaks to balance IE spending priorities and fleet configurations etc.
Fixed: In certain circumstances Phanon couldn't order more stations to be built when it wanted to build them because of a little bit of a priority mixup

What this update does for the Phanon is like what LU does for X3AP. Jumping traders will definitely make me rethink my plans on hindering the Phanon. Every ship I obliterated with my tri-formation jumped to Omicron Lyrae (from Sanctuary of Darkness) and became easy pickings to go after, so I'll also have to do more scanning with my sat network to see where they go now. I never really though about "following" TS's until I learned about that 'hacking' you can do to figure out where ships jumped to, but now that plan of attack is even less ideal. That's great! Time to invest in missiles.

Phanon has definitely started to become a problem again. I started my conversion to Terran ships again (those darn stats, I just can't pass up, even with the shorter weapon ranges. I haven't really planned a really ideal fleet yet, just a bunch of heavy destroyers) so I don't currently have a ready fleet. General infrastructure is in place (chaff, jump cores, 2 GB shields), but Infrastructure for terran heavy weaponry is still getting in place for mass production. It's so darn slow. Dock agents can only help so much with buying what I need.

Camping at their sector was quite hectic, but probably pissed off (and hindered greatly) the 5th and 6th generation. I didn't even try for the current gen, 7th. My ring of fire in their sector and at the outside sector takes care of most things that try to come through manually, so unless they're speedy M5's, they're not coming through without 100% damage to their hull.

I also learned they really hate jump beacons in their sector. This forces all of my attacks are coming from the debris-filled battlespace. Ain't that neat.

These lasertowers are also REALLY annoying my UTs. REALLY. Since most Phanon stations are based near the center, their laser towers have a good shot on any trader ship that quantum jumps to the center for that trade deal. They go in, then out... over, and over, and over. Message log completely stuffed with it. My UTs don't die at least, as their shield recharges enough, but it's darn annoying.

As for the dock war... maybe instead of blocking their docks with M5s... maybe... I should just... block every other station they would want to trade to. I mean, Xenon N's take one second to be made on the HQ.

Who needed UTs anyway? Just have one space on a equipment dock to mass-sell income hardware everyone once in a while.

Just an idea, that's all. Lag would be severe if I allowed such a plan to take place, but would surely cripple the Phanon's trading force. As for the mining... I guess... just mine everything before they get to it.

[dizzy]

OK I feel I should share my experience with Phanon Plus so far.

First, I tested it for about 30 game hours in a LUV + vukica's remap + more gamestarts + (of course) Phanon Plus 3.03. In about 4 hours game time (I barely had time to explore some of the new universe, maybe get about 10mil credits) and Nova Ltd announces me they took over from TandiTech. OK... that seems very fast. Their reports looked very threatening, army numbers increasing very fast and having over 40 traders around the time I finally got a Setanta and went Phanon trader hunting. Still, as much as I tried they seemed to barely feel the damage I was producing. I gave up on that game because I wanted to use IEX in LU and that only works with the vanilla LU map but it was an interesting, if challenging, experience.

Now I have a new game (about 20 hours in), normal LU map, IEX, Phanon Plus and Revelation Plus. TandiTech hasn't upgraded and I doubt they will very soon as I've been managing to successfully take down one of their traders every 15 minutes gametime on average. Their trader numbers aren't increasing almost at all now but army is so I'll have to take care of that somehow.

This makes me wonder what was happening with the LU remap version. That has a completely different map layout with many new sectors but it also has (from what I noticed) a lot more goods on the species docks and military outposts. Almost every sector was full with advanced satellites and other usually rare goods. It could be that Phanon Plus on the remap just take off very quickly and it's likely that if I continued that game I would have lost, like I said it seemed to me that against my better efforts I just couldn't slow them down.

[Wanabe]

OK I feel I should share my experience with Phanon Plus so far.

First, I tested it for about 30 game hours in a LUV + vukica's remap + more gamestarts + (of course) Phanon Plus 3.03. In about 4 hours game time (I barely had time to explore some of the new universe, maybe get about 10mil credits) and Nova Ltd announces me they took over from TandiTech. OK... that seems very fast. Their reports looked very threatening, army numbers increasing very fast and having over 40 traders around the time I finally got a Setanta and went Phanon trader hunting. Still, as much as I tried they seemed to barely feel the damage I was producing. I gave up on that game because I wanted to use IEX in LU and that only works with the vanilla LU map but it was an interesting, if challenging, experience.

Now I have a new game (about 20 hours in), normal LU map, IEX, Phanon Plus and Revelation Plus. TandiTech hasn't upgraded and I doubt they will very soon as I've been managing to successfully take down one of their traders every 15 minutes gametime on average. Their trader numbers aren't increasing almost at all now but army is so I'll have to take care of that somehow.

This makes me wonder what was happening with the LU remap version. That has a completely different map layout with many new sectors but it also has (from what I noticed) a lot more goods on the species docks and military outposts. Almost every sector was full with advanced satellites and other usually rare goods. It could be that Phanon Plus on the remap just take off very quickly and it's likely that if I continued that game I would have lost, like I said it seemed to me that against my better efforts I just couldn't slow them down.

Phanon getting to Nova in about 4 hours game time isn't normal from my own testing with the standard LU map. Without any player intervention they (on average) need a minimum of 24 hours gametime to advance to Nova (which is actually very similar to LUV Phanon Nova advancement time) but it's very variable game to game. I did a test game after installing Vukica's remap with Phanon Plus (version 3.03 plus a couple of unreleased but IMO irrelevant bug fixes) and this mod plus more game starts and your tweaks. I let my test game run for 14 hours game time and it was not yet at Nova. Manually running the Menu.PhanonCorpSpy script to check on them they appeared to be on track for a fairly standard advancement time to Nova.

Not entirely sure what happened with Phanon in that game. You did the right thing by starting over because in no time at all you'd have heaps of M7 M1 and M2 looking to destroy your stuff which would probably be quite bad.

Thanks for sharing your experience with this so far. Sounds like you're doing very good damage to Phanon in that game, you've probably got them safely contained for a good while with the trader massacre.

[dizzy]

Hmm, seems I was wrong, significantly so. They didn't upgrade in 4 hours but in 17, still, for some reason that felt very fast... Anyway, let me know if you need more information, here's a relevant screenshot from my message log, the last tanditech report and the message for the upgrade to Nova: http://i.imgur.com/FVUHBVI.png

[Wanabe]

Hmm, seems I was wrong, significantly so. They didn't upgrade in 4 hours but in 17, still, for some reason that felt very fast... Anyway, let me know if you need more information, here's a relevant screenshot from my message log, the last tanditech report and the message for the upgrade to Nova: http://i.imgur.com/FVUHBVI.png

Okay, 17 hours is still definitely very fast from the usual average that I've seen (especially with the player actively trying to hurt them which can have a very large impact) but I suspect that even though that is a bit of anomaly it might be "normal" in a sense. The last 10 games I tested to see how fast they advance (left alone without player intervention) the fastest time to advance to Nova was 1 day 2 hours with the slowest to advance in those tests being 1 day 12 hours. In older tests (which are no longer as useful to look at because too much has changed since then) I did see (rarely though) fast advancement times of 15-18 hours when most of the time back then they'd get to Nova around the 22 hour mark or so.

Anyway I'm fairly sure what you're seeing is likely just part of the variable nature of Phanon. There's a lot of randomness with what ships they pick, what wares they decide to buy/sell when trading, maybe they get lucky with the salvaging, lucky with mining, maybe they choose good profitable stations to build or maybe not. Sometimes Phanon build stations within the path of the OCV and would foolishly try to defend it with their single starting M1 when the OCV comes knocking. In my last game I also noticed a couple times Phanon hunters and their escorts got engaged by some pirates which did not work out too well for Phanon. Although that was witnessed while running Diverse Game Starts by solarahawk on the "Ruthless Buccaneer" start which has the player friendly with the pirates so that may have something to do with that occasional situation.

Unless there's some sort of bug that causes this to happen sometimes I'm not sure I can prevent "Super Phanon" from sometimes appearing in a game.

[Wanabe]

Version 4 released.

Pretty much just bug fixes for some stuff I've noticed and after my latest playthrough with Solarahawks "Ruthless Buccaneer" game start I had a change of heart on the default value of Phanon satellite hunters .

Depending on your current game the fixes relating to mining may cause Phanon to get a bit of a sudden payday within a few game hours if a combination of factors occurred which prevented them from being able to properly sell off their mined goods. I'm not sure how long they've been stockpiling resources in my game but to put it in perspective, my latest game is 4-07 long with Phanon in generation 3. After a few game hours they "suddenly" go from having 0 M2s at their disposal to having 1-2 M2s and an additional M2 Flagship.

[Wanabe]

Version 4.01 released.

[dizzy]

I've noticed 2 problems with Phanon Plus 4.00 Nova Ltd in the past 10 game hours, it's possible the issues exist in the original code too:
- I attacked a Nova Ltd Orinoco (placed it on the monitor first to be able to follow/track it after it jumps away), then it jumped away and looking at the "u" menu for it, it said it was in Xenon Sector 534 and was trying to dock with the Xenon Station; that makes no sense Xenon are enemies of all biological factions, they don't give Phanon a free pass
- when attacking the Nova Ltd mining group (TL + escort) in Guiding Star, a Kraken Response jumped near the South gate and started firing torpedoes at me so I was forced to jump away; as expected, it then set its eyes on the next and only thing I had in that sector: the advanced satellite at coordinates 0,25k,0; however, it just went near it and spent there the next 4 game hours, without damaging the satellite (although the satellite was showing the "red" flashing as if it's taking damage); I assume this was because it doesn't have any lasers but only missiles? in any case, all this was happening OOS, maybe the fix should be to not let Phanon M7Ms try to attack satellites if they can't destroy them; the stuck M7M provided a window of opportunity for me to hassle their home sector and destroy most of their fighter complement with a single M6, because the M7M was "busy" with the satellite and didn't jump to the HQ to help out

[Wanabe]

I've noticed 2 problems with Phanon Plus 4.00 Nova Ltd in the past 10 game hours, it's possible the issues exist in the original code too:
- I attacked a Nova Ltd Orinoco (placed it on the monitor first to be able to follow/track it after it jumps away), then it jumped away and looking at the "u" menu for it, it said it was in Xenon Sector 534 and was trying to dock with the Xenon Station; that makes no sense Xenon are enemies of all biological factions, they don't give Phanon a free pass
- when attacking the Nova Ltd mining group (TL + escort) in Guiding Star, a Kraken Response jumped near the South gate and started firing torpedoes at me so I was forced to jump away; as expected, it then set its eyes on the next and only thing I had in that sector: the advanced satellite at coordinates 0,25k,0; however, it just went near it and spent there the next 4 game hours, without damaging the satellite (although the satellite was showing the "red" flashing as if it's taking damage); I assume this was because it doesn't have any lasers but only missiles? in any case, all this was happening OOS, maybe the fix should be to not let Phanon M7Ms try to attack satellites if they can't destroy them; the stuck M7M provided a window of opportunity for me to hassle their home sector and destroy most of their fighter complement with a single M6, because the M7M was "busy" with the satellite and didn't jump to the HQ to help out

I definitely do want to have a look at making Phanon an enemy of Xenon at some point, possibly "near future" depending if any bugs or things that need general improvement come to my attention. This is vanilla Phanon behaviour that has not yet been changed.

Looks like quite the oversight (by myself) on how the M7M ships are handled in combat. I've modified the Phanon M7M combat behaviour to better account for that kind of situation. Thanks a lot for reporting that one. I've uploaded a new version with that change. If there are M7M ships currently stuck in a previous save game they won't realize this on their own, however.

[dizzy]

Ah I see, so it's vanilla Phanon behavior to be neutral to Xenun. In that case, one change that could be done (without the large number of repercussions that setting their actual relationship status would have) is to just avoid docking at Xenon station. That way at least they have no good reason to try to fly to a Xenon sector and worse, try to dock with their stations. Thus you'd be fixing a symptom, not the problem, but it should be minimal impact and it does. Additional bonus points: do not let Phanon setup stations in Xenon sectors.

[Litcube]

Miscellaneous Optimizations and also bug Fixes to some Phanon scripts.

I'd be interested in hearing what you did here, if you have time.

[Wanabe]

Ah I see, so it's vanilla Phanon behavior to be neutral to Xenun. In that case, one change that could be done (without the large number of repercussions that setting their actual relationship status would have) is to just avoid docking at Xenon station. That way at least they have no good reason to try to fly to a Xenon sector and worse, try to dock with their stations. Thus you'd be fixing a symptom, not the problem, but it should be minimal impact and it does. Additional bonus points: do not let Phanon setup stations in Xenon sectors.

That could certainly be one option without interfering with the balance too much. Before settling on which road to take I need to run a couple more test games with Phanon as an enemy of Xenon to get a better idea of how much of an impact that may have on its performance. From there possibly tweaking some behaviour which causes them to lose more ships than "needed" and/or consider compensating by increasing the default sales multiplier back to 5 again or some such and then checking again. I've done a couple test runs so far and there is definitely a noticeable impact to Phanon progress but comparing those test runs to some older tests in a couple of cases its progress isn't slowed down terribly much compared to having Xenon as neutral. I need to look into it a bit more but for now I'm trying to have a decent go at playing the game for a little bit instead of getting distracted by scripting so that I can experience those mods a bit better in a legit game play-through.

I'd be interested in hearing what you did here, if you have time.

Sure thing. I've got really basic notes here http://www.mediafire.com/view/v8tukw9ka ... n_Plus.rtf towards the bottom (I had to look at that to remind myself because I've also introduced plenty of my own bugs/issues along the way). For the most part the bug fixes/optimizations done to the original Phanon scripts were fairly minor.

Very important fix: Hunter escorts are now proper escorts. Previously hunter escorts could be reassigned to a different hunter which made them never stay with their parent Hunter properly.

I noticed this in game as a stream of fighters going from the front lines back to the Phanon HQs sometimes, looking at the original al.Phanon.ChckNeedOrders the reason for that is simple, the escort ships are still part of "HQGuard" and so can be reassigned to other Hunters. I made a basic Escort script which removes them from the possible selection and also allows them to come back home if they are no longer escorting the main ship.

Fixed: When Phanon ships die they now tell only their homebased ships to return to base instead of all ships that are fighters within the same sector.

This isn't really a fix I suppose but this changes ShipArrayPurge to send back ships that are in "formation followers" instead of all in the sector so other ships not escorting the dead ship can go about their business

Fixed: Phanon paid for stations twice, once when choosing it and once when buying it.

In TLStation and CreateStation the money for the station being bought/created was being deducted in both scripts. Also in Createstation it was checking for the ware type of the object instead of just checking max price of $StationType (ware type was already known)

Fixed: Phanon would buy and then mothball trade ships when it didn't have enough energy to supply them from the HQ

I still don't fully understand this one actually. In ChckNeedOrders Traders there is a check, looking at all Traders that are not running anything on Task 0 which are then mothballed. In Task.Trader they try to get energy cells from the HQ before leaving to trade. They wait around if there are not enough energy cells available. If the HQ did not have enough energy cells the trader would be waiting for energy but according to ChckNeedOrders they were eligible for the Mothball and so from that point onward all new traders would be mothballed as the HQ would never get enough energy.

I changed the energy loop in Trader to not wait for the HQ to get more energy I instead "buy" the missing energy. I also added a "Very Low" priority for ChckNeedOrders every 30 ticks which is when Phanon checks for possible mothball action.

Fixed: Phanon cleanup of in sector ships could sometimes stall out (especially on mining ships) and fail on some ships which would leave some ghost ships. (main fix was just adding a =1ms wait)

I only observed this one after I added mining ships so this may or may not be a bug that actually effects original Phanon. Anyway I added a wait to the cleanup script and also made it keep trying to cleanup the ships as long as there are still ships belonging to Phanon

Fixed: Phanon did not count OCV as an enemy presence when assigning a Sales agent to a station. This could lead to a loop where loss of life (for Phanon) becomes common.

Very simple small oversight from the (relatively new) change of having Phanon become an enemy of OCV. In MonitrStatn any checks for enemy only look for the [player] race.

Phanon Bomber/GuardSector ships no longer actively scan for enemies, instead it's the stations job to do that.

Basically I noticed that Task.Bomber and Task.GuardSect were scanning for enemies however the HQ itself was also scanning for enemies. I dumbed down the Task.Bomber and Task.GuardSect scripts and made the HQ which was already looking for ships tell the Phanon ships to engage the enemy target.

The other notable optimizations are likely simple enough that you can get the gist of the idea from reading the "Feature List". Overall I'd say the impact from the optimization tweaks I did wasn't exactly significant but there should still be some savings here and there.

[dizzy]

OK, so I noticed that there are tons of al.Phanon.Main global scripts running and as I understand there should be up to one max and that one finish very quickly. This likely explains why if I use SETA it slows down very quickly at times. Anything that can be done about it?

http://imgur.com/J4zCyVx

[myrmidon]

Hi,

Is a "single M4 game start", with Phanon Plus and Revelation Plus installed, a recipe for a torture device? Or should I start with an M3 or larger initial assets?
____

I have one vanilla LU victory under my belt but am in no way an "expert". I am a sci-fi role player that is playing in my private little universe. I won that game with a fleet of capped pirate M2s with some carrier support.

I like a traditional start with virtually no assets to my name except my little fighter ship, on my way to becoming a Military CEO. Many, many hours are used just wandering around trying to get that lucky M3 capture. Then on to the first UT, then on to the first M7, or other pathing. I just find the vanilla Phanon too passive in allowing me to expand as I like.

I'd rather not invest several game days just to find out that really I should have started with a mini-fleet.

Or is the "reset Phanon" trick mentioned earlier a potential way to "pace Phanon to the player's progression"?

[Wanabe]

Version 4.03 released with compatibility with LU 1.6.1.

Hi,

Is a "single M4 game start", with Phanon Plus and Revelation Plus installed, a recipe for a torture device? Or should I start with an M3 or larger initial assets?
____

I have one vanilla LU victory under my belt but am in no way an "expert". I am a sci-fi role player that is playing in my private little universe. I won that game with a fleet of capped pirate M2s with some carrier support.

I like a traditional start with virtually no assets to my name except my little fighter ship, on my way to becoming a Military CEO. Many, many hours are used just wandering around trying to get that lucky M3 capture. Then on to the first UT, then on to the first M7, or other pathing. I just find the vanilla Phanon too passive in allowing me to expand as I like.

I'd rather not invest several game days just to find out that really I should have started with a mini-fleet.

Or is the "reset Phanon" trick mentioned earlier a potential way to "pace Phanon to the player's progression"?

Starting the game with Revelation Plus won't have too much of an impact for your early and mid-game as they've got to slowly go through the races to get to your important assets so you can take your time with them.

Phanon Plus on the other-hand can become quite aggressive if they're allowed to grow. Even still you don't necessarily have to prioritize Phanon 100%, although trying to kill their traders every so often especially early on will dramatically slow their advance.

The playstyle of the player matters dramatically in terms of overall difficulty but I wouldn't worry too much about the game-start. My current game I started is almost 12 days old, Phanon are in generation 6 of 8 and I have never defeated a Phanon subsidiary once. The gamestart I used was part of a modification by solarahawk called "Ruthless Buccaneer". For most of that game up till about day 10 I was unable to do any real damage to the Phanon fleets and I never really tried hunting for their TS either as I was busy either trying to make money or trying to get my reputation up with the various races. I have had multiple serious attacks on my assets but I was able to fend them off, even if not able to deal any good killing blows. They have about 15 or so capital ships and lots of other smaller ships at this point but I can handle their fleets now and even inflict serious damage. Also LU version 1.6.0 changes the Phanon relations with Xenon to be enemies so they'll occasionally take some losses from battles with Xenon aswell.

If you do play and find that they are too difficult you can always go to the addon/t folder and open 8384-L044.xml to reduce their income bonuses.

[myrmidon]

Thanks for the detailed reply regarding "humble game starts" and Phanon Plus/Revelation Plus installed.

Thinking on what you said I will dive in with both feet and see if I can develop enough of a "mobile economy" to have cash flow, and that can hopefully avoid the sort of capital ship fleet that might be swanning around at day 10. Yikes.

That TL station building early-mid-game path is surely looking pretty good to me at the moment...then to get a M7 for my player ship to go and kill Phanon assets to drain cash and generally harsh Phanon's mojo.

I appreciate the heads up...because trying to hold off one or more Phanon capital ships (plus who knows what sort of support?) that is trying to kill my very first SCH 25 with, say, just my M7 (my traditional mid-game ride), some fighter drones, and a few laser towers would have been futile and likely induce me to pound my keyboard and say naughty things. Even jumping out to switch to an M7 with fresh shields would still be...unlikely to hold them off with my mid-game military.

I might just plonk down an SCH just to see how Phanon attacks it... (I am rubbing my role-playing hands together). Oh wait, that sounds like I could abuse that (I could simply refund the SCH) and use it as an exploit to "lure" or "strand" Phanon fleets and then kill parts of them before the heavies jump away...or jump into their home system and see who's left minding the store...

[myrmidon]

I'm now at 31 hours game time, and I've yet to see an upgrade by Phanon...they're still at Tandytech. I get reports of their progress (they are really weak with a pair of TS, which I kill a TS every once in a awhile, including a juicy Nexus). Also I placed a satellite in Sanctuary of Darkness and they didn't kill it.

I have my sat network in place, I have 15 UTs, have 62 marines in training, and just outfitted my first TL and have 30 million in the bank. I'm feeling pretty flash in my military-industrial CEO suite's big leather chair at the moment.

a) Is there a way for me to tell if I installed Phanon Plus correctly and/or whether this mod is actually "running" in my Litcube 1.6.1 build?

b) And/or is there a way for me to force-evolve Phanon to the next stage?

...if I do this, what stage should I put them at to be "on par" with my progress?

thanks

[Joubarbe]

You're in very early game. If they'd send their hunters now, you would not last long.

[myrmidon]

Excellent news!

that a) It sounds like I don't have a busted install and b) that Phanon is about to get busy with me. Time to continue the empire build.

[myrmidon]

I've restarted a new game with a clean install due to a very passive OCV (they took a single sector in 31 game hours)...which I suspect means that the Revelation Plus mod wasn't really active.