You've been duked?

General discussion about X³: Farnham's Legacy.

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Deianeira
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You've been duked?

Post by Deianeira » Fri, 28. May 21, 14:28

I guess this hidden achievement involves getting boarded by the duke's boarding ships (all CW M7M can spawn) he sends out to Heaven's Assertion from time to time?

Problem is, they don't do anything:
  • Spawn under duke's flag from Duke's Haven in Lasting Vengeance
  • Go through north gate and change ID to Paranid (sneaky)
  • Idling around and return south, without changing ID back to Duke
  • Getting killed by the duke's Zeus and Nemesis patrol
:lol:

I've checked their loadout and they most often don't even have marines, just boarding pods and a jumpdrive installation kit. If you destroy or board them, you get negative notoriety with the duke...

Any suggestions?

Cycrow
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Cycrow » Fri, 28. May 21, 16:48

they have a large idle time before they actually go out to start boarding.

for the marines, they will first buy them from nearby training barracks or dukes Haven.

The dukes also have personal transporters that will bring new marines to Dukes Haven to be used.
But this all depends on the economy and availability of marines

Thandrall
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Thandrall » Fri, 28. May 21, 17:21

Is it just getting boarded, or do you have to lose the ship to said boarding as well?

Deathifier
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Deathifier » Tue, 22. Jun 21, 09:38

My observations on Duke's boarding operations are consistent with Deianeira's.

A Duke's M7M and a support TM with some fighters spawns in Lasting Vengeance, flies through the gate, changes their identity to Paranid, fly around for a very short period, then fly back to Lasting Vengeance to dock at Duke's Haven.
They then typically get attacked but no matter, as another boarding task force often spawns straight away.

The problem is the M7M does not have marines.
Duke's Haven tends to have 3 or 4 marines, and they do appear to change over time, however this may just be normal turnover and the Marine Training Barracks in Lasting Vengeance has always been fully stocked with resources and 8 marines when I've checked it.

Duke's does have TP's as Cycrow suggested and I found all three are docked in Gunne's Crusade at a Rehabilitation Facility.
They each had 2 or 3 marines on board (and they were all good fighting marines, over 75 fighting stat, but not much else) but they did not move and, looking back to an older save (one game day earlier), they were in the same spot with no change in circumstances.
The facility had 7/8 marines and seems to be sufficiently well stocked with resources.

I destroyed those 3 TP's and they almost immediately re-spawned in Lasting Vengeance where they just idled in sector for several hours of game time.
I then killed the TP's once more in Lasting Vengeance and they re-spawned pretty much instantly, and then just idled as before.

Without the TP's bringing in marines there appears to be no other source of marines that the M7M's can access and so the boarding task force is not able to actually board anything.

Deathifier
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Deathifier » Tue, 6. Jul 21, 16:36

I think I've figured this out.

There are two scrips related to Duke's boarding activity and they work independently.

First is the script: !job.collect.marines
This script is assigned to the three Duke's TP's and their job is to go and get marines and return them to the ships homebase (i.e. Duke's Haven).
The script has some design faults particularly when considering what it is intended to do - i.e. get marines to fill M7M's.

Problem #1: It will only look for and buy marines with 70+ skill in at least one of fighting, mechanical, and/or hacking.
I suspected this when I saw the TP's in my game carrying only high skilled fighting marines and sure enough the first line of the script sets this value.
If you've gone through the X3 games and the process of finding, training, and using marines you will quickly realise that naturally finding enough 70+ skill marines in the entire universe for a boarding party is extremely unlikely.

Problem #2: The script collects marines until the TP is full.
This means each TP needs to find 40 marines however since they compete for a very limited supply I'd expect that all three TP's would fill up at about the same rate and therefore around 120 in total are needed before you could expect the TP's to start unloading.

Also Duke's Haven can only hold 10 marines so I'm not sure what happens to the rest when they do unload.


Second is the script: !job.dukes.boarding
This looks like it controls the entire functionality of the boarding task force.
It looks quite well written and appears to be behaving almost exactly as you'd expect it to once you read the code, however it too has several design faults.

I did notice is that what we have been seeing when the task force leaves Lasting Vengeance is not actually an attempted boarding operation with no marines, it's just an idle routine that picks a new sector to move to and the code it uses happens to give the ships pirate cover (i.e. hides the real owner) when it changes sector.

Problem #1: To go out and board the M7M wants a full load of marines with 40+ fighting skill each, but Duke's Haven only holds 10 marines.
So even if marines were being obtained by the TP's not enough are stored by the station for the M7M to load up in one go.

Problem #2: To go out and board it needs 10 pods, it only spawns with 5 and getting more can be difficult.
The script wants at least 10 pods on board, it seems to spawn with 5, Duke's Haven might have a few (it can hold 16 so in theory there is enough space, provided the pods are created fast enough), but generally it will have to get some from elsewhere and to do so it has to fly there.

Problem #3: No energy cells for jumpdrive.
The script will use the jumpdrive to move around, including when it picks a target to board.
However the M7M and its escorts don't seem to spawn with energy cells and not every escort (e.g. the ones in TM's that sometimes undock from the TM) has a jumpdrive.
The ships will try to buy energy cells to resupply however they have to slowly fly to a suitable source (the M7M has a freight drone and does seem to want to use it).
Duke's Haven can stock Energy Cells however since it is an equipment dock and since the number of ships that would want to go there vs. somewhere else is very small to nonexistent, I've not actually seen Duke's Haven stock anything except the auto-generating boarding pods.

Problem #4: The cover code is only used in sub.MoveSector and that is only called in sub.Idle
As the task force idles it may decide to move to a new sector and if it does it calls a specific subroutine which, when it sees the sector change, sets the ships to have pirate cover.
Unfortunately that is the only place it happens so when it goes home, it still has cover and Duke's own military destroy them.
Also, if it does anything else, it flies without cover.


Overall design flaws
The first big flaw is this whole process, which according to the script was first written in 2009, relies heavily on the in-game economy and specifically on parts of that economy which are not very dynamic.

Boarding pods are produced very slowly in docks, marines cycle very infrequently unless the player is buying them, and the TP's insistence on incredibly high skilled marines is hard for me to understand as I'm sure the developers have played this series long enough to know that even players almost always have to make do with low skill marines and carefully train them up.
At least the M7M is less picky about marines but it does beg the question of why the numbers are not the same - if the M7M is happy with 40+ skill fighting there is no reason for the TP's to only buy 70+ skill, though it would still be a significant challenge to find enough 40+ skilled marines from the sources Duke's can normally access.

The second big flaw, which ties in to the first, is that this is Duke's we're dealing with - just about everyone hates them, a M7M flying around is huge magnet for a RRF response (and the M7M is not armed, and its escorts are not powerful), and just because they can resupply in theory it doesn't matter because the only substantial supply sources (Pirates, Teladi) are a long way from Lasting Vengeance.
This particularly affects the acquisition of marines because you've cut out 4 major races and that is a very large number of potential sources for marines.
Now this flaw could probably be mitigated if the cover code was used throughout so the other races didn't shoot them, however it's not clear if the script would properly deal with the identity changes.

Also if it did all actually function, there's no code to check the hull state of the boarding target.
Thus a crafty player could sit in a low hull ship, be boarded, and enjoy collecting the marines that bail out in a panic after boarding.


Can it be fixed?
Sure, on spawn give the M7M 10 pods and give it and its escorts a pile of energy cells, then figure out what to do with the marines - for example cut down the skill requirements, or spawn them straight on the M7M.

Do note that there doesn't actually seem to be much of a delay between boarding attempts because $next.board.time is set to playing time when the ship is spawned, and then $next.board.time is tested against $current.time to see if it is time to board which it always will be because $current.time (which is playing time at the moment it is tested) is always greater than $next.board.time and so if you did just give the M7M marines it seems like it would be boarding as fast as the M7M is spawned, and they spawn fast.

There's also other possible problems with the script - such as what happens if it does succeed in boarding (the M7M goes home, but what about the boarded ship?) and is it even capable of getting the shields down and keeping them down (and not blowing up its target), to board?
Sure for a player to get boarded (e.g. for the achievement) it is easy, just remove shields and destroy the escorts and wait, but if it's AI vs. AI emergent conflicts you want to see then I don't see Duke's winning often, esp. if the target is faster than the M7M.


How do we get the achievement?
Not easily, that's for sure.

First we need to be friendly with Duke's.
Now this in theory should cause a problem at target selection time but looking at the code it may actually be better if Duke's likes you a lot.

Then we can sell them boarding pods and energy cells, leaving just the marines.
Sadly Duke's Haven only holds 10 marines and we can't sell marines direct to the station as far as I can tell.

In theory we could supply the TP's with such a huge volume of marines and thus get them to unload frequently enough whilst the resupply code runs (and before it decides to idle and change sectors and later get itself blown up) to get the M7M loaded up.
However I do not know if that is possible as even with a XXL Marine Training Barracks I'm not sure it produces marines with a high enough skill often enough, although I have yet to test this.

We could manually cycle the other marine production facilities however the odds of them making just a single suitable marine are terribly low.


In summary I like the idea behind the script, and Cycrow (the listed author in the script) obviously put a lot of effort in to making it, but man attaching an achievement to this and only having such a short dedicated development period (so things like this are unlikely to be spotted) is not a great idea, and as it stands the achievement is pretty much unobtainable via legitimate means.

Midnightknight
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Midnightknight » Tue, 6. Jul 21, 19:44

About marines i would add that yes it's pretty impossible to get 40 of them with more than 70 in a skill, in the whole game i have only seen one with 67 in fighting and i was pretty happy.
But the fact you have NPC running around to buy the best ones is once again punishing the player, as it makes it impossible for him to get them. I made a mod in M&B2 where NPCs were recruiting the best companions and it upset almost everyone, for a good reason, it's not fun to have only the crap left cause you can't be as fast as an AI to grab something.

Then i realized most stats of your marines do not level up while boarding. I wrote down the stats of 10 - 4* marines and made a few boarding in a raw to see if something was moving and the only skill that went up was actually fighting. Maybe it's only because they are already high (50+ everywhere), but that means if you do not train them at some point, they won't get better. So even if the Duke script could work correctly it would lead to a flaw that would make it afk 90% of time. Once it gets it's 40 high skill marines and attempt to board a ship, even if it knows correctly to get the marines back after it and don't blow the ship, it will have looses and needs to replace them, all the while the marines it get back won't be better. That means it won't actually ever be able to board anything else than M6 and maybe M7. And as soon as there is a hull polarizing or a firewall, bye bye, you loose everything and go back to collect A-Team.

I guess it's why it is looking for 70+ marines to avoid the defense issue ... But as stated before, it's not really an option, and it also defeats the purpose of the defenses except the internal sentry, if any ship that will attempt to board you have skills too good to be stopped by those defenses, why even care buying them?


Also i would say the cover code seem to not work always correctly as in my game i'm enemy of the Duke but friendly with Paranids and dropping a few laser towers in Heaven's assertion got me at war with Paranids in a matter of seconds. Apparently Duke's military were attacked by my laser towers and then triggered the police response from the Paranids ... Maybe the script did changed the identity while it was already fighting, but it's a bit weird how it works if it could trigger defenses before going under cover.

Deianeira
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Deianeira » Tue, 20. Jul 21, 15:47

I finally got one of the Duke's Military Transports with 40 marines safely from Gunne's Crusade back to Duke's Haven. The transport docked there once, unloaded seven marines (three were already available at the station) and then idles infinitely in Lasting Vengeance. The next Boarding Frigate took only four marines and proceeded with the usual senseless behaviour, before getting killed by the Zeus... I guess the marine limit of 10 on Duke's Haven makes this achievement 100% impossible to get. Glad this shit's been tested before release :evil:

Hwitvlf
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Hwitvlf » Wed, 21. Jul 21, 01:39

I suspect that "getting destroyed by allied destroyer" is the part that was unforeseen. Would the M7M might come back and pick up more marines if it lived long enough.

Pretty broken, but I seen to remember that an advanced satellite breaks the disguise. Maybe one placed near the gate in Lasting Vengeance or you could scan the M7M just as it enters the sector to break its disguise.

Midnightknight
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Midnightknight » Wed, 21. Jul 21, 02:15

The M7M from my experience is attacked twice. When getting out of lasting vengence it makes sometime before turning reen and could get attacked in the process. Noticed this because a Kraken was half life and wondered what could have attacked a "Paranid" ship in a paranid core sector. And then i had a duke ship attack me in heavens assertion before turning green when my towers attacked it and got all the police on my back.
So the biggest issue is how scripts are triggered in X3FL, looks like some multithreading bugs, just the same that makes everyone sleep at gates, some scripts are paused for an extended time where they shouldn't.

But yeah when everything works "correctly" it SHOULD revert back to Duke's identity when going back to Lasting vengeance ... But maybe the easiest thing is to increase Duke's Citadel marine capaticy to 40.

I was really thinking to make some sort of community patch about this and a few other bugs as apparently their won't be any 1.3 even to fix obvious things but let's face it ... I just gave up with this game cause many things are completely broken, most of them cause of "Dynamic" relation but not only, in the end i feel like debugging this is impossible and a community patch would be like a bandage on a wooden leg. I wonder if it wouldn't be faster to go back from AP and import one by one the features that are corrrectly working than do it the other way. And only add something new when it is correctly tested and to be able to go back to a stable version easily if the last feature added is messing the stuff.

Deathifier
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Deathifier » Wed, 21. Jul 21, 14:54

Midnightknight wrote:
Wed, 21. Jul 21, 02:15
But yeah when everything works "correctly" it SHOULD revert back to Duke's identity when going back to Lasting vengeance ... But maybe the easiest thing is to increase Duke's Citadel marine capaticy to 40.
The script isn't written that way - the code that sets the cover isn't the code that is used to go back to the HQ.
So yes whilst it would make sense for the cover to be turned off the script isn't going to do that unless the developers change it.

Hwitvlf wrote:
Wed, 21. Jul 21, 01:39
I suspect that "getting destroyed by allied destroyer" is the part that was unforeseen. Would the M7M might come back and pick up more marines if it lived long enough.

Pretty broken, but I seen to remember that an advanced satellite breaks the disguise. Maybe one placed near the gate in Lasting Vengeance or you could scan the M7M just as it enters the sector to break its disguise.
For breaking its cover I just tested it and the Adv. Sat doesn't do anything, scanning doesn't, shooting at it (to destruction) doesn't, however partway through boarding it did break cover but that's unhelpful because it was at ~75% hull and boarding can't be arbitrarily cancelled anyway.

Deianeira wrote:
Tue, 20. Jul 21, 15:47
I finally got one of the Duke's Military Transports with 40 marines safely from Gunne's Crusade back to Duke's Haven. The transport docked there once, unloaded seven marines (three were already available at the station) and then idles infinitely in Lasting Vengeance. The next Boarding Frigate took only four marines and proceeded with the usual senseless behaviour, before getting killed by the Zeus... I guess the marine limit of 10 on Duke's Haven makes this achievement 100% impossible to get. Glad this shit's been tested before release :evil:
That you got 40 marines on to one of their TP's is impressive, I figured that would be insanely difficult.

Since you achieved that I tested a few things to see if some progress can be made.

I had a theory for avoiding the M7M being destroyed, which was to link the Hub in between Lasting Vengeance and Heaven's Assertion.
However when they go through the Hub they still get cover and that cover is still Paranid, and when I gave them Energy Cells and they jumped through the Hub to a Boron sector they still took Paranid cover.

As for the M7M only loading 4 marines it will only take 40+ fight marines and it did pick up all 10 when I scripted a bunch of skilled marines in and got them unloaded (via script) on to Duke's HQ during testing.
It's possible that the TP's had picked up and dropped off marines skilled in non-fighting areas yet had <40 fight skill, and thus the M7M ignored them.
The Marines that are naturally found on Duke's HQ also tend to be insufficient so you'd have to buy those before the TP arrives to unload.

I tried to send marines to Duke's HQ by ejecting one near it and watching the Astronaut (Marine) dock, however it then just vanished instead of being added to the station.

I took another look at the script and there is a random element to if it leaves the sector or not, with a 1/4 chance to leave and it can travel up to 3 sectors away.
However if it stays in sector it does not stay idle for long.
So in theory if you could get marines flooding into the HQ fast enough, and got lucky with the random chance, the M7M might stay in-sector long enough to fully load up.

Also if you were in a game that had the HSAP sector in Lasting Vengeance, and Duke's claimed it, then that'd be some improvement to the odds of the M7M staying in Duke's territory and thus out of cover.

Another option is to destroy Duke's military or distract them (e.g. lure them a few hundred km away, though they seem to want to head back to the middle of the sector when they lose track of their target) as if they aren't at the HQ, they can't kill the M7M.
I do not know if the M7M can still dock at or trade with the HQ whist it is pretending to be Paranid though.
I suppose it is also possible to attack the M7M and try to break it out of its plan to move to another sector, however since it is unarmed it doesn't seem to have any interest in attacking the player.
Also fighting Duke's military might be at odds with generating enough marines to stock the HQ with.

I suppose I can now see the possibility of getting the achievement however the amount of effort required to deliberately get the game state just right is insane, and that's assuming that if it does go and board something that it actually picks the player as the target and the actual boarding process and achievement work.

Midnightknight
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Midnightknight » Wed, 21. Jul 21, 19:42

Deathifier wrote:
Wed, 21. Jul 21, 14:54
I tried to send marines to Duke's HQ by ejecting one near it and watching the Astronaut (Marine) dock, however it then just vanished instead of being added to the station.
It happens everywhere, i once ejected a marine close to one of my station to have it picked up by another ship of mine. The stupid marine rushed to the station and was lost forever after "docking" there. I think the script do not handle what happen after docking so it simply delete any marine just as if it was a random astronaut ...

Deianeira
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Deianeira » Thu, 22. Jul 21, 15:10

The funny thing is, I could have sworn the marine capacity of military outposts and Duke's Haven used to be 36 in 1.1, now it's only 10 everywhere. Also they only fill up to

Code: Select all

([max capacity]/2)-1
:arrow: max capacity is 4 marines. Before it was 17 :gruebel:

The duke's military transport unloads up to 10 of it's 40 marines before idling, and six vanish again almost instantly...

Deathifier
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Deathifier » Fri, 23. Jul 21, 05:18

Midnightknight wrote:
Wed, 21. Jul 21, 19:42
It happens everywhere, i once ejected a marine close to one of my station to have it picked up by another ship of mine. The stupid marine rushed to the station and was lost forever after "docking" there. I think the script do not handle what happen after docking so it simply delete any marine just as if it was a random astronaut ...
Yeah there is no special treatment for marines sadly.
Deianeira wrote:
Thu, 22. Jul 21, 15:10
The funny thing is, I could have sworn the marine capacity of military outposts and Duke's Haven used to be 36 in 1.1, now it's only 10 everywhere. Also they only fill up to

Code: Select all

([max capacity]/2)-1
:arrow: max capacity is 4 marines. Before it was 17 :gruebel:

The duke's military transport unloads up to 10 of it's 40 marines before idling, and six vanish again almost instantly...
Hmm well when I scripted in a bunch on a TP of my own and forced it to unload via script, it unloaded 10 and then the M7M picked them all up shortly after (I scanned it to verify) so if the game is removing marines down to only 4 it is probably on a timer.

If the M7M will still resupply at the HQ when covered, and if the ways of blowing up ships without it being pinned on the player still work, then that gives us a few more options to think about as even if it only loads 4 at a time it will eventually be fully loaded.

Deianeira
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Deianeira » Fri, 23. Jul 21, 20:02

The "Paranid" M7M can't dock at Duke's Haven anymore unfortunately. It wouldn't really matter anyway, as the Military transport unloads at most 10 marines before idling indefinitely... it's just par for the course at this point for an Egosoft game: badly designed, untested and forever unfinished :twisted:

Hwitvlf
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Hwitvlf » Sat, 24. Jul 21, 18:18

Deathifier, since you've been looking into the script and it's fresh in your mind, have you considered making a fix as a Mod? It wouldn't help get the Steam achievement, but it doesn't sound like it would be too hard and it might be one step closer to getting an official fix released someday.

Deathifier
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Deathifier » Sat, 24. Jul 21, 19:54

Deianeira wrote:
Fri, 23. Jul 21, 20:02
The "Paranid" M7M can't dock at Duke's Haven anymore unfortunately. It wouldn't really matter anyway, as the Military transport unloads at most 10 marines before idling indefinitely... it's just par for the course at this point for an Egosoft game: badly designed, untested and forever unfinished :twisted:
Yep, monitoring it in a test game had the covered M7M's loitering around the gate until something happened to them :(

The TP's should go and find more marines though, their code is one big infinite while loop which is basically split in two halves - being "if I have room, go find marines" and "if I am full, go unload", and there's an idle period at the start of each loop.
So it is quite likely the TP simply can't find any suitable marines.

I have a test game and some XXL Barracks up now, though so far they've only produced junk but we'll see how many per hundred marines are useful pretty soon.
I've also been observing the M7M behaviour (it's mostly as expected, and sometimes it does something bizarre), examining the code more (I think some of my probabilities are wrong, but in a good way - the odds are more in our favour, and having Lasting Vengeance Beta around is more useful than I thought), and figuring out ways to potentially jam up the broken system so we have a bit more control over what happens and when.

But if the XXL training barracks can't produce marines with a high enough skill I don't know how to get enough marines on any reasonable timescale.

Hwitvlf wrote:
Sat, 24. Jul 21, 18:18
Deathifier, since you've been looking into the script and it's fresh in your mind, have you considered making a fix as a Mod? It wouldn't help get the Steam achievement, but it doesn't sound like it would be too hard and it might be one step closer to getting an official fix released someday.
I suppose It can be done.
What would be the goal though? Fixing it so players can trigger the achievement is one thing, but that's kinda pointless without the achievement.
Making it function for day-to-day game sessions is more complex and it would be very easy to go from it doing nothing at all to constantly harassing the player.

To do it properly, or what I consider properly (i.e. something that the average player will see on occasion in regular play and that, unless otherwise provoked, might affect them very rarely) is actually a considerable amount of work.
If the dev's were agreeable to fixing it i'd consider putting the time in to do it properly however they've already stated that, essentially, this project is done and therefore the probability of future updates is almost zero.

Hwitvlf
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Hwitvlf » Sat, 24. Jul 21, 20:44

If it's lots of work, then it's not worth it. What I was picturing is simply getting the script to work as Cycrow intended it. From what I gather, the main problem is that the M7Ms cover is not removed when returning home. Secondarily, the high Fighting skill requirement lowers the odds of success.

If no one is making any fixes for FL, it will certainly will stay in its current state. My hope is that every fix which the community makes will raise the odds that Egosoft would spend the time to release another official update.

Midnightknight
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Midnightknight » Sat, 24. Jul 21, 22:47

Deathifier wrote:
Sat, 24. Jul 21, 19:54
If the dev's were agreeable to fixing it i'd consider putting the time in to do it properly however they've already stated that, essentially, this project is done and therefore the probability of future updates is almost zero.
Same for me. I'm already busy doing many other things not related to X3, so getting my hands on the script understand how they works, remember how the script language works (Haven't done any script in X3 for more than a decade now) for in the end have a game still bugged to the brim isn't worth the time i would put on fixing the things. It's a thing to fix your own code, it's a lot harder when it's not yours and you have to understand what the author wanted to do.

Anyway, i guess increasing the number of marines Duke's heaven can hold is easy, lowering the marine requirement is easy too, making the M7M and TP script have the same prerequisite for marines would be easy too. But that won't help much, there will still be many things to fix in this script and if it's only to get the achievement it's pointless as they are disables the second you use script editor or a mod.

Deathifier
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Re: You've been duked?

Post by Deathifier » Sun, 25. Jul 21, 09:38

After more than 400 marines trained it looks like the Marine Training Barracks has a hard cap of 40 on fighting skill regardless of size and that going up in size only improves the average fighting skill of newly produced marines.
The other skills are even less useful as of every marine trained during the entire testing process (more than 600) maybe one or two marines had a non-fighting skill of one star.

So the player can't produce a supply of marines and therefore it relies on the handful of NPC training facilities.
I don't know what they produce although I suspect it is random.

The problem is with all the other design faults the player needs to stack up a very large number of marines, get them near Duke's HQ, get the TP's near the HQ, then turn on the flow of resources (marines, energy cells, boarding pods) to the HQ.
At that point it would be a case of waiting for the TP's to move enough marines to the HQ and for the M7M to pick everything up, reloading each time the random check in the idle code decided to send the M7M to a non-Duke's sector.

On review of the code and documentation, I think the actual odds of the M7M doing things are:
1 in 3 chance of idling to another sector.
If idling to another sector the max range is 2 jumps but it can also choose the current sector.
Thus, if the Hub is not a factor (i.e. it isn't connected to a sector near Lasting Vengeance), then if you don't have Lasting Vengeance Beta unlocked and owned by Duke's it is a 1 in 3 chance to stay in a Duke's sector (i.e. to stay in Lasting Vengeance). If Lasting Vengeance Beta is owned by Duke's, it is a 1 in 2 chance to stay in a Duke's sector.

However without direct control of when to start the flow of resources and the location of those resources it is going to be very difficult to get a suitable game state setup due to:
1. Even if a TP picked up 40 marines it can only unload 10, and the M7M has to pick those up before more can be unloaded.
2. The TP's have no jumpdrive and move slowly, so even if they had marines to buy you'd be fighting the random generator for a long, long time - esp. as the checks are extremely frequent (the longest between checks is if it goes to Lasting Vengeance Beta, as it takes a while to get there and then back to the HQ and the next check).
3. Even if you used the hub to shorten the TP trips, the NPC facilities still need to produce suitable marines and I suspect that also takes a long time.

To even attempt it without going insane you'd need a game with Lasting Vengeance Beta in it, you'd need to supply the NPC facilities (and clean out any unsuitable marines), and then you'd need to constantly watch the M7M's behaviour after the first TP arrives with marines, continuously saving and loading to keep the M7M from idling to a non-Dukes sector and resetting the cycle.


That all assumes that the boarding process actually works.
Which it does - if you script enough stuff onto the M7M at the right time it will pass all its checks and start a boarding operation.
It really likes to board the playership (it happened first time, and I have max rep with Duke's), which in my case was a M6.
It jumps to your sector, flies over near you, turns hostile, and launches its pods (I had forgotten to script in some shields for my ship...), boards the playership, and kicks you out in your space suit when they win, sending your old ship off to idle in sector now owned by Duke's.

The only problem - no achievement, not when the pods hit, not after after they win, and not after the M7M had decided it had finished boarding and was going back home and I got in a new ship and jumped around for a bit to see if there was a short delay.
Even in a modified game you still get the in-game notifications for an achievement (my message log has a bunch even though this became a modified game just after starting it) and there simply was no notification.

So not only is the scripting packed with flaws, the achievement doesn't even trigger if you do find a way around the flaws.

I think this is done and it's time to ask Egosoft to either fix it in a reasonable timeframe, or delete the achievement.

Deathifier
Posts: 160
Joined: Wed, 6. Nov 02, 20:31
xr

Re: You've been duked?

Post by Deathifier » Tue, 9. Nov 21, 17:51

With patch 1.3 on the way I'm hopeful this was addressed however I can't see any mention of it and I'm not sure if achievements work in the release candidates.

I'm hoping the developers can let us know if it has been addressed or not.

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