[Mayhem 3.21b] Zero Hour 2.2

[sataricon]

Something strange happened.
I chose Argon as starting race and trader in the startup questions and then went to do a kill some xeno quest i just killed one of them and found the entire argon sector turns red on me.
They don't attack me or anything but they just turned red.

[Hector0x]

Where is the config file that i can use to lower upkeep.

/addon/t/9972-L044

Search for 'maintenance'. Right now i cannot check which line it was exactly. Its a multiplier. Reduce it from 100 to 20

BTW in mayhem 2 many products needed to have 2 primary resources but here i find it only need 1 so what is the idea behind this Design decision ?
Is it just to make things simpler for the player?

Easier for the AI. The resource simplification helps ship production to run smoother. Less refinement steps means less factories, less freighters and less disruption. Factions dynamically go to war. Each time the overall resource flow and trade has change. If this would affect many more different resources Outposts would get less ship parts and in the long run you would see even less battles.

This was the reason for the Mayhem economy

This mod could probably get away with adding more resources because factions generally leave each other's freighters alive now and a lot of intermediate trade is now unaffected by war and flows throgh the neutral trading stations.
But it would be a lot of work to expand the economy for potentially little gain

They don't attack me or anything but they just turned red.

No idea really. Best just switch global settings to friend and send to all property. If it persists i would need a save.

[sataricon]

It happened again the entire race turns against me and i have a save for it.
I was again following a pirate ship trying to scan it.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AlRkScKM5wubbJxd7so ... Q?e=UgviuV

This is the save file.

Update:
It now returned to normal after spending some time in Seta.
Only worry is that this may happen when i start to have ships with turrets on them who will see them as an enemy and begin firing.

BTW where can i sell ships that i claim?

[Hector0x]

BTW where can i sell ships that i claim?

you cannot sell ships. Only recycle them in an Outpost to get 50% of the resources back. That's why its often better to keep your rag tag band of random ships and find a good use for each of them. At least before you can mass produce standardized templates with ease.

[sataricon]

So in order to learn more about this mod do i have to watch the mayhem guide then watch the zero hour guide?

[Hector0x]

The Mayhem guide is more like an example playthrough. Its good if you don't have any idea where to even start but it can be difficult to find information about a very specific topic. It's also somewhat outdated at this point.

The 2022 Zero Hour guide series works different and is divided into very specific topics. You should basically just start playing and once you run into a situation you can check if there is a guide about it.

The thumbnail gives you some info about the video:
Blue icon is traditional tutorial stuff that everyone should know, regardless of playstyle.
Green icon is more about overall strategy (mostly personal preferrence)
Yellow $$$ icons teach you different ways to make money.

The video names could be improved though. I'll look into it. EDIT: done

[SaulGoodman]

Glad you were able to make compatibility and expand the Terran mod to work with ZH! Small problem though, I sent two messages over the course of the month and didn't receive any replies so I was worried as to the state of the project. Although it could be an issue with my forum mailbox.

last PN i got from you was from 09/04/22
inbox was only filled 93%. I emptied it completely now, so maybe try again.

Your Terrans mod was a good foundation to start from, but there were still lots of smaller things missing here and there. Police license, company, vocalisation for their outpost, Taxi, etc.

Although I have been extremely busy these few months, I do have a collection of ships from some Russian mod that I ported to an older version of mayhem 3(3.19) many months ago.
The origins of these are mixed, some coming from xtended, others from cadius, and some from unknown Russian mod but it is a collection of around ~30 high quality ships. This could be a good starting point to improving the diversity of ships in Zero Hour but they would need to all be rebalanced for zero hour.
I do not have the time at the moment however. One thing the mod does well is enhance the Yaki's fleet greatly.

[sataricon]

Something strange.
I created a galaxy map "using Hairless-Ape galaxy generator" i i picked up large.
Now when i enter any sector the computer says the wrong name for said sector.

Is that a bug on my end?

Also what is this
Abnormal Signal in sectors?
Is this related to the beacon thing?

[sataricon]

I wonder ho to automate a trader to buy what the outpost need?
In mayhem 2 the DA used to do that but now there are traders and though i have watched the guide video on it i fail to see the bottom the let me "register" the trade.

Edit :
I figured it out.

[alexalsp]

Something strange.
I created a galaxy map "using Hairless-Ape galaxy generator" i i picked up large.
Now when i enter any sector the computer says the wrong name for said sector.

Is that a bug on my end?

Also what is this
Abnormal Signal in sectors?
Is this related to the beacon thing?

Try this, but you will need to generate a new map.

viewtopic.php?p=5149718#p5149718

[Falcrack]

In this mods, do the AI factions have a finite supply of credits, like the player? One issue I have with X4 is that while shipyards need wares to construct ships, the factions unlike the player are given unlimited credits.

[Hector0x]

No. In my opinion there are 2 main reasons why its not possible. X4 still has the exact same limitations here. Egosoft should adress them in their next big release.


1) prices are not calculated based on ingame supply and demand. All that matters is how much % of storage is filled in each station. This is easier to track for the game engine, but its not how a market works.

Lets say the Argon cannot build any more ships due to an engine part shortage. This is a strategic issue and should be considered as extra critical demand by the military. But the price for engine parts has long capped out because there are already no more parts in their shipyard. What should happen now is that the price for engine parts on this shipyard continues to rise indefinitely until someone opens up a new trade route or a new engine part factory because its so profitable. But since the price is already capped out this never actually happens and they rather build some other useless factory or just make do with the few engine parts that do trickle in. Market price signals are very distorted. Thats why everything runs so inefficient in X4 and there is no real war activity.
Mayhem 3 gets around that issue by allowing the AI to beam available ship parts between shipyards and this mod improves the availability of missing parts further so that the AI actually builds more of certain factories if there is a chronic shortage all the time.

2) the AI would need to be super smart to be able to handle a budget. Otherwise the player would quickly own all the money in the galaxy and everyone else could not afford anything.
Right now the high level strategic AI in any Egosoft game is maybe 10% as smart as it would need to be for this.


TLDR: in this mod the AI doesn't use money. But its somewhat replaced by the maximum fleet sizes that they can build. For the player there is no hard limit. Its more of a soft limit due to ship upkeep cost

[Falcrack]

I've long thought that the issue of credit supply for the AI factions could be solved by adopting a different economic model.

Each sector the faction owns would contribute a steady stream of credits to the faction (sector taxes on the local population, money from nowhere). Ships and stations in turn would require maintenance costs (money to nowhere). The income from sector ownership would become balanced out by the maintenance costs, and a natural state of equilibrium would develop between sector income and maintenance costs. Disrupt that equilibrium, say by destroying ships and station, and the factions would gain more money in order to finance ship purchases. Or if they overbuild, they would reach a state where they could not afford further ship purchases because the rate of expenses exceeds income.

This economy model would overcome the issue of the player owning all the money, since money would be continuously circulating from sector taxes back into maintenance. If the AI cannot currently afford to buy what it needs for ships, all it has to do is wait until sector taxes provide it with enough new income to be able to afford what it needs, unless it has overbuilt the number of ships and the maintenance costs exceed sector tax income, in which case it shouldn't really be building new ships anyways. Maybe if the AI has persistent issues with having built too many unprofitable ships or station, it could recycle some of them which are not profitable so that it could regain a positive flow of income.

There would not be an issue of the player owning all the money in the universe because there would not be a static amount of money in the universe. Money flowing from the local population, back into ship/station maintenance would prevent the credit supply from being stagnant. If a player just sat in a single sector collecting taxes and paying very little in maintenance because he is using very few ships or stations to defend, then that would not affect the rest of the universe. This economic system would be designed to function even with a mostly brain dead AI. Fleet sizes would no longer need to be dictated artificially by caps, but would rather have a soft cap dictated by the rate of sector income balanced against the rate of maintenance.

[Hector0x]

Interesting idea.

But would it really change much for gameplay? Big factions with lots of tax money would still generally have more ships than smaller factions who cannot afford them. Just like with fixed fleet caps based on territory size.
Unless poor factions can somehow plan to not build any ships for some time in order to save up money to finance bigger fleets later.

But do they really survive until then? What stops the powerful rich faction from just annihilating the weak and poor faction that doesn't even build a military?

In the end you would still end up with similar fleet caps. Only that the AI now has to weigh up savings vs security and needs understand these concepts

[Falcrack]

Interesting idea.

But would it really change much for gameplay? Big factions with lots of tax money would still generally have more ships than smaller factions who cannot afford them. Just like with fixed fleet caps based on territory size.
Unless poor factions can somehow plan to not build any ships for some time in order to save up money to finance bigger fleets later.

But do they really survive until then? What stops the powerful rich faction from just annihilating the weak and poor faction that doesn't even build a military?

In the end you would still end up with similar fleet caps. Only that the AI now has to weigh up savings vs security and needs understand these concepts

Smaller faction could have their threat level lowered so that if they are too small, AI factions simply do not attack them or try to take their territory. The larger a faction grows, the greater their threat level and the more other factions try to take their sectors.

It would be a way to limit player growth without implementing hard unit caps.

[Hector0x]

It is worth mentioning that Zero Hour does make unit caps a lot less restrictive.

In X4 the factions have fixed fleet quotas. They put an invasion fleet next to a gate and build it up to x amount of ships. Once finished they send it into the meatgrinder. Usually everyone dies after the first defense platform. Rinse and repeat. Fleets size is always similar.

In Zero Hour you can see much more variance. Under certain conditions factions are allowed to ignore the usual fleet caps. Like when they have many resources or when they feel that they need an extra fleet.

And they also change strategy
A faction which gets beaten hard will eventually switch to a more defensive style of play. They stop attacking and combine most of their ships into a single fleet stack to stand a better chance to defeat everything which could get thrown at them.
At this point they try to get the upper hand again. They hire mercenaries. They import more resources after recycling low level factories to replace them with only high end factories. Those new factories just buy what they need from a trading station and the AI also knows what is even available to buy before deciding what they can substitute and don't need to produce themselves. This greatly optimizes the overall supply for their shipyards.
With those extra parts they can build new invasion fleets, which also ignores the usual fleet caps.

So the NPCs are basically able to do a lot of cool things and even go into debt which they don't need to pay back.
But they still have to build every ship and no resources get spawned from thin air. I think free money for the AI is the best compromise which leads to more interesting gameplay. This 'going into debt part' would not work if the AI had to maintain positive cashflow at all times.

[sataricon]

Something strange.
I created a galaxy map "using Hairless-Ape galaxy generator" i i picked up large.
Now when i enter any sector the computer says the wrong name for said sector.

Is that a bug on my end?

Also what is this
Abnormal Signal in sectors?
Is this related to the beacon thing?

Try this, but you will need to generate a new map.

viewtopic.php?p=5149718#p5149718

i don't know what i have to do.
How to uncomment a map?

[Hairless-Ape]

"//" is generally considered to be a symbol that says "this line is a comment and not something functional". This is however, only understood by .NET programmers, so your question is quite valid and I have updated the instructions on the ZMap page..
Open the 2 text files listed below, and REMOVE THE LEADING "//" from any lines that don't start with a single alphabetic character.
I.E.
//Avarice|43583004|853 (remove leading // from this)
//A|43985935|405 (leave this line untouched)

\mayhem_data\sector_names_stream1.txt
\mayhem_data\sector_names_stream2.txt

Once you do, you will need to run ZMap again and generate a new map.
The basic issue is that there are not enough names in these files which were provided in the original Mayhem 3 because some of the names were commented out.
If this does NOT work for you, please let me know by PM'ing me.

[stardiis]

1. In Ascension panel(ambition:Power), one of my Ascension Goals is Buy 1 police license. But I didn't find any police license seller in game. So the only way to get police license is get enough reputation of a faction?
2. How can I sell the ship I claimed before I set up my first outpost? I pick up some cargo ships, the maintenance is costly.

[aurelcourt]

1. In Ascension panel(ambition:Power), one of my Ascension Goals is Buy 1 police license. But I didn't find any police license seller in game. So the only way to get police license is get enough reputation of a faction?
2. How can I sell the ship I claimed before I set up my first outpost? I pick up some cargo ships, the maintenance is costly.

1 : from mod description in page 1

Police License reworked. You no longer buy it. It is automatically awarded at rank 6 and retracted if you drop below rank 6 or have any infamy. Also added notifiications.

2 : you can't sell ships, you'll have to support it until you can recycle it at your outpost once established, or get it killed somehow...