Kadatherion wrote:The only thing I was coming to hate was them going after my satellites, which is annoying without really adding much when it comes to actual gameplay. But now that you can turn the satellite hunters off I really can't find anything to complain about.

Yes I saw some posts about people not liking the sat hunters and it's such a minor feature I thought it'd be best to have some basic ability to easily turn the behaviour off. Glad you like it
ltdan81 wrote:Finally got around to trying out the new version... haven't had a lot of time with it yet, but I'm liking what I'm seeing. Smile
One small thing however, when I reset Phanon in my current game they evolved to generation 2 before they were done setting up generation 1 (I was them still setting up LT's in Sancuary of Darkness and still only had about half of their ships). Not sure if this is becaue of player's current level or if there is a global that is not getting reset, haven't noticed any other odd events yet.
Excellent. They probably evolved to generation 2 so fast because they get bonus cash depending on your trade/combat rank. That's something that happens in the original Phanon system aswell.
ltdan81 wrote:One thing I noticed is that there is only one "buy drones" command common for all ships and all generations... 14 drones is too much early on, but pitifull later.. I belive this could easily be changed so that $drone.count= 2*'Generation' and if Generation is higher that 4 or 5 make them Mk2...
Maybe even make the count random, because they seem to over use drones especially during the HQ blitz which cuts down performance.
The buy drones script is mostly used on their traders if I remember right. I haven't actually really touched on it but yeah I could possibly look into it. By default in LU each race can deploy I think 30 drones and then won't deploy any more in a combat situation unless some other script specifically tells them to deploy over that limit.
ltdan81 wrote:I have a fleet that could squash them in a heartbeat so testing this is much more fun at this stage, although from what I'm seeing I think they would be an equal opponent starting out, except for the sat hunters, (can these be tweaked to only start hunting sats at higher generations?)
Glad to hear that it's closer to being fair now. The satellite hunters are probably most effective in the earliest generation compared to later on so I'm not sure if I will do that or not.
artisauce wrote:TL's like to get to work right away. Fighters don't have enough time to dock with it, and ends up trying to catch up to it by flying manually across the universe.
Yes, I have seen this also but haven't really given it any thought so far. Not 100% sure about them waiting for the fighters to dock as that might be an extra opportunity to pop the TL.
artisauce wrote:They don't attack your bases in Unknown Sectors/ those Y beta or Y alpha sectors. I wonder if Akeela's Becaon is then safe to place my factories?
They should have the possibility of attacking any player station at random. However standard game complexes count as multiple stations so if you have one of those somewhere they're more likely to be attacked.
artisauce wrote:I had the thought the traders will start to jump out if I tried to attack them. Nope, I can still ram them with my M6 all day long. Only the third attack do they send out fighter drones, but you can kill them with one good melee attack.
I used to ram the traders all the time aswell as it's extremely effective. I thought about making each trader scan for nearby threats periodically but I was also thinking about the cpu limitations of X3 and decided against it. Rethinking it though I could probably try to come up with something to make bumping into their ships a little trickier. When I last played though I just used a bit of a house rule of not abusing that too often.
artisauce wrote:You can easily invade their stations. You just need to distract their sortie ships by personally "attacking" another. Is this not the case when they have more than 1 sortie ship?
Their M7M still tries to attack me even with no ammo. It's easy to deplete them by just jumping around the ship (jumping to jumpgates in same sector) all day until they run out. They have no weapons, they just come near and look threatening.
I did not put much time into testing possible exploits (or any exploits for that matter) with the sortie ships. I imagine this would still be a valid aspect to exploit even as they have more ships available to defend their assets.
When I made the M7M join combat I also had a think about them using the same logic as the Phanon M8's which cause them to jump out of combat when they're out of offensively used ammunition. My thoughts on this were simply that M7M have have a bit better shielding and could possibly serve as an extra bit of defense/distraction for their other ships even if out of primary ammo.
artisauce wrote:Salvage crew ships rarely use their jumpdrive. I constantly see them huffing around the sector, even when there's no abandoned ships or dropped wares.
Perhaps I should look at improving the salvager ships at some point. They will jump more often as they make more profits or when Phanon increases each generation though.
I am always a bit unsure especially about the mining ops as being an extra static potential target hard to know if it's easy to abuse or not. Also good to know about the possible exploits/flaws although I haven't specifically tried to make any of the exploits more difficult to pull off so far.
ltdan81 wrote: Just took out Gen 7... It was one epic battle for sure. This level seems perfect for late game, but IDK if I'd want to attempt a new game with this level. They don't seem as aggressive as the previous version so it might be doable, just not going to cash in on those rewards.
8th Generation should be up in a few hours... This has been a fun run, though charging the same sector every time is getting tedious, what ever happened to them choosing random sectors?
Starting a game with them being on generation 7 would be difficult I imagine. I will say if you attempt something like that don't build any stations until you are sure you can defend yourself against their fleets, you'd need to stick to more mobile forces for your economy for a while I'd imagine.
Can't quite remember when Phanon changed in LU to have their own sector from the older design of appearing in a random sector.
The ships Phanon can end up with in higher generations plus what they try to field is indeed quite something. Phanon basically do become less aggressive in higher generations as I've tried to set them up to make less hunter teams but of higher quality/numbers. Also perhaps next time I do some work on this mod I'll look at the predictable jumping to Omicron to make that slightly more difficult
Thanks for the feedback everyone.