[Mayhem 3] Renegades 5.10 - 6/2025

[Hairless-Ape]

No. Way too many changes.

[xvuchko]

Are defense missions buged for anyone else, Im just starting a new playthrough on a clean install. I take a defence mission park my wing next to a station and turn on SETA and thats it nothing ever hapens no attacks and no mission updates.

Congrats on 5.0 version and thanks for keeping this alive!

EDIT:

Ok after at least 10 minutes of SETA I get an update to destroy a beacon in the adjacent system, quite a waste of time doing these like this imo.

[Betelgeuse97]

Are defense missions buged for anyone else, Im just starting a new playthrough on a clean install. I take a defence mission park my wing next to a station and turn on SETA and thats it nothing ever hapens no attacks and no mission updates.

Congrats on 5.0 version and thanks for keeping this alive!

EDIT:

Ok after at least 10 minutes of SETA I get an update to destroy a beacon in the adjacent system, quite a waste of time doing these like this imo.

This has been a bug since ZH 2.1. I'm not sure what causes this to occur.

[Hairless-Ape]

I've had to update the 5.0 release zip.

If you had 4.x, and upgraded to 5.0, you won't need to do anything. If you installed from scratch using the 5.0 release, you will need to re-download it and apply it and then the latest patch.

[Hairless-Ape]

The 5.2 patch has been released.
Nothing earth shattering, but a few fixes and a few nice additions.

[Hairless-Ape]

I've updated ZMap (on Github only for now) to include the ability to Set a Custom Music Folder. Make a folder, fill it with .mp3's of your choice, set it as the music folder in ZMap and then if you generate a map with all that set, you get your own music. You can even customize the music per-sector using the ZMap sector editor. When the next Renegades release comes out, I'll update ZMap in there, but for the moment, just follow the github link (https://github.com/Hairless-Ape/ZMap/re ... .1.8.1.zip)

[Negmek]

Wow so many updates in just ahalf a year! Awesome stuff to see.

I was playing in winter when 4.0 came out and was stoked for the missile rebalace, but didnt have the time to properly test it out. My initial thought was that ONLY increasing damage isnt the best way to approach it (though the buff is absolutely needed), because they are also long range and m8s arent super fast, but i didnt have the free timee tp look into it.

Just as a theoretical example. Distict playstyles could be either having to keep your ships away from the bigger enemy ships while sending pot shots of rockets at them, and defending against fast fighters harassing you. But thats not really possible because you run out of miutes in 1.5 minutes. There is no prolonged stadoff skirmish game. But at the same time m8s dont for the fast strike craft role either, because they arent that fast, and missiles have long range so there isnt really much exciting or skill-intensive about firing the missiles.

This means that the only real usage for them is having them trail along your large fleet and just contribute their DPS to the rest of the fleet. They are differet from other ships, sure, but you as a player dont have to do anything different to use them. The gameplay is practically the same. And that i think is the missed opportuity, and what ultimately makes a person say "eh, may as well use coventional ships".Buffing missiles is ot the solution cus if you keep buffing missiles to the point where they always defeat a convetional fleet of the same resource cost, then there would never be a reason to build a convetional fleet.

On the other hand, suppose m8s not only require ressuplying, but also careful and prolonged tactical microcontrol, where you are able to put a lot of effort in an intense battle in order to defeat a more expensive fleet with relatively cheap m8s. While ordiary ships require stronger economy to build and maintain, but require less attention to make use of ad o resupply micromanagement. Distinct roles like this would make it so both are useful in appropriate circumstaces, rather than one is just better and therefore the other is useless.

But yeah, i will give more feedback or specifics about how to implement this after i played/tested this, but i hope just the game design theory part makes sense. (really id say damage should be increased somethig like 5-8 times, but rate of fire decreased by a factor of 4. This way they would have an even larger danage potetial, at the expense of having to stay within 25km of the enemy fleet for a long period ot time, with AI hopefully being smart enough to send fighters/m6s after ya to keep you away from m2/7 ships. Perhaps rocket mass reduced so ships can carry more.)

And god damn, there is even 5.0? All the fixes and updates are awesome, this is definetly a unique game/mod that deserves the attention, thanks for keeping it alive.

[z1311]

I'm somehow unable to manufacture lasers as the laser manufacture perk doesn't seem to exist at any of my stations. Is it gated behind some sort of scenario (like terraforming?)

[Betelgeuse97]

I'm somehow unable to manufacture lasers as the laser manufacture perk doesn't seem to exist at any of my stations. Is it gated behind some sort of scenario (like terraforming?)

No, it is not.

Laser manufacture is unlocked by default.

I need to play a bit more to see what's going on. Would you upload a video, screenshots documenting the bug, or your save and galaxy in Google Drive along with steps-to-reproduce please?

[archelf33]

Great work, I appreciate the updates. The changes to the Architect in particular for patch 5.3 sound great, I can't way to see how much that improves it's ability to build my empire for me. I pretty much always rely on it because I cba to place stations myself.

[GunthorNC]

I love that this is still being worked on, I've been scared away by mayhem before, if I install this, how much of the "trader" lifestyle can I still experience? I know it's mostly about empire management, but I do like the buy low sell high side of the game.

[Hairless-Ape]

I love that this is still being worked on, I've been scared away by mayhem before, if I install this, how much of the "trader" lifestyle can I still experience? I know it's mostly about empire management, but I do like the buy low sell high side of the game.

First, it's good to hear people still look at this and still want to play. I sometimes wonder if more than 3 people play and if it's worth my time, but I'm getting the impression far more are getting into it, or returning because of the updates. That's a great thing, because it's a serious passion for me and a lot of work. I just do it because I'm fanatical about the entire experience of playing X3, and I have a serious mental flaw that says I need to make everything work better, even when it's good enough. Hopefully there are other brain dead X3 phobes out there that have the same problem and Renegades therapy is working to cure them (or make them become an addict).

Enjoying Trading as a player is a real hard thing to estimate. As you said, it's very much an empire management game. Because there are so many automated traders running around, I'd honestly have to say it's not very profitable to do it yourself (for now). Your own Trader Agents will seek opportunistic buy/sell opportunities every chance they get, when not fulfilling their outpost demands.
You 'can' do trade Missions, which can add up and be profitable and fun, but it's a side gig, and not going to build you an empire.
I am considering creating some weird "pirate" missions that the player could engage in, where they are doing trading for the Pirates, which plays into the covert capability added in a recent patch. I'd hope that these would be far more dangerous and just as profitable. It's stewing.. have to think a bit more on it and get these QOL things done first.

This "Lack of something to personally do", other than manage outposts and logistics and stuff like that, is one of the things I will be focusing on over the next months or year(s).. Personally, I'd like to allow (but not force) a bit more automation concerning the setup and automation of outpost logistics, to allow the player time to do more personal content. This personal content would probably involve some custom missions, and hopefully not the traditional dull "fetch this bone" kind of mission. Lots to think about.

[GunthorNC]

I love that this is still being worked on, I've been scared away by mayhem before, if I install this, how much of the "trader" lifestyle can I still experience? I know it's mostly about empire management, but I do like the buy low sell high side of the game.

First, it's good to hear people still look at this and still want to play. I sometimes wonder if more than 3 people play and if it's worth my time, but I'm getting the impression far more are getting into it, or returning because of the updates. That's a great thing, because it's a serious passion for me and a lot of work. I just do it because I'm fanatical about the entire experience of playing X3, and I have a serious mental flaw that says I need to make everything work better, even when it's good enough. Hopefully there are other brain dead X3 phobes out there that have the same problem and Renegades therapy is working to cure them (or make them become an addict).

Enjoying Trading as a player is a real hard thing to estimate. As you said, it's very much an empire management game. Because there are so many automated traders running around, I'd honestly have to say it's not very profitable to do it yourself (for now). Your own Trader Agents will seek opportunistic buy/sell opportunities every chance they get, when not fulfilling their outpost demands.
You 'can' do trade Missions, which can add up and be profitable and fun, but it's a side gig, and not going to build you an empire.
I am considering creating some weird "pirate" missions that the player could engage in, where they are doing trading for the Pirates, which plays into the covert capability added in a recent patch. I'd hope that these would be far more dangerous and just as profitable. It's stewing.. have to think a bit more on it and get these QOL things done first.

This "Lack of something to personally do", other than manage outposts and logistics and stuff like that, is one of the things I will be focusing on over the next months or year(s).. Personally, I'd like to allow (but not force) a bit more automation concerning the setup and automation of outpost logistics, to allow the player time to do more personal content. This personal content would probably involve some custom missions, and hopefully not the traditional dull "fetch this bone" kind of mission. Lots to think about.

Thanks for getting back to me. I've been a humongous X3 fan well, since X2 lol. It's one of those things that I keep coming back to for 50-100 hours every year or two. It has been getting progressively harder and harder to mod the game to my liking, based off of how I used to run it (yaki/pirate guild/phanon/like 100 other mods) they're all disappearing and every time I come back it takes me longer and longer to remod the game to how I enjoy it. It always winds up "less than it was" due to things disappearing to time.

I think you are right though, I do have overly fond memories of the early game trading for profit, but eventually I always do wind up in the situation where I'm automating everything, which from what I can tell mayhem handles fantastically, I have always been a huge huge fan of cag/cls for setting up semi rigid, multi system trade routes (I like to have to escort my trade ships through pirate territory) I'm not sure what is comparable to those scripts in mayhem, but at the very least a more active galaxy and some ways to take the tedium out of replacing lost ships would be much appreciated over vanilla.

I guess the long and short of it is, I'm glad that the game is still being worked on, and I think it's time for me to eventually move on from how I played and got joy out of the game over a decade ago and on to what is "now". Spending the past 3 days trying to get all my old favorite x3ap mods collected and working again is... Well it's been too much. You're offering a "ready to go" work of love that builds on years of modding. I need to learn the new system and get with the program. I'm gonna give your mod a shot, and thank you for spending so much time on it!

If you know any tutorials/resources to help me get started I'd love to start learning.

[GunthorNC]

And I have no idea why my quotes are always broken lol. I very rarely use forums.

[N8M4R3]

Have a look at the options when you post a reply with quote. There you have to take out the hook from "Disable BBCode"

[Hairless-Ape]

For automatic ship replacement, there is something built in for Fleets. It's limited, but it does work.
In the Fleet Management Screen, for each fleet, you can select an outpost under "Build Followers Here" link near the bottom. Then, you can select a ship type and quantity right underneath that. It will automatically ensure that your fleet has that exact amount of that ship in it, replacing any that are lost in battle. Keep in mind, that this doesn't work great for fleets with carriers if you are trying to replace fighters. I don't think it was intended for that and could use enhancement for sure, but it's there to use.


Regarding Tutorials, there's a Mayhem Series of video's that Hector0x put out. It's getting outdated, but it certainly covers the basics. If I had the silky smooth voice and infinite patience of Hector0x, I would make my own video's. He could make a video about the quality of dirt in different places in the yard and make it sound interesting.

[Annadnab92]

Hello everyone,

first of all let me say congratulations and thank you to everyone involved in development of this fantastic mod, I’m having a great time playing it.

Now, since this mod is in constant development (I’m playing 4.0), obviously we can encounter some occasional bugs:

1. As I think it was reported already, workers don’t seem to obey the outposts’ max. jump distance. I mostly keep the default value 4, but my traders/tugs still tend to go almost to the other side of the galaxy.

2. Also, contrary to what “Fleet Settings” info says, followers are sent for “Auto-Repair” and “Auto-Maintain” not to the nearest safe outpost, but their home outpost. Because of this, whenever I relocate one of my fleets, I need to change homebase for all ships in the fleet (fortunately there is a utility for that).

Theoretically this is nothing game-breaking, but unfortunately, recently I started encountering more serious issues:

3. I’m not able to end a war. I answered to Argon invitation to join a coalition against Terrans. According to Ministry of War info “It ends once they own less sectors than the largest coalition member”. At the moment I have 28 sectors, Argons have 19 and Terrans only have 13, which means that the war should have ended a long time ago. Regular solutions, like doing missions or killing Khaak, don’t work because the reputation is being reset almost instantly to -5.

4. When I was preparing my fleets for war, I switched off their options to “Auto-Repair” and “Auto-Maintain”. My idea was to prevent a situation when my ships turn around in the middle of a battle. The thing is, when I switched it back to “yes”, it didn’t kick in. What’s more interesting, even ships for which I didn’t change the setting randomly ceased their maintenance. At the moment, although all of them are set to “Auto-Maintain” as it should be, some of them do, and some do not.

5. For a few in-game hours I can’t transfer sectors. During the war I conquered one of the sectors which I’m supposed to give to Phanon, but whenever I try to transfer it, it says “Not possible at the moment. Please wait a few min (technical limitations)”. I think I’ve seen this already, but only a few minutes after conquering a sector, not hours.

As I said in the beginning, I wish I could continue playing, but with this recent situation I feel like I’m out of options so I really hope that you can help me somehow. Below you can find a link to download my map and the latest save:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Thank you in advance and best regards.

[Hairless-Ape]

Worker Range is dictated by a setting in the /t/9973-L044.xml file. Specifically ID 128. This defaults to 8 jumps. The Outpost range setting is only used if it is set Above this value. If you want to put it back to a default of 4 jumps and then extend it per-outpost with the in-game outpost setting, you need to change the 9973 file. If you weren't aware, you should adjust settings in both the 9972 and 9973 file before you start a new game. This is where all your configurations are to customize your game.

I've never looked at the fleet Auto-repair. Or conditions for ending a coalition war. I'd have to do some research to see what Hector has in there. I'll add it to my list, but won't be able to get to it quickly.

Regarding the Transfer of Sectors, again, never looked at this before, but from a cursory scan, it appears that it doesn't allow a transfer while one of the long running scripts (ZH.Core) is still running to prevent any harmful interactions. This is a long running script that's run once every 8 hours. How long it takes to run I don't know exactly, but I would guess 5-10 minutes depending on how much stuff is going on in the galaxy. Given that script does about a hundred critical things and is core to the A.I. decision making process, its probably a good idea to let it finish. It's like trying to calculate a route from one city to another while another process is removing some roads.. This isn't something I'm going to change, so sorry if it's a show stopper for you.

[Annadnab92]

Thx for your response. Regarding worker range, apparently I assumed that if there is a corresponding in-game setting, it would override whatever is in those files. Well, I stand corrected. Anyway, I’m sure that I’ve seen my tugs travel like 12-13 jumps. I was wondering, is it possible that the script calculating jump distance also takes into consideration jump beacons which are not deployed (I mean, in the cargo holds)? Just a random thought…

About the sector transfer, well, that’s why I’m worried because it’s already been like 2 hours with the same message popping up each time. I guess I will wait a little longer, I’m cool with that.

[Hairless-Ape]

Thx for your response. Regarding worker range, apparently I assumed that if there is a corresponding in-game setting, it would override whatever is in those files. Well, I stand corrected. Anyway, I’m sure that I’ve seen my tugs travel like 12-13 jumps. I was wondering, is it possible that the script calculating jump distance also takes into consideration jump beacons which are not deployed (I mean, in the cargo holds)? Just a random thought…

About the sector transfer, well, that’s why I’m worried because it’s already been like 2 hours with the same message popping up each time. I guess I will wait a little longer, I’m cool with that.

Sorry, when you said "Workers", I assumed you meant your Station or Trade agents. Both Tugs and Explorers have a fixed 15 jump limit.

Yes, your save was broken and the flag that says ZH.Core is still running was in a strange "stuck" state and I had to reset it twice before it would actually reset. First time I've ever seen that weird condition for a simple global variable. I'd have to say the save is technically corrupted based on this fact alone. You can reset the flag with the instructions below and continue playing, but anyone's guess is as good as mine regarding what happened to your save.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K5U19j ... sp=sharing
Throw this script into your /addon/scripts/ folder and then load up your save game.
Once in the game:
SH-C
s
<enter>
<enter>
The highlighted line should say "script editor" at this point.
<enter>
Cursor down in list of scripts until you are on "ResetZHCoreFlag"
Hit "r"
<enter>
<enter>
Your done. escape out of this and you should be able to give your sector away.

Sorry I can't offer more. Only thing I could guess at is that you have a really massive amount of ships (far more than I've ever seen in a save), and you may be running into some limitation of the game engine. Who knows. If anyone else has advice, please add to this.