[SCRIPT] Sector Takeover v2.4.3 [Updated 20-Apr-2007]

[voxol]

WOW, that all sounds soo cool!

One thing, your using Race1... couldnt you just use 'Freindly Race'...

Have you tried it in combination with LV's RRF? How does it perform? What about a cut-down RRF, so there's a minimal instant reaction, followed by the arrival of the main fleet?

Gonna grab this baby right now.

[DesertEagle]

Hey hey,
glad you like it but it's not officially released yet!
Nirwin's gotta review the code.

But stuff will be out soon.

DE

[Evans3rd]

Wow! This is turning into something special. I love the added strategy now involved in planning a takeover, Eg; attack when they have committed forces else ware, but I’m not sure about limiting the jump capability.

7. Enemy races will respond aggressively if you attack their stations. I have preserved compatibility with LV's script, as well, but I want to highlight what I consider to be differences in our design philosphies:

A) I do not consider instantaneous response to be at all realistic. Forces take times to mass, battle plans need to be drawn, OPORDS written, etc.

B) I think that, given all the race warfare going on in this version of the X Universe, the constant use of jumpdrives would become prohibitively expensive.

Thus, my response fleets do not use jump drives. Instead, they drive the conventional way through adjacent sectors. Troop movements of responders result in dynamic military re-allocations as necessary.

The idea being that when I jump my force into the sector they would send out a distress call as soon as I attack the station. I would expect to have to fight any defending forces obviously and any who answer the distress call as well. If they can’t jump then they will not arrive in time to defend and should then be diverted to any counter attack force being set up to reclaim the sector.
Letting them use the jump drive adds a bit of uncertainty to any attack you plan as you have no idea what forces may respond immediately to your attack.
Maybe two different response teams. One for any who are available for immediate response and a more “planned” response if the original team was not successful in repelling the attack.

Either way is good with me. No jump makes planning a takeover strategy easier because you know you only have to deal with in sector forces but the jump drive adds the uncertainty factor normally involved in planning such a takeover. Either way you eventually have to deal with all the enemy forces I just proffer a bit of uncertainty.

But then we need to consider just how big we want this script to become as well. To many If Else statements can really slow down a PC.

[nirwin]

I must say I do agree with evans3rd, they should be able to use jump drives, but perhaps keep it at a low probability? Usually I imagine the response will come from a neighbouring sector so it won't take long for them to get there anyway, no longer than the current raiding parties anyway, so jumping isn't essential.

I must also say that what you have done, does sound very good DE, sadly I haven't even had time to look at the code since RL has had me quite busy the past few days, however I have no plans tonight, and I am just itching to give this a go. So my plan is to have a play for an hour or so and then go over the code with a fine-toothed comb.

If everything looks good, I will switch to the new code base and integrate any changes I have made recently that aren't in there. and then we can ditch the (sorry acrh2) hard-to-work-with core.

And I still have to get around to adding that german translation, I've been so lazy lately.

[voxol]

3. Other races are continually embroiled in a giant territorial struggle. They can, and will, capture sectors , including sectors that were not originally their own.

Just wondering what sort of 'notoriety' effects are included... I.e. would the argon be initially peaceful with the paranid, but then the paranid do a sneak invasion because the argon have some strategic resource, and so argon declare war? Then trading between the two races slows, or maybe even traders start getting shot at...

Or is it much more disjoint from the rest of the AI? so attacks and invasions are constantly going on at a constant rate of aggression, but trading, etc is unaffected?

Would be good to see some real dynamic politics, maybe backed up with BBS ads - "Paranid invade Cloudbase SW, Argon declares war! Known friends of the Argon are advised to stay away from Paranid space".

And maybe have blatant effects on the player, so if they have a really good rep with argon, and argon go to war with paranid, your notoriety is negatively offset with paranid, until the war ends?

And maybe alliances between races if one race starts dominating? To keep the balance (enter the player...).

This script is gonna be amazing as it is, but the possibilites are near-endless. Really adds something to do for the late game besides what everyone ends up doing: 'build complexes, build army, blast xenon sectors, repeat'. Taking over the universe could add 100s of hours of gameplay that were just missing before! How egosoft could have missed this is unbelievable.

Nirwin: Test the code pronto so I can download it!!!

[tc3]

wow this really sounds amazing - could open the game in the best possible way, total war in space!

thanks guys for your hard work and dilegence, looking forward to getting hold of this as soon as poss!!

[DesertEagle]

Hey, I'd love help tuning the algorithms. Race invasion mode is turned off in the alpha I gave you Nirwin, but I'll send you the latest if you like. Otherwise there's plenty to do in terms of cleanup / testing in this code, since it's all very drafty.

DE

[nirwin]

Hey, I'd love help tuning the algorithms. Race invasion mode is turned off in the alpha I gave you Nirwin, but I'll send you the latest if you like. Otherwise there's plenty to do in terms of cleanup / testing in this code, since it's all very drafty.

DE

Well I don't have the Internet at home yet (and won't for a month) so for tonight, I'm guna have to have a look at the version you gave me before, but I will get the latest version off you perhaps tomorrow?
I'll help you in any way you'd prefer, might be best if you stick with the algorithms and I do the cleanup/testing, since you are already buried in the algorithms, that said however, I will make suggesions if I come up with them.

Sorry to all those who are desperate to play with the re-write but this will probably be a while, mainly because re-writes often mean bugs (nothing personal to DE, but in my experience they creep in even for the best programmers), and it is still in alpha state, and rushing releases leads to very bad things (as my debug message spamming proves ), and there is probably going to be some integration work to do. But fear not, we will work dilligently on it, since we (certainly I) want this finished as much as you do.

Right I'm off home now to start exploring the re-write.

[DesertEagle]

Hi voxol,
notoriety effects at the moment are quite minimal. Everyone is taking a Machiavellian approach. Looking out two-three weeks from now, I hope that will change however -- Nirwin and I are both solid coders, and once we are comfortable with the mechanics we will be able to start fleshing out a lot of detail -- with help from users like yourself, of course! At the moment, testing this version is rather difficult, because it changes the behavior of the entire universe all at once. The way the algorithms are, some interesting things start to happen -- like troop movements into Black Hole Sun.... I guess this is what I love about this kind of project. You start to get emergent effects. I think the politics/allliance idea is a good one. Ultimately, I agree with you guys that there probably should be an immediate response component to threats. I'll need to have refueling algorithms in place because I don't like to cheat tho'.

Best,

DE

3. Other races are continually embroiled in a giant territorial struggle. They can, and will, capture sectors , including sectors that were not originally their own.

Just wondering what sort of 'notoriety' effects are included... I.e. would the argon be initially peaceful with the paranid, but then the paranid do a sneak invasion because the argon have some strategic resource, and so argon declare war? Then trading between the two races slows, or maybe even traders start getting shot at...

Or is it much more disjoint from the rest of the AI? so attacks and invasions are constantly going on at a constant rate of aggression, but trading, etc is unaffected?

Would be good to see some real dynamic politics, maybe backed up with BBS ads - "Paranid invade Cloudbase SW, Argon declares war! Known friends of the Argon are advised to stay away from Paranid space".

And maybe have blatant effects on the player, so if they have a really good rep with argon, and argon go to war with paranid, your notoriety is negatively offset with paranid, until the war ends?

And maybe alliances between races if one race starts dominating? To keep the balance (enter the player...).

This script is gonna be amazing as it is, but the possibilites are near-endless. Really adds something to do for the late game besides what everyone ends up doing: 'build complexes, build army, blast xenon sectors, repeat'. Taking over the universe could add 100s of hours of gameplay that were just missing before! How egosoft could have missed this is unbelievable.

Nirwin: Test the code pronto so I can download it!!!

[Evans3rd]

This script is gonna be amazing as it is, but the possibilites are near-endless. Really adds something to do for the late game besides what everyone ends up doing: 'build complexes, build army, blast xenon sectors, repeat'. Taking over the universe could add 100s of hours of gameplay that were just missing before! How egosoft could have missed this is unbelievable.

My thoughts exactly.
This will add so many new avenues and realism to the game that I’m sure it must have been discussed among the developers. Maybe they plan to use the idea in the next (X4?) release.
I doubt many of us will ever totally own the X universe. I thought of doing this but realistically I’m not sure I have enough hours of play time left in my life to accomplish such an endeavor (life is too short). However, the ability to conquer the Xenon, squash pirate space, and even take over all Peranid sectors (or your favorite love to hate race), just thrills me to no end and it seems so right for this game.

Thanks guys for all your hard work and as anxious as I am to get this script installed I agree that you should spend whatever time you need to get it right. Saves you from a lot of frustrated replies and us from the frustration. However, if you need testers I’m sure some of us are willing to help with that much at least. I am anyway (evans3rd@hotmail.com).

I’m on vacation for the next four weeks and I won’t have internet access during that time but I’ll make a point of using a friends’ connection or go to the cyber café and check in on this when I can.

[nirwin]

Well I had a look at the changes last night, I didn't get to go as in-depth as I wanted, but got the general idea of what you were trying to acheive with each script.

I must say DesertEagle has been VERY busy and the code looks not only solid, but incredibly well thought out. This new core should be a pleasure to work with.

I also had a little blast through and tried to steal montalaar from the Argon, though sadly the untimely arrival of the second RRF Titan put an end to my collosus' rampage. And where was my stupid Titan you ask? Still plodding it's way over from Loomanchstrats, guess I could have planned the invasion a little better.
Still it made me agree with DE a bit more, jumping huge capital ships can be costly, and I kinda feel like races are more likely to jump if they are actually attacking a sector rather than defending (because they would plan rather than being caught off-guard, and there is seldom need for an M1/M2 to have energy-cells since they rarely jump).
Sector wars go on for quite a while, but those RRF fleets were over me in minutes. With the script attempting to allocate the enemies forces more dynamically, I think maybe we should keep jumping to a minimum (there should be plenty of in-sector defense), though it should still be possible, so we are going to have to write a refueling routine.

Also, this was my first time attacking a sector belonging to a non-pirate race, so I'm not sure about this next bit.
The trading station I was attempting to destroy, launched some police/military fighters (with orders to kill - so they KEPT telling me), but they didn't seem to attack me at all, they just flew around me, not sure if it's because:
1) I was in an M1 and they were M3/4/5's, or
2) because the new script set was trying to organise them for a response, or
3) they could have actually been firing at me but the bullets were just too small to see (can't zoom in close on a collosus anymore ) and the entry for my ship was not flashing in the sector map.

Next time I test, I will disable RRF, so that I can tell what we are actually doing in response to an attack on a sector.

Anyway, it was good fun. I will carry on testing this weekend, and hopefully be in a position to get working on this new version next week.

[DesertEagle]

Hi,
as a treat for our user community, I have recorded the first part of what will be a multi-part audioplay relating the background story of how the universe changed to what you will see in the next release of sector takeover. Part I, the Prologue, is 1.5 minutes. You can grab the mp3 here:
http://www.travisgood.com/X3/SectorTake ... kstory.mp3

Nirwin -- thanks for continuing to check out the script!!

Cheers,
DE

Reply to Voxol: Yes , I am doing all the voices, and score, and sound effects. Benefits of having a studio in your studio apartment.

[voxol]

Hi,
as a treat for our user community, I have recorded the first part of what will be a multi-part audioplay relating the background story of how the universe changed to what you will see in the next release of sector takeover. Part I, the Prologue, is 1.5 minutes.

Haha, is that you doing the voices? sounds quite professional, like a real audio book, but I don't exactly 'get it'... will have to wait for further installments no doubt. Lol.

Maybe you should have a few BBS missions where you get your race recognised by the others as a seperate nation, before you can start taking over sectors. All based on your backstory, of course.

[JJPHATX]

WOW, guys, WOW

this sounds incredible!

EXACTLY WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR IN X3.....i hope this comes out soon, so I can play it before i move...next friday.

[Joshua_Dahl]

Nice MP3. I always said the best stories are told with an english accent...

[JJPHATX]

any chance we can get an update...i'm dying to try this before i gotta move at the end of the week

[nirwin]

WOW, guys, WOW

this sounds incredible!

EXACTLY WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR IN X3.....i hope this comes out soon, so I can play it before i move...next friday.

Ummm, update huh? Friday you say? Not very likely I am afraid, you could however download the current version to start you on your road to victory, then install the new one when it's done.

The problem is we need to perform a lot more testing and possibly do a bit of fixing before we can call such a big re-write 'beta' quality, once we are confident that it is at the beta stage we will release it for community testing. In the long run we are just saving you frustration.

[Evans3rd]

I have been using the current version for a while now and it is nice. It adds a dimension to the game that I thought should have been included in the original release. The next version should be far better and I will check back frequently for its release.
Thanks guys.

[hobi]

Hi guys,
I installed XFP and the recommended script package recently and started freshly with the plot enabled. I discovered a maybe unwanted inconvenience/problem.

Spoiler

Show

At the end of the plot you are loosing all race rank and money. And just of course in the final battle it was time to pay the tax... So I lost all fabs despite the fact that I had 6m credits on my account

I found it incredibly hard to loose them completely and not beeing able to reclaim them. It would be nice if you could go to the next trading station and pay a fee (lets say 10x the tax) to get your stations back if you have lost them due to some mistake of bad luck.

Cheers,
Hobi

[nirwin]

Woohoo I am back from holiday... I also now have a phone line at home and have applied for broadband, I can feel home internet access coming my way shortly, which will really help me with working on this script.

Anyway hobi,

Firstly, I am sorry you lost your factories, hope you had a save you could go back to? If I were you, I would go back to a save before it happened, disable the tax system, then complete the plot, then re-enable it, instructions for doing that can be found on page 1 of this thread or in the readme.
That said however, I do not recall anything in the plot that took away my money, so as far as I am concerned, you should not have lost your factories, as long as you did indeed have plenty of money in your account.

I am going to have to go through the plot again now to test this possible bug. If confirmed I will do my best to find a fix. But our highest priority right now is getting the overhauled script DE did, tested, ready and out, so it may be a while.

One of the things on our to-do list is to offer the player options other than losing their factory if they can't pay the bill.

Thanks for the feedback.