[AL Plugin] Litcube's Phanon Corporation V1.21

[Litcube]

-Update-

0.99b - No restart req:
- German now included. Thanks to Urschleim for the translation!
- Traders now employ fighter drones

[aerick911]

I wound up blowing up their station, and then I installed .99. I am not receiving any "update" mails from Phanon reporting its assetts. Is there a way I can reinit the script?

[Litcube]

You blew up the HQ?

Did you recieve a reward? An angry message from The Phanon?

[aerick911]

I did receive an angry message. Its been a few game days since.

[Litcube]

A few game days? Yikes.

Upgrading wouldn't have effected anything, as I've completely seperated the scripts on many different levels to avoid having to reinit on an upgrade.

Can you do me a favour?

There's a debug script called al.LitQB.PhanCorp.SpyReport (NOT the one with the .D at the end).

Can you run that (highlight it and press 'r', then ENTER) and tell me what the Next Generation Wait is?

[aerick911]

Hrmm, there is no "Next Generation Wait" value.

All values are basically 0 in the list however.

[Litcube]

0.991b - No restart req:
- Traders have increased priority for purchase


@aerick911

Sorry about that. Upgrade to version 0.991b and try again. Everything being zeros is expected thus far. I will be able to help you, once I get this info.

[Maddox65]

Thanks Litcube.

[Litcube]

@aerick911:

Uh.. What happened?

[Kadatherion]

Just passing by to say thanks. And then thanks again. And again.

Absolutely great script, working more than nicely for the moment, and it's even filling the gameplay hole left by the loss of LV's RRF with head-high. Wonderful way to keep the game interesting even later on apart from nuking the dumbest (and least reacting) space faring races to date since H.G. Wells' martians

Can grow even further, and I really hope it will, but it's already a must have for me.

One thing, for instance, I would love to see is a function to hire an AI mercenary strike team to assault some of their assets. Not probably really needed, since it should cost quite a lot to be balanced and if you have money for this then probably you have enough money to buy a good enough ship to get better results than any AI controlled strike force, but it would surely be another interesting way of interacting and experimenting with the Phanon, while sitting back and enjoying the fireworks.

And even better - but probably only for later generations since it would make your life REALLY hard rep wise - giving the same chance to Phanon too: when they are grown big enough they could have a (not so high as to happen easily) chance to spend their money to hire a RACE (maybe choosing the one you have the lower rep with, apart from pirates/yaki/xenon/khaak, or keeping out of the question races with which you have VERY high reputation as another incentive to be everyone's hero and be the tedious do-gooder) mercenary team to go after you instead of using their neutral ships.
When they hire "rogue" races (after all they are misteriously friendly with all of 'em, so why not?) it's not an issue, but what would the player do once they decide to hire, let's say, the Paranid? React in full force to defend his station thus risking - through rep loss - to anger the Paranid maybe even to the point of full open war (and all that could happen then if he has precious assets in their territory), or swallow the bad surprise and intensify his direct efforts against Phanon to avoid further diplomatic dangers?

Could give a bit of that promoted and surely missing -THINK- to the game.

[Litcube]

Just passing by to say thanks. And then thanks again. And again.

You're welcome!

One thing, for instance, I would love to see is a function to hire an AI mercenary strike team to assault some of their assets. Not probably really needed, since it should cost quite a lot to be balanced and if you have money for this then probably you have enough money to buy a good enough ship to get better results than any AI controlled strike force, but it would surely be another interesting way of interacting and experimenting with the Phanon, while sitting back and enjoying the fireworks.

I agree with your second to last point . To hire some ships to assault the Phanon, it's assumed that you'd have assets to assault them yourself. I think assaulting them yourself is kinda the fun in the whole thing, no? Maybe I'm wrong. Plus, I'm trying to stay away from using any command slots. This whole project was started in an attempt to utilize AL Plugin functionality in its purest intended form, or at least, what I interpreted that to mean.

And even better - but probably only for later generations since it would make your life REALLY hard rep wise - giving the same chance to Phanon too: when they are grown big enough they could have a (not so high as to happen easily) chance to spend their money to hire a RACE

Uh.. To maintain accessibility across multiple demographics, I have to keep this package from interfering with anything else run in the game; this would include bribing an entire race of creatures. So far, I've prided myself on keeping this thing relatively bug free, and far from that, non-game altering. I think this last suggestion of yours might cross that line.

I do plan on implementing more. After release, Targ suggested better Phanon sector protection in the form of M8s, which I did implement. I'm open to .. confined .. suggestions, for sure.

I have a feeling/suspicion that the Phanon are currently underperforming in terms of revenue gain, but I'm only at NovaTech right now.

I'd definitely like to hear how people's Phanon are progressing and what generation they're on.

[Kadatherion]

I see your point, and - in a sense - the idea of keeping everything simple and bug free was what made me think of something like that.
Right now I see only one real "issue" in how the plugin works: as everything else managed by the game AI, they are dumb. I'm myself still at the second generation, but from what I've seen 'till now, on the military side of the plugin everything that changes through generations is that they start with more defenses, shielding for the HQ, and they are faster at strenghtening themselves thanks to the increased trade bonus.

Problem is, the vanilla AI will always be underwhelming: unless you use scripts such as MARS et similia, you just need a ship capable of mounting front PPCs and a bit of fighter defenses on the turrets and hey presto, you can clean up even the most defended sector in solo. Even if later generations have such a strong HQ that you would need an entire fleet pounding at it, you can solo the active defenses and then patiently wear it down without any worry. Since the reward for defeating a Phanon generation is really attractive, in the end it all seems a bit too easy.

For other components of the game there were several plugins aimed at solving this very issue: the aforementioned MARS, or LV's Race Response Fleets for example. These plugins, however, directly act on the AI behaviour, thus they are very complex, or performance heavy, and susceptible to bugs or difficult cohabitation with other scripts. Scripting a reacting routine somewhat like RRF for your Phanon to make them more of a challenge in the direct confrontation could give life to all those dangers you would like to avoid (and I'm with you in this, I like things simple and clean )

By making them able to hire a race strike team against you, however, everything would simply lean on vanilla mechanics while touching nothing else: apart from a simple and hardly problematic script to spawn a strike team with one of your assets as target, then everything else is left on the rep system and how you, the player, decide to react. Destroying the Phanon would be as easy as before, but if in the meantime you were careless (or overconfident) and ended up falling in war with a race because of them, then without messing at all with complex AI mechanics or interfering with anything else the Phanon would have been able to actually REALLY hurt you.

I admit this would however be *definitely* game altering, as probably any real challenge would be, and not for everyone's taste, but couldn't this downside be offset by just making this "component" as optional, activable from the AL menu?




Of course, mine is just an idea thrown in the mix, the point is I have the impression what most is troubling this great script is exactly that game downside: once you have a couple of m7s the vanilla game is pretty much "won", nothing can endanger you anymore even if it throws at you more and bigger enemies depending on what you're flying and your combat rank: one m2 or ten really doesn't change anything when they are sitting ducks.
And this script, for its very nature, tends to cater at the late game trying to give you an active challenge when you have most likely reached that troublesome point...

[mr.WHO]

Hello can someone clear the things for me:

From what I read in description of this script, the subsidiaries will spawn one after another when you kill them, right?
I'm asking bacause in another forum I read that the subsidiaries will spawn when Tandi corp grow big enought to create them.

I'm far from killing the Tandi corp now, but I don't want to kill it just to see it to spawn same again (I prefer that next one would be stronger).

[Litcube]

once you have a couple of m7s the vanilla game is pretty much "won"

I know. I know exactly what you're talking about. It's not much of a threat past that, but I sincerely thought that generations past Nova really did offer up a defensive fight. Give it a shot and let me know.

Let me stew on this. I do plan to offer more challenge, I just don't see the Phanon bribing an entire species across vast regions of the Universe as a realistic option.

@Mr.Who:

Once Tandi is gone, it's gone forever*, Nova will spawn within 16 - 18 hours.

*Unless you re-start the plugin, of course.

[Kadatherion]

Nova is no more

And holy hell, I did give a quick peek at the scripts before, but didn't notice the reward gets an increasing multiplier by the generation... thats a LOT of money!

Maybe a bit too much... especially since now that I am pretty settled up (with the help of all this easy money) nothing really would stop me from blowing up the next generation as soon as it respawns... for even more money than before. And so on. Pretty fun endangering loophole I fear.

While I was clearing the sector defences I began wondering from what pool do the Phanon choose to "buy" their ships and if there's the chance to see them use some rare ones (not buyable ones etc). As soon as I got the reward, that made me think a much better balanced reward would actually be one of the aforementioned rare ships: you get the thanks message from the anonymous like now, but instead of giving you a buttload of money, it points you to a random sector where the wreck has been located (and spawned by the reward script).

Earlier generations would reward with smaller, less valuable ships (like the Notus Hauler for TandiTech, not really even a great M3+, but nice for the collectionists out there), while later ones could spawn an otherwise unobtainable Ozias for instance, up to the Boreas, ATF cap ships et similia. Money wise the reward would be much less unbalancing, but still at least as attractive as before: let's say it rewards you with a Sirokos, the ship value is around 30M if sold (less than 1/5 of what I got for defeating Nova), but it offers you another way of obtaining it instead of doing 50-70 boring missions for OTAS. And, unless you have endured the brain damaging Hub plot to later get the PHQ (which anyway if done without cheating would mean already being the economic, and thus militar, ruler of the universe), you still have a good enough reason to do them if you want more of the pretties.

Same goes for the Agamemnon, Hyperion, Boreas, ATF ships and the kind, giving you an alternative way to put your greedy hands on them without the need of waiting weeks to train marines with the much harder post-patch boarding mechanics.
The very last generation could reward you with a TL sporting a nice and shiny PHQ in its cargo hold, offering you a definitely non cheating, non easy and non fast (but luckily also non boring ) way to get it even if you hate the Hub plot and prefer a combat oriented game.

[Litcube]

Good ideas, all. I'm going to be changing the reward system tomorrow.


What did you use to take out the Nova?

[Catra]

do any of these guys have a "seek out and destroy enemies" routine?

[Kadatherion]

I was growing eager to see more action and get to the later generations, thus instead of roleplaying a bit waiting to build up a decent strike force for some serious fireworks, I just jumped in with a Thresher (the real I WIN button in this game imho): Nova hadn't that many hours to grow up really (probably around 12-16 as I rarely make extensive use of SETA at this stage of the game), and the two M1s, single M2 and TL were sitting ducks for my PPC equipped main guns. Turrets took easily care of the missiles thrown at me in the meanwhile (not many fighters around apart the bombers, many more M3/4s and maybe some fast M6s around since the beginning would make soloing the sector a lot harder since they would interfere with you sniping at the caps from the safe distance of 5-8 km), then all that was left was a bit of patience alternating PPC and torpedo fire to get the HQ shields down.


Cakewalk, really, that's why I felt quite guilty when I got that humongous reward
Actually guilty enough to decide to play with the reward script changing it from money to rare ships wrecks right after coming here to throw in the idea. It was pretty easy in the end, using apricotslice's scripts as a template, and a fun experiment: first time I felt like messing with the editor since I began playing X... about 5 years ago. This tells quite a lot about how much I like your script

[Litcube]

-Update-
1.0 - No restart req:
- Traders even more priority, especially at higher generations
- Traders capped, to allow more financial room for military
- New HQ defence script, hangared fighters will now attack on site
- Increased bomber launch frequency
- Greater range for sector guardians
- Rewards now significantly reduced from beta version, as it was unbalanced.
- No longer beta. Without a single bug complaint, I'll conisder this stable.


@ Catra:

Yes, as stated in OP. But I admit, it's probably not entirely clear. I'll fix that.

@ Kadatherion:

I have nerfed rewards to smaller monetary amounts. 10 mill per generation. That should cover the cost of a lost M7 or M2 here and there, as I do believe at higher generations (higher than Nova), that you'll need extra firepower.

I tried jumping into Nova territory and attacking the HQ myself flying an Agamemnon. I did run into a little bit of trouble, as my turrets barely took over the missile fire. I noticed that if there were more fighters incoming, it would have been more difficult. I've tweaked a script to simply launch all HQ fighters on sight at any enemy within range.

I'm considering making M7s the seek and destroy class and keeping M6s as sector guardians. I think it'd be a little tougher if you couldn't just sit in your Flakk laden M7 and one-punch ever fighter that flew towards you.

If you have 30 tomohawks, 20 M6s, 30 fighters, and 3 M2s lobbing plasma at you, I might hope one would require backup.

The goal here, of course, is that it's difficult enough for you to require heavy backup. I'd like to see the final fight require you to unleash hell with your fleet consisting of several carriers, destroyers, fighters, and corvettes. That's the goal. You're right, it's a late game mod, but it should be running with you all the way from your start in an M4 with 1,000 credits to your name.

[NeverSnake]

- New HQ defence script, hangared fighters will now attack on site

...

I've tweaked a script to simply launch all fighters on sight at the HQ.

Typo in the change log?