AL Plugin : Heavy Assault Capture Technology 1.2b 28/4/06

[LV]

good feeback

I better not tell you that khaak m1+2's would take over 20 minutes now then

it's just a few number changes but i'd rather know opinions on those numbers before changing them.

[Hieronymos]

Seems realistic that boarding ops against larger military targets would take more time---desperate room by room fighting and all.

And mentioning that time for capture increases proportionally to the size/strength of target is something you'd DEFINITELY want to mention in some form in the script description and readme. Plus some hints about optimal success paramenters--like 'a Centaur with 325 marines will nail a superfreighter every time...but a Khaak M2 only 25% of the time.."

By the same token, such a brawl would probably involve some feedback--comms chatter and such--from the boarding party. Like "need reinforcements..enemy resistance too strong", or "all objectives captured..mopping up..", or "..enemy survivors barricaded in bridge. Activating plasma cutting torches..now..This will take a few minutes.."

Historically, the Napoleonic Wars were the last major war to witness large-scale boarding actions. While many of these were desperate actions fought by entangled capital ships during fleet engagements, there were perhaps more incidents of mainly French privateers--fast sloops, schooners and brigs for the most part--loaded to the gunwales with boarders, capturing much larger British East Indiamen through force of numbers.

BTW, it's assumed you've changed HAT to enable capture of ship-types by
only same or bigger ship-types (or was my experience with the Mammoth due to something else)?

LV, with some more development and playbalancing this script, along with your Race Response Fleets seems a good contender for Signed status as they're among the very best X3 scripts out there.

[Heretic666]

Write that where?

Sorry not too good with this

bump

Incase you didn't see it..

Edit LV

the script has been updated since you posted, pay attention

[LV]

Mirror

Updated to 1.2

Military transposrts have been removed (will be on next plugin run) as they were taking up too much cpu time looking for big ships so instead of having the check code run 10 times a min it run once every 30 mins now.

[Red Spot]

a suggestion LV ..

why not deactivate the turrets on the ship doing the capture (playerships)
so it wont chew up the target ..

and when an assault is taking place based on time start deactivating the targets turrets as a 'position secured' kinda thing .. making the target less capable of fighting the 'boarding-ship' ...
(also showing the player he's already partially succesfull and things are *looking* good)


G

[LV]

tempting but i've never touched turret code yet

[Red Spot]

as long as you dont want the turret to fire (better said; if you want to forbid an active turret to fire)
its pretty straightforward ..

*a* way of doing it could be;
make a script that has a loop in it ..
in this loop look for a local on the ship .. no local found -> quit script ..

now 'interrupt' the turret with the script after having set the local on the ship ..
remove the local or incase of NPC ships the ship goes OOS and the script be will terminated ..


an other way is to simply call the 'standby' script on the turret .. but this means you have to restart the turret-commands after a failed capture ...

(note; I advise you to quit any turret-command if a ship is captured as the NPCs use diff. commands for turrets as the player .. wich could cause some confusion ..)



G

[Hieronymos]

Started another game with HAT 1.2, plus other goodies like DDRS2.1d1, Yaki Armada, most of yr (LV's) and Cycrow's scripts, plus a few other scripts...Started by cheating me up a YT-1300 Sidewinder (the DDRS heavy fighter with ~750L cargo) with HAT, and a Dem Superfreighter crammed with marines.

Found that capping a TS 'consumes' ~40 marines, an M4 ~60, and an M3 ~100. Almost all HAT capps have >80% shields intact, but ~50% weapons. Capped around 35 pirates and smugglers so far. Most M3's with ~78% hull sell for 650-850k, considerably better than a non-HAT capp

Time from initiating boarding op to target going green varies from 5s-30s with a TS/TP, to 50s-90s with an M3. Have not yet calculated marines/time needed to capp an M6 or TL. Have already determined that an M6 (1,250 cargo) cannot hold marines sufficient for capping a TL. And only a supertuned and super manueverable M6 (using Cycrow's script) can evade a target M6's turret fire without its shields dropping too low..and auto-aborting the capp.

Which sucks IMO.

Thus, in 1.3 if you could eliminate the requirement for keeping your shields >80%, and/or lower by 50% the numbers of marines needed for each target ship type...I'd very much appreciate it.

Found no less than 17 Argon military transports mulling around in Light of Heart last night. There are lesser concentration of them on the Argon Main. About 66% of those I scanned contained marines; 33% were m/t or had E-cells as cargo. The script is now generating way too many transports...

[LV]

i've pmed you with some info on the first part of your post and with the new version manually running plugin.capbig.count.tp will nuke the lot if you cant wait for the plugin to do it

[fud]

Is there something I'm missing? Just "capped" a Condor, but it won't dock anywhere. SYs or eq docks. It gets close, then stops. "Location: Space || Orders: None"?

Any suggestions?


Edit:

Any suggestions?

I'm an idiot? Dunno why, the thing didn't dock the first 5 tries. Things seem to be sorted now. Please disregard.

[russbo]

Only 17? Well, I most definitely beat that. I've installed HAT 1.2 (or so it says), and in Paranid Prime and Kingdom End, I must have well over 200 ships bouncing around, with easily over forty of them being "military' transports. The game is unplayable.

As a huge fan of anything LV and Cycrow makes, I have most of their scipts installed. I'm going to disable the HAT one, and hope that all of these extra ships die off as I linger around Mysts of Elysium (nothing there, so I can actually fly a bit). I do hope that this gets worked out, as it most definitely is a killer idea.

[LV]

running plugin.capbig.count.tp will nuke all traders

to run it highlight the script and press r,enter,enter once

if not let me know asap

also i have a "diamond geezer" (imperial slave) giving me some feedback on capping times and MP amounts and such, if you have any requests for this script in relation to balance which does not make it any easier now is the time to post them

[russbo]

OH MY. They're like little bunnies...

Well, I had "uninstalled" the script using Cycrow's installer initially, then, after reading this thread again, discovered that you need to disable the script first to kill the little buggers off, so I turned it back on, and disabled it, and SETA'd for a while.

Hundreds. Almost twice what I had before. Paranid Prime is a mass of wiggling blue icons. I'm laughing so hard I have tears in my eyes.

Tried nuking via above instructions, to no avail. I can't kill them.

I have your script package and Cycrow's main script package, along with Community Extended Mod Pack and Aalaar's Salvage mod. Everything was playing nicely together until I installed HAT. I guess one of these scripts decided to not like HAT, and caused my ships to reproduce at an alarming rate.

Anyone have a nuclear weapons script?

[fud]

Weird. I've never noticed that.

[LV]

try this

http://www.angelfire.com/darkside/lord. ... at1.2b.spk

[russbo]

LV, thanks man, greatly appreciate your quick reply. But remember, you're dealing with the intellectually impaired here, so please be patient with me.

I tried the new spk file, installed via Cycrow's wonderful installer.

Entered Ship / Orders / Script Editor / highlighted the "cap.count" script, pressed R, then ENTER, then ENTER (and it returned me to script editor). I tried various combinations of saving, exiting, returning, etc.

Paranid Prime remains as infested as a New York City apartment. Nothing died. I tried taking screenshots, I'll have to look and see if I was successful. It's actually quite comical to look at.

In any event, I had one save game from three days ago (and millions of credits, sniff...) from the preinstall time, that did not have all the extra ships running around. I disabled and then removed the script, and have started playing the game from the 4/25 version. It's running smoothly now, as it should, ableit, from a much less "poorer" condition. Ah, that's life. Just when you start to get on top of things, boom...

One thing should be mentioned. I quite literally had hundreds, possibly two or three hundred ships roaming around Paranid Prime and Kingdom's End. The computer was most definitely bogged down, and moving the cursor required a bit of patience, but, Egosoft's program kept track of each and every one of those little creatures. Well, I guess it's a tribute to what this game can do, given the right horsepower.

I'm looking forward to future modifcations of this script; your programming skills are impressive, as is your dedication to this community.

[LV]

the 1.2b update will auto run the nuke ts command and it works everytime for me

send me a save if possible so i can get to the bottom of this

[russbo]

Well, I have got some serious issues going on here, after installing a version of the HAT. I reverted to an older save game from a few days ago (typical save file size 12 mb), and got rid of the save game files that were from the HAT scripted game (which, interestingly, were around 23 mb in size: you figure out how many extra ships this thing spawned). I tried nuking everything as per above instructions, and have installed, and subsequently removed, the latest HAT script.

Over the past day or so, I've noticed game instability that I never had before; freezes mainly. Can't let the game play at normal speed on its own for over an hour at a time, the game just freezes. Get corrupt save files also. I did not have this problem prior to the HAT install, which, I might add, was concurrent with Aalaar's pathfinding script. (I've removed both).

I am again noticing, that in the sectors that have shipyards, hundreds of ships continue to spawn.

I'm baffled. The game is a nightmare. Prior to the HAT and Aalaars script install, I was running most of LV's and Cycrow's scripts, along with the M7 Extended mod, all without any problem. The game ran flawlessly, on its own, on SETA, for days. Post HAT install, and I continue to have these overwhelming spawn problems. And, they are not all military ships.

Any suggestions? I really don't want to go back to playing Rainbow Six Lockdown...

Oh, BTW, my save game files are now about 19 mb in size, up from 12, just over the past two days. My "universe" is again growing out of control.

I'll try installing the 1.2b again, and let it run, and hopefully, it will destroy these extra ships before the game freezes again.

[LV]

for info

after quite a bit of testing and feedback the issue above is nothing to do with this script so there is no need to worry

[Tritous]

instability and dodgy saves...sounds like the save glitch that's been going around with V1.4. you may want to check the tech support forum.

I agree, there should be feedback of some sort going on, maybe after a minute or so a message saying "We're in, they are fighting back but we're pushing forward, see you on the bridge". then depending on numbers messages every minute or two like "we're getting slaughtered here, send reinforcements", or "get us out of here, we're getting swarmed", and if doing well the usual "Moving on their command deck now". "They are surrendering", etc.

As for turrets, I have my own suggestions and possible answers...

Firstly, Is it possible to set a turret to remove the target ship from it's list of targets? set it as friendly (as far as your turrets are concerned)? if so that should sort it, as your turrets will continue to work, but not on that ship. Otherwise the easiest way to disable a turret is to remove the gun from its slot, and put it back afterwards.

Also, when the ship is being taken, there should be the ability to sabotage. As the marines push through the ship they can do things like disable (disarm) the turrets, possibly disable the shields, all dependant on progress. If the progress is good they may be able to take 5% off the shield, or disactivate a couple of turrets. If it's not so good they may be despairate and try and eject cargo or shields into space maybe even short the weapons (drain a portion of the weapon energy) or sabotage the engines (remove engine tunings). Obviously for larger ships their ability to do that is more limited by huge equiptment, but it should be possible...just. Of course, if the attempt fails it shouldn't take long for the enemy to get things back up again.

basically if the attack is going well it will be temporary disarming but if it's going badly, scorched earth!