[SCRIPT] NPC Bailing Addon v1.7.8 [2010-09-21]

[djrygar]

Currently, though, as I said it's very difficult to get big/huge ship bailing set up well. Always seems to be lots or none.

what about this

a self destruction mechanism;

but:
for example you could transfer CODEA mechanic/technician to disarm?

of course this is too easy.
so there must be something additional. Kind of riddle, I don't know, mini-game that requires you to solve more or less simple riddle (but time is ticking)

now. How to prevent player from cheating (reloading)
only reliable way to prevent that is to defer consequences in time.

It could be simple 'choose colour of the cable to cut' (maybe made trough ECS menu - you are talking to your technician) or something more fancy. And you don;t know if you did well for ... short or maybe long time But this would probably end with player installing some p2p and transfering ship straight to shipyard
well...I don't know yet

[Wintersdark]

Ewww. God no. No minigames please

Minigames are immensely immersion-breaking for me, and the whole personel management thing drives me batty.

These sorts of "balancing measures" never really work out like that. Minigames, you're either very good at(or become very good at) in which case they add no difficulty only annoyance, or you always struggle with them in which case they just make things needlessly difficult (and also annoying).

Every game with these "minigames" to accomplish actions always ends up that way.

Also, this forces ship capturing/salvage/recovering into being a direct player action and not possible OOS; or creates a wierd situation wherein you've got to jump though additional hoops if you are IS.


A option (which can be disabled!) that I'd like to see is a way to have derelict ships decay. Say, have all ships without pilots that are also below, say, 25% hull continue to loose hull points (a percentage of the total amount) after bailing. This would negate the need for (though you could still use) NPC salvagers, ensuring that the universe doesn't fill up with derelicts. This could be written off as a self destruct mechanism, as you note, or simply the effects of catastrophic battle damage and no on-board crew to repair/keep the ship together.

I'm not concerned with "too easy". The "easy" factor is really going to be set in the likelyhood of big ships bailing in the first place. The trick is to get lower percentages to actually work well, so huge ships are very unlikely to bail *but* will occasionally bail with sufficient hull points remaining to survive incoming fire.

[RyuKazuha]

If Minigames, only optional.


With the right bailing values set up and NPC salvagers, the problem of the universe filling up with garbage is just not really that big.

As für the difficulty: It's the players choice. I think just flying to an claiming a big ship is way to easy, so I restrain myself from diong so and instead force me to capture any bailed boardable ship with marines.

[djrygar]

well

other balancing factors:

1. include salvagers, and make their number dependent of bail rate

2. claiming ship could cause huge drop in notoriety (as it is equal to stealing ship)

4, self destruction time (could also be dependent of bail rate)

[Wintersdark]

well

other balancing factors:

1. include salvagers, and make their number dependent of bail rate

2. claiming ship could cause huge drop in notoriety (as it is equal to stealing ship)

4, self destruction time (could also be dependent of bail rate)

None of which should be part of the plugin, or should be optional.

It doesn't need balancing factors hardcoded - let players decide how they want their game to run.

I personally see no problem with salvage as it is. The only reason I run NPC salvagers is to provide a bit of my own "reality": If I want to fly about and salvage wrecked craft, certainly others do as well and create some competition.

As soon as you start hardcoding "balance" features, you wreck the plugin for everyone who disagrees with your notion of balance - and that'll be nearly everyone. It'll still be too easy for some, and too hard (or just annoying) for others. Far better to leave them either as options, or as a separate plugin entirely.

[djrygar]

where did I wrote about hardcoding?:) "dependent" does not mean 'hardcoded'

[ThisIsHarsh]

I also agree that a minigame would spoil the immersion a bit. It's also a lot of work when there is still plenty to do.

I like Wintersdark's idea about a hull degeneration option. I want to include this feature, though not sure if it will make next release. It could be used to replace the already existing self-destruct timeout with something more realistic. Yeah, I really like this idea.

Salvagers can already be added via a separate plugin.

But the other suggestions djrygar makes, notoriety drop option and make the self-destruct timeout period optional, I will definitely consider.

Of course, any additional features/change in logic will be entirely optional.


At the moment, I'm rewriting a large part of my generic JSON driven menu code, to make use of the X3TC 2.5 menu commands, which I've neglected until now. Once finished, I'll use it to add the requested additional options to this plugin.

[Vayde]

This script is always the first one I install in any new game and I'm glad its getting an update. If I could make a suggestion or in my case a blatant beg

Try to get a balance where big not huge ship bailing is concerned. In all of my games I set big ship bailing to 30%. Any higher and I end up with 10-15 m6's after the 1st day. Not really realistic imo. At 30% I come across maybe 1 every other game day with a hull at about 8-14% so it's a massive investment in time and money to get it on it's feet so to speak.

So, when checking if a big ship bails is it pos to turn off collisions for a few secs so the remaining shots/missiles do not destroy it? That way even though they would still be rare finds they would at least have more hull left?

[Wintersdark]

Yeah, that's what I was getting at earlier. It's extremely difficult to get a good setup where you get some derelicts, but not many. The "Lots or none" issue, as it were.

It's compounded greatly, I think, by having big and huge ships share a percentage, so with that being broken up into two settings things should be a fair bit easier to get a nice balance.

[Jack08]

So, when checking if a big ship bails is it pos to turn off collisions for a few secs so the remaining shots/missiles do not destroy it? That way even though they would still be rare finds they would at least have more hull left?

Disabling collisions will only save it from laser fire, Missiles will still hit the ship (in sector, not sure about OOS)

[ThisIsHarsh]

I actually quite like the fact that stray lasers can blow up the ship. It means the pilot bailed precisely at the optimum moment, from his point of view at least.

Of course, stray lasers don't exist OOS. Missiles do however, though I'm not sure how they work, I have a feeling they are insta-hit when OOS, so impossible to protect against.

In future versions I'll perhaps make the bail factors a bit more configureable, so you could e.g. have less ships bailing but with more hull, or more ships bailing with less hull, etc. Currently the chance of bailing and the hull damage required are interconnected. The current formula works quite well - recieved very few complaints - but if something can be made configurable, why not do it I suppose.

[djrygar]

Of course, stray lasers don't exist OOS. Missiles do however, though I'm not sure how they work, I have a feeling they are insta-hit when OOS, so impossible to protect against.

not only insta hit, but IIRC they have infinite range

[Wintersdark]

I actually quite like the fact that stray lasers can blow up the ship. It means the pilot bailed precisely at the optimum moment, from his point of view at least.

I like this from a gameplay perspective as well. Stray shots should be able to. My only issue is that it's very difficult to configure ships to rarely bail; but actually leave some wrecks behind. When set to rarely bail, when they do, there's very little hull left so the ship is practically always destroyed - resulting in an effective 0 bail rate.

Bailing less often with slightly higher hull remaining would certainly help with that. Or, of course, hull mods fix it too - bailing at the same percentage then results in a larger amount of actual hull remaining. Of course, that can swing the problem back to "Too many bailed ships left." Being able to set them independantly would make integrating this mod with others that affect ship hull amounts a lot simpler too.

Yeah, I'd have to vote for independant bail rate/hull remaining controls, and ideally a bailed ship decay rate setting for my most desired new features

[Gravitycontrol]

well i just tried this out and is it normal that sometimes the military turns hostile to you when you claim a ahip? ^^

[Wintersdark]

well i just tried this out and is it normal that sometimes the military turns hostile to you when you claim a ahip? ^^

No.

[Gravitycontrol]

interesting ^^ i just tried to claim a ts in a boron sector and the military decided to shoot me to space dust xD

[Wintersdark]

interesting ^^ i just tried to claim a ts in a boron sector and the military decided to shoot me to space dust xD

maybe the TS had illegal cargo?

[Gravitycontrol]

according to my freight scanner no ^^

[Varek Raith]

according to my freight scanner no ^^

Did you have the proper police license do perform a freight scan?

[Gravitycontrol]

they turned enemy after i took it over. I was running the freight scan after i reloaded so this cant be the reason. Maybe its an incompability with IR/SRM/CMOD?