Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

Antigravitas posted:

Just take the flight feel from Elite and transplant it into X4. I doubt Elite would even miss the flight stuff, they certainly aren't doing anything interesting with it.

I don't think there's a space game I've played since 2015 where the thought "this would be :discourse: if they just stole elite's flight model" hasn't intruded at least once a play session, but the monkeys paw would be that they'd take elite's implementation of supercruise too

Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Jul 10, 2021

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
A fun thing I tripped across the other day was "buying a ship counts as boarding it" so if you take any of the "And...Action!" pirate missions that require boarding a specific type of ship, you can grab them and treat them as cash-back bonuses for just buying the ship in question


Relatedly, is there any sort of cap on "number of missions taken at the same time"? I've been hoarding ones with no time limit that fall into the category of "I'll probably take care of this, if I'm in the area, with the right stuff, eventually, probably" and hoping that doesn't bite me in the rear end later

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
So dumb question that I either "can't find a real answer to" or "can't find the right combination of things to look for to answer it":

I've been selling illegal goods, but since the buy requests tend to be small and I don't want my big haulers to be pulled over with 3,000 tons of illegal cargo as they drift slowly from station to station, I'd like to have a weed warehouse with a bunch of storage where my big haulers show up and dump all their poo poo at, and a bunch of small couriers with repeating orders and limited cargo space actually distribute it.

The problem is I can't for the life of me figure out how to do that without babysitting it.
- I can't set up a repeating order to "dump", just "buy" or "sell".
- I can't set up things in the logical view to simultaneously "buy everything that comes in" and "sell everything that comes in"; it seems to only allow for setting a balance point where "below this I'll buy, above it I'll sell".
- I can manually "sell" for 0cr to the station when it has no demand, but the repeating buy/sell orders have a minimum/cap so as soon as it hits the "sell" portion it bounces because 0cr is less than the minimum it's allowed to sell at.


Is there something buried in the UX that I haven't found that allows for this, or is this "esoteric weird approach the game wasn't built to handle" territory

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

FrickenMoron posted:

Where are you buying the illegal wares from? The way i'd try to handle it is as follows:

- Set up station with container and docks
- Make a buy order for illegal ware X, set buy price 1 below the min price you want to sell it for
- Place buy and sell amounts manually (max out buy and sell min sell amount to 1)
- Set up a repeat order to buy ware X at your illegal station of choice and sell it to your container dock.

Ideally now your repeat order will keep supplying the station up to the max ware amount you set while your station traders will actually sell them. I cant guarantee that this works, from what I've read repeat order trades want to make profit. This probably works much better with tatertrade.


This part right here is the issue I'm running into with it-- the UI absolutely refuses to allow the sell amount to be less than the buy amount. You can put sell > buy and drop whatever you have extra, but the game seems to think you're crazy if you want to do anything involving "importing a resource for anything that's not hoarding it or crafting with it". If this is the point where I need to start looking into mods to fix it then it is what it is, I just wanted to verify there wasn't something I was missing outside of "you can't do that, the closest you can get is setting up a factory and cooking the meth yourself".

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
after getting really tired of spreadsheet simulator with material supply chains I took a break for a bit to steal someone else's ships instead of making my own

and now I'm in a kuraokami doing donuts around a dead-in-the-water asgard waiting for my boarding crew to cut through the hull, a process that I have to assume involves convincing rabbits to chew through the hull, given how long it's taking

game is good

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
I've been doing that for the most part, it's just that this one time they've meandered into being one sector away from suiciding into a sector full of xenon and I don't want to lose the boarding crew

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
I know, I'm willing to take my lumps in waiting if it means I'm not taking rep hits from every individual killed turret, defense drone and fighter in the process (apparently killing the 200 crewmen on board doesn't matter)


e: there's probably some meta-commentary here about the value of life vs. items in the far future where the only economy that exists explicitly relies on people being at war and peacetime would cause the entire universe to slowly grind to a complete halt

Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Jul 27, 2021

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

chglcu hinted at it in their post, but in the bar where you save loadouts for the build, there's a die icon which randomizes the layout and adds the necessary connectors based on which blueprints you have (so if you're going for a particular style, avoid buying blueprints from races you don't want).

perusing old pages just for the sake of finding other guide dang it style things (like finding out I've been throwing money out the window by jumping straight to wharfs because everyone that said "wharfs make bank" said that before the prices NPCs pay you got nerfed in 4.0 :argh:) and I just wanted to say thanks for mentioning this because it explains something that bugged the absolute poo poo out of me-- I was throwing together the minimum requirements for Duke's quest into a box, hit the "randomize" a couple times, accepted and walked away, and came back several hours later asking "where the gently caress did all these terran connectors come from" and thought I had just hosed up massively placing things

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
I heard the trick of "manually make and sell ships for more money" which seems pretty ridiculous to me for several reasons but it's something I'll keep in my pocket in case I ever decide to play unmodded for ventures (which I probably won't because at this point "mods to fix the dumb stuff" seems to be the name of the game)

case in point, I got the initial vibe from the internet at large that "the xenon will literally wipe out the NPC races if the player doesn't start taking action to prevent it by midgame" and was spinning up containment fleets with any resources I had to spare

then the Split in the northeast cleared them out with absolutely no input from me, and the Paranid in the northwest nearly did the same, and after dropping sats all over the place I realized that the Yaki sectors were the only place where the xenon had a functional shipyard at the point in the game I was at

I'm getting the vibe that at some point their ability to exist for any period of time in an unmodded game got severely nerfed

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

FrickenMoron posted:

- Map can now remember last position when closed/reopened rather than always centering on your position.

oh thank god

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
For some wild and crazy reason I was under the impression that "Attack my Current Enemy" on ships you're not piloting would, you know, attack "whatever thing I've set that ship to attack". I was disabused of this notion when after many, many hours, I finally sat IS on a fleet of asgards attacking a station, accidentally targetted a defense drone, and had 30 plasma turrets pivot immediately and vaporize it.


Oops.

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
I actually don't but based on everything mentioned earlier ITT I feel like it'd be hard to start late and go backwards

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

Baba Oh Really posted:

I don't think I have had more than 20 mil in this game because I usually spend it on something dumb which takes too long for the AI to do something with and then I lose interest.

I scrounged together enough to start buying bottom of the barrel malicious compliance ships like "an osaka with 1 fixed gun and no shields" for the terrans and fulfilling the ship-request missions for 100mil with 50mil worth of ships

and then I started stealing the exact same ships since I knew they were crewed with 1 person apiece and using them to re-fulfill the same missions since their requirements never changed and hijacking ships didn't lose me enough rep to make it not worth it

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
Since you can only have one constructor building one thing at one time, most people prefer many small stations for the sake of not taking until the heat death of the universe to finish the project, although it does mean more shipping route finagling

also I think there were mining AI issues if a station is directing miners to acquire more than one raw resource of one type at a time? I don't remember if that got fixed in 4.10 or not

Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Dec 10, 2021

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
Omnibase building also has the prerequisite of knowing how all the supply lines fit, I think I still have one floating around that's got like 3 mismatched habitat modules because I had no clue about the food nuances and was just throwing things together by appearance and what blueprints I had happened to snag

faster to gently caress up and do it right the first time when you don't have to wait 12 hours to see "oh poo poo that doesn't do the thing I thought it did"

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

RBA Starblade posted:

Is there a way to get the station randomizer to not use Terran connectors? It's really annoying lol

"don't learn them in the first place" iirc

e: i started up the game for the first time since the 4.1 beta and the utter wall of "can't complete that order" was an aural delight

Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Dec 14, 2021

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

What I'd note regarding carriers is that you want to value efficiency over maximum performance because you're going to lose fighters pretty regularly. (Unless you have infinite money and don't care, ofc.)

I'd avoid using M-ships for the Attack role; they are too vulnerable to L Pulse and even L Plasma turrets. They work better for Defense or as a no-role reserve.

I like to stick to same-race ships for kitting out fleets, so for a Colossus I used Pulsar Vanguards as bombers - you can do 4x Mk1 Plasma Cannon and 2x Mk1 Torpedo and get a lot of them for pretty cheap (if you use light torpedoes.) In large numbers they're pretty good at laying down enough torpedoes to take out turret groups. Heavy torpedoes are more effective - but it costs too much to load up a bomber fleet with them, and a carrier can't really carry enough components to easily rearm a heavy torpedo bomber wing.

Choosing fighters is a little trickier. I went for having expendable fighters for Intercept & quantity and medium-quality heavy fighters for the attack role. I tried to make Elites work for the light fighter role but they just aren't as good. You have to use Mk2 weapons to keep a useful level of firepower which cuts into their efficiency, and they are actually pretty slow. I settled on using high-efficiency Nova Vanguards instead: mk1 pulse lasers, mk2-3 shield, mk1 engines. Novas are a good fit because they have a decent turn of speed for an Argon fighter, high maneuverability, and a strong hull compared to other cheap Argon options. If you're flush with cash you can upgrade to mk2 pulse lasers and mk2 engines without adding excessive expense. Thus you get fighters you can afford in decent numbers and that will be able to survive combat reasonably well between their hull and ability to dodge.

For an attack fighter I went for a heavier chassis, but you still gotta choose whether you're going for efficiency or not. Mk2 weapons are pretty expensive when you buy them in high numbers - an Eclipse Vanguard with mk3 shields and mk2 engines literally more than doubles in price if you go with Mk2 Bolters instead of Mk1. You're still going to be throwing these fighters into the worst of it, so the cost of that firepower stacks up pretty quick.

I played with fighters but ime "a supply ship with 100 defense drones set in escort mode" seems better and cheaper for nearly every situation I've used them in, especially when it comes to soaking fire from station defense drones

IS vs OOS obviously comes into play too, but when I was playing with it, OOS escort mode launched every defense drone at once instead of waiting for them to come out of a handful of small ship ports two at a time

I usually would end up setting the supply ship to "defend" the capship with real guns and it usually worked out alright

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

madfury posted:

Theoretically your scout could get hit by a volley of hot plasma, but the chances are quite remote.

Additionally:
- Make sure the response to attack is "flee" for that ship
- Complying or Escaping from police interdiction is an explicit choice to be made-- the former means it'll drop and destroy any "illegal" pickups, the latter means it'll run and keep the cargo (but you temporarily lose faction rep with the cops) (this is a moot point if you own the sector you're looting in)
- If you use anything beefier and mid-sized at any point, make sure the turrets are explicitly disabled
- There's value in clogging up their ship inventory with some cheap resource like energy cells-- if you're too close to a station that gets hacked by a pirate faction and your ship collects loot from it, you'll lose faction rep and probably instantly lose your ship to station turrets


e: also worth noting is that you can basically do this for "free" at any place where it's factions you're not hostile with vs. each other, but squatting on xen combat locations means if your scoutship has the bad luck to be the first thing a K or I sees when it drops in, it'll probably be vaporized and you'll get a "we're taking serious damage" warning popping up with a view of an already-destroyed wreck of a cockpit

Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Dec 23, 2021

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

OoohU posted:

Speaking of crew should I be hiring them in this ship? Or do they only really function in AI controlled vehicles?

Service crew do repairs over time, marines are used for boarding/fending off boarding (the latter of which I've never seen initiated by NPCs, ever)

most of the time "just the pilot" is fine, especially early game when you're scraping credits

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
Impossible to be rude to a boron imo


Unrelated: Is there any mod floating around to say "Hey dumbasses can you prioritize the capital ships over the defense drones tia"

Having plasma turrets set to capships seems to work most of the time, but it's always great to tab over to see a defense fleet chasing after a cloud of tiny fighters while they're getting their rear end kicked in by some Is skirting around the outside

I guess I could counter by making sure every defense point has perpetually stocked fighters 100% of the time but I can't automate that so

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

Have you read the X Encyclopedia? Because there's Keepers, Sohnen, The Ancients, and The Won, Outsiders and a bunch more things which I doubt we'll ever actually see - but there's plenty of existing lore reasons for doing anything they want, without handwaving (well, more than they already have).

EDIT: I even forgot the Wenendra and the Free State of Solara, which are supposedly co-existing in the present-time of the X4 games.

Yeah, I realize that the game would grind to an absolute halt if they were to even double the number of systems, but drat it I wish X4 was bigger than it is.

If you don't mind mods, there's several that extend the available sectors. My game is still perfectly functional with a bunch of extra systems, although not all of them are populated since I added them late-game and dropped admin buildings in most of the immediately-adjacent-to-civilized-space ones.


FrickenMoron posted:

I don't know how much the optimization helped with the latest patch. It previously the 100~ systems we have with both dlcs brought the game near it's breaking point.

tbh it's noticably better on my machine in most situations

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

i mean thats when you start asking questions like 'why is there a highway that goes entirely through HOP space that permits extremely easy access both in and out in the middle of a vicious ideological war'

To be fair, the highway technically predates the vicious ideological war, although with how frequently "just destroy the gate 4head" has been used as a tactic from an in-universe perspective you'd think someone would at least broach the subject

also this is one of the few games where the answer can unironically arguably be answered with "a capricious higher intelligence loving with everyone for shits and giggles, or that at least has ineffable motivations and reasoning for doing things so it looks like the same thing to an outside observer"

OwlFancier posted:

Frankly it's weird that apparently everyone wants to just sail through the tharka's cascade gate, really I think normal traffic should be far more reluctant to do that and also the xenon should be better at stopping them.

Also the xenon gate should not be located next to the highway but that's another argument.

the Xenon pay the highway maintenance taxes and use the highway all the time too, so fair's fair :colbert:

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

HiroProtagonist posted:

counterpoint: i've never seen anyone maintaining the highways anywhere and in fact you can shoot out the ad signs and nobody even replaces them.

WHAT ARE THE XENON PAYING FOR THEN? :tinfoil:

It's libertarian space hell future, the ads are the responsibility of whoever put them up in the first place, the xenon are the only ones with proper civic pride and sense of social responsibility to keep the roads themselves working

which is also why every faction views them as red and shoots them on sight :ussr:

(this is also why I parked a build ship in the terran XL dock and removed the pilot, so the terrans would stop sending out asgards and wiping the xenon completely off the map)

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

HiroProtagonist posted:

this is interesting and i'm only interested because what strange AI behavior makes this happen

or do you mean physically blocking the dock, because if so lol. especially because i've had that happen by accident when the eternal undocking AI bug shows up.


FrickenMoron posted:

Send in an XL ship to upgrade it will occupy the XL construction dock. If you remove the pilot then nobody can move it out of the way when a build request starts.

Basically this, the only "odd AI behavior" from doing it is it's too dumb to do anything to resolve it, even in terms of "making another dock" (they will try and buy them from you if you don't restrict your own docks though, but they'll do that anyways)

in theory you could probably do this to literally every large and small dock of every faction in the universe which might be entertaining in and of itself, but personally I only did it for the terran XL and two Free Families L docks, since the assholes keep letting the fallen families buy rattlesnakes that immediately aggro on anything in the sector

if FRF wants large ships they can buy them from my dock the next sector over :colbert:

e: in hindsight I've never actually checked, do NPC factions rebuild their own docks if they get down to 0, or do they just have what they start with and that's that?

Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 10:37 on Jan 3, 2022

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

FrickenMoron posted:

Get that billion by doing war fleet delivery missions. They're the most lucrative poo poo in th Game by miles.

"Used to be" for me, even with no Asgards available the Terran seem to have all converted all their quests to "Ship value plus 50%" and they keep asking me for like 5 frigates instead of the old multi-hundred-million credit fleets they used to buy (also they've got a bad habit of wanting outposts 2-3 xenon sectors deep instead of "just outside the front door" like they used to so gently caress em)

not that it matters, the empire has become self-sustaining and now that I'm not bogarting my shipyards with asgard orders all the "I choose chaos" questline resolutions have come to fruition, wharfs placed at key locations where factions buy ships, start shooting each other to pieces before they even clear the bay doors, and turn right back around to pay for repairs


I guess I should get around to doing the terraforming at some point


before I found this out I was sending out Sketchy Contractor specials for the terrans (one main gun, one turret, no shield, technically and by the book exactly what they asked for) all to one middle-of-nowhere sector in PAR/ZYA territory, after I found this out I took a cobra with 25 marines and started doing supercruise drops of

1. Move in reverse
2. Activate supercruise
3. Deactivate flight assist immediately so you're at just about 0 m/s
4. Aim for the underside of that Tokyo you just delivered and twiddle your thumbs for a bit while supercruise activates and "gets up to speed" while you're still stationary, literally a space burnout
5. Reactivate flight assist and immediately be moving at 5-6000m/s
6. Pause directly under the ship, set up the boarding and confirm
7. Unpause and laugh maniacally as you get out of range of both the ship and get "technically OOS" so the target ship's turrets can't properly handle the boarding pods
8. Wait awhile and steal a ship with little to no reputation consequences, because you didn't shoot out any surface installations or defense drones and "killing the single pilot" doesn't count as violating the space NAP, only destruction of property

Ended up with a dozen lovely tokyos/osakas, some of them even with the fighters still on board if the fighters got bored and re-docked before the boarding completed

It was hilarious while it lasted but now that I've got trade fleets and stations nearly everywhere, I can't do it as much because the ship will absolutely beeline for and try to shoot down any of your other nearby ships/stations in the waiting time between boarding and actually taking the ship over

Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Jan 6, 2022

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

HiroProtagonist posted:

Is there a way to order your ship's turrets to fire to disable? because its intensely annoying to have to set up order chains especially when the objective is a merchant that happily fucks along in travel drive

If you're piloting the ship in question, set your turrets to "shoot my target" and then make use of the combination of "pause the game" and "target the next surface target on my current target" buttons until you manage to find the engines.

If you're not piloting the ship, there's options under individual attacks (iirc) for "shoot to disable" and an option during boarding to shoot for the engines, neither seem to really work for poo poo because the AI is just north of "comatose behind the steering wheel" when it comes to most combat situations, basically relying on the turrets to shoot whatever they can reach while the driver bumblefucks into the nearest asteroid-- and that's when the target is stationary, interdicting anything out of supercruise is basically entirely reliant on swarming with fighters and hoping some of them getting lucky shots off

there's a mod for "tell the AI to prioritize certain subsystems in combat" but I haven't tried it so can't speak to if it improves the situation any

Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 08:59 on Jan 6, 2022

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

HiroProtagonist posted:

Thanks. I ended up trying the boarding option and the several dozen fighters blew it to hell anyway even though hull strength was set to strong. :v:

Oops!

"Strong" just means "the point at which your marine pods launch", it doesn't prevent anyone from being a dumbass and continuing to blow the ship up while you're actively trying to take it over

The most effective "real" boarding strat I've found is to have 1 decently-manuverable medium ship with plasma/thermal weapons and one large troop carrier with "more marines than your target has passengers" (I usually use Syns, but even some large miners/cargo ships could probably work too)

Set both of them to follow without attacking, then
- Hop in the medium ship and faceplant into your (large, I assume) target just to get in their physics area and stick to them if they are in/go to supercruise
- Shoot out the engines and turrets
- Leave the shields alone but use thermal weapons to damage hull without damaging shields (in case system security or another faction shows up to "help") while your troop carrier gets close-ish-- not necessary but getting hull down to 80-90 speeds up the hull cutting process a fair amount
- Teleport to your troop carrier, take control of it, set up the boarding with all the settings set up for "very strong" and default action "maintain distance"- when the NPCs are flying the troop carrier they'll take all goddamn day to position themselves just right but if you're driving all pods will immediately launch as long as you're within 2km of the target
- Either teleport back to your medium ship or use the troop carrier guns to keep squatting on the engines yourself, since they'll probably get repaired at least once while you're waiting for the hull cutting and takeover

Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Jan 6, 2022

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

Baba Oh Really posted:

I just want to say the last 10 or so pages in this thread have been enjoyable to read because the real pirates of this game are goons. Maybe I am too innocent to think of the skullduggery going on here to take advantage of the dumb AI.

to be fair a lot of this is less about "pirating" and more, uh, "borrowing from your allies without them getting too pissy about it"

I spent far longer than I should trying to figure out the best way to steal carbide/substrate from TER/PIO space stations with minimal destruction, the best solution I ended up coming up with was buying a bunch of large cargo ships, parking them a couple kilometers away, hacking the station to deactivate turrets/defenses/dump cargo and then using a small ship (filled with legit cargo, so it doesn't accidentally pick anything up and aggro the station early) to tractor beam thousands of tons of cargo out to the waiting vulture NPCs

OwlFancier posted:

I am not entirely sure that the entire X series hasn't been some sort of deep cover anticapitalist training tool because it really does lead you to be a complete rear end in a top hat in the name of making as much money as possible.

I mean I noted it before but the entire game is predicated on conflict, there's no "peacetime" economy, just "making warships", "hauling materials to make warships", and "hauling materials to make ships to haul materials to make warships"-- if all the factions end up in a state where they're not fighing anyone or anything the entire simulation would just putter to a complete standstill

Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Jan 6, 2022

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

Antigravitas posted:

I wish the Xenon in my games were that aggressive.

Though that may have been an artifact of the mining station bug. They just weren't producing and their ship yards were empty of resources.

Awhile back I found a mod that flips the AI on xenon mining ships to run away from combat instead of trying to attack-on-sight/retaliate against everyone; even that alone seemed to make a fair difference in their ability to actively build poo poo

(that was 4.00, I'm not sure if the recent patches have fixed that vanilla)

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

madfury posted:

I'm at the end of Split questline where I have to make a choise. I cant find a proper answer which one is the clear "chaos" path? Im doing a playthough where everyone should be at war to give Xenon better chances of expanding. Organic life is overrated. Anyone got suggestions which ending is more war oriented?

As far as I can tell the "most chaos" option is to back CUB in their rebellion but stop short of pushing them to the point of actually dominating FRF/ZYA, basically walking into a civil war and saying "you know what this civil war needs? more factions involved"

There's a CUB quest that literally has a description in part of "if you complete this, CUB demand for materials may drop off as the conflict resolves", I assume there's nothing past that quest-wise

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

RBA Starblade posted:

I was wondering about that too, the part where you pay them 400 mil right? I assumed what would happen is that FRF is fully replaced with CUB, which is in active war with ZYA (as opposed to FRF, which isn't, so their sectors are just a bunch of stations taking potshots lol). I think they'd need less materials because they'd gain all the stations again - for now they only control two sectors with the rest still FRF, and ZYA untouched by them (though the Argon frontier sectors have had enough and are taking advantage of the Xenon loving them up). It seems like a problem that will resolve itself as the Xenon eat Zyarth lmao. I'm still not actually at war with them, though I can't dock at their stations so some distant station building Terran missions up there are a pain in the rear end.

iirc it's the step (or two? I forget if there was a fleet delivery in there somewhere) after paying them 400 million-- CUB is elevated to the point of having a proper/respectable in-game presence fleet-wise, the next quest is delivering a bunch of missile/weapon components to CUB with the stated outcome of "Reward: Imperial Coup" and "This will end the Split Civil War and allow the remaining split factions to recover, after which their demand for resources could stagnate" which seems pretty...definitively non-chaotic to me

RBA Starblade posted:

Thinking about it it's weird how there are no opportunities to join the Argon/Split war. I guess technically they're not though it's repeatedly described as the Split raiding the Argon for slaves?

You can absolutely join the ARG/ZYA war on the ZYA side once you get your rep with them up, it is a little weird that I don't remember ever seeing the inverse as an option though

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

cheesetriangles posted:

They need to patch it so you can do SETA in your office.

It's a shame but the act that the desk seems to be "a ship" in every other respect means I'll accept not having to listen to "I'll wait for you to tell me to take off" all the goddamn time

also your office seems to have trophies based on plot progression/decisions made/possibly game starts completed that looks like it's got enough room to be account-wide, which is cool

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

Less Fat Luke posted:

What the hell is a welfare module?

Looks like a new subset of the PHQ research, the only one there right now is "Gambling Den"

e: Am I missing something or is there no way to salvage L and XL ships at the moment?

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
Did the quest, did the reasearch, the gambling module "increases the rate at which a station's workforce grows". I'm sure having my ship builders gambling 24/7 will have no detrimental effects on my shipbuilding efforts

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

Sedisp posted:

I kinda want to fly something other than a rattlesnake. How are the Syn or Osaka as player ships?

Syn's my personal favorite L but I think that's in part because they're the only ones that can reasonably exist in NPC hands for any period of time due to the grace of "a fuckton of L Plasma turrets set to fire on capships regardless of how poo poo the NPC driver is" so they're actually around to jump into during a battle, whereas the rattlesnakes just dissolve if anyone sneezes on them and all of the rest of the larges have uh, issues

if you want one as a daily driver make sure you throw on some good mods to take the rotation speed from "excrutiatingly slow" to merely "pretty bad"

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

RBA Starblade posted:

I had tried that setting once but they just never attempted to launch :shrug:

Still an improvement over eyeballing the boarding pods though lmao

It's "set both options to Very Strong and make sure you're flying, not an NPC"

either option set to anything less means they'll just patiently wait until you run down enough hull or kill enough turrets, respectively


also 5.00 beta 3 dropped

quote:

This week, we'd especially like to draw your attention to the new player office, which was introduced in the first 5.00 beta. We've received a lot of feedback on this over the past few weeks and, based on that feedback, we've taken it up a notch by allowing you to use SETA while sitting in your office or standing at a terminal.

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum

lagidnam posted:

60 Large plasma turrets solve a lot of problems I guess.

I've seen that a couple times in Hat Choice 1, yeah

who would win, a xenon war fleet or one (1) libertarian gas station

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
Yeah welcome mats are effective but strictly OOS, they get nervous when you're nearby and their aim goes to poo poo apparently

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
I don't know what I like better, the mental image of "overworked underpaid argon gas station attendent who is Fed Up With This poo poo flipping the turrets on again", or a redneck boron in overalls with a shotgun taking potshots at xenon off the porch

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Ursine Catastrophe
Nov 9, 2009

It's a lovely morning in the void and you are a horrible lady-in-waiting.



don't ask how i know

Dinosaur Gum
so I got to the point of "seeing the Erlking" and lol

The first thing I did when I dropped into the system was start running couriers for fast trade rep so I was at VIG +0 when they warned me off and then aggroed...with -19, which put them at "unfriendly but not hostile", and then boarding the ship didn't aggro the station or the ship itself so that was just...that.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply