X3 - Terran Conflict - Questions for Intermediates

[Spikey00]

I've had only a few major problems with the AI (I now have a few M3 fighters), and even so, some are avoidable.  The game itself is quite a masterful, complexed sandbox that I still find enjoyable after being destroyed nearly a hundred times--if you have an interest in it, it's only $20 on Steam, and the TAGES DRM was removed in the latest patch.

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Say, why can't I see the turret missile defense for my wingmen?  Do they need a module for it, and does the turret do anything [useful] when set in "none" mode?



EDIT:  Where can astronauts be 'sold'?

[eRe4s3r]

If you have mars defense system installed you just need the mars package and set the turrets to missile/defense (it will still shoot at stuff, but when missiles are there it'll shoot at those with priority)

But the game does have a lot other problems i stopped at 120.000.000 credits in a argon battlecruiser fully equipped with a huge complex, at that point you have to fight with the fleet ai which is atrocious (part of the reason you as player always win is that the ai uses the same ai your wingmen use) . which is fine in dogfights as long as you are the one dogfighting, but if you sit in a battlecruiser its quite depressing seeing how good fighters aren't exactly cheap...

[Lancefighter]

sorry was a tad late answering, lets get to it:

Guns - eh Full rack of PRG is usually the idea. If you are rolling in enough money by now, and the ships can fit them, pulsed beam emitters are awesome for ai - virtually no flight time on the projectile means it hits rather often. If your computer is having staggering issues in combat (slideshow stuff) then its performance degrades however.

Factories - If nobody is buying a ware, nobody buys it.. end of :p Equipment docks act as a 'sink' for weapons, shields, and missiles however - you can always SELL any type of those to an equipment dock, where it dissapears forever.

Jumpdrives - its a ship extension sold at home of light (terracorp, again), or in .. legends home (otas), or at.. One of those boron systems in the south east (another hq building). Terrans sell them, but only after you finish their plot.
It jumps you to any *gate* that you have enough e-cells to get to, cost being 5/sector for fighter, 10/sector for freighter(i think) and 20/sector anything bigger. Any units following you with a jumpdrive and enough e-cells will make the jump as well. Yay micromanagment.

'help' I believe if you convo a carrier of some sort or other military craft and ask for help *and if they have no other orders* they might help you. Maybe.
I'm usually too busy blowing stuff up..

convoy escorts - ... uh. Pelican is a TM, right? It has hangars.. If a unit is set to protect, it will launch and pewpew stuff that attacks the leader. I would .. er ... Ignore this option - generally out of sector fighting gets your ships killed.

Complex construction.. heh. If you have two factories, you can connect them with a 3rd factory 'complex construction kit'. Basically you build it the same way, but you select your two factories and then place a 'hub', where stuff docks at. They essentially become the same factory with multiple production lines..

Wingmen - The best stance for AI wingmen is 'dock at nearest station'. (maybe youve noticed,..) If Protect me only works AFTER you get HIT. Otherwise, attack my target might work better. Protect me works once you have a carrier of some sort that is both incredibly slow and crappy at dodging shots..

@velox: Yeah, its an awesome game.. If you get past the fact that the autopilot is suicidal... *sigh* its as good as can be expected really. Anything better and it becomed hellova cpu drag.. More than it already is..

Missile defense? huh? oh.. Believe it or not, usually the focus of a hostile attack, even with multiple ships, is you. You are the aggressor, and they focus on you.. Your wingmen usually are busy shooting stuff and colliding with stations to be annoying really. Anyway - The hostiles are shooting you, not your wingmen. So thye dont have a problem with missiles.. And when the turret is set to 'none', that literally means 'sit there uselessly'.  You need fight 1&2 for missile defense i believe

Astronauts.. heh. Bring them to your local pirate station. GO to your command console, under piracy? and select enslave passengers or something. THen sell them as slaves.

MARS is nice and all, and I quite swear by it, but its annoying as hell when your trying to pod-board hostile ships. missiles are COMPLETELY USELESS against a target with mars+goblins. Its annoying as hell. Thus, I had to turn it off for the ai.. poor things...

Yeah, a lot of the game is balanced around the stage from fighter -> m7. Largely a player in an m7 is 'the endgame', as .. well, strafe... *sigh* Unfortunately, the strafe drive is also the only thing that lets the player compete beyond his level - I once, mistakenly, let the AI have beam weapons. Instant-hit, beam weapons. Thus, ... ... ... strafe drive was useless suddenly. So.. well.. it wasnt worth it. It was balanced so that fighters could still work fine..ish, but capship engagements were quite literally 'who had the bigger stick'.... Generally not fun. Ever since then, I have campaigned against beam weapons in any form in the AI's hands...
Anyway, minor tangent.

Its an awesome game, sure its got a flaw or 5, but the scripting and modding team really make up for it. <3 them

[Spikey00]

Is that all you can do with captured astronauts?  I heard that you could turn them into some other stations, though that may have been a mod/etc.

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Wingmen just became a nightmare to handle recently--they are frequently destroyed by enemies in stupid ways--all five of them with 75MJ shields/many weapons... 

...why do some of my ships keep undocking from structures automatically?  Is it the station that is kicking them off, or...

[Lancefighter]

eh i think so? I usually leave them alone...
I know there aer a number of stations that buy slaves, but .. you cant really do anything else than sell them

YOu finally noticed? :p wingmen are great and all.. eh.. not really.

As for undocking - if the ship has no order and is docked, the station will decide it wants the docking room for an npc ship, and kick you out

[Spikey00]

Uh... today was quite interesting.  Finally have a simple complex, totaling my structure count to five (AMAZING).

Q jumped in to Black Hole Sun, I had to go and seek revenge for one of my freighters in a slight-cheating way, docking my fighter escorts, knowing that an invincible Argon Elite following me from the main mission would become very nice bait.  When the two magnets joined up, I launched my escort and destroyed it happily (after reloading once because of the blast radius).

Then at Omnicon Lyrae, a carrier appeared and the military/Xenon were having fun, while I looted/took the last shot at the carrier and earned only 20,000 (does this increase?) for it.  Now I am essentially ready with corvette/frigate weapons from the battle, but the fourty-some Xenon fighters began to come from a gate, so I'll have to deal/wait that one out tomorrow.


Aside from that, you gain bounty money when your own ships destroy enemy objects, right?  I don't hear the usual harassment speaker informing me that I have earned X credits when they do so, nor do I see the notification of credits at the bottom of the screen (which I rarely see even if I destroy enemies). 

Another issue is that I still have not found a vendor of jump drives--where is one location roughly on the map? 

[Lancefighter]

Shooting carriers? more money? Eh no. Not unless its a mission spawned target..

Same goes for getting money off them - you have a police license that gives you money, but your wingmen dont.. unless its a mission target.


Jump drives are at..
west side of map
west-middle
north (heh good luck)
and south-east

If the boron like you, head far east from OL, the south
If the argon like you, head west from OL until you hit argon space again.. then look around
If the terrans.. heh who am i kidding

[Spikey00]

Looks like one of my Novas have glitched--listed on the map list and I can target the "vacuum" where it apparently is, but no ship is there.  I can apparently do a freight transfer, so I guess I'll need to salvage what I can from it since I can't reload backward.  Attempting to control the ship results in the game crashing.

Thanks again for the help and info, Lance.

[Lancefighter]

Looks like one of my Novas have glitched--listed on the map list and I can target the "vacuum" where it apparently is, but no ship is there.  I can apparently do a freight transfer, so I guess I'll need to salvage what I can from it since I can't reload backward.  Attempting to control the ship results in the game crashing.

Thanks again for the help and info, Lance.

thats odd - can you order it to dock up? can you shoot it? >.>
Jump in and out of system usually fixes stuff like that (ships dont exist in the same sense out of system..)

And yeah its no problem, helping get others addicted to one of the more awesome games out there is something I'm happy to do 

[Spikey00]

Jumping out of the system did the trick (but now I'm out of 25MJ shields because of another capped L), while my "Hired Argon Mammoth was destroyed by Argon Shipyard".  Ironic.

=\

I'll be back if I have any more questions--for now, it seems I'm sustaining the interest.  Having my wingmen "attack closest target/targetted" works far better than "protect me".

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I was also expecting enemy ships to always focus on the player ship, but it usually isn't the case--which is why I've stuck to my M4 Elite in opposed to switching to an M3.  Seems that the enemy AI doesn't attack unless aggro'd if they already have a target.

[Spikey00]

Would you have tips on avoiding the "wingmen crashing into gates" syndrome, other than having less of them?  Is there a formation that eliminates this behavior, or am I doomed if I have seven wingmen or more?

Consequently, my wingmen are exhibiting the "appear in the middle of the map but not exist"; I can assume this is another consequence of having 'many' escorts...


Is there anything I can do?

[Lancefighter]

at your point, start selling them and pick yourself up a carrier of some sort. Early game I like to.. acquire...  a panther for this purpose - 32 docking ports means a whole lot of hurt can be placed exactly where you want it. Of course.. yarr micromanaged crap that comes with vanilla commands \o/

(i recommend CODEA. Seriously... Or, i mean, if you want to 'stay pure' or 'stick it to the man(egosoft)', i suppose that is ok. I still recommend CODEA. its a tad annoying to figure out at first, but it makes for a hell of a lightshow.. most of the time :p Of course, there is the minor problem that fighters will engage any hostile within range of the Carrier, but I mean.. Eh your the one whos supposed to have a huge fighter escort.. I'm sure you can spare a few to pewpew everything nearby. Just pretend you left your carrier on FRD...)

Or, i guess vanilla wing commands will work, they have certainly come a far way from the wingmen of x2/3r. Still a tad micro-yy...

[Spikey00]

I believe I have found the cause for the more-than-average stupidity of my wingmen:  since I have recently been using "Attack Target of Player" instead of "Protect the Player", I incidentally switched back to it; everything seems much better with their navigation.

I don't see a reason why the unit behavior would be different since they appear to be in a similar mindset (following the player until X happens), but I'm glad gate humping isn't an issue.  Though of course I won't be using it when actual combat happens, and it's less of a convenience to macro them back into a more suitable stance in contrast with having to reload a save.

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I've browsed through some mods over at Egosoft, and I've found what you mentioned, and some other mods (race enhancement/etc., patrol optimization for NPCs etc.), so I thank you for your call, as I will now obtain even more profitsss.

[Lancefighter]

Just.. be careful!
Some things were meant to be played out as egosoft made them, and really I would recommend not installing any major mods until you start a new game!

And.. for the record: A 'mod' involves the use of packed game files (a cat/dat pair... its always a pair) that modify a ship or other game asset. Because of how the engine handles things, there can be some .. minor problems .. in changed assets after a save/load (a changed ship will only affect newly spawned ships in some cases. Its best not to install these without a new game)

A 'script' will have .xml or .pck, or .. some others, but can only change behaviors.. it will never add a new ship or change an old ship, and as such is generally compatible with any save.


Again! Be careful, there are a good deal of scripts or mods out there that will ruin the game for you! (I lost myself in x2 this way.. I learned how to open the script editor and do as i wish.. I lost all will to play when I could just 'write' myself whatever i wanted.) As a word of advice, Never learn how to write your own scripts. Never.

[Spikey00]

Thanks for the advice and information on scripts/mods--I usually refuse to cheat in most games, since it ruins the fun, but some of the scripts sound intriguing (until Xenon/Khakk are everywhere) enough.

I'm trying to load a engine + trails mod, but I have no clue where one would load a script in the "Thereshallbewings" menu.  How would you load a script from this menu (since I couldn't find a elaborated guide)?

Lastly, why is it, on my Centaur, the second weapon bank is disabled/greyed?  All the seven others are operational except for that one.