[WIP] X Rebirth: The New Frontier

[Hector0x]

Getting rid of spawns does sound incredibly good and like the logical step to a new X-perience.
Sadly i see you hitting two major walls.
1. There will likely always be one faction that snowballs like crazy and roflstomps the poor guys in no time - preventing interesting long term gameplay.
2. Production chains are linear from basic resources to highend ship parts. Cut them anywhere and they break as a whole. Especially the player will be able to cheese the system by attacking the weak spots.

If there was an intelligent strategic ai which could adapt to those things and plan ahead it could work. I don't know what you are capable of coding into in this regard, but i doubt it would be enough
The factions would need to know which ship types they currently benefit the most of building. Where to conquer the most needed resources, And they'd need to be smart enough not to send unprotected harvesters into their death over and over again. In short: Adapting to changing parameters. Can you really create something like this too?
It seems to be very ambitious and hard to tweak. For a project like this XR is lacking groundworks entirely. You'd have to do it all by yourself.
How about these suggestions for the two problems above.

1. Temporary coalitions which cut down factions that grow out of control. Creating a natural balance that prevents blobbing MOST of the time. This means even more features/code/work/time for you, but i think you will definitely need some sort of a control tool like this.
2. Timer based building. At the very least for civilian ships and stations crucial to the economy. Shipparts merely boost those timers. It prevents a total collapse. For example if most mining ships are down.
If the lack of just one ore two commodities can prevent ai shipbuilding entirely it will most likely not work. The gameworld is too small for this.
But its of course all just my humble opinion based on the concepts you shared with us. For real now: good luck

[tomchk]

Interesting points, but I believe these guys can at least make things much more realistic. It definitely won't be easy! I hope your points help the process.

[ezra-r]

I don't see problems with snowballing you can always program when a faction stops trying to grow too much.

The same with anihilated factions, you can always program special jobs for them where they can start rebuilding slowly from scratch again and you can start seeing them show up in small numbers in small ships and from there they are on their own again. edit: For instance, Xenon are anihilated, when game detects that it will spawn two small miner and ships and a small base in a remote isolated location and from there they have to earn their way up again (no more spawns until completely anihilated again).

In fact, the whole "jobs" thing could be perfect if Egosoft added needed conditions so they don't become periodically mindless.

Like tomchk says, not easy but these guys know their stuff

[Alandauron]

I like it, and I think this will be what I try to build my mods off of. I thought about CWIR, but I'm not sure that has me as interested as this concept does.

MM are all your mods going to be built into this? Namely Fleet Supported Boarding & Carriers

In regards to the issue that people are worried about, why not just code in that when a faction is destroyed the game checks for the most powerful(most ships and stations) faction and splinters a portion of that faction?

X Faction has double the stations and ships of everything else so 2 stations and the ships currently planning to trade with those stations breaks away and forms Y faction, but it is only triggered when Z faction is eliminated. They can either take a significant amount of funding away from the faction they split from or can be entered into an agreement with another faction that has the funds to support them.

Not sure how viable this is since I'm just getting started, but based off other things you guys have done it sounds like it would be doable.

My only concern personally is with the wallets, there definitely needs to be a soft cap to spending to prevent maintaining an empty wallet at all times which could bring all production and trade to a halt if a few ships with big scores are all taken at once. Would be easy for the player to manipulate the balance in this manner.

Suggestion: Soft cap of a pretty high amount that prevents the construction of stations; Soft cap of a high amount that prevents the construction of L and XL ships; Soft cap of a medium amount that prevents new trades from being scheduled.

i.e. >100,000,000 needed to allow new station; >50,000,000 needed to allow new L and XL; >10,000,000 needed to schedule new trade. This is once again without looking at what was done in CWIR and just going off the stated intentions to "create" a wallet which tells me the AI currently pulls money out of thin air.

Just some thoughts for consideration! I can't wait for the end result and hope that I can peek at the code as things are going so I can make my changes to certain parts.

[Alandauron]

Just wanted to take a moment to jot down some rough ideas for consideration in this mod:

• Method to open/close gates
• Pirate/Sabotage missions for red stations
• Emergency Fund for AI factions
• Rushed Production
• Investing System for player

And then a list of things I want to add to whatever the final product ends up as:

• Boarding requires multiple Marine Officers for larger ships/stations
• CVs and Stations require multiple Engineers
• Subordinate Engineers(Like Marines)
• Marine Officers and Marines needed for boarding defense
• Modifying of defense values and AI for boarding

Concepts for Consideration in detail:
Method to Open/Close Gates: I'm not sure if this is something that has already been done by somebody but I haven't seen any indication that it has. Essentially this would be a strategic option to either allow yourself to build up forces for an assault or to make the path to your main establishment harder to get to for a time. In the vanilla campaign there are gates that you can't pass through until an event happens, it would be great to be able to replicate this but also allow a method to close the gates as well. Options:

• Mission chain that allows a temporary disruption in gate travel
• Mission chain that disables gate travel until another mission chain re-opens it
• Attach a dock to the gates and create a new item required to power gate, it will close without the power source

While I like the idea of the last one I feel it would be the hardest to balance properly and could lead to trouble with keeping the gates open when you need them. AI might be able to be modified to have the other factions working to either supply or disrupt supply to the gates but that would be some extensive change I'm sure.

In regards to the mission chain I feel it would be fairly easy to have the AI simulate this by creating a mission for the player to destroy/kill a ship that is working to close/open one of the gates(with a timer). The player would have to monitor the gates in order to make sure they were open or closed based on their preference, otherwise if it's a gate they don't care about the AI would be free to fight among themselves to control the status of the gate.


Pirate/Sabotage Missions for Enemy Stations: I saw a mod for this to a degree, though it read like it allowed all missions for enemy stations. I would like to see it where if the station has become an enemy that the only missions that become available are the missions to attack Civilian Vehicles, Weaken Station Defenses, etc. This may be something that already exists in CWIR, haven't played it yet, but I just wanted to make sure the concept was mentioned.

I know many things are being carried over from CWIR so if this was already in and was one of the things being carried over then awesome!


Emergency Funds for AI Factions: This would be a set amount of money that can be stored separately from the "main wallet" it isn't automatically created and the amount stored within can vary depending on the size and power of the faction. The Emergency Fund(EF) would be something that the AI adds to only when they reach certain milestones in their productivity(i.e. faction builds 4th station, + 5mil to Emergency Fund(EF); - 5mil from Wallet).

Essentially the Emergency Fund(EF) would be used either when the faction is being threatened or when they are nearly wiped out, the determination could be different depending on the faction(i.e. HoA doesn't use unless it loses all but 1 station; PMC uses after losing first station; etc.). The factions could also use the funds differently depending on their individual action preference(i.e. HoA stores EF on Construction Vessel and stores vessel in empty space then when activated builds near a concentration of asteroids to mine).


Rushed Production: This would be something that could be used alongside the EF or independently once again depending on faction preference. Rushed Production could use the same resources and just cost 10x, could use double resources, or could just result in an inferior product(half shield and hull strength, etc.). Rushed Production would only be used in cases of emergency whether simply the station being attacked or the faction being nearly destroyed.


Investing System for Player: I noticed this was something mentioned in the OP and that's awesome because it's something I think is severely needed in the game. This would give the player more a more direct impact on the progress of a faction and also allow them to have access to a means of "buying friendship". The more support the player gives means a more friendly partner in the universe, it would also allow the player to impact how quickly a faction is able to build up strength in a new sector.

On the other side of this there would also need to be a method to disable investing if the player attacks a faction in order to prevent cheesing the system. Maybe an attack sets the faction to enemy automatically with a maximum rating of -10 and then you need to have at least a +1 rating to invest.

[The Cheshire Cat]

This sounds like a really cool mod concept and contains a lot of stuff I've been thinking about lately but don't know enough about modding to actually do myself. Hope it works out! Balancing a self-sustaining, non-cheated economy sounds like it would be a nightmare.

One comment regarding "resurrecting" dead factions - perhaps this is something government factions could do, using a portion of their wallet to finance the construction of a station for a previously destroyed corporate faction + provide them with a few trade ships to get going again. Maybe their likelihood of doing so could depend on how many corporate factions within a single trade group exist - if a group has been entirely wiped out somehow it will be extremely high priority (since the economy will eventually stall out if certain goods aren't being produced at all), and it diminishes as more competition is created. This is of course assuming that government factions will be more durable than corporate ones - if they get wiped out in not sure how you could bring them back (maybe if a government faction loses its home system there could be periodic "rebellion" events where loyalists to the old government try to retake control from the current owner, even if the old government has been totally wiped out).

One other idea for keeping the economy stable - maybe different corporations within the same group could have their own specific production modules that take different inputs to produce the same output. This would represent each corporation having its own manufacturing process, and also make it advantageous for competition to exist within a trade group, since a shortage of a particular raw material might not stall the whole system if a corporation exists that doesn't require that material for production.

[spankahontis]

If I may offer an idea.

Food should have a more important role, Factories should accept any food (Food Rations/Bofu)
Or merge them all into something new 'Food Packages' or something like that?
Not immersive to have Bofu and have factories reject it for Food Rations.

Food should also cause a huge production/wealth buff/debuff on having or not having Food.

[JESS 246]

Hi BlackRain & Marvin Martian

May i add an idea that's been bugging me for a long while and that is the atmosfair air on ships/stations.

How about new wears like "Oxygen generator" & "Oxygen cyclers" as part of the station/ship builds, "Oxygen canisters/tanks" for smaller/fighter ships and crews.

Maybe add a station "The Air realtor" for Air/gases and to produce the above items as well.

Wares for Oxygen item above and station Hydrogen/Nitrogen gases, Bio Wiring all steels/metals and most item needed same as ship/station builds.

Also a new station "The Gravity Well"one for gravity items like "Gravity engines" use in station and capital ship builds, "Mag plating" and Gravity polarizers" for small ships/fighters.

Items for above production similar to station/shipbuilding.

Both station should be of new designs that's if viable.

After all how and what are the stations/ships people breathing if there is no way of producing the air for them and what is stopping us floating off if no gravity.

[BlackRain]

Most likely in a month or so from now I will start working on this more and I will make sure to read the ideas and such that people are posting. Limited time right now.

[The Cheshire Cat]

A random thought occurred to me: since all ships will actually be properly constructed in shipyards rather than just spawned in, do you have a plan to prevent them from being constantly clogged up by the AI so that the player can actually buy ships without their own shipyard?

[Alandauron]

A random thought occurred to me: since all ships will actually be properly constructed in shipyards rather than just spawned in, do you have a plan to prevent them from being constantly clogged up by the AI so that the player can actually buy ships without their own shipyard?

An interesting thought, I'm sure faction specific shipyards with a "general" faction will probably do the trick. The faction specific ones would only give a very short pause(long enough to undock and then a matter of seconds or at max a minute) before starting on the next, but the general faction shipyard would take a break for x minutes in between each new AI project.

For the factions that don't have their own shipyard though...

[BlackRain]

A random thought occurred to me: since all ships will actually be properly constructed in shipyards rather than just spawned in, do you have a plan to prevent them from being constantly clogged up by the AI so that the player can actually buy ships without their own shipyard?

This shouldn't be too complicated a thing to fix assuming the folowing:

With our new way of producing ships with a single "Ship parts" (or whatever we call it) resource, it should be much smoother building ships at shipyards, which means they wont get clogged up by unbuilt ships (and we can always set a delay for each new ship built by NPC's) this way the longest you might have to wait to build a ship would just be a few minutes.

[mr.WHO]

A random thought occurred to me: since all ships will actually be properly constructed in shipyards rather than just spawned in, do you have a plan to prevent them from being constantly clogged up by the AI so that the player can actually buy ships without their own shipyard?

May I also suggest to mod shipyards to have more docks?
I think that 3 x XL and 3 x L size docks would help with clogging up of the SY.

Or even make the separate SY for XL and L size ships - it would also privide much more resource sinks.

[UniTrader]

A random thought occurred to me: since all ships will actually be properly constructed in shipyards rather than just spawned in, do you have a plan to prevent them from being constantly clogged up by the AI so that the player can actually buy ships without their own shipyard?

May I also suggest to mod shipyards to have more docks?
I think that 3 x XL and 3 x L size docks would help with clogging up of the SY.

Or even make the separate SY for XL and L size ships - it would also privide much more resource sinks.

counter-suggestion: turn XL docks into combined L/XL Docks (pretty simple to do ) and add more of them only (thats the more complicated part if you want to make it look good..)

[The Cheshire Cat]

Is there a way to modify the cap ship dealer dialog/UI to allow for the player to queue up a ship? i.e. If a ship is already being built, the player can go through the buy UI as if the shipyard was open, and it just starts on that ship as soon as the shipyard becomes available again.

I feel like if this was possible someone probably would have made a mod that does it already, but I don't really know.

[Marvin Martian]

the actual queue -process for NPC builds is only a modified randombuild and have no individualization options, so you can place a simple order of a macrotype this will be build like a NPC ship (full+drones+crew)
the regular queue have 5 slots (actually mostly occupied) so the player can add always a 6th

[maggaen]

Can I just take a moment to thank you (all of you, creators and modders alike) for airing these ideas out in the open. It kinda just makes me warm and fuzzy thinking about what could be with X Rebirth, which I believe to be a great platform, if just a mediocre game.

[Ghrathryn]

Quick question regarding the NPC wallet system.

Will NPC factions run everything from the same wallet or will they work similar to the player where there's the 'CEO' that holds the purse strings for the faction but each station (possible all trade ships as well) has its own 'department' budget that it works from? Reason I'm asking is that I've seen some stations will burn millions, particularly when they're in the set up phase. Energy Arrays, for example, don't really have a running cost because their only resource is food rations, which are secondary, URV lines on the other hand need hundreds of microchips, bio-optic wiring, reinforced metal plate, energy cells and other things that really kill an account in a hurry since managers try to build a good few hours' stock in each ware required.

[Marvin Martian]

a dedicated wallet won't change anything, in that case there would be a balance process required that would transfer money anyway

ATM the Stations will start like in vanilla with an base amount of required ressources

Problematic stations like Warehouse, which buy expensive and sell cheap (also in 4.1) won't used from this NPC factions about that reason they burn your money
sadly there is also no way i know right now to set prices for NPC-Stations by MD

[UniTrader]

not sure how long the changes persist, if at all, but have you tried this one on the Stations Trade Offers?:

Code: Select all

      <xs:element name="update_trade">
        <xs:annotation>
          <xs:documentation>
            Update certain parameters of a trade
          </xs:documentation>
        </xs:annotation>
        <xs:complexType>
          <xs:attribute name="trade" type="expression" use="required">
            <xs:annotation>
              <xs:documentation>
                The trade to update
              </xs:documentation>
            </xs:annotation>
          </xs:attribute>
          <xs:attribute name="amount" type="expression">
            <xs:annotation>
              <xs:documentation>
                New amount for the trade (optional, should already be adjusted to be the amount we can afford)
              </xs:documentation>
            </xs:annotation>
          </xs:attribute>
          <xs:attribute name="desiredamount" type="expression">
            <xs:annotation>
              <xs:documentation>
                New desiredamount for the trade (optional, how much we *really* want, ignoring financial constraints)
              </xs:documentation>
            </xs:annotation>
          </xs:attribute>
          <xs:attribute name="price" type="expression">
            <xs:annotation>
              <xs:documentation>
                New price (per unit) for the trade (optional)
              </xs:documentation>
            </xs:annotation>
          </xs:attribute>
        </xs:complexType>
      </xs:element>

Also maybe you can manage the Trade Offers of a Station per Script only if you dont perform the <create_ai_unit/> (located in the Manager AI or MD Script iirc) for that sation (i think this one is responsible for the Station to start generating Trade Offers, but you can also generate each one per Script, with more suitable and unchanging prices )

Note: Infos provided here based on assumptions didnt get around to experiment with these myself yet..