So, I've been back to the game (after more than a year) this past month having noticed Litcube had released his total conversion. I've run 1.50 with several of memeics' tweaks, and I just had to stop by to say thanks: it's been an extremely enjoyable playthrough.
For the first time playing X3 with fleets and vast infrastructures didn't become a painful micromanaging hell, and that last battle I had against the OCV before considering the game "won" was one of the most epic and cinematic moments I ever had in a sandbox game (heck, I went there with a MLCC fleet of a dozen Astraeus, a few Boreas, an Excalibur with 36 Sirokos and a couple Aquilos sprinkled on top: that was... awesomely overkill
).
I'd like to take the chance to give a bit of feedback on the few (very few!) things that didn't totally convince me or that I think could be improved upon though, and a couple of trivial bug reports.
Repetitiveness: If I had to find one general thing "missing" in the whole feel of the game is that it feels a bit "grindy" at times. Having all the plots disabled (not that after all this time the vanilla plots are per se so important), as well as the Khaak being gone and all of the dangers coming from specific areas, can sometime cause a bit of repetition. It's good to prevent headaches with your UTs, for instance, but as you have to fight the same enemy over and over again pretty much always in the same places, it can get a bit tiresome. I believe that's an area which could be worked upon more, but I trust the EMS module will grow up in that direction spicing the universe up and increasing variety.
Phanon: They felt much weaker than their old standalone incarnation. Once you are flying an M2 they are not a threat in the slightest anymore: you can fairly easily clear their sector as soon as they spawn. While I like how there's much less missile spam than there was in the old version (which was the main reason why you couldn't take them out alone), I think something should be done to make at least the last 2-3 incarnations of the Phanon a bit more worrisome.
Even the last generation only had a couple M7s and a few M6s to throw out as hunting parties (which, by then, I could immediately take out camping the gate in Guiding Star), and the sector itself didn't feel much more fortified than in previous gens, 2 (or 3?) M1s, a couple M8s, the usual TL and fighter wings. Very easy to deal with.
It might be they are meant to be a threat earlier in the game, leaving the OCV for when you begin playing with the big guns, but with how I progressed in my game they felt a bit underwhelming.
OCV: They are super badass, they look super cool, and with memeics' tweak to their behaviour they are definitely not trivial or easy to exploit in their AI. You still can - sometimes - manage to bypass them taking out the station before really having to face them, though, so I guess something could be done to ensure battlegroups stay closer to the station, or maybe the station itself could be given some stationary defenses (OCV overpowered lasertowers?). I was definitely able to reconquer systems alone a few times simply jumping in the middle of the sector, destroying the station before they could get to me and rape me with their gamma kyons of badassitude.
Another (cheap) trick one could do to stop them in their tracks is putting a ring of fire around one of their gates (IE: the one in Tokyo Lambda to their home system): they seem to mostly ignore the lasertowers, except for the stray PX that once in a while gets caught trying to scoop up loot, and in the meantime all the deca fade collectors are taken out, effectively halting their advance further down the string of systems. BTW, the deca fades bail at an alarming rate: if you use such cheap trick their bailed ships will build up to the HUNDREDS in a matter of hours.
Bottom line: it's a cheap exploit, so you just have to avoid doing that, but I suppose it could be nice if lasertowers where recognized as valid targets by the battlegroups. A 360 ring of fire would still reap havoc in their lines, potentially giving the chance of reconquering a sector alone, but at least it wouldn't be a one time fire and forget "stop the OCV" button.
P.S. I know that when you defeat the OCV it's basically The End, not much else left to do, but still it feels a bit odd you don't get any kind of reward apart from the bounties you have collected in the meantime. I don't know, blueprints for the otherwise unobtainable OCV ships, maybe? I mean, if you have beaten them it means you have a fleet that can level the whole universe anyway, so there's no more "balance" concerns to take into consideration: just a badass toy to play with for a couple more hours before calling it quits, I guess.
Marines: With how the game scales economic wise, an old vanilla issue is back with vengeance. I began training a squad of 20 marines fairly early in the game, but when they were finally ready for some serious action I was already at the point where you think in terms of
billions, and ship capping really isn't an interesting endeavor anymore. I did use them to cap a couple of Phanon M1s, but it was just for novelty of it, as the 100/200 millions the cap is worth my complexes were making in a few minutes in SETA.
I do like the simple vanilla training system, and don't really feel there's need for deeper approaches like the Marines Training and Repair script, but the training speed should be made a lot quicker imo.
Deploy Satellites Network: One of the first things you should do as in this mod everything depends on having property in sector. Which is fine and I like, it avoids lots of headaches with traders. However, for some reason this command does not consider the autojump settings of the assigned ship, which slowed down the placement of my network a lot, and also forced me to micromanage my explorer ships to prevent them from going 'round half the universe to avoid a xenon sector in between their actual position and next destination.
It should work with autojump, simple as that.
Saturn Hubs in complexes bug: To avoid cluttering of the property menu, I decided to put my Saturn hubs together in three megacomplexes, one for building materials, one for weapons and shields, and one for missiles and other amenities (jump cores, lastertowers, etc). When you put these hubs together the new complex leaves behind the E-cells surplus you had, so you might want to add another small saturn hub dedicated to energy to the mix (plus I wanted a BIG one in the shipbuilding materials one). For some reason the actual output once put in the complex is incredibily small though (like few hundred e-cells per cycle in one complex, even though the saturn hub I used should have crunched out something like 150.000 e-cells per hour).
From the looks of it I suppose the vanilla complex mechanic gets somehow confused, and maybe reads the e-cells output of the previously forgotten surplus from one of the other saturn hubs, instead of the energy one you jut put in.
No biggy, I added a standalone Saturn Hub to manage energy needs for my headquarters and MLCC docks, but it's something you might want to take a look into.
Jumpdrive cores and MLCC: This one is odd. For some reason, while everything else scales accordingly, as you add ships with jumpdrive cores to an MLCC dock, the capacity for jumpdrive cores gets capped at exactly 1388 units. Even though 9 M2s on a starliner dock, set to autostock 250 cores each, should amount up to 2250 for one full restock. No matter what combination of ships and stocks you use, that 1388 seems to be a hard cap. Every other ware (energy, missiles, etc) scales accordingly, as intended, instead.
I gave the M2s 250 cores instead of the 125 they need for one emergency jump to ensure the dock capacity was higher so that my freighters would keep busy stocking the dock with lots of spare cores, in case I wanted to have 2-3 engagements with the OCV in a row without having to wait for the stock to replenish after the first, but that odd cap got in the way.
That's it, all I can remember worth reporting from these several weeks of great fun. This is really X3 brought to its full potential, so, again, thank you for these countless hours of entertainment.
I sent you a message on skype the other day but I think you must have been busy. Then I got busy myself and haven't checked again to see if you've responded.
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