X3: Terran Conflict

[WayAbvPar]

Win7 actually, which is pretty cool most of the time.

I have been playing in short bursts and saving often. Finally found a shipyard to sell off the Xenon L I was dragging around. 1M credits later and I get to go shopping! Got a Teladi cop license too...need to find someone to sell my a freight scanner.

Edit-
How the hell do you scan the damned pirate base? Every time I get close I ton of fighters launch and blow me all over the sector. I have tried staying 10km from the ship I am following but nothing seems to make a difference.

[Reg]

I'm pretty sure that's talked about earlier in this thread - or possible in the X3 thread in the Steam sub forum.

[WayAbvPar]

It is one of the most commonly asked questions as far as I can tell. I understand that I need to scan the base itself, and that I need to get within 500m to do so- I am just wondering if there is a condition that triggers the base to spit out a bunch of pirates or if that is part of the mission. Either way I am just going to wait until I have a sturdier ship and just blow them all out of the stars   

[Ceryse]

It is one of the most commonly asked questions as far as I can tell. I understand that I need to scan the base itself, and that I need to get within 500m to do so- I am just wondering if there is a condition that triggers the base to spit out a bunch of pirates or if that is part of the mission. Either way I am just going to wait until I have a sturdier ship and just blow them all out of the stars   

Its part of the mission. I've heard sometimes they don't spawn, but that was never my experience through a couple playthroughs.

Generally they aren't too bad if you've got the Sabre with a full weapons load and have gotten comfortable with combat and your combat rank is still pretty low. On the whole, I found it not too difficult to make a run for the station after waiting for the spawned ships to travel a bit outwards towards me from the pirate base. Then, as I scan the pirate base (the scan % adds up through multiple fly-bys, so you don't have to worry if you get out of range -- it might decrease if you stay away too long, not sure) I use the pirate base itself as a shield from the fighters until done. Then you can book it or fight your way out.

The learning curve for the game is pretty steep, but once you get the hang of things.. everything else comes pretty easily.

I stopped playing the game a month or so back simply because I got to a point where I could have demolished anything that came my way due to sheer number of credits and ships at my disposal and things got stale real quick after that, even with several of the war mods.

[Reg]

I think I finally beat it by using a fast ship and having the pirates chase me. Then I'd get back to the base and do the scan before they had time to catch up to me.

[WayAbvPar]

Generally they aren't too bad if you've got the Sabre with a full weapons load and have gotten comfortable with combat and your combat rank is still pretty low.

Does it scale the difficulty according to your combat rank? That hardly seems fair, but I can see why might be that way.


Have a bit over 2.2m credits now, and am itching to upgrade to an M3. Anyone have racial preferences as far as ships go?

[Ceryse]

Does it scale the difficulty according to your combat rank? That hardly seems fair, but I can see why might be that way.

Have a bit over 2.2m credits now, and am itching to upgrade to an M3. Anyone have racial preferences as far as ships go?

Almost all combat and trade encounters and missions scale with your combat and trade ranks. They essentially have to given the degree of power differential you'll go through. It wouldn't be too bad if they fell at a quicker pace while not engaging in combat or trade, or if the first half of the combat ranks didn't fly by at such a quick pace.

I know the pirate base mission is giving you trouble (as it does just about everyone), but if possible I'd suggest getting through it somehow. The Terran plot-line essentially serves as a somewhat shitty tutorial for the game, but it does give you a ton of free stuff, including ships (M3, M5s, M6, M8) and the Terran ships tend to be fairly solid, although generally don't mix with Commonwealth tech.

For ships, I personally went Sabre -> Cutlass (free Terran M3) -> Vidar (free Terran M6) -> Springblossom (purchasable M6 from a sector unlocked by the Terran plot-line, and the ship I found to be the best mix of fun/powerful) -> Osaka M2.

http://eng.x3tc.ru/x3_tc_ships/ is a great place to compare ships to find one you like stat-wise, but a lot of them handle a bit differently and I found a lot of the Commonwealth ships just didn't feel 'right' for me, thus I stuck to the Terran ships generally. That site also has a ton of information for the game; a Universe map, several lists (such as free/claimable ships floating in the Universe) and so forth. Helps a lot with the learning curve, I found.

I also found bhodi's first couple posts in this thread very helpful (especially when I finally got around to starting up traders). A bunch of his recommended mods were also incredibly helpful in extending my enjoyment of the game and dealing with some of the vanilla pitfalls, such as clunky AI for traders (the EST and similar mods make it vastly easier to control and set up fleets of automated traders).

[Lantyssa]

Xenon is my favorite.  I grew pretty attached to the Split Mamba the Assassin game starts with.  Riding my Khaak ships and the Arrow can be fun, but not for combat.

I like the look of the Boron ships, but haven't gotten to fly one since X or X2.

[bhodi]

It is one of the most commonly asked questions as far as I can tell. I understand that I need to scan the base itself, and that I need to get within 500m to do so- I am just wondering if there is a condition that triggers the base to spit out a bunch of pirates or if that is part of the mission. Either way I am just going to wait until I have a sturdier ship and just blow them all out of the stars   

I think the 'spit out pirates' is at 10km or something - I just went in a fast ship, lured them away, circled around and scanned the station. I got nav mk 1 that let me double-click on the map, so I just seta'd around and doubleclicked myself around in a circle, scanned, and got out.

Now, there is one mission that requires you to freighter in, when you get that, just go and get a jumpdrive and SETA and install it on the freighter. I actually installed cheat scripts for some of the missions because there's almost no way to actually do it them legitimately (boarding mission, I'm looking at you).

[Murgos]

The boarding mission just seemed to time out after a while for me and end.

For a relatively cheap effective ship go to the OTAS yard and get an M4+ Solano.  This is what I did at the scan the pirate base mission in (after a trip through that one Argon/Terran border territory to make some cash and faction).  The Solano has 75k shields and carries 'enough' guns to take out M3s pretty easy.

[koro]

So is there a way to keep my ESTs from being pants-on-head retarded and immediately selling all their energy cells?

Edit: They seem to turn around and sell most of their energy cells (but keep around 40) and then begin doing nothing but slowboating from one destination to another, despite having the settings to enable the use of jump drives (which they are all equipped with) active.

[Ceryse]

So is there a way to keep my ESTs from being pants-on-head retarded and immediately selling all their energy cells?

Edit: They seem to turn around and sell most of their energy cells (but keep around 40) and then begin doing nothing but slowboating from one destination to another, despite having the settings to enable the use of jump drives (which they are all equipped with) active.

If you're running the EST mod, yes. Go into the EST options for each ship (you can do it for all of them at once but I forget how) by going; Ship Command -> Trade -> Economy and Supply Trader. In one of the options there (likely Jump Drive settings) make sure the minimum jump is set to 1 and bump up the minimum energy cells the ship holds on to. That's what it regards as energy cells to keep and not to sell. I generally put mine around 400, I believe. Default is around 40.

bhodi's second post in this thread has a good start up guide for ESTs. Especially regarding exclusions for sectors that are too dangerous for them. I ended up adding every Pirate and a lot of Unknown sectors to that list simply to stop retarded trade paths.

[koro]

So is there a way to keep my ESTs from being pants-on-head retarded and immediately selling all their energy cells?

Edit: They seem to turn around and sell most of their energy cells (but keep around 40) and then begin doing nothing but slowboating from one destination to another, despite having the settings to enable the use of jump drives (which they are all equipped with) active.

If you're running the EST mod, yes. Go into the EST options for each ship (you can do it for all of them at once but I forget how) by going; Ship Command -> Trade -> Economy and Supply Trader. In one of the options there (likely Jump Drive settings) make sure the minimum jump is set to 1 and bump up the minimum energy cells the ship holds on to. That's what it regards as energy cells to keep and not to sell. I generally put mine around 400, I believe. Default is around 40.

bhodi's second post in this thread has a good start up guide for ESTs. Especially regarding exclusions for sectors that are too dangerous for them. I ended up adding every Pirate and a lot of Unknown sectors to that list simply to stop retarded trade paths.

Bhodi's guide was what I used to start up my ESTs. I've managed to get one EST jumping properly, and one's currently on standby, but my third is still slowboating and I can't figure out why. It was at the solar power plant in Nayana's Hideout, and just left to get wheat from Omicron Lyrae, two systems away. Its jump drive settings are the same as everything else: autojump yes, min jump 1, fuel resupply 40 jumps/400 energy. But it's still simply flying there. Unless I am misunderstanding "minimum jump" I think something's wrong.

Edit: Okay, I guess I'm just misunderstanding "minimum jump" then. Everything seems to be working properly now. Very weird how it wasn't before.

[Ceryse]

They like to idle now and then; can be quite annoying. Even with bhodi's guide it took me a few goes and some time to get mine going how I wanted them to. Had a similar experience with factories and moving supplies between them (silicon wafers from Asteroid Belt to my Space Fuel and Weed factory in Heretic's End). Speaking of which, the complex cleaner mod was a godsend for that, when I figured it out.

[koro]

And now one of them is not only slowboating to a destination, he's slowboating to a destination with the intent to sell all 400 energy cells in his cargo, and thus won't jump and have less than 400, even though it means flying through a pirate-infested sector I set as an exclusion.  

This is ridiculous.

Edit: Alright, I figured out what the hell was going wrong. Apparently if you keep the energy cell supply entry in the TC command console set to 40 jumps as well as the 400 energy cell storage in EST, it'll confuse EST and it'll try to sell the cells in its cargo. But setting the command console entry to 0 and the EST at 400 (it drops down to 399 if you simply turn off the Fuel Resupply Quantity in the CC, and continue fucking it up) gets it working right.