phezzan

"Attack Enemies" - but Xsotan are only enemies if you fire your weapons. Arguably this is a problem with any faction that attacks factions friendly to you. I could imagine a 'sector owner' configuration: - Aggro any non-friendly military ships (with a setting for friendly reputation level) - Aggro any non-friendly military ships that fire weapons (similar to the Xsotan themselves) - Aggro any attacks against ships that are (docked/going to dock) with me. I find that placing long range point defense on your station helps: - The point defense fires on any torpedo... - and then Xsotan aggro you... - Then your main guns attack.

My point defense works well. I built them at a factory and they do over 20dps with trinium. The quality (dps, range, velocity) of your point def turrets (and their placement) is important.

After reading above... I was thinking about HP vs Mass... But really it's dps vs mass. How much do turrets weigh? AFAICT, turrets weigh nothing but in order to get 'slots' you have to build Hull/Cargo/Etc and add Turret systems ... and that increases Mass. I imagine that's pretty complicated to balance out - especially with the huge variance in turret dps vs slots.

Double / triple / quad turrets are (on paper) just decorative. The dps is decided then divided by # of 'weapons'. The only effective difference is high number of projectiles makes it easier to hit, but harder to hit 100% of the shots. And I know this because I read data/scripts/.../turretgenerator

Dear OP: here you go: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1917041255 Currently - Crew requirements are calibrated for 'untrained' crew - so you need less level 1 (1.5) crewmen, which in turn means you need less sergeants and command staff. But as you get level 3 crews, the most expensive command staff (that can't be filled untrained) become unneeded. It's a real mess, and if you don't hire that extra command staff, morale will drop and your precious trained crew will suicide - then your ship will lose hull and be destroyed. ( and that's the first notification of a problem the player receives: Ship destroyed) Suggestions: - Lack of mechanics will never destroy your ship - Higher level crew will provide bonuses but doesn't alter the amount of staff needed - it's super frustrating for civilian freighters who don't need extra. - Instead of committing suicide due to low morale, low crew could have penalties to fire rate, fighter launch rate, fighter speed, command execution frequency, max hull self-repair%, etc.. - Fleet list icons for low Morale/performance penalties/insufficient crew/damage/cargo space% - a remote 'buy/pickup/sell/store crew' Order. We can move the ship to the crew station but we have to be in sector to get the crew on/off the ship? The order would find a station with the best crews available and pickup/buy/offboard as needed. Once the ship crew meets requirements the Order is complete. If a required crew type isn't available, then message the player just like an unavailable buy/sell goods order (No sellers...). Problems solved: - Having to keep a ship's worth of extra crew 'on standby' to deal with the variation in staffing requirements as they level. - Having a ship die because it lost a crew quarters -> morale loss -> suicides -> no mechanics -> hull destroyed. - Having to hire a general just because your commanders haven't leveled up yet, and then storing him in a station until you build another ship. The result is that you can find the problem and fix it before you lose a freighter full of credits and level 3 crews.

This interface was solved a long time ago, in a galaxy far away.

AFAIK the current cargo shuttle implementation simply tries to fill the inputs and empty the outputs and it's coded to buy/sell one item at a time. A good solution would: prioritize the most needed good anticipate goods already requested / in-flight apportion cargo space between goods based on units per cycle instead of volume/(count of inputs&outputs) Shuttle capacity based on cargo volume would require a fair bit of work when some goods are 0.05 volume and you'd buy 200-2000 cycles worth in one go. Being able to fill 1/3 of a 100k cargo space with them would suck up your cash pretty fast. The logic would probably want to avoid sucking away the player's main balance (like in X3 each factory has its own credit account)

Well - I looked at that code recently (I mod everything for fun). There's a start delay (1 hour) and then it appears to count down a hazard counter - 1 per minute. It looked troublesome enough that I wasn't sure what the countdown (after the hour) was for.

Personally I find SMT just muddies the waters. OP has 6 'real' cores and that's probably huge overkill for 4 players. SMT allows the game to think it can do 12 things at once, and in a non-realtime processing workload it's better, but the game probably schedules workload based on the available threads and placing double work on each single core is going to mean the workloads are evicting each other from the single pipeline. No need to deal with all that. Use a thread per 'real' core and hope the scheduler chooses not to double up (or untick the odd cores in windows process details under affinity).

Frustratingly - the headhunters might be sent by Pirates or a faction the sector owner is at war with.

It would also be nice if bounty hunters working for a enemy faction (relative to the sector owner) didn't count toward the hazardous sector number. I tried to mod that in - but I couldn't find where bounty hunters were generated and whether they had something like 'is_bountyhunter' or "sent_by_faction" ...