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There are a lot of menus, but I've tried to simplify most commands and I've removed many features that were feeling too arcade. In Mayhem, you get a true feeling of what attack and defense mean, even though you are eventually able to create 'bridges' between sectors, with the help of jump beacons.Īlthough it is a very complex mod, I feel that Mayhem has never been so friendly to new players. There is no jump drive, because in a game of turf war, being able to instantly teleport your ships makes no sense.

Mayhem is slower than X3 and Litcube's Universe.

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And by 'real' I mean that the AI has to know what it wants, at what moment, how to build the proper stations and economy to sustain its goals, define the objectives of its fleets, and adapt all the time to other AIs, the player, and the permanent threat that are the Terraformers. When starting Mayhem 3, I knew I had to have my own Jobs system, but I didn't really know how tedious it would be, because in the end all combat scripts had to be rewritten, and whole new systems had to be designed to make the AI lively and real. Rewriting everything was a very good occasion to homogenize a lot of fundamental systems. In X3 vanilla, you have a lot of scripts that have been added over each other, written by different coders who had a different approach and a different vision. There is A/ the leader, B/ some followers, and C/ some support ships that are in charge of independently defending their carrier. Every ship formation follows the same standard behaviors.To the player's eyes, it's invisible, but under the hood, the scripts are generally designed for the AI, then some exceptions are added for the player. To make sure the rule 1 was always respected, everything has been designed around the AI instead of the player.During the last stage of the development, this rule has to be bent a bit, to improve general gameplay and avoid some exploits, but when it comes to combat, trading and crafting, know that the AI is just like you and use the exact same tools (ie. AI and Player use the same scripts, for everything.At the beginning, I was just facing an empty galaxy, so I had to make some golden rules: It has been a very intense adventure for me, as a developer, not knowing if one day, I wouldn't face an engine problem that would crush the whole project. I've spent about 6 months on the development of Mayhem 3. However, if having an empty galaxy was not that hard, making it alive would take months of work. The name changed to Mayhem 3 a few weeks later because gameplay-wise, I thought most previous ideas of Mayhem 2, despite their sometimes poor implementation, were good to be kept.

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Then I've realized that designing the layout of a galaxy was not that hard, and I've released Stardust, a very early version of the new mod I've always wanted.

So for a few years, I had this crazy idea of having procedurally generated galaxies in a game that was not at all made for that. Always having to play in the same galaxy was the main reason why I eventually quit X3. Even though combat in X3 is 'ok', I've always felt that it could be greatly improved, not only by overhauling all ship stats and characteristics, but also by changing the AI behavior and rewrite their scripts. Having an empire is about macro management, not micro management. X3 being about managing an empire, it should be intuitive to replace your ships, give them global orders, automatically put them into a fleet, repair them, etc. Products are artificially consumed and the AI does not use them to make their ships or stations. Even though Litcube has changed them quite deeply, the system remained the same: ships were created out of thin air and spawned around shipyards, with very basic goals and poor AI. This is the name of automated ships in X3. I've developed Mayhem 2 for about 4 years (part time, obviously), but at the end I didn't want to play it anymore because of some important problems I had with X3: I also wanted to not make everything orbiting around money, so I've implemented a way to craft your ships, stations, weapons and equipment.

I had understood that conquering sectors is not only about changing the race of a sector, it's about all the consequences and the price that you and the AI have to pay to achieve it. I've always loved games where territory war is an important element of gameplay, it gives replayability and an experience often more intense and more customizable than story-based games. Mayhem 1 began one year later with the very primitive idea of making it possible to conquer new sectors. I've started modding X3 in 2014 after the release of Litcube's Universe.

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It has mostly been a full time job and is today a robust mod, fully playable, and replayable! Mayhem 3 has been in development since December 2019.