From a long time X3:R and X3:TC player - musings

[soleilnoir]

Hello to all. I am a long time X3:R and X3:TC player and a rare poster. I skipped the Albion Prelude and Rebirth and came straight to X4:F after reading it had multi-core support.

I still have X3:R and X3:TC on optical media in my shelf. I was an avid TC player and the primary reason why i stopped playing was lack of multi-core support. I was playing on a dual-core AMD system and the game was heavily CPU-limited, so on my dual-core AMD could not cut the mustard (and getting a top of the line Intel CPU just for X3TC was also not an option). Not with my huge complexes, not with the new 2000km wide sectors.

However as of today, I am about 30 hours into X4:F. So here are my likes, dislikes and meh + dreamscape between versions 1.50 and 1.60. This list is by no means definitive, but considering my largest complex in X3:TC was a relatively neat thing featuring 63 weapons producing stations with over 1B in cost, i may have some clout.

Likes
+not a single crash across any and all hours of gaming with FX8350 with R9 Fury at 3440x1440.

+no more grinding - you no longer have to grind for weeks in trading (or combat) to get enough funds for a trading ship. In X3:R it put me off right away. In X3:TC i had to trade for a week to buy the largest trading ship (sth Boron) and then another week or 2 to afford my first station. But now, 5-6 mine destroying missions can buy a trader, yay!

+more speed. With the new travel engines I really do not miss SETA, even capitals can now do 1500m/s with travel mode, so puttering on with 53m/s + SETAx10 in my trader in X3 feels literally antiquated.

+more varied gate options. There are highways, super highways and gates. Awesome. You could now have a sector which leads to 11 additional places (4 directions per spatial dimension) instead of the old 4.

+bigger sectors - 300km between gates is a much needed improvement from the old times where small sectors were about 50km between gates and the big ones were about 100+.

+stations behind the gates - something that always annoyed me with the old X3:TC. If a sector was 100km across, all the stations in the sector were fitted between the gates, the rest was just wasted space. Same if the sector was 45km across. Now a 300km sector can have stations more than 300km apart from each other.

+subfactions. The old X3:TC had 5 races + Terrans (+ OTAS, pirates, organized pirates, Xenon and Khaak), now Argon has the Federation + Antigone Republic + Hatikvah's zones, Paranid have their own kingdom + the Holy Order. This offers for a much larger a variety of both agendas as well as divided loyalties. i. e. A nice civil war across all of the sectors.

Dislikes
-first and biggest dislike, changing the old ship nomenclature. Yes it used to be weird. M5 to M3 from smallest to largest, but then M6 was a corvette, M7 was a missile frigate and M2 and M1 were a battleship and a carrier respectively. Yet you could take the shilouette and the first 2 letters of a serial code and you could tell exactly what kind of power the vessel was expected to have. But no more, now one had to relearn everything.
-lack of loadout flexibility. No longer can you have 6 or 8 forward weapons' bays on a fighter or a heavy fighter, never mind a frigate. All you get are 2 (on Argon vessels). The old system was much better with distinct power levels and much greater variety. You want 6 forward HEPTs on your M3? Go ahead. Even if they are useless, you still look cool. You want all 6 in use with actual use? Sure, mass drivers, just be prepsred for the lack of range and carrying around consumable ammo. Everything else is a compromise.
- But no more. The old balancing was great: Argon was all-rounder, Teladi was heavily shielded, but much slower. Boron was heavily shielded and comparable to Argon infirepower but much larger in bulk. Paranid was all-rounder with a rebalance and Split was fast and powerful with a compromise in shields. OTAS tried to be the best of all races but in the end ended up no better than Argon when guided by AI.
Each race had specific ships and weapons (which could be mounted on all ships). Now, the distinctions are much less pronounced (I hope this changes and each faction and subfaction has a load of different types to choose from in the future).
-Lack of a real questline to care about. Building your own empire is awesome, but it would be more awesome with some tactical goals to care about or at least a story discovering whet happened with the gate shutdown. etc.
-lacking all the weird secrets - like the goner faction and their vessels. The terran discovery and the Terran conflict quest line. Having ypur own Ancient Dyson Structure questline etc. I wish X4 had a lot of stuff like that. New tech, new mechanics, weird vessels and factions etc. to discover.

Meh
-/+ Can my automated traders really taken advantage of the navigation sattellites i've dropped in sectors? If yes, yay! If no, then they really should (and also i've wasted my past few play sessions).

Dreamscape.
I once had a dream of the old X3:TC, albeit with a 3D sector mapping. i. e. You had not only 200 sectors, but 200 sectors per level, and there were at least 5 levels to explore. So the universe had like 5 layers of sectors. Instead of the usual 1. They could be claimable sectors or even parallel universes. In either case the X-universe could be much wider than anticipated and much deeper as well. Like having your main shipyard and base hidden away in a corner of 10:10:10, from which you extend your tentacles across the rest of the universe. The players could certainly handle such gigantic empires, so could the computing power..

[grapedog]

Meh
-/+ Can my automated traders really taken advantage of the navigation sattellites i've dropped in sectors? If yes, yay! If no, then they really should (and also i've wasted my past few play sessions).

Without satellites, your auto-traders will function very poorly. Having a great sat network is a HUGE boost to auto trader efficiency.

[pref]

-Lack of a real questline to care about. Building your own empire is awesome, but it would be more awesome with some tactical goals to care about or at least a story discovering whet happened with the gate shutdown. etc.
-lacking all the weird secrets - like the goner faction and their vessels. The terran discovery and the Terran conflict quest line. Having ypur own Ancient Dyson Structure questline etc. I wish X4 had a lot of stuff like that. New tech, new mechanics, weird vessels and factions etc. to discover.

Meh
-/+ Can my automated traders really taken advantage of the navigation sattellites i've dropped in sectors? If yes, yay! If no, then they really should (and also i've wasted my past few play sessions).

..

Like having your main shipyard and base hidden away in a corner of 10:10:10, from which you extend your tentacles across the rest of the universe. The players could certainly handle such gigantic empires, so could the computing power..

Hope the DLCs and/or patches will bring more quests and hidden secrets. Those are easier to add then a whole new race, and for me would add much more to the game as well.
You have a goner-like race, the alliance by the way. There isn't much story to them but their shipyards are really nice - you can get any races' ships (iirc only 1 variant though) with any equipment just by maintaining good relations with them.
They seem to support an all hostile playthrough.

Sats are needed, if you check a station on the map which you just passed by, the station overlay info will show the time until your info is valid on the station. After that expires your traders will not go for their trade deals. Stations which you have visited but have no up to date info about will appear darker even.
You can fix that with a sat, an EMP bomb, or buying trade subscription from the faction at higher reputation.

You can build a shipyard behind 4 xenon gates now, if that qualifies as hidden - but there are no unpopulated out of the way sectors unfortunately. A couple of those would be nice to have, think the single such sector is in about the center of the map.

[Falcrack]

Meh
-/+ Can my automated traders really taken advantage of the navigation sattellites i've dropped in sectors? If yes, yay! If no, then they really should (and also i've wasted my past few play sessions).

Without satellites, your auto-traders will function very poorly. Having a great sat network is a HUGE boost to auto trader efficiency.

But bear in mind that the station needs to be in range of the satellite (~35 km) in order to receive constant trade updates from the station. So multiple satellites per sector are needed. But, I use the "sector satellites" mod which alleviates that condition somewhat.

[Falcrack]

-lack of loadout flexibility. No longer can you have 6 or 8 forward weapons' bays on a fighter or a heavy fighter, never mind a frigate. All you get are 2 (on Argon vessels). The old system was much better with distinct power levels and much greater variety. You want 6 forward HEPTs on your M3? Go ahead. Even if they are useless, you still look cool. You want all 6 in use with actual use? Sure, mass drivers, just be prepsred for the lack of range and carrying around consumable ammo. Everything else is a compromise.

Some fighters have more forward weapons. For example, the Pulsar fighter can have up to 6 forward weapons, the Eclipse can have 4.

[grapedog]

Meh
-/+ Can my automated traders really taken advantage of the navigation sattellites i've dropped in sectors? If yes, yay! If no, then they really should (and also i've wasted my past few play sessions).

Without satellites, your auto-traders will function very poorly. Having a great sat network is a HUGE boost to auto trader efficiency.

But bear in mind that the station needs to be in range of the satellite (~35 km) in order to receive constant trade updates from the station. So multiple satellites per sector are needed. But, I use the "sector satellites" mod which alleviates that condition somewhat.

30km on the regular satellites, 75km for the advanced satellites.

Or you can buy the trade subscriptions for about 10 million, from each faction, but you only get the updates for stations you have found. Any stations you haven't found will not magically show up when you buy it.

[StormMagi]

Without satellites, your auto-traders will function very poorly. Having a great sat network is a HUGE boost to auto trader efficiency.

But bear in mind that the station needs to be in range of the satellite (~35 km) in order to receive constant trade updates from the station. So multiple satellites per sector are needed. But, I use the "sector satellites" mod which alleviates that condition somewhat.

30km on the regular satellites, 75km for the advanced satellites.

Or you can buy the trade subscriptions for about 10 million, from each faction, but you only get the updates for stations you have found. Any stations you haven't found will not magically show up when you buy it.

I was under the impression that they weren't lit up on the map but you still received prices for them. I have had traders wander off into unexplored area to trade with a station I did not know was there.

[grapedog]

But bear in mind that the station needs to be in range of the satellite (~35 km) in order to receive constant trade updates from the station. So multiple satellites per sector are needed. But, I use the "sector satellites" mod which alleviates that condition somewhat.

30km on the regular satellites, 75km for the advanced satellites.

Or you can buy the trade subscriptions for about 10 million, from each faction, but you only get the updates for stations you have found. Any stations you haven't found will not magically show up when you buy it.

I was under the impression that they weren't lit up on the map but you still received prices for them. I have had traders wander off into unexplored area to trade with a station I did not know was there.

even if you have discovered no stations, your traders will go find stations randomly.... but it's really inefficient.

[StormMagi]

30km on the regular satellites, 75km for the advanced satellites.

Or you can buy the trade subscriptions for about 10 million, from each faction, but you only get the updates for stations you have found. Any stations you haven't found will not magically show up when you buy it.

I was under the impression that they weren't lit up on the map but you still received prices for them. I have had traders wander off into unexplored area to trade with a station I did not know was there.

even if you have discovered no stations, your traders will go find stations randomly.... but it's really inefficient.

Fair enough. Still, I am not positive, but I believe I saw mentioned in a different thread that the trade subscription includes all stations for the faction, discovered or not.

[rictec]

nice post there i agree with most of what you write there

i do beleave egosoft can make x4 universe a LOT bigger with DLC content and get the game to what players love on the series

one thing i miss is the deversity and no ideia why xenons and Kha'ak behave like humanoid races i miss the Kha'ak cluster ..those were scary and we never knew what ships come out of them at start

i have been playing x4 for 500 hours now i m loving the game lots of spare time just wasted moving arround making money

egosoft can and i beleave they will turn this game into the best of series and i hope they bring old X3 ships to the game i would love to see those designs back

[Thecrippler]

nice post there i agree with most of what you write there

i do beleave egosoft can make x4 universe a LOT bigger with DLC content and get the game to what players love on the series

one thing i miss is the deversity and no ideia why xenons and Kha'ak behave like humanoid races i miss the Kha'ak cluster ..those were scary and we never knew what ships come out of them at start

i have been playing x4 for 500 hours now i m loving the game lots of spare time just wasted moving arround making money

egosoft can and i beleave they will turn this game into the best of series and i hope they bring old X3 ships to the game i would love to see those designs back

hell no i don't wanna see those Argons ships back from x3

[Dani_Gecko]

What I have read over the past month here on the forums, German and English, a lot of people want back the diversity of X3. Diversity in weapons, ship designs and station parts. Also a lot complain about the races being basically identical, just having different names. I would argue, X4 is very young in comparison. There's much to improve and to add, also there is the headroom to improve and add. I do very much hope, this is the start of a never ending storry.

PS: Please bring the Terrans, there stations and ships back!! And there superiority for that matter. Then there would be at least one race being different.

[adeine]

Dislikes
-first and biggest dislike, changing the old ship nomenclature. Yes it used to be weird. M5 to M3 from smallest to largest, but then M6 was a corvette, M7 was a missile frigate and M2 and M1 were a battleship and a carrier respectively. Yet you could take the shilouette and the first 2 letters of a serial code and you could tell exactly what kind of power the vessel was expected to have. But no more, now one had to relearn everything.
-lack of loadout flexibility. No longer can you have 6 or 8 forward weapons' bays on a fighter or a heavy fighter, never mind a frigate. All you get are 2 (on Argon vessels). The old system was much better with distinct power levels and much greater variety. You want 6 forward HEPTs on your M3? Go ahead. Even if they are useless, you still look cool. You want all 6 in use with actual use? Sure, mass drivers, just be prepsred for the lack of range and carrying around consumable ammo. Everything else is a compromise.
- But no more. The old balancing was great: Argon was all-rounder, Teladi was heavily shielded, but much slower. Boron was heavily shielded and comparable to Argon infirepower but much larger in bulk. Paranid was all-rounder with a rebalance and Split was fast and powerful with a compromise in shields. OTAS tried to be the best of all races but in the end ended up no better than Argon when guided by AI.
Each race had specific ships and weapons (which could be mounted on all ships). Now, the distinctions are much less pronounced (I hope this changes and each faction and subfaction has a load of different types to choose from in the future).

This is probably the biggest problem with the game right now, and one of the harder ones to fix.

The game needs more equipment, and equipment needs to be more ship specific for ship roles to make sense and being able to balance the game properly, but trying to introduce these changes gracefully will be very difficult if you want to preserve players' games in progress. One way of doing it could be to automagically convert old save games by changing ships to 'functionally equivalent' loadouts, but it would still be a major undertaking.

Hopefully even if some of these additions come as part of DLC (e.g. Split/Boron weapons), they'll include the relevant parts in the base game so rebalancing things around new content is a possibility.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

With 1000+ hours (6000+ hours overall, at least some of which was Pre-Steam/Off-Steam) in each of X2, X3:R, X3:TC, X3:AP, X-Rebirth, X4 my take on X4 is quite simple - directly comparing X4 with any of the previous games is not being fair to either X4 nor the previous games.

Regarding some of the OPs Likes/Dislikes though...

1. Stability - crashes are pretty rare in X4 (they do occur) but there are other issues such as UI rendering issues, UI interactions being erratic, and game freezes that make the overall experience far worse than any previous X-series title I have played
2. Grinding - previous X-games need not require weeks of grind, the TS ships were not *that* expensive on balance and you could always get ships to bail on you (or find ships that are abandoned). X4 ship hull prices have a tighter distribution than previous X-games - the higher end ships are cheaper and the lower end ships are more expensive.
3. Super highways/Accelerators were really introduced with X3:TC/X3:AP (c/f Terran Space)
4. Highways were introduced as part of the engine rewrite that was X-Rebirth
5. Loadout flexibility - I was never a big fan of the loadout changes between X2 and X3 and X4 really returns back to the X2 grass-roots in that regard. That being said, there are the Paranid Nemesis, Argon Pulsar, Argon Quasar that each have 6 forward mount weapons.
6. Race Balancing - Balancing is done differently now (more module focused than ship focused - though ship design does play a part), so much so you can not reasonably compare it with previous X-series games. In brief, the key differences in X4 are Argon in general are all-rounders but tend to have the best Cruise Speeds, Teladi focus on Hull/Module/Shield Hit points, Paranid focus on Max+Boost Speed/Manoeuvrability/Shield-Recharge.
7. Weird Secrets - there are some, hints:
   Spoiler

   Show

   LR Scan, ALI faction, and keep an eye on Pirate/Rogue Plunderers/Raiders
8. Questlines - waste of time on the whole from my perspective, sure they added a limited amount of scripted content BUT the main bulk of gameplay has typically been completely unrelated to any questlines. In X3:TC/X3:AP, the quest lines did spread out a bit more but you need not spend more than 200 hours (at most IIRC) on plot related activities.

Regardless of what X3 fans may think, X4 was never going to be an X3 content plus extras type game and it is unlikely that Egosoft are ever going to release such a game anytime soon (if at all). There are too many complications with doing so, that much is abundantly clear.

X-Rebirth was a reboot of the X-Series, the X-BTF based engine had more than run it's course with X3:AP. X4 (and any other X-game in the foreseeable future) is likely to continue to re-use the X-Rebirth/X4 engine and with that comes some inherent pros and cons that we all are going to have to either learn to accept, adjust via modding (where possible), or move on.