X4 is a cool sandbox game where we can set our own goals. One obvious goal that many players have when they start the game is to conquer the galaxy. That seems like a reasonably challenging goal, which would require investment of considerable amounts of time to achieve.CBJ wrote: ↑Sat, 26. Jan 19, 01:18As some of you may already have figured out, one cool feature of X4 is the ability to own entire sectors and even change their names. With 3.00 we aim to build upon this with a number of features to help you benefit from sector control. You can then basically become your own faction with your own set of rules.
One issue with such a goal, however, is that in the context of the game, owning sectors is pretty meaningless. You can conquer the galaxy, but so what? Yeah you can change the sector name, but that’s it. Taking over sectors, as it stands now, feels pointless. Egosoft have indicated that with 3.0, they will introduce additional benefits of sector ownership. I have no idea what they are planning, but here are some thoughts I had that would give extra incentive, and thus extra meaning, to becoming a sector owner, essentially a faction unto yourself.
Taxes:
Collecting taxes from the NPC stations or local population within the sector could provide a good reason to sector ownership. If you are merely setting up a station in a sector owned by another faction, you would be paying regular taxes to the sector owner. That would provide a strong incentive to either set up stations in unowned space, or to own a sector yourself, so that instead of paying out taxes, others would be paying out taxes to you. There could be property taxes based on the number and size of stations, sales taxes which would be a % added on to the price of each item that the buyer pays, and taxes of the local population. Sectors with large population centers could generate a huge amount of tax revenue, and sectors that are uninhabited would provide very little in taxes. Taxes would be collected every half hour or so.
Limited workforce per sector:
Another thing that would encourage ownership of multiple sectors is if there were limitations on the amount of available workforce in a sector. You would not be able to simply sit in one tiny corner of the galaxy and produce megastations that will outproduce entire factions. You could still have a megastation in a sector, but it could not realistically grow uninhibited past a certain point. With more production modules, the workforce would be spread more and more thinly among the various stations. Perhaps you could set your wages higher to quickly attract workforce away from other NPC stations in the sector, but that of course would mean decreased profitability. Some sectors would have more available workforce than others. So to become more powerful, you would have to expand your presence to more sectors.
Increased workforce necessity:
If sector workforce were limited, workforce requirements for stations would probably need a rebalance. Currently, a station with 0 workforce is just about as efficient (100% efficient) as a station with full employment (125% efficient). This difference in efficiency between full employment and no employees seems much too small to me. Not enough to provide a strong incentive for a fully staffed station. To simulate the critical need for workforce to run your stations, stations with 0 workforce should maybe only operate at 10% efficiency, while a fully staffed station would have 100% efficiency. Under such a scenario, the cost for blueprints for habitation modules should probably be reduced from ~14 million as of now to ~0.5 million credits, because habitation modules would no longer be simply nice to have, they would be critical. You could operate with no workforce, but it would be incredibly inefficient.
Restrictions on building permits:
Owning a sector could give you the right to restrict other NPCs from setting up shop and using the available workforce you need for your own factories. Or, you could allow NPCs to freely set up shop in your sectors, paying you a generous amount in taxes. So, you could either have a command economy (all production owned by your faction, you collect very little in taxes but own all the raw materials to produce ships), or a laissez-faire capitalist economy (NPCs own stations in your sectors, produce goods, and pay you lots of taxes, which you use to buy stuff from them to produce ships at your shipyards). If you do not own the sector, the NPC owners might not allow you to place maybe more than ~5 production modules per sector, for example, so to get around these restrictions, you would need to diversify where you set up stations, add more production modules anyways and risk loss of reputation, or conquer the sector and make your own rules.
TLDR version:
Two things which would make sector ownership a meaningful goal are taxes and workforce limits per sector. Along with workforce limits would be rebalancing of workforce requirements on stations, and ways to restrict unlimited building in sectors to prevent too few available workers. It would add a lot of incentive for players to have the goal of owning sectors. I think changes such as these could greatly benefit the end game of X4. If these changes are beyond the scope Egosoft is willing to introduce, I hope a talented modder would see the potential for these ideas.
The only downside I see is that these changes could seriously screw up a game in progress, so it would likely require a game restart. It would therefore be good if existing games would not be subject to these changes, but any new game would follow these new set of rules.
