Hey guys, can this possibly be any more tedious? Who greenlit this?

[photomankc]

I hope they fix this.

Even people in the room just hearing me go through the process are left:

1.) Remarking along the lines of "You have to do THAT"?

2.) Later saying "OMG that's annoying... how many more do you have to do"?


Come on... fix this.

[samoja]

[Not sure about X4 but back in X3 the game was in fact balanced around empire building.

No, it wasn't. It was actually worse than X4 in that regard. There was no sensible way, in vanilla, to effectively control (or equip) fleets bigger than just a handful of ships, the UI and controls yet again made it virtually impossible, the only difference is the fleet tasks AI behaved a little better and more reliably than it does now. Station building too, was never meant to let you build big enough complexes to support a really vast infrastructure and fleets: the incredibily dumb design with those connection tubes that would always make a mess and make the sector unplayable perfomance wise (to the point of causing crashes) when going over a quite small number of station modules made it yet again virtually impossible and yet again only mods ever addressed that. Station building at least has become immensely better in X4 and it's finally suitable for thinking wide.
And let's not forget X4 is the first game to include actual sector capture and ownership (although in an unfinished state yet), which is arguably the most fundamental needed feature to even begin talking about proper "empire building".

X games are always like this: on paper they are supposed to let you play from a very zoomed out point of view in a more RTS / management role late game, but the game balance, UI, AI and mechanical limits end up making it exponentially more unwieldly the more you go from the Freelancer perspective to the empire building one. X4 has actually made quite a few steps in the right direction, but when it comes to UI and AI we're still way behind what would be needed for a smooth experience.

The issue is really conceptual, most of the times: when you "zoom out", and you are supposed to control hundreds of assets, the game has to offer you simplified tools. What works when you are controlling your ship only or just a little flight group doesn't necessarily work (quite the opposite) on a bigger scale. X games never really managed to get that, to offer you that separate set of macromanaging tools.

I actually think the bigger issue was that the game was balanced around you having a player ship with virtually no support, once you got one M2 there really was no reason to expend resources on another, even Xenon core sectors never presented enough opposition to warrant bringing any other asset, at best they would just get in the way, at worst the retarded AI would just get shot to bits in a battle where you as a player could not possibly loose, and don't let me even start on the smaller ships, i once ordered 20 fully kitted out M4s to attack a pirate factory, just to see what would happen, some 20 minutes later i lost over half of them to collision, they were not even getting shot at by anything, they were too dumb to realize they can just sit there and pound on the shields to their heart's content.

[scaco]

As usual with egosoft post-rebirth, their silence is deafening.

[Kadatherion]

As usual with egosoft post-rebirth, their silence is deafening.

I've just seen the steam statistics for the number of players left, and the actual sales estimate compared to the previous titles. I'd keep my lips sealed as well if I were in their shoes.