Effect of taking a Side - wars

[Hairless-Ape]

I see a variety of missions involving Argons vs. Paranid, and similar faction->faction opportunities..
However, being a trader with trading ships and miners running all over the place, I can't help wonder what will happen should I start taking a side and participating in a war.

Can you do this without basically sacrificing your ability to travel through certain areas of space? If you, for example, fight with the Argon against the Paranid, would you no longer be able to dock or trade in paranid space? and is this problem pretty much permanent?

Just curious why and when anyone would want to participate in a war effort against a 'normal' faction when it means it could hinder much of what you want to do otherwise.
Comments, questions, observations welcome !

Thanks.

[Imperial Good]

Yes if you kill enough ships of one of the factions they will hate you and remove your docking rights and eventually start to destroy all your ships.

However there are a lot of war missions that do not involve killing stuff. They can involve anything from building stations and ships to deploying satellites or even resupplying stations. These missions can be accepted and completed without any rep loss. This means one can accept and complete missions for all 4 sides of the war and gain a ton of reputation in the process.

[Karmaticdamage]

If you play long enough you will eventually become so rich and powerful that you start to run out of things to do. What do you do when you have 50 or more destroyers and several carriers? Anything you do can be undone though, its very easy to get rep back to friendly if you become hostile with a faction. You can even rebuild their shipyards and wharfs for them if you happen to level their home system once you become friendly with them again.
I helped the HOP conquer the game world, turned the whole map pink, then I helped all the factions reclaim their space and rebuilt their shipyards and wharfs after being -30 with every faction and having been fed a massive amount of war content.
You can completely exterminate a faction to nothing, become friendly with them again by killing npcs near their unfinished plots, and they will come back to life out of your own shipyard/wharf. At one point I had completely killed the HOP off, all ships, all stations, they were gone from the game. After regaining friendly rep they bought several builder ships from my shipyard and started to restore their empire.
You can also drop your own defense platforms and conquer the game world yourself if you want.

[Hairless-Ape]

Awesome information. Thank you.

[Raevyan]

If you play long enough you will eventually become so rich and powerful that you start to run out of things to do. What do you do when you have 50 or more destroyers and several carriers? Anything you do can be undone though, its very easy to get rep back to friendly if you become hostile with a faction. You can even rebuild their shipyards and wharfs for them if you happen to level their home system once you become friendly with them again.
I helped the HOP conquer the game world, turned the whole map pink, then I helped all the factions reclaim their space and rebuilt their shipyards and wharfs after being -30 with every faction and having been fed a massive amount of war content.
You can completely exterminate a faction to nothing, become friendly with them again by killing npcs near their unfinished plots, and they will come back to life out of your own shipyard/wharf. At one point I had completely killed the HOP off, all ships, all stations, they were gone from the game. After regaining friendly rep they bought several builder ships from my shipyard and started to restore their empire.
You can also drop your own defense platforms and conquer the game world yourself if you want.

How can you gain rep with a faction that is wiped out and has no ships, no stations and no sectors? I would assume "completely terminating" means the faction is gone (including build spots). Are there NPCs that give missions for them on other faction stations?

[Tamina]

Did the war missions ever ask you to attack the opposing faction, help an invasion or do other hostile actions? For me all missions are just passive "place sattelite here", "scan station there", "build a defence station far away for anyone to care". It's really boring. I was hoping for them to ask me to join their invasion attempts or something.

[Falcrack]

Did the war missions ever ask you to attack the opposing faction, help an invasion or do other hostile actions? For me all missions are just passive "place sattelite here", "scan station there", "build a defence station far away for anyone to care". It's really boring. I was hoping for them to ask me to join their invasion attempts or something.

I agree, war missions need to involve more war-like. In addition, fulfilling any war mission, no matter how benign, should reduce your standing for the side opposing the faction you helped. Any Argon vs HOP mission, even if doing something like building a defense station for ARG, should greatly drop your standing with HOP.

I would like it if war missions were more dynamic, more reflective of the actual events of the war. For example, a war mission that states that an invasion will take place in a given sector at a set time, which you can join or not. Or a defend sector mission against an actual invasion taking place.

The types of war missions I would like to see done away with entirely are those which are strictly role playing, which provide no actual in-game benefit for the faction that gave the mission. I am thinking of such things as scanning for spaceweed, resource probe missions (these are such a hoax, since AI doesn't even need the info, can mine 100% without resource probe info, I hate that), satellite missions (I really doubt the AI actually utilizes the satellite info for anything meaningful), and so forth. Build defense stations have marginal benefit I suppose, as does other station building missions, assemble a fleet, destroy ships missions, or supplying resources to stations.

[Hairless-Ape]

I agree completely. A sandbox is fun only to a point, and that point seems very easy/quick to reach in X4. After that, some content would be nice and I can think of no better way than to participate in a War in an active way.

Right now, the war system seems so passive from the player perspective, it's almost like you don't know it's going on, and that is fundamentally the problem. Instead of feeling immersed in an experience where you can play a part that matters and see what is actually happening in the war, you feel like you're just running pig crap from one station to a dump and so you never feel involved.

If there is truly a war going on, anything you do for one side should affect standings on both sides towards you, so this is a total fail in the current design.
You should also see some sort of War status should you decide to participate.
One would hope, that if you fail war missions, that you would see an impact to the war that is actually tangible and observable.
Instead of an immersive experience, or at the very least a sequence of static objectives that make it look like progress, we have nothing but some random missions that mean nothing.

The X3 war experience, while static, was at least something where you had a progression through a sequence and some finality. I don't see any effort was made in X4 towards this. Understandably they have a lot on their plate, but it just reinforces to everyone that any egosoft game isn't really complete for at least a couple years after it launches, and even then we can only hope they can see the successes of the past and implement them in the present. Right now, it just feels pretty, hollow and empty to wander around X4. Gameplay is everything, graphics come second.

[Karmaticdamage]

If you play long enough you will eventually become so rich and powerful that you start to run out of things to do. What do you do when you have 50 or more destroyers and several carriers? Anything you do can be undone though, its very easy to get rep back to friendly if you become hostile with a faction. You can even rebuild their shipyards and wharfs for them if you happen to level their home system once you become friendly with them again.
I helped the HOP conquer the game world, turned the whole map pink, then I helped all the factions reclaim their space and rebuilt their shipyards and wharfs after being -30 with every faction and having been fed a massive amount of war content.
You can completely exterminate a faction to nothing, become friendly with them again by killing npcs near their unfinished plots, and they will come back to life out of your own shipyard/wharf. At one point I had completely killed the HOP off, all ships, all stations, they were gone from the game. After regaining friendly rep they bought several builder ships from my shipyard and started to restore their empire.
You can also drop your own defense platforms and conquer the game world yourself if you want.

How can you gain rep with a faction that is wiped out and has no ships, no stations and no sectors? I would assume "completely terminating" means the faction is gone (including build spots). Are there NPCs that give missions for them on other faction stations?

Empires will still create plots even if they don't exist in the game world anymore. These count as stations. Lure enemies to them, you can always get khaak to teleport to you by flying randomly out into empty space.

[Panos]

I see a variety of missions involving Argons vs. Paranid, and similar faction->faction opportunities..
However, being a trader with trading ships and miners running all over the place, I can't help wonder what will happen should I start taking a side and participating in a war.

Can you do this without basically sacrificing your ability to travel through certain areas of space? If you, for example, fight with the Argon against the Paranid, would you no longer be able to dock or trade in paranid space? and is this problem pretty much permanent?

Just curious why and when anyone would want to participate in a war effort against a 'normal' faction when it means it could hinder much of what you want to do otherwise.
Comments, questions, observations welcome !

Thanks.

My problem is that I want to keep my ships out of PAR space and focus on TEL and MIN sectors, cut them dry of the supply runs completely.
Teladians 4TW.

[Dirk-Jan]

I agree completely. A sandbox is fun only to a point, and that point seems very easy/quick to reach in X4. After that, some content would be nice and I can think of no better way than to participate in a War in an active way.

Right now, the war system seems so passive from the player perspective, it's almost like you don't know it's going on, and that is fundamentally the problem. Instead of feeling immersed in an experience where you can play a part that matters and see what is actually happening in the war, you feel like you're just running pig crap from one station to a dump and so you never feel involved.

If there is truly a war going on, anything you do for one side should affect standings on both sides towards you, so this is a total fail in the current design.
You should also see some sort of War status should you decide to participate.
One would hope, that if you fail war missions, that you would see an impact to the war that is actually tangible and observable.
Instead of an immersive experience, or at the very least a sequence of static objectives that make it look like progress, we have nothing but some random missions that mean nothing.

The X3 war experience, while static, was at least something where you had a progression through a sequence and some finality. I don't see any effort was made in X4 towards this. Understandably they have a lot on their plate, but it just reinforces to everyone that any egosoft game isn't really complete for at least a couple years after it launches, and even then we can only hope they can see the successes of the past and implement them in the present. Right now, it just feels pretty, hollow and empty to wander around X4. Gameplay is everything, graphics come second.

Exactly

[memxcom]

You don't need to do war missions, I only did a few and then concentrated on trading with all factions,Argon,Teladi,Holy etc have +30 with them, only real enemies are Xenon and Khak IMHO, rest you can get along with .

Even Rebirth had better missions, let alone story line.

My goal was to wipe out Xenon from every sector and remove all their stations etc, they are now extinct apart from the bugs with some Xenon stations still listed as " under construction" with nothing to build with.