Here is a very hopeful list for 4.0+ Terraforming and planetary resource sinks
- Xenon absolutely must 'terraform' worlds in their controlled space. Not only is it an excellent opportunity to tie lore into gameplay but it also gives players a reason to halt the Xenon advance/try to avoid them holding space for too long if it's that costly and time intensive to reverse the damage. It would make the new system actually feel meaningful. (Maybe you're already planning something like this, but in the feature announcement, you mentioned the AI will not make use of the terraforming features, which would be such a waste)
- Another thing mentioned in the streams was making workforce/bonuses more important. A good way of doing this would be to make station production actually depend on workforce (no workforce -> no production for nonbasic/tier 2+ wares). Fudge the workforce numbers for nonplayer stations if the economy can't handle this.
- Have all workforce originate from TP shuttles spawning from planets/transported to orbital stations, and implement some workforce churn (workforce is lost over time and continuously replenished this way). How much workforce a planet produces depends on habitability/population and resource availability. Supply or terraform a planet well and stations will thrive, blockade it or starve it out and it will have far-reaching implications for the stations it supplies. This would tie in extremely well with the new terraforming system and add significantly to the immersion/simulating a living universe. (Build in the proximity of a big habitable planet with readily available workforce? Better be ready to pay high prices for plot and face stiff competition for your wares. Build in a far-off uninhabitable sector with great market opportunities? Better make sure you can protect the TP shuttles coming your way or you will be unable to make any use of your stations. It'd also add more indirect threats to the player and open up more opportunities for strategic warfare - if Xenon siege or take out planets this could dramatically impact player supply chains as workforce collapses, giving you reason to care about protecting planets/orbital stations.)
- Have Betty say the faction of the selected target (when spoken targets is enabled, obviously). The ship class is a good start, but you kind of want to know who it belongs to when quickly cycling through targets while focusing on something else. If selecting a renamed/player ship, do what X3 did and still have her give the information as opposed to remaining silent.
- Add a ticker-style bar at the bottom of the management and map screens that shows messages (like this). Considering how much time we spend playing from the management screens, it's an issue how blind we are in them. We can hear the incoming message/notification sound, but can't actually see what's happening unless we close out the map/build screen/etc and lose all panels/location/zoom, etc.
- Improve the display of the currently executed command with destination in the 'property owned' tab. X3 allowed you to quickly check at the press of a button where all your assets are, their status, and their current command and destination and it was very helpful. In X4, you have to click the ship and then search for the destination icons on the map, or open the info menu.
- The logical overview of stations is not very useful once your factories get bigger/more complex. I can only see a fraction of the information at a time and while I can scroll up/down via mouse wheel the same isn't true for left/right. My advice would be to make it similar to the map interface, where you can click drag the overview and mouse wheel zooms in and out to make it easier to see.
- Please consider bringing back a text/list overview of product consumption/production for factory complexes, preferably also available in the build planner. With something like the commercial agent menu in X3, it was possible to design stations efficiently just by looking at the raw overall numbers, whereas right now in X4 there is no easy way of doing so.
- Better graphs have been mentioned in some of the DLC2 streams. Yes please! Bring back some of the more advanced graphs from X3 - station overview is missing basic information like profitability, it's impossible to select more than a couple items at a time (why?) and player graphs are absent altogether.
- Make better use of tooltips/contextual information. The module equipment tooltip in the build planner is a good example of what the game could use more of across the board - it's very useful and stops you from having to click into a different screen every single time or expanding the section. Particularly the station/ship information could benefit a lot from helpful tooltips - right now you have to navigate through two separate menus with their own nested sections (information/behaviour) to know what's going on with a ship where most of this could be in a neat little popup when hovering over it on the map or in the nested list (current cargo/command/destination; or for stations, trade offers perhaps?). This could also save on some clutter, as right now additional information is contingent on zooming in past a certain point, at which point it can render the map unreadable with overlapping text over overlapping text.
- Once the encyclopaedia is more filled in, implement info boxes when planning or equipping ships or looking at wares. The way X3 read out/showed weapon, ship and ware descriptions while in the menus actually relevant to gameplay really brought the world building into the game itself, making you learn about what you're actually dealing with. I think part of why X4 feels more drab in this regard (wares and ships don't feel very distinct except for slightly different numbers) is because this bit of personality is missing, or hidden behind a very awkwardly accessible encyclopaedia entry.
- Make existing keyboard shortcuts obvious from menu items/titles (e.g. "Information [ i ]", or X3's blue menu indicators) and introduce them across the board.
- Too much of X4 is spent clicking around interfaces where a simple keypress would do fine in prior games.
- The right-hand info panel needs a dedicated key binding to open and close. Shift-I perhaps?
- Ideally bring back X3's system of key that opens menu -> key that closes menu. Much easier than having to worry about going back vs. closing the menu, etc.
- Common commands should also be possible via keyboard (e.g. select player asset on map or maybe even from HUD, press 'shift-D' and click on station -> ship will dock at station; same for follow/attack/etc.)
- Make the map navigable with keyboard: A good change in that direction would be to make the ship ID always visible in sector and property listings (maybe in its own column like in X3) and being able to type it into the filter search bar to select a specific ship. Right now a ship's unique ID is basically useless and you can't even see it most of the time as it clips with longer names. Along with a key to press to enter the filter search text box (say, ctrl-F, then type, then press enter) it certainly would help in selecting an individual ship from the list, as by the time you mouse over it the list may grow or shrink, making you have to chase the one you actually want to select with your cursor. Especially a problem with the right click menu options or double click to centre. Then have a key to bring up the right click menu, which you'd be able to navigate with cursor keys.
- Confirm/Cancel need a dedicated key across all menus.
- Remove gravity well/drag for hostile ships.
- Make subsystems on smaller ships destructible as well, and/or have systems fail as ships take damage. Right now it's easy to disable large ships, while medium and small ships are invulnerable to any issues or disarmament until they blow up.
- Reintroduce ship reactors with a fixed MW capacity and constant regeneration rate. I know this is a big ask with a lot of underlying changes, but it would solve so many issues immediately. You could have specialised ships/weapons for sustained fire or burst damage; similar for boosting (which would drain off the same energy, so boosting too much would mean lack of sustained fire from weapons due to low energy). If you really want to keep shield regen nerfed, you could even have shield regeneration tied into the ship reactor, so your shields might regenerate slower or not at all if you max out your boosting/weapons.
- The Terran DLC is a great opportunity to implement more choice in weaponry and take a page from X3/XRM by making possible loadout choices highly ship specific, where lot of the pros and cons for ships in specific situations came down to what armament it could bring – expanding on the base Mx classification. A mining ship should not be able to mount the same calibre of weapons as a destroyer. This gives ships back their distinct roles and personality: Say a frigate capable of mounting a good number of flak/anti-fighter weapons, vs. a similarly sized vessel designed to take on capital ships with its extra heavy weapon slots. Or a ship that doesn't excel at anything, stats wise, but stands out by offering more choices in loadouts (X3 pirates). At the moment it's basically just a case of who has the most hardpoints wins, since with such a limited selection, any ship can use pretty much anything.
- Substantially increase the difference in pricing between different ship classes and stations. X4 suffers from little to no early game, rendering lower tier ships and equipment irrelevant and exacerbating its comparative dearth of content. In X2, there was an entire stage of gameplay where upgrading your ship and software mattered, which would then transition into being able to afford better and better ships, and eventually get into station building etc. If you wanted to skip "the grind", you could always pick an advanced game start, and presto. Right now in X4, you can basically start with M ships. This is a big part of why it feels there is less variety in gameplay, since all the stages of early game and progression have been removed, and you're immediately thrown into fleet, empire and station building (e.g. it never feels satisfying or like an achievement to install the docking computer, or put better guns on a starting fighter).
- With the introduction of sector policing and finer control over territory you control, it feels like a massive oversight that you can't sell AI factions plot licences in your territories. In fact, if they like you they'll avoid your space like the plague. Individually being asked about every plot could be a pain, but how about having a menu where you have checkboxes to select from a list of different types of station for each faction (similar to the blacklist interface, with a default setting and a per sector override if you so choose) so you can allow certain parts of the production chain or factions to prosper in sectors controlled by you. Then you'd just have to do the usual licence fee calculation, and whenever said faction starts a new plot, the money is wired directly into the player account.
- Large ships need a better way to get around. While piloting L and XL ships yourself, the travel drive mostly works to navigate in a reasonable time, but for AI ships, the constant stopping and restarting will slow movement to a crawl. This is made worse by the fact that AI large ships approach gates and accelerators(?) from the back. I assume this is to try and limit collisions, but this needs some sort of better solution, as right now it leads to traffic jams with large ships/fleets piled up behind the gate trying, and failing, to manoeuvre.
- Small ships need to be able to dock and launch efficiently. For stations, ships glitching through modules and bouncing all over the place is jarring, but not really a big problem; however when it comes to large ships supposed to be carrying a complement of escort ships, this renders them practically useless. Getting smaller ships launched and docked on pads is a major undertaking and takes minutes, making emergency launches or withdrawal not viable. This problem was solved in X3 via the magic of the docking computer snapping ships into their docked position. X4's docking computer can work similarly when used by the player (aim at dock, boost in, and the docking computer will generally take over), but AI ships do not seem to take advantage of this even under the best circumstances. If AI needs to cheat a little to replicate this, make it so.
- Implement an XRM style bounty system that applies both for the player and AI ships. If a player is able to rack up a bounty on their head, acts of aggression or piracy would have more realistic, tangible effects beyond generalised reputation. Similar rules as XRM should apply - police licence or equivalent gives you access to a faction's bounty listings (and rewards) with vague 'last seen' locations of said vessels in their space; ideally with a list of their crimes/victims and number of kills. Add to this something like the fabulous LIFE mod's NPC-ships-levelling-through-kills system and the universe suddenly becomes a lot more immersive as high tier bounty targets will be more viable and write their own little stories.
- Mines and sector hazards not working OOS needs to be addressed somehow. It's a cool thing to have sectors like Tharka's Cascade, but totally throws immersion when hazards turn off the second you're not around in person (with a thriving economy and traffic in the very same system!).
- Have a list of faction themed alternate names for every sector in the game, so factions can rename enemy sectors they take over. Admittedly it's a decent number of extra voice lines, but it would be a very cool bit of immersion to see Xenon turn the universe into a sea of Matrices, or Argon Prime being renamed after the Split who conquered it. To avoid confusion, the sector's original name could still be displayed in some form e.g. "Previously: Argon Prime" in the info menu.
- Make a sort of Hub plot 2.0 where by completing a quest you reconnect/activate some jump gate that leads to a number of previously disconnected Xenon sectors with high production output. This way you can have an optional and meaningful late-game goal/challenge which is guaranteed to be available (since the disconnected sectors can't be wiped out beforehand), with a decent infrastructure requirement (like providing millions of microchips
) to deter people from accidentally stumbling into it early game and complaining that Xenon are too strong. (Though probably should have some logic built in that only spawns the Xenon in those sectors upon completing the quest, as otherwise they'll slow down a game they might never appear in and clog up resources)
- When docking at a station, make the welcome and generic announcements more faction specific. This added a lot of character/life to X3 whereas in X4 it's generally a monosyllabic "welcome", making all stations feel alike and making it hard to tell what faction you're dealing with at times. Have us be welcomed in the name of the Kingdom of Boron, the High Priest, or the Chairman, etc. With how immersive X4 tries to make everything, this bit of character is sorely missing.
- When redesigning a station, instead of the generic background image, use the skybox of the system you're building in as a backdrop. When upgrading a ship use the skybox of the current system and (if applicable) the ship docked to the current station. For extra effect, you could even have some of the little constructor drones hovering around it (like for stations under construction). This way, the ship equip/upgrade screens would be less monotonous and detached from the game, and lend themselves to a more credible 'ship being worked on in hangar' scenario reminiscent of how Freelancer and others do it to great effect. More seamless experience in the early game, and visual variety in the late game.
- Implement horizontal 'observation' corridor modules that act like the current horizontal connects, except you can take the lift to them and walk their length/look out the windows (similar to the venture module).This way you can design your stations with interesting views and observation platforms to hang out in. More connected walkways across modules in general would also be a good idea. Right now you can connect several docks if they're next to each other, but other than that there's no way to build a station that feels less fragmented.
- Improve the collision logic so ships don't "catch"/stick to each other when entangled in geometry. This wasn't a problem in earlier games because ships just exploded when this happened, but with collision damage turned off, this makes close encounters or manoeuvring around stations or obstacles feel pretty janky/awkward, especially in larger ships. There's no real indication you're colliding or stuck with anything, other than suddenly not being able to turn your ship properly or use your engines until you've slowly floated out of whatever geometry you're stuck on.
