Does HAT actually even have their own ships/fleet?

[Midnitewolf]

Totally agree Wrath_Magus. However the thing is, you really don't didn't emergent narrative. You just need the game mechanisms that allow the player to create his own emergent narrative. I play Bannerlord for example and while it has its own issues it is very similar to X4 in a lot of ways. However where it is different, aside from it being a medieval empire simulator, is that it doesn't really force a story down your throat and lets you decide which direction you want to go. For example, my favorite playthrough in Bannerlord is to work my way up to being invited to be a vassal of one of the factions kings or queens than help them to grow their kingdom. You can't do that in X4.

To kind of list many of the the things you have there than you don't have in X4:

-Dynamic Wars
-Diplomacy including war and peace negotiations
-Join Kingdom mechanics
-Betray Kingdom mechanics
-Create your own Kingdom mechanics
-Conquest mechanics
-Meaningful Territory Control


Also the second you join or create a kingdom, your in the mix. You can be attacked without Warning and you have to react to the situation whether you are ready for it or not.

This allow for the player to create emergent narrative. For example, in several runthroughs I have betrayed my King because of silly stuff like him not giving me enough territories after battle or the AI not responding to raids on my villages fast enough. Those weren't scripted events, they were just random things that happened in my game that let my own personal imagination come into play that drastically changed the course of my gameplay experinence.

You just can't do that in X4 becasue the wars are scripted events and even with the story, if your playing at being a Terran Cadet, your not treated as being part of the Terran Protectorate, ever so your not really part of anything. Your holding are never going to be randomly attacked by any one just because they want your territory. Just keep relations up and your good. Territory control just means a green boarder on the sector, yay me. You just so looked down in X4 that you have to work really, REALLY hard to create your own emergent narrative aside from a very narrow scope of choices like fighting off the Xenon. Your never going to "live" in a galaxy where Terra decides to eradicates all Aliens, it is just 100% off the table.

So yeah, you don't need story or narrative, except maybe some background to build upon. The story or narrative comes from the players themselves.....if you let them.

[grapedog]

Maybe i am in the minority, but i like being able to choose which factions fight, or don't fight. I wish there were more options to setup who you want warring though. But overall im ok with the current options.

[Midnitewolf]

Maybe i am in the minority, but i like being able to choose which factions fight, or don't fight. I wish there were more options to setup who you want warring though. But overall im ok with the current options.

I think there is a place for both. For example, that game Bannerlord I mentioned, has a Story Mode and a Sandbox Mode. If you don't want anything to do with Story, you just play in Sandbox mode, same thing could happen here in X4. I mean there is no need to reinvent the wheel with X4 because the vast, vast majority of what it needs to be a good Sandbox is already built in and it would be a shame to let all that story content go to waste.

So what they need to do is create a DLC adding in the missing Sandbox elements I mentioned above and maybe call it "X4: Foundations - Empires" or something. I know I would pay full price for that. I would even be more willing to pay full price if they re-worked the UI and command structure and added a ton of the QoL features you can only get in mods right now and added that as part of the content too.

[aquatica]

Wasn't there a "No Story"-mode for at least X2? Maybe even X3: TC? That was real sandbox. Ofcourse what you could do was limited, but the idea isn't too far away.

[Wraith_Magus]

Wasn't there a "No Story"-mode for at least X2? Maybe even X3: TC? That was real sandbox. Ofcourse what you could do was limited, but the idea isn't too far away.

While true, there's a difference between having a game that is set up to be reactive to the player and have mechanics that allow for the player to tell their own story and literally just a game with a linear story mode (and therefore has those mechanics missing) that just has the story turned off.

That's, again, why I think that when people talk about a sandbox game not having a linear plot, there's a false dichotomy drawn by people who think the only alternative to a voice acted linear plot is the exact same game with no plots at all. The alternative that's not being considered is a game where all the effort that went into a scripted linear plot was instead put into creating procedural storybuilding elements, such as, say, a diplomacy system where players could influence the relations between other factions, the way that grapedog mentioned. If you have, for example, repeatable missions where you could worsen or improve relations between ANT and ARG instead of a single scripted sequence which can either set the factions against one another forever or keep them unified forever, you could allow the game to react more dynamically to what the player feels like playing at the moment. You could also have in-game events that trigger this as part of the emergent narrative, like ANT starting to get more belligerent if, like in my game, they start really kicking XEN and HOP ass and expanding quite a bit while ARG does nothing, and ANT wants to become a senior partner rather than the junior one, causing factional friction. You could have the HOP-PAR war die down some if for some reason either paranid faction starts really getting eaten by XEN, and they temporarily shelve their mutual differences for species survival.

You could then add these sorts of conditions in as all-text parts of the news crawlers, or put them up in a news section of the map menu, or have news broadcasts on televisions on docks, station bars, and possibly even cap ship crew quarters/rec rooms/bars (please add internal rooms to larger ships, Egosoft). The talking head on the news would then rattle off the state of relations between different factions as the news, and could give detailed reasons why specific faction relations go up or down. (Again, you might do something like sabotage/hacking/boarding/destruction of ships/stations while trying to make it look like you belonged to another faction to deliberately worsen faction relations, so the news might play the false story you cooked up, instead, which I'm sure would get a chuckle from some players.)

Likewise, most missions are just sort of randomly spawning ad infinitum. I frequently get faction missions that ask me to do something like prospect for silicon in the same sector over and over again. And I mean, four sub-missions where they ask me to find the same materials in the same two sectors, so I'm literally just telling my ship to pick up the old resource probe and putting it back down on the exact same spot. It's just an arbitrary hoop to jump through which I do because Egosoft decided to add a bunch of materials I can only get through repeating quests and these are by far the easiest to spam. (Provided it doesn't ask for the impossible, like finding .4 ore density in Second Contact 2, which has one spot with 28 ore density that is always mined out to 0.01 density and nothing else going above .2 ore density to probe...) It would be a lot better for gameplay immersion and storytelling if, instead of just spamming the same mission types blindly, more missions could actually state in their descriptions that these missions are being given as part of a situation in the simulation of the digital nation to address an actual shortage. For example, I saw a mission that said "Hey, we've been short on shield components in the whole faction for a while, build us a shield component factory, and we'll pay you 12 mil." A part of the problem with the current way the game works is that even when there are missions that work like this, it's hard to tell the "reacting to actual needs of a faction" missions apart from "infinitely spammed busywork" missions, so actually explaining in mission descriptions why these missions are being given out would help greatly with this.

[Sanshy]

Actually it is a sandbox ...

those side quests are not mandatory and can be totally ignored.
The HAT are very insignificant before and after the HAT plot...

I also tried to give them a new system claimed and with a warf via a building mission but they never produced anything with it.

Same apply with the split and paranid plot ... you can ignore it or do the level 1 or level 2 or level 3 of the plot at the end with each level changing the situation progressively and you can stop when you are satisfied or go to the end or skip totally.

I do agree that a bigger control on who fight who and on what level of aggressiveness would be a very nice add on into the game tho.

The game is still offering a far better experience then previous X series ...

The khaak are also a bit pale .

[Midnitewolf]

Actually it is a sandbox ...

those side quests are not mandatory and can be totally ignored.
The HAT are very insignificant before and after the HAT plot...

I also tried to give them a new system claimed and with a warf via a building mission but they never produced anything with it.

Same apply with the split and paranid plot ... you can ignore it or do the level 1 or level 2 or level 3 of the plot at the end with each level changing the situation progressively and you can stop when you are satisfied or go to the end or skip totally.

I do agree that a bigger control on who fight who and on what level of aggressiveness would be a very nice add on into the game tho.

The game is still offering a far better experience then previous X series ...

The khaak are also a bit pale .

I just came back to this thread to report that my experiment with HAT went the opposite direction. I built them a complete Wharf and Shipyard and boy have they stepped up to the plate. They have built up Hatikvah's Choice big time and are up to 28 stations and they are patrolling it with Destroyers. I counted 6 destroyers, about 8-10 M ships and at least two dozen fighters operated by HAT currently. I wasn't even paying attention until I saw a message that HAT had tried to push the Xenon out of Trarka's Cascade XV.

Playing a modded game obviously or else I couldn't give them a Shipyard/Wharf but it is cool to see that when I gave them support they took it and run with it despite how their story is apparently supposed to go. Now this feels like a sandbox.

As far as X4 being a true sandbox, I still disagree. It has many sandbox qualities to it, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't really have the mechanics and tools required for a player to create his own story and that is why it is not a full sandbox.

For example. When I just recently bought the game, about a week before COH released actually. I was hyped up because of the way the Terran's didn't seem to get along with anyone. The story I had dreamed up in my head for my first playthrough was a Xenophobic Terra bent on galaxy domination. They were going to eradicate all those nasty Teladi, Paranids and Split from the Galaxy and those exile humans of ANT and ARG had better toe the party line or else. Of course this was before I had even bought the game or knew anything about it but since everyone considered it a "Sandbox" there should be no reason why the player can't make this story happen and I guess that is my point. There isn't any sort of mechanism in the Vanilla game that would ever allow me to bring Terra into conflict with the Teladi, Paranid or Split. I also can't ever actually be a part of the Terran Protectorate. I mean the story makes it out like I am part of it, but my faction is always treated as a separate faction to the point where Terran Protectorate ships will open fire on me if so stray fire accidently contacts their shields. This is why the game IS NOT a sandbox.

[Ezarkal]

Playing a modded game obviously or else I couldn't give them a Shipyard/Wharf but it is cool to see that when I gave them support they took it and run with it despite how their story is apparently supposed to go. Now this feels like a sandbox.

You can, though.
HAT will offer a station building mission every now and then. Nothing prevents you from adding a shipyard to it.

[chip56]

Playing a modded game obviously or else I couldn't give them a Shipyard/Wharf but it is cool to see that when I gave them support they took it and run with it despite how their story is apparently supposed to go. Now this feels like a sandbox.

What mod do you use to handover stations to other factions?

[Midnitewolf]

Playing a modded game obviously or else I couldn't give them a Shipyard/Wharf but it is cool to see that when I gave them support they took it and run with it despite how their story is apparently supposed to go. Now this feels like a sandbox.

What mod do you use to handover stations to other factions?

Recycle Ships and Stations. I think it is only available on Nexus. It lets you sell stations to NPC factions. It also lets you scrap a station you might no longer be using and get some of the value back out of it. You can also recycle ships for a change to get the blueprint for the ship and/or its equipped items. I tend to use the sell stations option quite a bit and use it to help out other factions being overrun by Xenon. Basically I build a gate defense platform and then "Sell" it to the NPC faction that controls that sector. I technically don't have to sell it and could keep control but for roleplay reasons I sell them and let the NPC's fate he in their own hands. They can maintain, repair and protect the defense platform or not, it is completely up to them.

[chip56]

Recycle Ships and Stations. I think it is only available on Nexus. It lets you sell stations to NPC factions. It also lets you scrap a station you might no longer be using and get some of the value back out of it. You can also recycle ships for a change to get the blueprint for the ship and/or its equipped items. I tend to use the sell stations option quite a bit and use it to help out other factions being overrun by Xenon. Basically I build a gate defense platform and then "Sell" it to the NPC faction that controls that sector. I technically don't have to sell it and could keep control but for roleplay reasons I sell them and let the NPC's fate he in their own hands. They can maintain, repair and protect the defense platform or not, it is completely up to them.

Thanks, gonna give that mod a try

[flatbush71]

HAT is my favorite faction.
I "gave them " a lot of ships after the mission
And they went to town with them !!
Very cool indeed.
So did the ALI as well
(Buy from the BAD, sell to the GOOD )

[rudi_pioneer]

Maybe i am in the minority, but i like being able to choose which factions fight, or don't fight. I wish there were more options to setup who you want warring though. But overall im ok with the current options.

I often end up editing my save games to change relations to match where my game is. Last one had alliance of convenience between Terrans and Paranid, which grew to them owning most of the universe. It would be awesome to have more official way to change or nudge relations. (stories work well, but it's bit limited) Like, imagine how fun would it be to role-play PIO's revolution when they realize TER are sabotaging the research, etc.

[flatbush71]

role-play PIO's revolution when they realize TER are sabotaging the research

Great idea !

[Midnitewolf]

Maybe i am in the minority, but i like being able to choose which factions fight, or don't fight. I wish there were more options to setup who you want warring though. But overall im ok with the current options.

I often end up editing my save games to change relations to match where my game is. Last one had alliance of convenience between Terrans and Paranid, which grew to them owning most of the universe. It would be awesome to have more official way to change or nudge relations. (stories work well, but it's bit limited) Like, imagine how fun would it be to role-play PIO's revolution when they realize TER are sabotaging the research, etc.

I agree 100%. I really hate having to "Cheat" to actually have a fun run through. II keep saying that if they would just add a few more thing to their game, they would have the ultimate space empire building game. Right not it is just missing a few elements that would make it into full 4x game except in this 4x game you would have the ability to ump into a fighter or take command of a fleet from the bridge in first person. It would be the only game of its kind and give rise to its one genre....if only they would take those few extra steps to add in Diplomacy and meaningful territory control. So, SO close to perfect and yet so far away at the same time.

[flatbush71]

I saved old game and started new, gave HAT miners, freighters and builders at the very start.
Maybe I'm wrong and they are in different locations but It seems to me they a built a few more new factories