Saw this video and something dawned on me....

[Dreez]

I remember when playing X3TC, and no matter how big and slow capitalships i had, i never ran into the problem
of not being able to clear the jump-in gate before another ship jumped in behind me, i would easily manouever away
from any risk of collision.

Then just now i watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPhMx5FKT9c this video and i just noticed
that Egosoft completely dropped the ball on capitalship movement. Why have they made capitalship so
slow that they can't clear a gate before another ship comes in behind them !?.

I remember jumping into a system in X3TC with my Teladi M2, the largest and possibly slowest M2 in the game,
and i could still easily get out of the way of a Boreas, which is one of the faster M2's in X3TC.

Now i know X4 isn't X3, but still - capitalships should be able to move fast enough to clear a gate and avoid collision.
It's just stupid imo how slow they are in all aspects.

This is also something that is very visible during capitalship fights, the ships are so slow that they can't
avoid slowmoving enemy projectiles unless it's from a considerable distance.
In X3TC i foundly remember taking on 2-4 Xenon K's with a single Boreas and with the ability to dodge
the incoming fire, i could prevail even outnumbered - because of piloting.
In X4 we are flying bricks suddenly... why this stupid change ?.

[Axeface]

Capital ships are faster in X4 than they were in X3 And thats without travel drive, in fact, all ships are faster Eg, Titan was like 40 m/s.....
And X3 gate fustercluckery was a constant PITA for me, I dont know what game you were playing but capital ships blowing up due to collisions whether at gates, with other ships or sometimes even with the gates themselves... or with stations they were docking/undocking with was infuriating. I will never forget that *clunk clunk clunk* collision noise, knowing that something was about to pop.

[KextV8]

I lost more Suicidal Squid runs in X3:TC/AP to going through a gate and hitting a capital in the butt or undocking from certain stations with bad collision mesh than any actual combat.

So yeah. Collisions were def a thing in X3.

[chew-ie]

In X3TC i foundly remember taking on 2-4 Xenon K's with a single Boreas and with the ability to dodge

The Boreas was a overpowered cheat ship, basically the Springblossom version of the destroyer class. No good starting point for talking about balance / how a destroyer should be.

As a all-time capital ship fan I love the X4 versions - especially the destroyers - the most (minus the ugly PAR destroyer). Point defense with salvos, sturdy, good turning speed and a lot of different docking configurations for aux fighters.

X3 capital ships were slow, awful & a lot more expensive - they just kept exploding after a few seconds and only controlled by a player they could beat the AI without casualties.

[Axeface]

X3 capital ships were slow, awful & a lot more expensive - they just kept exploding after a few seconds and only controlled by a player they could beat the AI without casualties.

Yep, because of strafe that the AI didnt use > And projectiles that were just as slow (if not slower) than X4's.

I lost more Suicidal Squid runs in X3:TC/AP to going through a gate and hitting a capital in the butt or undocking from certain stations with bad collision mesh than any actual combat.

So yeah. Collisions were def a thing in X3.

Makes my blood pressure rise just thinking about it...

[sd_jasper]

Kinda the opposite experience for me. In X3 I lost all rep with a faction because I tried to pilot a capital through a gate, and once on the other side, AI ships kept smacking into me and being destroyed.

[aquatica]

I remember gatecrashing in X3 R, TC and AP to be a real issue for me. Literally died more times crashing than fighting. And I'm crap ad fighting

[Dreez]

The point i was trying to make was that the current lack of speed and manouever m/s doesn't allow capitalship
to clear a gate before the next ships jump in. Something i had no issues with in X3.
Ofc the has never been able to fly ships properly in any X-games, but that's a whole other chapter.

In this video you can clearly see the Tokya carrier barely moving before several other ships starts
jumping in and collisions commences.

[Wraith_Magus]

The point i was trying to make was that the current lack of speed and manouever m/s doesn't allow capitalship
to clear a gate before the next ships jump in. Something i had no issues with in X3.
Ofc the has never been able to fly ships properly in any X-games, but that's a whole other chapter.

In this video you can clearly see the Tokya carrier barely moving before several other ships starts
jumping in and collisions commences.

Yup, totally common for all the X games. Egosoft never did figure out how to avoid these kinds of "roadkill" problems, which is why they wound up giving up and just turning collision damage off for X4, so at least your ships only lose shields instead of constantly explode.

Your best work-around is to just rely upon keeping collision detection off by being in another sector and just teleporting back into your main ship when it arrives at a destination, or at least a little bit away from the gates. I personally bounce around between a dozen or so ships I set up as gofers to do mission objectives really quickly while I let the captains of my playerships handle the actual transits between sectors I want to do my main adventuring in, and do missions on the side. (For example, I take a lot of those "teaching the ropes" missions and have two small miners set up just for that. When I need to step out of a playership for a bit, I just hop over, run to pick up the passenger, then send my mining ship out to drop a resource probe on top of a resource probe that already has the required resource amounts, then pick it right back up while teleporting back out because I don't need to be there for that. Once I complete that stage of the mission, I then teleport back into the mining ship and drop my ore/silicon and then pick it back up, because they never require you to mine for it or sell the stuff you pick up, just "pick up" an amount of ore/silicon that fills your ship's cargo capacity, so I just keep reusing the same ore/silicon. For about 20 seconds of player attention, these are worth 700k, and they're constantly given out by factions like Teladi and Segaris.)

[Fenris321]

Kinda the opposite experience for me. In X3 I lost all rep with a faction because I tried to pilot a capital through a gate, and once on the other side, AI ships kept smacking into me and being destroyed.

In Albion Prelude I can't count the number of times I'd go through a gate in a capital just to hear "not like this..." *boom* as another NPC got splattered on the hull

The point i was trying to make was that the current lack of speed and manouever m/s doesn't allow capitalship
to clear a gate before the next ships jump in. Something i had no issues with in X3.
Ofc the has never been able to fly ships properly in any X-games, but that's a whole other chapter.

In this video you can clearly see the Tokya carrier barely moving before several other ships starts
jumping in and collisions commences.

That seems to be more of an AI pathing problem than a ship problem. At least in my experience I can watch a capital or large freighter spend 10 minutes trying to maneuver around a gate it just jumped through in order to go to a station. If I teleport to the ship it takes seconds to do the same maneuver and get the ship on its way.

[jlehtone]

Kinda the opposite experience for me. In X3 I lost all rep with a faction because I tried to pilot a capital through a gate, and once on the other side, AI ships kept smacking into me and being destroyed.

In Albion Prelude I can't count the number of times I'd go through a gate in a capital just to hear "not like this..." *boom* as another NPC got splattered on the hull

In X2/X3 you had two options: manual flight and autopilot. The autopilot (both fly through and jumpdrive) did wait for its turn within Gate traffic. The player at helm neither knew nor did care. Obviously the AI traffic did not know about the player either. Hence we, who did not let auto-pilot (the cursed AGI) take over, were very experienced in unscheduled tail-pipe inspections.

X3AP had a war-script: two Megalodons in Asteroid Belt. 2-3 ATF did pop in, back to back, from Gate. Into tail of Megalodon and previous ATF's pride. At least two of the ships died instantly and the rest suffered badly. Alas, that was clearly not regular traffic.


X4 4.0 did change how big ships enter and exit Gates. They can still fly through each other, but throughput is higher.

[SwizzleStick86]

I think also there's alot more large ships in X4 than in X3. Before there went L traders, the only L civilian ship (to my memory) was the transport for stations.