What now?

[Elviscerate]

Hello,

After playing TC for about 80 hours (great game!), I've explored much of the Universe, setup up 15 Universal Traders, built some factories, did some corp quests and some plots. Money is flowing nicely, some of the random missions have rewards that go into millions so I can afford every ship (I think).

If I jump to Albion Prelude, are the changes/improvements sufficient for another play through? More hostile NPC, a factions conflict, some ships and some starbases seems insufficient to warrant a second playthrough without boredom kicking in.

My second option is installing Xtended or XRM, which, judging by what I've read, are total conversions that focus on major balance changes and improvements but generally keep the "flow" of the game unchanged.

The third one is Litcube, which, again from my understanding, feels more like a brand new game.

What do I do next?

[Sorkvild]

What do I do next?

You research what each mod from "holy trinity" exactly does and then you install one and play
There are major differences between them.

[Jack08]

Play LU.

I'm totally not biased.



--

The improvements to the map system alone were enough to sell me on buying AP, but my motivations were more from the modding perspective.

[dizzy]

One of the design pillars of LU is to give you end game purpose so listen to Jack08.

All sandbox games (X included) have an eventual burnout. The good ones keep you entertained for a long time before that happens (say >100 hours). Personally, I experience X3 vanilla burnout in about 80 hours (matching your account). LU has bumped that up for me to over 200 hours. It's actually surprising how much more gaming is possible in the X3 game but because of lack of direction I previously (before discovering LU) stopped playing well before I discovered all those things.

I wouldn't say LU is like a new game, it's more like another expansion similar to how Albion Prelude was to Terran Conflict. Sure, its additions are so many that it goes way beyond what you'd expect from a "mod" but that said, at no time does it feel like playing a different game, personally it still feels very much like playing X3, just "end game"/"things got serious" X3

[vukica]

Yup, play LU.