[AP] (and possibly Rebirth?) The Big Picture,.. be prepared for some reading...

[Whisperer]

Been playing AP now for several days. and have to say "The big picture" it doesn't work. Go back to basics.

Seems to me that what they are doing in AP is expanding and a whole bunch of aspects is a complete miss. I'm pretty sure when i say that we all enjoy a good round of sharing kuckle sandwiches. Combat was way to fast and yes. Possibly battles between capital ships wil last a lot longer compared to X3 Reunion or TC for that matter. That's one point to Egosoft.

We all enjoy Setting up florishing industries and building our arsenal our selves. Churning out guns and shields faster than you can say OMGBBQ. Perhaps building up'and managing industry has gotten better in AP. (can not say for sure since i've not gotten to that point yet. But from what i can say so far after playing AP for 4 days streight, (i actualy took time off from work to get the best possible view of the game as i could) I have to honestly say that the more i see in AP makes me doubt me even buying Rebirth.

For one, Stock exchange. Realy? We are gamers. We want to build ships, guns, shields and raise all kinds of hell. Granted, running an industrial empire is a part of that, and the joy of setting up a friggin big complex and just waching the output go up and the joy of seing that all your complexes sub-factories are in the positive, producing more than they are using is a lot of fun. However doing more than that seems wasted effort. A stock exchange? Realy, i wonder how many people will be even bothering to get into this.

Personaly i'd say drop that aspect of the game faster than you can blast a space-fly with a zap-gun. Two reasons why,... First of, when you are starting out you simply don't have the money to invest in shares. Secondly, when you do get money you want to get your selve bigger ships to be able to generate more money so you can start setting up complexes and be self sufficient. Third, By the time you got your selve a good complex set up, the player will become selfsufficient meaning they no longer are dependant on the economy around them, hence making the stock market an obsolete feature.

It's a simple adding equation.
1 Player starts in a ship - does missions / raids transports
2 Gets a bigger ship - does bigger missions / raids or steals bigger ships
3 Builds a factory and sells wares to get factory generating money for input resources while doing more missions / raiding and stealing.
4 Adds factories to the complex to eliminate primary resource input and starts selling end-products (By this time Stock Exchange is already obsolete as the end product will most likely be what they are using to form battle fleets)
6 The player is forming large fleets and becomes a fleet captain, waching battles unfold by managing their fleets and getting in to the biggest ship out there to mess up what ever is in their way.
7 Once their now multitude of complexes are generating enough resources they set out for total galactic domination.

Now i don't know about most people here, but i'm not the kind of person that is going to sit down and stare and look at numbers on a stock exchange to tie up my hard earnd money that i'm making in the beginning of the game and wait for products to turn in my favour and sell them again. Fair enough there will be people around that actualy enjoy waching the index and pressing SETA to wait for things to turn in their favour. But since NO SETA is present in Rebirth. i can't see anyone just sitting behind their computer for half a day to wach statistics to turn favorable.

I don't know if there will be Sector Traders or Universe traders in Rebirth, but since wares need to be shifted around from station to station my best guess is that they will. Hence there will also be "best buy/best selling price locators". This means that the pilots you hire in BOTH AP and Rebirth will be doing the very same thing for you without you having to bother with Stock Exchange. Granted, the exchange looks cool and all, but unfortunatly it's a lot of effort and resources put in an aspect of the game that's not even interesting to the people playing it (given the select fiew that actualy like to play a Stock Exchange kind of game. Wich you most likely will not be finding in a SPACE SIM).

An other aspect of the game that is killing it in my opinion are the pirate spawns. As i've said before, i've taken time off to play the big jezus out of this AP release. Ever since the beginning of the games i've done so far every ship i capture gets shot to space debris when it goes through a gate and i'm not there. We all are knows with the "reported stolen" concequence when you do a return my ship mission. This is exactly what happens to ships that i "acuire" through combat. More precisely, this is what happens to my ships in space when they are in a different sector than i am in my selve.

I've lost well over 50 ships now and tried 2 different campains in wich this both happend. I steal a ship, send it to a shipyard for repairs, the ship goes through a gate, a pirate spawn is dropped in the sector and takes out the ship.

I order a group of ships to go for repairs and guide them my selve, i go through a gate with the lead ships, i get a message that pirates are attacking my ships in the back of the convoy at the gate in the sector i just came from with the lead ships, return to protect the ships that where falling behind, get a second message that the lead ships are getting attacked in the sector i had to leave becouse of the attack on the ships in back, and end up with space debris in two sectors wich where once the starting ships of my potential trading empire.

Better yet, when i guard each seperate ship that is to become a sector trader and concequently a universe trader from the moment i capture them to the moment they are all set to go sector trading They get shot the moment they have the balls to undock. Not while i'm in sector, mind you. However, the moment i leave the sector, there comes the pirates.

Think that's it? Wrong.... i've set up an advanced satelite network to keep track of the sectors that i use, and also the surrounding sectors to be able to have a good awareness of what's going on around me. These are not just stray pirates stumbeling across my "aquired" ships. They are litterly being hotdropped in the sectors my ships are in from out of the blue. For example. They are not comming from the sector "Ore Belt" and going through the east gate in to "Cloudbase South East" When my captured ship is entering Cloudbase South East from the gate comming from President's End. They are litterly hot dropping from god knows where....

These kind of goof-ups are what get's me ticked off like you won't beleve. Seriousely, why on earth would you even bother wasting resources on AP when you already can't meet your deadlines on Rebirth? I have to say that it would not be all that bad if the current game on wich it was build (read Terran Conflict) would improve, but you did not even manage to do this.

One such an example of such is the sector Ore Belt that i mentioned before. Granted there is a ton of ore, but might i ask you where on earth (or should i say where in space) all those ore Asteroids have gone? Kind of hard building a complex with no mine-suitable asteroids around... not that it matters to much since everything i own gets shot to kingdom come by pirates (when i'm not flying it my selve).

My thought on Rebirth?

"The Big Picture: The head doesn't know where the feet are going"

But seriousely, all jokes aside. I sure hope you guys will not bother with trying to patch AP. Stick your resources where you need them most. and honestly, by the looks of what has been tried to achieve in AP, you will need all you got on Rebirth, becouse if you don't, we might not see it before Christmass 2012...

[Catra]

First of, when you are starting out you simply don't have the money to invest in shares.

the only start where you -really- dont have enough would be bankrupt assassin.

A stock exchange? Realy, i wonder how many people will be even bothering to get into this.

seeing as theres about 5 - 10 threads all detailing the apparent imba of the stock exchange and how its far superior to early game missions for money generation, id reckon everyone.

[Jumee]

1) I kind of agree on stock exchange I personally didnt use it but some people did so hey why not keep it? (besides some people are making billions out of it - and it is really easy if you feel like it)

2) The pirate spawn thing? Just weird I haven't experienced that problem in AP, the only sectors that are "strange" are war-zone, because no matter what your rep with any of the fighting sides is the moment you leave the war sector every asset of yours gets attacked. But for me that only happened there, in normal sectors I have no experienced spawning pirates

3) Regarding wasting resources from what I got AP is heavily based on mods so I don't think that they "wasted" that much time on it, as most of the work was incorporating and adapting various mods

4) Ore belt got depleted by Plutarch and other miners (remember those 50 microchip fabs we all have built? ), it is part of the lore and explains why there is so much hype around Albion systems (which are rich for minerals) + there are plenty of other good spaces around and a lot of old places are still there, for example Antigone Memorial still had those high yield roids

EDIT: also they will patch AP

[AL'42]

Mostly agree on the stock exchange. I used it a few times at start of game for generating some easy cash, not used it since.

Pirate spawn. Not seen that either. Sounds like a glitch. Why would pirates be chasing your assets with such vengeance. Worth investigating what’s going on here ! Anyways, I could do with some of that in my current game, I’m well tooled up for a big fight, bring it on.

Patching AP. They will patch it, they will add the PHQ, and they’ll add loads of content. I look forward to it.

[Neferdias]

I have to ask in regards to your pirate spawn thing is. Are you stealing pirate ships in pirate sectors? (M6 and bigger)

And a second question... WHY are you not loading your acquired ships into a carrier/TM or giving them a JD and jumping them out?

I have never ever ever had any issues getting a ship OOS from deep in pirate space. They made the AI smarter, they added RRF to deal with people capping race ships in race sectors... I wouldn't doubt if the pirates get their own lesser version of RRF to deal with their own losses. You have to adjust your strategy accordingly

Pirate sectors in general are busy now, very busy. In TC I'd be lucky if I had more then one or two Carracks running around and maybe one Brig OR one Galleon running around. On average in AP I have 3 Carracks in Pirate alley and at least one M1 or M2 and I stopped counting what was in the Maelstrom area cause I had to keep running away but there was a lot...

[Sir Warwick]

On the stock exchange - yeh - its got problems - but as a concept if done properly - its actually an intersting idea - just a shame the economy is so small that it can so easily be manipulated and abused in the early game.

As for pirates - there seems to be two lots of pirates - there is the normal pirate race that you can make friends with, trade with etc then there are the random hostile renegade gate spawns you get.

I think the RRFs you get in your face when you attack a race ship are similarly spawned artificially hostile as well.


As for the war zone sector - they are just completely screwed - even total universe wide genocide of one side doesnt solve the problem and finish the war. I could problem completely kill off all argon everywhere as well and still have that annoying git giving me greif over the war that should have noone left alive to fight it...

[Whisperer]

The ships i've aquired are 54 demeter haulers, (all paranid owned) and 2 nova's and a blast claw (pirate owned). Been at it in Elena's fortune, so Argon space to be precise.

I'm not adding them to a carrier becouse the three pirate ships i've captured are still at the military station in Elena's fortune. The ships that get scrapped by pirates are all captured haulers from the paranid. i have not been able to fit them out with jump drives becouse i can't buy them since every ship i capture gets shot to hell. And as for getting them in to a carrier.... getting all my resources shot to pieces the moment i can't cover them doesn't help generating funds to buy ships. (though i'm sure a Galleon will be spawned atop a carrier if i'm not in the sector as well (as is happening to each and every other ship i own). All three pirate ships i have where bailed, have yet to use my boarding crew to enter a ship.

EDIT: 51 out of the 54 demeter's have been destroyed by the way. Like i say,.. the moment i can't be around the ships they get hot dropped by pirated from out of nowhere.

[Jumee]

This is definitely not an intended thing I capped/boarded quite a few ships both pirate and race in AP and haven't experienced the problem at all, not a single time. Pirates do sometimes appear near gates but they don't charge straight for my stuff IS or OOS

[kylania]

I have to honestly say that the more i see in AP makes me doubt me even buying Rebirth.

That's like saying "I have to honestly say that the move I watch Star Wars The Phantom Menance makes me doubt even watching A New Hope".

They are totally different games set in the same universe. There's basically nothing from AP (other than highways) that is going to be in Rebirth. As they've said "it's an entirely new game". So don't let problems with AP tarnish Rebirth. Hate it because it's change and it's different, not because of AP! heh

[grumman]

Even for someone who doesn't buy any shares, the stock exchange still represents an easy way to get an overview of the economy. If you're considering buying a BoFu factory, for example, you can check what the existing supply of E-cells and BoFu is like.

[Xander Cade]

It sounds to me as if you either have a broken/modified script that spawns those Pirates, or you chose a gamestart that spawns them. That is not normal behaviour for Pirates (though it is with Terrans when you jump into the Warzone).

As far as the SE goes, I think it is a very good first attempt at what could potentially become a major factor in the way X is played. The game already has, more or less, a fully simulated economy based on supply and demand, the SE is simply the natural progression. The next step is to integrate the company listings into the game-world. Just because you don't like the idea or the implementation does not mean it is "wrong" or that others dislike it as much as you. And this is coming from someone that got bored with the stock market after the first few hours in the game.

[JDCollie]

A stock exchange? Realy, i wonder how many people will be even bothering to get into this.

Of the 240 million in assets I currently possess, ~200 million of it was made in the stock exchange directly, and the rest was make possible due to those stock exchange profits. (I started as soon as I unlocked the Teladi exchange)


As for whether or not it should be in the game? HELL yes. Does it need some work? (to add in some risk) Again, yes.

Considering that for many, many players of the X3 series economics is where it is at, a stock exchange makes perfect sense. (After all, X3 is essentially a giant market simulator, and markets have stock exchanges.)

Even for someone who doesn't buy any shares, the stock exchange still represents an easy way to get an overview of the economy. If you're considering buying a BoFu factory, for example, you can check what the existing supply of E-cells and BoFu is like.

And this here is another fantastic reason why the stock exchange should exist.

[ConCorDian]

i think the stock exchange is well worth while. im now into the game by a good few hours and im still using the stock exchange, id say when your in early game your looking at the standard ware stocks to make you money but later on when your busy doing other things your looking more to the company/corporate stocks. ive got around 50mil tied up in my stock exchanges all in all, just sold one last night for a profit of 9.5mil. yes it takes longer to turn your money into worthwhile profit but if your busy micromanaging your complex's for startup, or getting involved in combat you can just leave the corporate stocks run and make some nice profits later.

and just because there is no SETA in rebirth doesn't mean there wont be something there. this is a speculation that if rebirth is going to have huge area's to explore i dont think anybody will want to sit down early game in an Albion moving at 150m/s scouting out sectors the size of Maelstrom/Unseen Domain or worse Aldrin without something

[Morkonan]

A note on the Stock Exchange.

I don't have AP, but I do remember reading about a mod for X3 that introduced a stock exchange. I was pretty ecstatic, to be honest. I think it is an EXCELLENT "Meta Game" add on for X3. It's something that is part of a natural progression for an industrialist type character and is, in general, a natural progression of the components of the setting. Where else could you go besides having a Stock Exchange?

That it may be poorly implemented in AP is, apparently, obvious. But, the premise is sound and the evolution of the financial/industrialist meta-game for the X series is a perfectly suitable addition, just as a "Real War" would be for the fighting side of things. (The two together should be outstanding.. if implemented properly.)

That being said, it may be that it should be limited or priced so far above the head of the average new character's bank account that they don't have access to the lucrative trades or even the market in general. That would be, IMO, a good way to go once they fix the obvious abuse issues. Make it part of the overall "meta-game" and make it part of a player's own "goal setting" variables to one day be able to compete in the Stock Market and influence the financial destiny of corporations, stations, sectors and even races.

[Nick Northern]

I will also add my voices to those who disagree with the original post. Although this mainly falls on def...eyes.

1.) The stock exchange is a step in the right direction. No, it is not perfect and can be manipulated, although this is not as easy to do as most of the posts I have read claim it to be. The stock exchange just needs a check/balance system to avoid the majority of manipulation, which someone smarter than me will have to figure out. I would also like to know which stations the companies I invest on own specifically, and the addition of a dividends system that lets you 'invest' in stations instead of just buying stock at low prices and selling at high ones. But to get back to my original statement, this is a move in the right direction adding depth and variety to the economy. If you don't like it, don't use it. I like it and use it.

2.) Combat is largely improved in AP over TC. This is not a close comparison. Missiles are far more deadly. AI ships make better choices. Pirates and Yaki are a bit of a larger threat, but this is checked by the improved reaction time of racial ships responding to their stations being attacked. I like all of these changes. Again, imop, a move in the right direction.

3.) The universe is bigger and the atmosphere of politics and war is much more interesting than that of TC. I just finished mapping the entire universe for the first time in AP. You get far more lore and back-story leading into rebirth from reading the sector descriptions, and picking up on the changes to sectors (such as the Split and Xenon sectors in the top right of the map), than you do so far in the plot. The plot also gives you a nice story in company profiteering and manipulation, again adding depth to the struggles in X.


I am just never going to understand people who complain about Albion Prelude when I only see improvements over Terran Conflict. We literally just got this game, and already the amount of threads complaining about it and cries to 'not buy AP' or 'now I don't think I will play rebirth' are truly astounding. AP has done nothing but improve my opinion of Egosoft and make me truly grateful to play a game by a developer who does listen to its customers and try to turn out the best games possible despite its often exhaustively picky fanbase.

tl;dr - This is the best space sim out there by far. Constructive criticism is useful, but if you are complaining and trying to discourage others from enjoying this product, it only gives me a negative viewpoint of your opinions, not this game.

[Sabrina Bergin]

I agree there are far too many waiting too criticise even the smallest flaw in AP. IMOP people should regard it as advertised a bridge too rebirth.
Certainly there are limitations in what we have too date but given the time scale of development involved in ap it is unsurprising.
I am prepared to wait and see what effects the upcoming patch has but even if that fails too deal with all the issues posed by the poster it wont stop me buying Rebirth. I waited an age after completing Reunion for TC to come out and I have been playing that for some time now. (so much so that after completing every game start and becoming so rich it
becomes boring) I'm finding the challenge of AP refreshing knowing that it is but a taste of things to come. The X series is an evolving game and has to be given time to reach a certain level of maturity in itself before it is dismissed out of hand. I have ceratainly not had a problem with pirates and as a whole only the War zones are out of kilt but that can be classed as the fog of war. My advice wait and see before making dire oaths