I don't think there has been any game in the last couple of years that managed to engage me that strongly, so before anything else, let me say thank you Egosoft, I appreciate your work. Following I will try to outline in a few paragraphs the ups and downs I experienced from a fresh start to the late game. It may be useful to Egosoft for figuring out development priorities and other players who haven't played version 5+ before. I am not spoiling any story, but I do mention some game mechanics, which may be too much for some new players. If you are new to the game and want to experience everything for yourself, better stop reading. Mods, if you think this thread is too "spoilery", please feel free to move it.First I did the flight school introductions, then started a Young Gun game, which is probably how most people start out. I played X3 years ago, so was somewhat familiar with how the game and interface work, and still, at first I was very much overwhelmed by the extensive UI. I think this game would be much more accessible to new players if it had a sort of short campaign, that introduces the different game parts one after the other, actually hiding the interface parts that are not yet relevant. After playing a while (and seeing a few online tutorials) the interface makes total sense and is in my opinion pretty good at managing the massive amount of things that you can do and manipulate in this game, I just think it is scaring away quite a lot of people before they even get to know it.
My first days were occupied with getting to know the many things you can do and I was really impressed by the amount of freedom the player has and by how alive the universe feels. Discovering all the stations and the thousands of ships that are cruising around, and all of them are not just eye-candy, but have a purpose and clearly do something useful. I think here my motivation playing the game reached its highest point. I had a pretty well equipped M fighter, could take down even large numbers of Xenon fighters, and could even take down lone Xenon capitals by taking out their turrets and then spending a lot of time taking down the rest.
Engaging larger groups of enemies was still not an option, and this triggered the need for large amounts of money, to finance stations, capital ships, fleets and so on. So I started building lots of miners and setting them to local mining in any sectors I could find that had a reasonable demand and the appropriate resources. This worked pretty well and lots of money was coming in. My first few miners started to draw in Khaak patrols, and at first were easy enough to take out. As my number of miners grew, this started to become an issue. While in theory, it would have been possible to take care of most of them myself, it would not have left any time to do anything else, and basically stopped any progress. So defensive measures where necessary and I built my first few patrol groups. Unfortunately it turned out, that defending all miners is impossible. Fighter groups on "patrol" do not engage enemies unless they stumble literally directly on them and setting them to defend positions or each ship would require far more patrol groups than are feasible at this point in the game. I ended up with defending a few key positions and removing miners from all sectors where Khaak patrols where showing up distributed throughout the sector (more precisely, the Khaak removed them for me
). My income was still pretty good and I was free to do other things. I think it is totally fine to be unable to mine wherever you want early on, this opens up new possibilities later on, when access to large numbers of fighters and L miners is no longer an issue, and it allows for some sort of progress in mining. It did however also feel very disappointing, that the "patrol" command, with the obvious purpose of keeping a sector save and clear of enemies, was entirely ineffective.Now that I had a decent income, I started building all sorts of production stations, fitting them with miners, traders, and so on. To me, the building and economy simulation parts felt very well developed and are definitely among the strong points of the game. I can think of only two things that annoyed me somewhat: (1) Miners assigned to a station *always* require to set a blacklist for them, that limits them to mining in the 2-3 sectors where you actually want them to mine. If you do not, they will be going to sectors 5 gates away, tripling the number of needed miners, or sector with strong Khaak presences, Xenon incursion, etc. Every new player will be frustrated at first, because their station miners are going to weird places. I think it would be far better to add a setting to the station that allows selecting the mining sectors for each resource, and making it a requirement to do that for mining to even start (maybe add a supply mission). It would also be far more convenient than the blacklist system, which is in this case used to white-list a few sectors, and requires an update to every blacklist whenever a new sector is discovered. (2) The second thing is pirating. Pirates are showing up everywhere, from early to late game, and usually they are not a big issue. If your traders are set to flee, pirates will only very rarely manage to catch them. Most of those that do get caught only do so, because they decide to flee directly into the enemy, or for some weird reason stop fleeing after a few seconds. Still, the few occasionally lost traders are easily replaced. You do however have to keep the pirate numbers in check. The easiest way I figured out to do that, is to have patrol groups in every other sector and immediately send them after each pirate. This does require a lot of direct intervention, even in the late game, and I think a proper patrol command would solve this far better.
After having a lot of fun with building up a decent economy and getting in more and more money, I started buying capitals and building fleets. My intention was to take a hand in the Xenon war that was raging everywhere on the map. This was the part that frustrated me most and almost made me stop playing before reaching the endgame. Even with a fleet of 10 high-end capitals it was completely impossible to engage even a single Xenon K without taking losses. Your ships outrange the K by 5 km and together have a dps that should take down the K in about a second. Unfortunately, instead of staying in formation, simply facing the target and firing, they fly around like chickens, occasionally managing to fire one of their plasma turrets, doing almost no damage, until the K is close enough to fire on one of your ships, taking it down within seconds. I think it is important to point out, that in my opinion, fighting a war should not be possible without taking losses. It should be expensive for both sides. This should however be achieved by having ships engage in a somewhat sensible way, balancing movement behavior, weapon ranges, damage output and hitpoints. This is obviously not easy to achieve. They way it is now is most definitely extremely frustrating. This issue also extends to fighting stations. I think fighting stations should not be cheap, losses should be necessary. The way it is now, ships outrange stations and theoretically can shoot them down at leisure, but they do not manage it and die in droves because they position themselves close to the station. After a while I realized that fighting a war at this stage of the game was not possible. While I did have the financial support to buy a significant high-end fleet, it was not enough to just throw away my capitals. I really tried, with lots of micromanagement and saving every few minutes, but even if you watch your ships closely, sooner or later a few of them are going to kill themselves, and loading takes too long to do it more often than very rarely.
So I decided to focus on the awesome economy part of the game again and build up a mega-wharf/shipyard, get all the plans and finally have the production capability to allow me to build any kind of ship with any combination of parts. A lot of playtime went by with station building and doing some of the questlines. I also spent a lot of time experimenting with different ships and weapons in and out of system, figuring out that fast S ships are basically invincible while out of system, as long as you don't fly them into a station, and in large numbers they take down even capitals with ease. I set up lots of fleets with 50 fast S fighters, having them defend all the contested points. The Xenons could not progress any further anywhere in the galaxy. I also added a single fast fighter with repeat-collect order at each contested point, occasionally dropping in and picking up the thousands of parts that were collected. Modding was suddenly very easy.
I now had fleets with hundreds of S fighters and larger numbers of capitals. Clearing sectors from Xenons without major losses became possible as long as I stayed out of system. The S fighters could take down any ships and the capitals could take down stations as long as I kept constant watch on them. It was still tedious, but doable. Then I was able to build Asgards and things suddenly got very easy. I even modded them, at least with basic mods, and each one was easily able to take on any enemy fleet or station. Even Xenon fleets with an I, several Ks and lots of support fighters were taken down singlehandedly by one of my Asgards.
And so i progressed into the super end-game: Money is no longer relevant, I can build any ship with any outfit and experiment with it, and there aren't actually a lot of challenging things left to do. Ships doing something stupid is now more amusing than irritating. Just yesterday I sent in a fleet of 10 Odysseus to clear a Khaak installation off the map. These fights are particularly relaxing to watch, since the installation hasn't any defenses and your capitals can't kill themselves. So I used a simple attack command, which is most certainly going to cause all kinds of problems, teleported onto the flagship and watched the hilarity unfold... First my flagship arrived long before all the others, and I had the opportunity to enjoy flak fireworks for a while, taking down a few puny Khaak fighters. Then the others arrived in a rush, unfortunately far to close to each other, bumping each other around and scratching the paint. They really should teach pilots how to keep their distance in flight school. One of them must have been getting a call or something and got distracted, because he missed the right time to stop his travel drive, and used one of the other ships to slow down. The friendly stop-ship in front got "bowled" right into the station and was whirling around for a while before reestablishing control and again gaining distance to the station. The whole thing looked so funny I couldn't stop laughing for minutes.
As a final note: In my opinion this game is awesome, has incredible depth and complexity, freedom of action and the universe feels very much alive. It also still has many flaws and issues, which is only to be expected in game of this scope. I am curious how the game will develop in the coming years.
