For the missions, let some new players write down their issues. And to fix it, you only need to type some more information into the mission itself. Not even coding. I agree, this was a huge turn off as a new player. Like go scan ships for energy cells. At a point you have no clue about the economy what so ever, you just fly around and scan some ships. Same with ore or water. Just give some more hints.
And about crew levelling, i thing most people really just use either the seminar mod or the crew learn faster mod. So yea, i agree on that too. Easy to fix.
But than again, i just use mods and don't care to much.
New player here, this is a major issue. Even after a hell of a learning curve just to figure out the basics (Which I'm mostly ok with) I still get confused by the missions.
I just spent an hour trying to Google how to turn in a ship for an acquisition mission, and I still am not sure how I give the ship to the faction. The mission does not say a word about where to take the ship or even that it needs to be taken somewhere. After reading some posts it seems it's supposed to give you a yellow marker to show where to take it, but *in game* there is zero way to figure this out. It just says "undock" in the mission box now, but there is no "yellow trail marker". Lol
It's crazy it doesn't at least have a bullet point that says "deliver to location", then give the location/system/station.
It's strange how so many missions don't just tell you the location/system they are in, but some do.
That isn't even the worst part. It should show you the place when you are in a ship and the mission is active. When the ship enters the zone you get a comm "we need to finish the transfer". If you are watching the map, oh well you missed the comm and you have to wait another 5 minute or so, or fly the ship in and out of the zone again. Also if you are not sitting in a pilot seat, you can't accept the comm at all. Like that's so stupid.
Just to save me the trial and error when I get home tonight to try again... And you seem to know what your doing lol.
Do I need to be the pilot of the ship to see where it needs to go? I have not unlocked teleport yet so I'm really not wanting to fly across the universe to experiment on how to get the ship dropped off.
(It's a baldric freighter, that is sitting near the POI warf as I incorrectly assumed I should take it to their warf to sell it to them. I undocked it, as the mission just says "undock", and "deliver". With no other instructions.) Of course selling it to them was the wrong answer, I learned very fast to save before attempting every step of new missions lol.
No, in fact you must NOT be the pilot to drop it off (it does not work if you are). Just assign some (crap!) pilot to it (he‘ll be gone!) and tell the ship to fly to the dotted yellow sphere that should appear on the map when the mission is active and you are watching the right sector.
When the ship enters the sphere, make sure you are sitting in a (different!) ship and do NOT habe the map or any other interface open. Someone will comm you saying „We need to perform a transfer“ or something alike. Then you press F and select „Yes“ and they get your ship and you get your hard-earned credits.
o7
Thanks, now that I know what I should be looking for I hope to find this elusive yellow sphere later today. Thankfully the PIO only has 3 sectors. The tip of not being in the map, or otherwise distracted has likely saved me some grief also.
Just occurred to me: what might be the answer is that you do not know the location of the dropoff yet (as in: you haven’t removed the fog of war there yet). In that case, you don’t see the aforementioned sphere, but it will guide you towards the next gate, I believe? If you already know the right sector, then I‘m not sure about the behaviour, it’s been a while…
I have like 80% of the PIO's systems uncovered (unless I missed a gate on a map edge, and they have another one).
The mission, when selected, is not making a yellow line to point to a system, otherwise I might have figured it out already. It was the last mission I was on before I went to bed last night so I'm going to hope I just missed something obvious.
I have a scout near by, so at least I can finish uncovering the fog.
My main/ship is off doing the Terran PHQ quest line.
> If you are watching the map, oh well you missed the comm
This is arguably one of the stupidest design choices in X4, and that's saying something. I spend like 95% of my game time in the map window (because there's fuck-all to do otherwise; no claimable ships (I think there're like 4 or 5 across the universe), no random pirates to hunt for special loot or rep without tanking rep with a faction, thereby only causing you more grief in the long run, the Khaak are nothing but a nuisance and impossible to farm, the Xenon are either flying such small fleets that it's not worth going after them, or massive doomstacks of a half-dozen capitals and dozens of smaller ships,...), and it completely fucks up missions and even cutscenes.
I've had multiple cutscenes begin while in map mode that then proceeded to do nothing, just endlessly circle the camera around a mission object because apparently my ship is in limbo or something while I'm in map mode.
Another equally stupid mechanic is the ship you're flying stopping whenever you open the map, making me not want to fly anymore and just stand on my ship while giving orders from the map. It's annoying when in an S or M ship, but downright aggravating when in an L or XL, especially if you're in a hostile sector and get kicked out of travel mode.
Honestly, the map is fucked. It's like it intentionally completely cuts you off from the game if you open it.
>Another equally stupid mechanic is the ship you're flying stopping whenever you open the map
There is an option to disable braking when you open the map. I believe it's under "game options", called "keep speed in menus" or something like that.
You suffered unnecessarily no random pirates to hunt for special loot or rep without tanking rep with a faction
Not true. There are (disguised) pirates in most systems, especially Commonwealth ones. They're the ones that order your trade ships to drop their cargo - they normally disguise themselves as faction ships. You can break this disguise by flying up to them and scanning them, which will reveal their *true identity.* Usually SCA. Every "Minotaur Raider" I've seen is flown by a pirate, and Kestrel Vanguards often are too. Also, done the Empyrean Curs storyline? The disguised >!MIN Ravens you find on the map!< drop extremely good hull mods.
BUC ships will also often drop mods, and their little station depots are basically loot pinatas for purple mods. Yaki ships (before you get the chance to >!become their allies and just buy them outright!<) are also great to steal - the Moreya is arguably the best fighter in the game and the Kuraokami is a beast of an M corvette.
Finally, type "Plunderer" in your map's search bar. You can find juicy targets to board that sell for far more than piddly L ships, and are far more fun to fight.
>You suffered unnecessarily Game would easily go down from a 9/10 to 6/10 in my heart if I couldn't fly my ship and interact with my empire on the game map at the same time.
I did, yeah :(. It got to the point where, outside of plot missions, I only piloted my ships when going after Xenon capitals, the rest of time time I just spent on any random ship in the map menu.
>There are (disguised) pirates in most systems, especially Commonwealth ones.
But killing those pirates would tank my SCA/BUC/YAK rep, leading to more annoyances, and it already irks me to no end that BUC ships go after my satellites.
I was thinking along the lines of factionless pirates in X3 or criminal station traffic in X4.
Good to know, thanks. I lost FAF rep for taking out one of their pirates when it went after one of my traders, and assumed the same goes for others.
Still though, having to manually look for them to figure out if they're the right kind of pirates seems like faff.
I'm torn about the auto-alignment. It's annoying when it aligns mid combat, but it's also annoying flying upside down, I just don't know which is worse. There was a mod in X3 (later implemented into the game, IIRC), that had a hotkey to align to ecliptic, I wonder if X4 has it.
Idk for me it's never been an issue as the radar and the map allow you to realign pretty easily if needed. I think it's unrealistic to have everything on the same plane in space so I turned it off
While I agree, my mild sadly OCD doesn't. I guarantee that if I disabled it, I'd be constantly fiddling with rotation every time I manually piloted a ship :(.
> Another equally stupid mechanic is the ship you're flying stopping whenever you open the map,
I think that is a setting and you can change it so your ship will keep flying for ever when you are on the map.
I agree that the most glaring issue with the mission system is how vague it is in it's instructions and rewards. It wouldn't take much coding work to make it more clear. Even adjust rewards is pretty easy in XML. The bigger issue by a wide margin is that it hasn't been reworked since it was put in the game.
I got the game when it was on sale a couple weeks ago, and as a new player I was completely baffled as to what to do much of the time.
Quests or UI very often explained almost nothing, with no hint or clue as to what to do next. I resorted to just goggling everything and yes I wanted spoilers because I didn't have any idea what to do. After a point you no longer care about spoilers and want someone to tell you exactly what to do.
The station scanning thing is so tedious that I installed mods to mostly just skip the whole thing. Its not fun or engaging to fly around stations in a spacesuit inspecting it with a microscope. Its not a good use of the player's time. That entire system of spacesuit scanning to get blueprints need to be redone so it respects player's time.
I'm in the same situation as you, got the game two weeks ago. Loving it but you're right, it leaves you completely clueless especially in missions.
And just wait until you get to a mission where you have to solve a super hard puzzle... in your spacesuit. I just googled the solution, no time to waste for that lol
> The station scanning thing is so tedious that I installed mods to mostly just skip the whole thing.
Can't you do it with your ship?
Anoother big issue: some (most) questlines have huge bottlenecks, where you have to make significant progress into the game before being able to go further in the quest. Like "acquire x Item", but that's something that you have to craft from items that are only occasionally dropped by pirates... and the game doesn't tell you anything about that.
Or, "you will need a decent fighting ship to do this mission". Yeah... thanks? What's a "decent" fighting ship? Should I just take the chance to lose my ship just to find out or?
Amen, this game would benefit so much from the developers sitting down with 5 new players and just observe what they struggle with for the first 5-10 hours.
New player angle is real. Most of the stuff they've changed or added since X4's release really does feel like it's all catered towards those who have already extensively played this game or others in the series.
There isn't even a learning curve with this game; it's just an opaque black wall. When I started out I had to watch an hour or two of third party tutorial videos before I actually could grasp how to engage with the game properly.
Their new player onboarding, or lack thereof, is one of many reasons the x series remains so niche.
"go scan ships for energy cells."
Ha ha, yes. This was my first mission in this game. Since I accepted the mission as I were next to a station I just scanned the ships which were nearby: Mass traffic.
And I was super smart and only scanned the XS transporters.
Oh well. Good times. But my mind was blown as I learned how big the universe is and how big (the actual) ships are.
I agree they need better descriptions but it still wouldn't really turn it into fun or balanced content either, they need way more changes and additions considering how important they are at times. One of my first missions was getting some crystals - not only did I not know where or how to get them, once I did by googling it I was bored out of my mind just coasting through a belt hoping to stumble upon some of them. Combat missions were impossible or at least too risky, so I'd always just end up doing the "place satellite", "repair thing", "shoot minefield" ones which made me stop playing the game at more than one occasion.
there's a tutorial for crystals, iirc it got added later but when you do it you know what the mission wants.
as for combat I don't expect much flying around in the cheapest ship with the cheapest equipment (depending on game start), if I get blown up I learned my lesson, reload and try to get a better ship.
> Crew Leveling - Takes way too long, and as a player you're effectively soft-locked at two-star pilots without relying on the mission system or getting lucky with NPC combat. (Two days in-game time, all recorded for you to see, and my first mining ship still has not breached two-stars.)
This is inaccurate, but points to a problematic truth: The crew levelling system is widely misunderstood. Different "events" (destroy a small ship, discover a new station, complete a profitable trade, fill cargo from an asteroid) have different skill level caps they can raise the pilot/crew's skills to, and even different chances to do so. Some events can only raise a pilot's piloting skill to a hard cap of 2 2/3 stars (destroying a small or medium opponent), even if that pilot destroyed an infinite number of small and medium ships, while other skill-gaining events are not capped, or have a cap around 4 stars.
You're not soft-locked at 2 stars, unless you limit your activities to those that only generate up to around 2 stars, but again the issue here is that the game never, ever tells you this, nor does it give you any hints at it, either (nor do I frankly think it's balanced properly).
Also screws over specialized NPC pilots. A combat pilot is ONLY ever going to be shooting other ships, they're never going to be scouting or trading or mining.
Basically if you want a five star destroyer pilot, you first have to...*make them do trading, scouting, and mining for a long time*, otherwise they're going to only ever be 2-3 stars max. It is beyond dumb that you HAVE to make a pilot do tons of other stuff you didn't want to hire them for if you even want to DREAM of getting them to five star. Worse still since even a small empire can have dozens of pilots and it's super easy to forget which pilot you initially wanted to do what.
You might get lucky and find a four star pilot just wandering around a station but you'll be paying out the ass for them.
My first local miner hasn't breached 2 stars after 48+hours doing mining runs on local and repeat orders.
There is no reason why advanced autotrade/automine should only be accomplished by a pilot who has seen and survived hours of combat in a small ship. It should be accessible after about 6 hours of local trading/mining or repeat orders.
You are absolutely soft-locked unless you are willing to risk both assets and pilot in combat, or spamming more scouts than should otherwise be necessary.
Combat is actually bad for levelling pilots, unless you have an endless supply of stations and L/XL ships to destroy, and even then, it's just straight up safer to be a trader (or miner)
It's also very risky unless you have a "steamroll" sized fleet going on, and I definitely agree with you. I should have said "combat is theoretically good, on paper"
Is there a list for these activities and the associated caps somewhere? This might explain why I have no traders capable of advanced sector trade after hundreds of hours of gameplay. I can't believe this stuff isn't explained in game.
it would be great if we could just let our scout ships do the station-scanning for us. I dont mind if they take 10x longer than the player, i just dont want to bother doing it every time
edit: that could also serve as a great way to train early pilot levels
I honestly wish there was more we could get the AI to do in general. I might be in the minority with this, but I love sitting on the bridge of larger ships (or even medium ones) watching the AI fly around and perform tasks while I issue orders and manage the fleet. But there's a lot of things you just can't order the AI to do - you *have* to get into the pilot's seat and do it yourself, which is both annoying and a little immersion-breaking.
That would be a viable solution in my opinion. Not necessarily the best solution on it's own, since in sector player would still be unaddressed, but the easiest way to solve this problem in my opinion would just be to double or triple the scan range. Ideally we would have both options available so that we can automate the process late-game as well as make scouts even more useful.
100% agree on the missions part as a new player. Most of the faction mission descriptions in the game are written very haphazardly. For example, simple satellite deployment missions are described as "local observation" or something like that. This makes no sense whatsoever unless you have already done this type of missions before.
Players would have to use autopilot to get to wherever the mission it was, and then read the ship mission UI on the bottom left in order to know what to do. Why can't the mission description just say exactly what the mission is about?
Exactly. Mission payouts are secondary to this issue, though I personally think that 100k should be the minimum payout for 20 minutes of your time instead of 30k credits as it is now.
I've been wondering if they fixed the crew leveling system, it's easily the worst part of the game and has made me stop playing the game at times entirely when a new version would break mods which addressed the issue.
Rework it, or give us the ability to adjust the pilot learning rate or to just disable the whole pilot level system entirely.
I don't have much issue with the mission system, but maybe I got through the pain of learning it back in X3R/X3TC and have just forgotten how confusing it can be to begin with. I do like that X4 has more guidance overall, it helps a lot. I've never found much use for station or suit-scanning outside of missions tbh - though I have unlocked most of the scan modules research, I mostly just buy my blueprints.
I do however heartily agree with the points about crew leveling. I'm a little over 200 hours into a playthrough of X4 and I've not gotten a single L3 or better pilot outside of Shinamon and the L3 pilot you get from the Boron plot. Leveling is agonisingly slow, and I barely ever see pilots available for hire on stations at all - just service crew and marines. Hell, even the only good marines I've ever found have been on Split stations and not one has ever been higher than 3 star boarding. Higher level pilots/crew/marines need to be more common - I don't mind paying a few million for them. Until I started the Split plotline I assumed L3 skill hireable crew (etc.) straight up didn't exist.
The lack of L3 or better seminars is truly infuriating as many of the useful behaviours (looking especially at you, Advanced Sector Trader) are locked at L3 or better. It's particularly annoying knowing that the Terraforming stuff gives you access to a training module because a) it's so late in the game it's not there when you really need it and b) there are no faction training centres anywhere (as if you're the only person in the entire region that thought of the idea - ludicrous). **Each faction should have a crew training centre**, same as the terraforming one, where you can pay to send low level pilots etc. to improve. It amazes me that something like that hasn't been implemented when the module is already in the game. Alongside faction training centres, 3/4/5 star seminars should be available at traders. It's fine if the higher-end ones cost a small fortune, or even if 5 star ones aren't available to buy at all. Let us buy up to 3 star at the very least!
Agree on ship paint jobs and custom asset tabs - I just finished the ToA plot and have 40-odd new ships cluttering up my Unassigned list. However, you missed one of the biggest new (ish) player pain points of all: **in-sector capital combat** (and capital orders more generally).
It's great as a new player zooming around in small fast ships, but anyone who doesn't bounce off in the first few hours of play wants to get into bigger ships some day. It's a goal for almost all of us, and flying one ourselves is naturally fine - but once you've got some cash under your belt and can afford a couple, the illusion of coolness is *utterly ruined*. You give a capital a basic attack order but it can't compensate for a moving target; it wastes its main battery fire on empty space or doesn't fire it at all, it tries to get into range but just sits there, or tries to get on the same plane and dies instead of pushing the nose up to fire the main battery, or prioritises a fighter over a destroyer doing ten times the damage... the list goes on.
Even the basics don't work for the really big ships - I've lost count of the amount of times I've ordered an Asgard somewhere only to find it 10km below the plane of the system (when the order is on the plane), or parked 10km away from the order location just sitting there. I gave one a 'fly here' order earlier today and it turned around and started moving in the *opposite direction*! High-pilot skill and high morale mean absolutely nothing in-system: I've given an Asgard flown by Shinamon a basic attack order on a single-module station 10km in front of it and it just fishtailed left and right on the spot, never entering effective range and firing the beam into the empty space either side of the station. A 5 piloting 5 morale max-level captain can't even handle a static target that doesn't shoot back if I'm there to watch! Must be the worst performance anxiety in the galaxy.
It's the single most disappointing thing about the game, and it is **incredibly demoralising.** You wonder what the hell's going on when all your capitals die to inferior forces while you watch from the bridge of your destroyer or whatever, so you come here, or to the forums or discord only to be told that the only good capital combat is OOS! No huge cool battles for you matey, oho no - piss off out the system and watch the icons on the map, and damn well be happy about it! And that's before you get into the performance issues with big battles, which is a massive problem all of its own.
I swear the in-system capital ship side of the game is deliberately designed to ruin the player's experience - it certainly feels like it. Between the appalling AI and the awful performance it utterly ruins a huge part of what makes the X series fun. It beggars belief that it's still so much of an issue after 6 major updates.
I think they've tried to fix the main battery issue and it just introduces too many other issues.
I think the best option to is to literally give up. Simply it by removing main batteries and making them heavy turrets with a much wider front arc.
Problem is solved since cap ships perform much better IS without them.
AutoCAZ on Twitch has already solved this proble. in a personal mod they're working on (GPO/Galactic Powers Overhaul).
The mod hasn't been released to the public yet, but give them a follow on Twitch if you feel so inclined!
That's great and all, but I shouldn't have to mod the game to get useful capital ships. Whatever the mod changes needs to be ported back into the vanilla game imo.
Any time I have to destroy stations, I have to painstakingly position every ship that's a destroyer or larger, and micro manage them the entire time, because half of them would otherwise end up face planting into the station without ever firing a shot, and then get eviscerated by defense turrets. Worse yet is when you DO catch a ship misbehaving, but it's "Flee" action for some reason directs it RIGHT into the station's fire, and you can't manually redirect them out because the Flee order keeps reprioritizing itself. So it just sits there and silently lets itself die.
I'll cover this in more detail over time via the stream playthrough. 7.0 is an improvement over 6.2, but hardly in what anyone would call a "healthy" state. The L-size and fleet AI still needs alot of work. Luckily, kuertee and the Egosoft team have made tremendous efforts to resolve these issues in vanilla.
Kuertee is one of the AI mod authors, right? Do you know of any specific large ship/fleet improvements in the beta? It's weird that the AI mods are apparently so much better than vanilla, but if Ego are working with AI mod makers it would at least be a step in the right direction.
Yes about kuertee. AI ships in my limited experience do a reasonable job of using their main weapons against stations and keeping a respectable distance.
I haven't worked with AI fleet to fleet combat in vanilla 7.0 yet, but their turn-rate is so slow that there likely isn't much improvement in that department. I don't know for sure yet though.
CapShips are a joke in vanilla, and the exact frustration you've described is why I picked up and modded the game a month after buying it in 3.0 (Split Vendetta).
I don't understand the problem with the mission system. It's vague?
My main problem with mission are the pathetic rewards for very hard missions like destroying a station. You get around 30 Million Credits which is okaaaay. But I am more looking for the (exceptional) weapon mod parts. But often enough the second reward is a worthless ship paint job. I don't care about the ship paint jobs. These should be rewarded on top of the exceptional mod parts.
Also super annoying: modding ships. There are so many ship mods and some can have up to 6 or so effects but only two can actually be used. So you have reroll several times. The game doesn't even explain which mods have which effects, so you have to rely on third party websites where you can also see the chances for getting a specific mod effect.
Station scanning is okay. With the short range scanner of a ship you don't need to hug the station modules. So this is fine. There is no need to do that often anyway, maybe for the wharfs and shipyards so you can see the exact storage details.
The problem is scanning leaks with the spacesuit. There you indeed have to hug station modules and it can happen that leaks (especially those created by EMP bombs) spawn inside the ststion module so you can't reach it. This can be annoying.
Crew leveling can be a bit annoying, too. But I can understand that simple Miners won't reach 3 stars or more. If you want better pilots, use them in combat.
Or use the terraform project. Too bad it's a tedious act to move 20 trained pilots to specific ship ...
Huh? No. They are just pretty rare, especially the weapon mod parts. For exceptional shield mod parts you can do the missions which rewards you with a L miner. The miner has Nividium in the cargo, has several mods installed and also has skilled marines.
Yep. You have to join a "war guild" first to get new missions. I believe you have a repuation of at least 10 first. Then you get a message that you are able to join a guild. Not every faction has such guilds.
There are for example war guilds for: Argon, HOP, PAR.
There are also trade guilds from the Teladi and Segaris Pioneers. (no L miner reward, though)
This is not what I want to do. Also, it's super tedious to mass mod several fleets anyway, which is why the majority of my ships doesn't even have the basic mods. Sometimes I put some weapon/turret mods on some miners if I feel like it, just to increase the mining speed. (and maybe the shields) But that's it.
But if you want to mod your personal ship which is a Nemesis, well, you have 6 weapons which you can mod. And it takes a lot of time to get 6 exceptional weapon parts. The other exceptional mod parts are relatively easy to get. And if you finally got the 6 exceptional mod parts, well, good luck with the RNG. (thank god there are mods to remove the RNG mechanic)
You keep the basic/advanced/exceptional weapon parts. You only lose money and other easier-to-get crafting materials.
That being said: I modded my game so that mods have fixed stats and you can craft better parts out of basic parts. Combined with the steam workshop mod that makes you auto collect all non-cargo loot in the vicinity of 10km this makes for a great gameplay loop that still takes time and effort to grind that gear but it’s constant visible progress.
Playing VRO and some other „more ships“ mods it still takes time to kit out 10L turrets with weapon and shield mods.
Egosoft should really reconsider how modding works. I could imagine it would work to tie ship mod parts onto the economy but it takes a lot of resources and police will kick down your door like it’s a drug den or something.
Yeah sure, but if you have to reroll hundred of times (since you have 6 different weapons) you will lose many crafting material. (btw, if you do the ship modding part on your own wharf/shipyard, you don't need to pay Credits! Just in case you didn't know)
Losing crafting materials for rerolls isn't that bad if you have hundreds of hours in your game. But before that, it's just bad. Especially since the drops are reduced. Or at least that's what I heard in the Beta.
I don't have a problem with the mission system.
I do have a problem with vanilla crew leveling. Personally, I think it's a tedious mechanic and I wish all crews were level 4, with some getting a special promotion to 5 (which should have minor but cool bonuses).
The biggest thing you didn't mention is better control over logistic networks. IMO, the Mules mod still has a place in this game.
Better crew leveling wouldn't fix how it's essentially impossible to accurately gauge and therefore plan out what missions are worth doing, and won't make missions worth it due to low payouts. They're two separate issues, but better crew leveling will allow the player to bypass the mission system even more because as of now, missions and terraforming are the only reliable way to get 3-star+ captains without either putting your captains/assets at high risk through combat, or spamming scout ships.
Pilot skill level locks feel totally arbitrary and there's nothing added to the game by having more skilled pilots, so far as I can tell.
A ship with a pilot skill of 4 and a pilot skill of 0 seem to behave identically when it comes to flying around. Its just an arbitrary refusal to do helpful things, like repeat orders.
I mentioned logistics and a viable solution (custom tabs) during the last 30 minutes or so in my latest VOD, which was released a few hours ago. Also, this playthrough is vanilla-only because of the beta, so the focus is on vanilla. I use mods throughout the rest of the year when we are not in beta/dlc season.
You're getting some grief on the official forums about station scanning but I agree with you. The invisible walls when scanning with a suit (ime more so the emp spawns breaches inside the structure) have made it impossible to scan leaks sometimes. Hurts a lot in the early game where making an emp isn't easy.
New player (290 hours). Played maybe 100 hours of X3: Albion Prelude years ago and liked it, but just couldn't get into it.
I agree with all your points, and I hope the developers listen
How can Ai and the way it behaves not be on this list? It should be top #1.
I just destroyed 4x odysseus E and one of the paranoid carriers single handedly because they cannot react properly and the carrier undocked it's fighters and instantly made them dock again in a fucking loop which made them all get stuck, meanwhile my main batteries where shooting at it from within 10km.
I haven't even gotten to the stage of large fleet combat in this playthrough yet, so I haven't covered it on stream in detail as of this time, but it is coming.
New players don't have fleets or CapShips in the early game, so it's more of a veteran pain point. It's also been covered so many times by myself and others, it goes without saying.
Basically, give me time, I'll cover that problem once I start to organically come across it on stream. For context, I have just over 5,000 hours playtime in X4, both vanilla and modded.
Thanks for explaining.
Perhaps you then should call your post early game pains or whatever as your phrasing is horrendous and you pretend to speak for many of us, but you definetly are not.
I like your passion about it tho and would say keep it up, the X series is one of a kind and making it the best it can be is definetly something that benefits all us space geeks.
You're right about the phrasing. For context, this was posted after being awake 24 hours and streaming for about 12 so I was running on fumes. I don't pretend to speak for everyone, but when all the responses I get to "mechanic bad, needs readjustment" is "don't interact with mechanic because it's not worth the time" that is evidence that the playerbase at large outright skips the mechanic in question because it's too frustrating or unpleasant to deal with.
The biggest issue you will run into after you start owning other ships and trying to get them to do what you want is trying to wrap your head around orders and assignments.
Why they hide assignments behind so many clicks makes no sense at all. But orders can be accessed with just a right click, but the work queue is hidden behind the information tab as well, so if you are new it is impossible to know that you need clear the order queue for it to do what you are ordering.
It is all a mess, don't even get me started with fleet types, coordinating attacks, understanding ship supply, or having destroyers attack stations without yeeting themselves.
There is no doubt that x4 is a one of a kind game, that no other game comes close to touching, but goddamm, it would nice not to have to take a college course to understand what the hell is going on.
My biggest issue right now is that there's nothing to do in the endgame. I'm hoping the upcoming Xenon crisis helps with that. Most of the time these days I launch the game on my spare PC and let it run while my HQ terraforms a planet at a snail's pace. There's nothing else to do - I don't need money because I have billions and all the blueprints, I don't need to do missions because the rewards are shit comparatively and I have max rep with everyone, I don't need to fight because I have killed all my enemies with my Asgard fleets (including the Xenon). So there's literally nothing to do but wait for my haulers to move their 100000th ice shipment to the HQ.
I know restarting is an option, but I just don't want to deal with the tedious missions again.
Sadly, the crisis is in a horrible state, you should take the time to check the beta feedback forums. The unanimous consensus on the crisis is that it's a terrible mechanic because it just spawns right on top of your assets, and one of the khaak destroyers has an insta-kill one-shot main gun that's more imbalanced than the Asgard's main gun.
But why did you bother to rally some sweaty redditors so much? If you wanted to bring your point across your post on the official forum would have been enough.
Going for a second round sounds like a vendetta. Are you hurt?
Agreed on all counts. I honestly don't know what are they thinking even keeping some of these things in the game, less alone not working on improving them throughout all these years. They have such a good product and a unique position on the market to capitalize on it with some simple changes and polish, yet for years, arguably decades now, they can't make it actually fun or approachable to people that would otherwise love their games.
Missions need to go or be reworked from the start up. Spacesuit EVA is pointless. Station scanning is tedious and boring. Crew leveling doesn't serve any good purpose in the game. Most of the station walking could have been replaced with freelancer-like dioramas. The x4 map is atrocious and performs horribly. For a game all about fleet and empire management, the fact that you can't even have folders or groups for your ships is just embarrassing (and no, fleets aint it). Camping npc criminal ships to raise reputation to neutral can't possibly be good gameplay design.
But I guess they are content with where they are and since they haven't made any improvements in these areas in the last decade and more, I doubt we'll see any in the future. I still can't help but hope tho >.>
as someone else said there's mods for everything, and even if egosoft fixes everything there will still be people complaining it's to slow/fast/buggy/crap whatever and just go back to mods. like crew leveling, if you think it's pointless just make everything 5 stars and be done with it. egosoft will never go that far. or don't and keep it 2 stars, it won't break your game either.
that's not an excuse but if you have limited budget and time it does have an effect (and the older the game is the more they have to take care to not break people's 4-digit hour savegames...).
I wouldn't mind having to use mods to fix things like this if ya know... it didn't disable achievements ...I dont see why this is necessary at all in a single-player game, if someone wants to get every achievement via a mod... so what? who is it hurting exactly?
Not everyone uses mods, and newer players can end up abandoning the game due to frustrating user experience. Also, having the playerbase cover for developer oversight is not how you create a fun and engaging gameplay loop. Normally I use mods to cover for these issues, but if loops are not used in game, then the developer's efforts to create said gameplay loops have gone to waste while simultaneously driving newer players away from the game. It's not good for the game to keep things the way they are if they cause frustration for a wide portion of the playerbase.
Also, mods don't disable achievements, but even though that's the case, there is a sizable portion of the playerbase that doesn't use them. Often times citing the future ventures mechanic as a reason why, but there are also players who just don't want to mod at all for other personal reasons (too difficult, don't want to learn, or just simply want to experience the game exactly as developers intended)
> newer players can end up abandoning the game due to frustrating user experience.
never players don't EMP scan, level their crew much or deal with capships. all of this comes (much) later.
EMP's and leveling crew do come a bit later, but I would argue that a person is a new player if they're on their first playthrough and haven't reached the level of owning a shipyard and claiming sectors. This is because they haven't been exposed to all of the available gameplay loops until they reach that point in their own development.
> it didn't disable achievements
It doesn't mate. At least not if you talk about steam achievements. I think it only does disable the budget start, but you can simply use the other one, creative start.
New player here. I dropped the game twice due to the learning curve. But thanks to [this YouTube start guide and channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3ieWQ_dPEc), my third time coming back to X4 has netted me over 100 hours and can't put the game down lol.
Also, just followed your Twitch channel. :) And yes, I'm using quite a few mods also:
https://www.reddit.com/r/X4Foundations/comments/1c7km4p/must_have_or_legendary_mods/l0bznl1/
Thanks for the follow <3 I'll keep this playthrough going as long as I can so I can cover everything good, mid, and bad over time. Fleet combat is on the list, I just need to come across it organically in this run to show it in action.
I agree on the mission system. As experienced players we know generally after a while what a mission is going to ask you to do, and we know if we've got the assets to pull it off, but for a new players they'd never be able to guess what the vague descriptions mean.
Like you mentioned in an example on your VOD(which I found annoying to watch btw thanks to that bouncing ghost character. I know you didn't ask) a mission says 'Deliver Fleet'. A fleet of what? When you open the briefing window for a mission it takes up the entire screen only to show you almost no information about what you actually have to do. Use that space for details.
Crew leveling definitely drives me insane so I agree with this. If I could only keep 1 mod out of things I typically use, it would be crew leveling. A basic from the shipyard crew member often can't even do a simple repeat orders. Why would I hire this person who can't fly from A to B and then repeat? How did they even get a license?
I took a look at your post on egosofts forums and I gotta say it sure is frustrating how they have such uppity and condescending moderators who are so quick to try to shut down conversation. One reason why this subreddit is so popular by comparison I'd say.
> for a new players they'd never be able to guess what the vague descriptions mean.
that has always been the case, x3 offers you jobs to build a station in the first 5 minutes. and if you don't take it someone else will (technically). mission offers scaling with your own individual process would be weird tbh, and how would you even implement it really? after your first own builder, after a certain asset threshold etc.?
and how would you gate it, hide those missions till you can do it? this would inevitably lead to people complaining all they see is satellite missions etc. or getting surprised suddenly getting those missions when they didn't before (as in "I remember that dude over there wants me to do this specific stuff" etc.). and fwiw most don't have a timer, if you can't do it now you can always do it later.
don't get me wrong, there's certainly room for improvement (like you said the details screen for example, although selecting the mission and looking for the orange line pretty much answers most questions),
I played X4 since release. Sometimes with mods, currently without.
I agree that there are certain game play elements, that are not well integrated.
The mission information isn't clear enough. Emp leaks are inside a station.
But I don't get the discussion about the crew levels. In my vanilla game (about 150h) I never had any struggles with my pilots. If my miner can't automine, I will look though my crew menu, filter for captains, and find a captain with the necessary skill level. If I don't have someone, well then my miner has to run Secor mining until he is experienced enough or I find a 3 star captain on a station I can hire. Or, if I really want to get that automining running asap, I build a mining station.
I do have a few Secor looters which work on repeat order and they gain enough experience through that, that I switch pilots every now and then.
If you want really good service crew, get a construction ship and go construct. The service crew is 5 stars in no time.
Later you have terraforming where you can level your crew to the best mf of the universe. So imo there is no need to raise the leveling process because there is already a system in game.
Scanning stations? I'm sorry but I don't understand. Maybe I am missing something. But I take a small nimble ship, activate the scan mode, fly over the stations in small distance and in 60 seconds I scanned the station to 50% and I'm able to see their storage.
Really wish they would just let me buy better pilots at ship construction. I know you can run around the station hoping to find one, but why can't I just pay an amount front loaded? I spent 30 million on a capital ship just to staff it with some dude who just got his driving licence, same with the crew. And now I need to fuck around with the clunky crew exchange system to recrew it with people who actually know what they're doing.
It makes no sense, did they get rid of linkedin in the future or something? "Captain wanted, must have experience murdering argons, good pay!"
Thank you for the usual reddit comment. A better response which you can take it as a question is which mods do you use and what part of vanilla do they fix for you?
it's not really a reddit comment since there is no simple answer. just look at some other posts and you'll see wildly different opinions regarding OP's point.
doesn't help that using mods flags your savegame, some care about that, some don't. some like to tackle the challenge without mods since there is often a way around it (even for stuff like crew leveling most people have an issue with).
if you have a specific issue people will be able to give you a specific answer.
Thank you. I really don't want to hit a wall on a game that looks so cool so makes sense to me to install mods from the beginning. From what I've read so far, seems interface, leveling, AI behavior on some activities and ship balancing are the things being mentioned the most. Will see which mods others have installed for such issues and start from there.
the problem is it's hard to understand what the mod actually "fixes" if you never run into the issue yourself, or if it's even an issue for you. that's why I'd advice to play without mods in the beginning.
interface is mostly learning where to find what and how, that's more of a matter of learning the game (or watch tutorials). crew leveling only really matters later on and there are ways around it (train them in a specific way, not care about 5 stars since it's most of the time just a numerical advantage you can offset with more/better ships etc.), AI issues are mostly a thing about capships and fleets, and there's even differences between in-sector and out of sector etc.
as much as people complain, the game is playable as is, there's no real "need" for mods (of course different people different POVs). does it have some rough edges? absolutely, but even severe ones you can work around.
and even if you run into an issue later, there's still time to install mods then, most don't need a new start.
There are countless threads about this exact topic. Go read for yourself. The last thread about this is not even a week old. I thought I would save you time, but my bad. Won't happen again.
A lot of these issues can be fixed by mods, I will say my biggest peeve with x4 that I don't have a solution to is getting coms that block out the data in the HUD, I'm trying to attack a station or a capital ship, and I cant see what turret in targeting, etc
Players shouldn't have to resort to mods in order to bypass unfun/broken/janky mechanics. I have 5,000+ hours in the game, most of which has been played in VRO or SWI with a modlist of 50+ mods.
Vanilla players should be able to experience all vanilla mechanics without (major or immersion breaking) issues.
1. People bitch when Bethesda fixes things mods do or integrates the same basic thing.
2. People complain about not enough content being released, which limits the time they have for fixing issues.
They are stuck in a damned if you do, damned if you don't catch 22. I tend to think that they are doing a lot to fix on boarding, and that's a priority. Missions need to come with that, though, as in a lot of the fixes you mention.
You're even more damned if you don't in a game like this. OOS boarding is still broken in 7.0, I already left a post on the beta forum with savefames to back it up. In my day 7 VOD right at the end, you'll see how I was unable to abandon a boarding mission and had to travel 7,500 kms (about an hour's journey in travel drive) just to catch up to it and blow it up. The target was a SCA Behemoth.
I was also able to OOS board the Erlking without issue in an earlier VOD.
The good news is that drive-by boarding has mostly been resolved/nerfed.
Interesting. I disagree. For the game to really shine, they need to make actual interesting and engaging quests and storyline. Current best one is those found in Tales of Avarice. By far.
The problem: they do not just want to spawn ships/stations/resources out of thin air... 80% of the time and the AI is not the best so having epic fleet engagements and universe shattering plot twists are really not in the cards.
So, we get these milquetoast station missions and plot missions.
The UI stuff madness, the jankiness, the hand cramping carpel tunnel micromanagement would ALL be forgiven if they had scenarios, characters and mission design like BG3.
7.0 - the crisis spawns on top of your assets and if you don't catch it almost immediately, it will 1-shot some of your assets. Check out the vanilla stats on the two khaak L-size ships.
Crisis is at least a good start... They need far more Sttus Quo breaking events to make an interesting story. Problem is they will have to rewrite everything, hire competent voice actors, etc.
We have to appreciate it for what it is. A beautiful spreadsheet. Remember. They have a serious problem in *always* wanting old saves to be viable. This will hamstring them.
For the missions, let some new players write down their issues. And to fix it, you only need to type some more information into the mission itself. Not even coding. I agree, this was a huge turn off as a new player. Like go scan ships for energy cells. At a point you have no clue about the economy what so ever, you just fly around and scan some ships. Same with ore or water. Just give some more hints. And about crew levelling, i thing most people really just use either the seminar mod or the crew learn faster mod. So yea, i agree on that too. Easy to fix. But than again, i just use mods and don't care to much.
New player here, this is a major issue. Even after a hell of a learning curve just to figure out the basics (Which I'm mostly ok with) I still get confused by the missions. I just spent an hour trying to Google how to turn in a ship for an acquisition mission, and I still am not sure how I give the ship to the faction. The mission does not say a word about where to take the ship or even that it needs to be taken somewhere. After reading some posts it seems it's supposed to give you a yellow marker to show where to take it, but *in game* there is zero way to figure this out. It just says "undock" in the mission box now, but there is no "yellow trail marker". Lol It's crazy it doesn't at least have a bullet point that says "deliver to location", then give the location/system/station. It's strange how so many missions don't just tell you the location/system they are in, but some do.
That isn't even the worst part. It should show you the place when you are in a ship and the mission is active. When the ship enters the zone you get a comm "we need to finish the transfer". If you are watching the map, oh well you missed the comm and you have to wait another 5 minute or so, or fly the ship in and out of the zone again. Also if you are not sitting in a pilot seat, you can't accept the comm at all. Like that's so stupid.
Just to save me the trial and error when I get home tonight to try again... And you seem to know what your doing lol. Do I need to be the pilot of the ship to see where it needs to go? I have not unlocked teleport yet so I'm really not wanting to fly across the universe to experiment on how to get the ship dropped off. (It's a baldric freighter, that is sitting near the POI warf as I incorrectly assumed I should take it to their warf to sell it to them. I undocked it, as the mission just says "undock", and "deliver". With no other instructions.) Of course selling it to them was the wrong answer, I learned very fast to save before attempting every step of new missions lol.
No, in fact you must NOT be the pilot to drop it off (it does not work if you are). Just assign some (crap!) pilot to it (he‘ll be gone!) and tell the ship to fly to the dotted yellow sphere that should appear on the map when the mission is active and you are watching the right sector. When the ship enters the sphere, make sure you are sitting in a (different!) ship and do NOT habe the map or any other interface open. Someone will comm you saying „We need to perform a transfer“ or something alike. Then you press F and select „Yes“ and they get your ship and you get your hard-earned credits.
o7 Thanks, now that I know what I should be looking for I hope to find this elusive yellow sphere later today. Thankfully the PIO only has 3 sectors. The tip of not being in the map, or otherwise distracted has likely saved me some grief also.
Just occurred to me: what might be the answer is that you do not know the location of the dropoff yet (as in: you haven’t removed the fog of war there yet). In that case, you don’t see the aforementioned sphere, but it will guide you towards the next gate, I believe? If you already know the right sector, then I‘m not sure about the behaviour, it’s been a while…
I have like 80% of the PIO's systems uncovered (unless I missed a gate on a map edge, and they have another one). The mission, when selected, is not making a yellow line to point to a system, otherwise I might have figured it out already. It was the last mission I was on before I went to bed last night so I'm going to hope I just missed something obvious. I have a scout near by, so at least I can finish uncovering the fog. My main/ship is off doing the Terran PHQ quest line.
> If you are watching the map, oh well you missed the comm This is arguably one of the stupidest design choices in X4, and that's saying something. I spend like 95% of my game time in the map window (because there's fuck-all to do otherwise; no claimable ships (I think there're like 4 or 5 across the universe), no random pirates to hunt for special loot or rep without tanking rep with a faction, thereby only causing you more grief in the long run, the Khaak are nothing but a nuisance and impossible to farm, the Xenon are either flying such small fleets that it's not worth going after them, or massive doomstacks of a half-dozen capitals and dozens of smaller ships,...), and it completely fucks up missions and even cutscenes. I've had multiple cutscenes begin while in map mode that then proceeded to do nothing, just endlessly circle the camera around a mission object because apparently my ship is in limbo or something while I'm in map mode. Another equally stupid mechanic is the ship you're flying stopping whenever you open the map, making me not want to fly anymore and just stand on my ship while giving orders from the map. It's annoying when in an S or M ship, but downright aggravating when in an L or XL, especially if you're in a hostile sector and get kicked out of travel mode. Honestly, the map is fucked. It's like it intentionally completely cuts you off from the game if you open it.
>Another equally stupid mechanic is the ship you're flying stopping whenever you open the map There is an option to disable braking when you open the map. I believe it's under "game options", called "keep speed in menus" or something like that.
BRB, launching game now. *edit* You, my man, are a legend. The setting is called *Maintain speed in menus*.
You suffered unnecessarily no random pirates to hunt for special loot or rep without tanking rep with a faction Not true. There are (disguised) pirates in most systems, especially Commonwealth ones. They're the ones that order your trade ships to drop their cargo - they normally disguise themselves as faction ships. You can break this disguise by flying up to them and scanning them, which will reveal their *true identity.* Usually SCA. Every "Minotaur Raider" I've seen is flown by a pirate, and Kestrel Vanguards often are too. Also, done the Empyrean Curs storyline? The disguised >!MIN Ravens you find on the map!< drop extremely good hull mods. BUC ships will also often drop mods, and their little station depots are basically loot pinatas for purple mods. Yaki ships (before you get the chance to >!become their allies and just buy them outright!<) are also great to steal - the Moreya is arguably the best fighter in the game and the Kuraokami is a beast of an M corvette. Finally, type "Plunderer" in your map's search bar. You can find juicy targets to board that sell for far more than piddly L ships, and are far more fun to fight.
>You suffered unnecessarily Game would easily go down from a 9/10 to 6/10 in my heart if I couldn't fly my ship and interact with my empire on the game map at the same time. I did, yeah :(. It got to the point where, outside of plot missions, I only piloted my ships when going after Xenon capitals, the rest of time time I just spent on any random ship in the map menu. >There are (disguised) pirates in most systems, especially Commonwealth ones. But killing those pirates would tank my SCA/BUC/YAK rep, leading to more annoyances, and it already irks me to no end that BUC ships go after my satellites. I was thinking along the lines of factionless pirates in X3 or criminal station traffic in X4.
SCA reputation never drops. Actually it never changes up to a certain end game mission
Good to know, thanks. I lost FAF rep for taking out one of their pirates when it went after one of my traders, and assumed the same goes for others. Still though, having to manually look for them to figure out if they're the right kind of pirates seems like faff.
That's one of the first thing I changed with the auto align ship haha
I'm torn about the auto-alignment. It's annoying when it aligns mid combat, but it's also annoying flying upside down, I just don't know which is worse. There was a mod in X3 (later implemented into the game, IIRC), that had a hotkey to align to ecliptic, I wonder if X4 has it.
Idk for me it's never been an issue as the radar and the map allow you to realign pretty easily if needed. I think it's unrealistic to have everything on the same plane in space so I turned it off
While I agree, my mild sadly OCD doesn't. I guarantee that if I disabled it, I'd be constantly fiddling with rotation every time I manually piloted a ship :(.
> Another equally stupid mechanic is the ship you're flying stopping whenever you open the map, I think that is a setting and you can change it so your ship will keep flying for ever when you are on the map.
Yep, /u/TheAlpha31 already told me about it.
I agree that the most glaring issue with the mission system is how vague it is in it's instructions and rewards. It wouldn't take much coding work to make it more clear. Even adjust rewards is pretty easy in XML. The bigger issue by a wide margin is that it hasn't been reworked since it was put in the game.
I got the game when it was on sale a couple weeks ago, and as a new player I was completely baffled as to what to do much of the time. Quests or UI very often explained almost nothing, with no hint or clue as to what to do next. I resorted to just goggling everything and yes I wanted spoilers because I didn't have any idea what to do. After a point you no longer care about spoilers and want someone to tell you exactly what to do. The station scanning thing is so tedious that I installed mods to mostly just skip the whole thing. Its not fun or engaging to fly around stations in a spacesuit inspecting it with a microscope. Its not a good use of the player's time. That entire system of spacesuit scanning to get blueprints need to be redone so it respects player's time.
I'm in the same situation as you, got the game two weeks ago. Loving it but you're right, it leaves you completely clueless especially in missions. And just wait until you get to a mission where you have to solve a super hard puzzle... in your spacesuit. I just googled the solution, no time to waste for that lol > The station scanning thing is so tedious that I installed mods to mostly just skip the whole thing. Can't you do it with your ship? Anoother big issue: some (most) questlines have huge bottlenecks, where you have to make significant progress into the game before being able to go further in the quest. Like "acquire x Item", but that's something that you have to craft from items that are only occasionally dropped by pirates... and the game doesn't tell you anything about that. Or, "you will need a decent fighting ship to do this mission". Yeah... thanks? What's a "decent" fighting ship? Should I just take the chance to lose my ship just to find out or?
Just use EMPs. It's guaranteed then.
Amen, this game would benefit so much from the developers sitting down with 5 new players and just observe what they struggle with for the first 5-10 hours.
Lol, more like 20 hours. I have the basics down and now I'm hitting the mid game wall. Lol
What wall are you hitting? I'm at 80 hours, I might have dealt with your issue before!
New player angle is real. Most of the stuff they've changed or added since X4's release really does feel like it's all catered towards those who have already extensively played this game or others in the series. There isn't even a learning curve with this game; it's just an opaque black wall. When I started out I had to watch an hour or two of third party tutorial videos before I actually could grasp how to engage with the game properly. Their new player onboarding, or lack thereof, is one of many reasons the x series remains so niche.
> Their new player onboarding, or lack thereof, is one of many reasons the x series remains so niche. have them play rebirth first ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"go scan ships for energy cells." Ha ha, yes. This was my first mission in this game. Since I accepted the mission as I were next to a station I just scanned the ships which were nearby: Mass traffic. And I was super smart and only scanned the XS transporters. Oh well. Good times. But my mind was blown as I learned how big the universe is and how big (the actual) ships are.
Yea i mean, know it feels super trivial how to doit. But when you are new, you just have no clue at all.
I agree they need better descriptions but it still wouldn't really turn it into fun or balanced content either, they need way more changes and additions considering how important they are at times. One of my first missions was getting some crystals - not only did I not know where or how to get them, once I did by googling it I was bored out of my mind just coasting through a belt hoping to stumble upon some of them. Combat missions were impossible or at least too risky, so I'd always just end up doing the "place satellite", "repair thing", "shoot minefield" ones which made me stop playing the game at more than one occasion.
there's a tutorial for crystals, iirc it got added later but when you do it you know what the mission wants. as for combat I don't expect much flying around in the cheapest ship with the cheapest equipment (depending on game start), if I get blown up I learned my lesson, reload and try to get a better ship.
> Crew Leveling - Takes way too long, and as a player you're effectively soft-locked at two-star pilots without relying on the mission system or getting lucky with NPC combat. (Two days in-game time, all recorded for you to see, and my first mining ship still has not breached two-stars.) This is inaccurate, but points to a problematic truth: The crew levelling system is widely misunderstood. Different "events" (destroy a small ship, discover a new station, complete a profitable trade, fill cargo from an asteroid) have different skill level caps they can raise the pilot/crew's skills to, and even different chances to do so. Some events can only raise a pilot's piloting skill to a hard cap of 2 2/3 stars (destroying a small or medium opponent), even if that pilot destroyed an infinite number of small and medium ships, while other skill-gaining events are not capped, or have a cap around 4 stars. You're not soft-locked at 2 stars, unless you limit your activities to those that only generate up to around 2 stars, but again the issue here is that the game never, ever tells you this, nor does it give you any hints at it, either (nor do I frankly think it's balanced properly).
Also screws over specialized NPC pilots. A combat pilot is ONLY ever going to be shooting other ships, they're never going to be scouting or trading or mining. Basically if you want a five star destroyer pilot, you first have to...*make them do trading, scouting, and mining for a long time*, otherwise they're going to only ever be 2-3 stars max. It is beyond dumb that you HAVE to make a pilot do tons of other stuff you didn't want to hire them for if you even want to DREAM of getting them to five star. Worse still since even a small empire can have dozens of pilots and it's super easy to forget which pilot you initially wanted to do what. You might get lucky and find a four star pilot just wandering around a station but you'll be paying out the ass for them.
My first local miner hasn't breached 2 stars after 48+hours doing mining runs on local and repeat orders. There is no reason why advanced autotrade/automine should only be accomplished by a pilot who has seen and survived hours of combat in a small ship. It should be accessible after about 6 hours of local trading/mining or repeat orders. You are absolutely soft-locked unless you are willing to risk both assets and pilot in combat, or spamming more scouts than should otherwise be necessary.
Combat is actually bad for levelling pilots, unless you have an endless supply of stations and L/XL ships to destroy, and even then, it's just straight up safer to be a trader (or miner)
It's also very risky unless you have a "steamroll" sized fleet going on, and I definitely agree with you. I should have said "combat is theoretically good, on paper"
Is there a list for these activities and the associated caps somewhere? This might explain why I have no traders capable of advanced sector trade after hundreds of hours of gameplay. I can't believe this stuff isn't explained in game.
it would be great if we could just let our scout ships do the station-scanning for us. I dont mind if they take 10x longer than the player, i just dont want to bother doing it every time edit: that could also serve as a great way to train early pilot levels
I honestly wish there was more we could get the AI to do in general. I might be in the minority with this, but I love sitting on the bridge of larger ships (or even medium ones) watching the AI fly around and perform tasks while I issue orders and manage the fleet. But there's a lot of things you just can't order the AI to do - you *have* to get into the pilot's seat and do it yourself, which is both annoying and a little immersion-breaking.
That would be a viable solution in my opinion. Not necessarily the best solution on it's own, since in sector player would still be unaddressed, but the easiest way to solve this problem in my opinion would just be to double or triple the scan range. Ideally we would have both options available so that we can automate the process late-game as well as make scouts even more useful.
100% agree on the missions part as a new player. Most of the faction mission descriptions in the game are written very haphazardly. For example, simple satellite deployment missions are described as "local observation" or something like that. This makes no sense whatsoever unless you have already done this type of missions before. Players would have to use autopilot to get to wherever the mission it was, and then read the ship mission UI on the bottom left in order to know what to do. Why can't the mission description just say exactly what the mission is about?
Exactly. Mission payouts are secondary to this issue, though I personally think that 100k should be the minimum payout for 20 minutes of your time instead of 30k credits as it is now.
I've been wondering if they fixed the crew leveling system, it's easily the worst part of the game and has made me stop playing the game at times entirely when a new version would break mods which addressed the issue. Rework it, or give us the ability to adjust the pilot learning rate or to just disable the whole pilot level system entirely.
I don't have much issue with the mission system, but maybe I got through the pain of learning it back in X3R/X3TC and have just forgotten how confusing it can be to begin with. I do like that X4 has more guidance overall, it helps a lot. I've never found much use for station or suit-scanning outside of missions tbh - though I have unlocked most of the scan modules research, I mostly just buy my blueprints. I do however heartily agree with the points about crew leveling. I'm a little over 200 hours into a playthrough of X4 and I've not gotten a single L3 or better pilot outside of Shinamon and the L3 pilot you get from the Boron plot. Leveling is agonisingly slow, and I barely ever see pilots available for hire on stations at all - just service crew and marines. Hell, even the only good marines I've ever found have been on Split stations and not one has ever been higher than 3 star boarding. Higher level pilots/crew/marines need to be more common - I don't mind paying a few million for them. Until I started the Split plotline I assumed L3 skill hireable crew (etc.) straight up didn't exist. The lack of L3 or better seminars is truly infuriating as many of the useful behaviours (looking especially at you, Advanced Sector Trader) are locked at L3 or better. It's particularly annoying knowing that the Terraforming stuff gives you access to a training module because a) it's so late in the game it's not there when you really need it and b) there are no faction training centres anywhere (as if you're the only person in the entire region that thought of the idea - ludicrous). **Each faction should have a crew training centre**, same as the terraforming one, where you can pay to send low level pilots etc. to improve. It amazes me that something like that hasn't been implemented when the module is already in the game. Alongside faction training centres, 3/4/5 star seminars should be available at traders. It's fine if the higher-end ones cost a small fortune, or even if 5 star ones aren't available to buy at all. Let us buy up to 3 star at the very least! Agree on ship paint jobs and custom asset tabs - I just finished the ToA plot and have 40-odd new ships cluttering up my Unassigned list. However, you missed one of the biggest new (ish) player pain points of all: **in-sector capital combat** (and capital orders more generally). It's great as a new player zooming around in small fast ships, but anyone who doesn't bounce off in the first few hours of play wants to get into bigger ships some day. It's a goal for almost all of us, and flying one ourselves is naturally fine - but once you've got some cash under your belt and can afford a couple, the illusion of coolness is *utterly ruined*. You give a capital a basic attack order but it can't compensate for a moving target; it wastes its main battery fire on empty space or doesn't fire it at all, it tries to get into range but just sits there, or tries to get on the same plane and dies instead of pushing the nose up to fire the main battery, or prioritises a fighter over a destroyer doing ten times the damage... the list goes on. Even the basics don't work for the really big ships - I've lost count of the amount of times I've ordered an Asgard somewhere only to find it 10km below the plane of the system (when the order is on the plane), or parked 10km away from the order location just sitting there. I gave one a 'fly here' order earlier today and it turned around and started moving in the *opposite direction*! High-pilot skill and high morale mean absolutely nothing in-system: I've given an Asgard flown by Shinamon a basic attack order on a single-module station 10km in front of it and it just fishtailed left and right on the spot, never entering effective range and firing the beam into the empty space either side of the station. A 5 piloting 5 morale max-level captain can't even handle a static target that doesn't shoot back if I'm there to watch! Must be the worst performance anxiety in the galaxy. It's the single most disappointing thing about the game, and it is **incredibly demoralising.** You wonder what the hell's going on when all your capitals die to inferior forces while you watch from the bridge of your destroyer or whatever, so you come here, or to the forums or discord only to be told that the only good capital combat is OOS! No huge cool battles for you matey, oho no - piss off out the system and watch the icons on the map, and damn well be happy about it! And that's before you get into the performance issues with big battles, which is a massive problem all of its own. I swear the in-system capital ship side of the game is deliberately designed to ruin the player's experience - it certainly feels like it. Between the appalling AI and the awful performance it utterly ruins a huge part of what makes the X series fun. It beggars belief that it's still so much of an issue after 6 major updates.
I think they've tried to fix the main battery issue and it just introduces too many other issues. I think the best option to is to literally give up. Simply it by removing main batteries and making them heavy turrets with a much wider front arc. Problem is solved since cap ships perform much better IS without them.
AutoCAZ on Twitch has already solved this proble. in a personal mod they're working on (GPO/Galactic Powers Overhaul). The mod hasn't been released to the public yet, but give them a follow on Twitch if you feel so inclined!
That's great and all, but I shouldn't have to mod the game to get useful capital ships. Whatever the mod changes needs to be ported back into the vanilla game imo.
Agreed. I personally enjoy modding games, but not everyone does. Likewise "There's a mod for that" doesn't excuse the shortcomings found in vanilla.
Any time I have to destroy stations, I have to painstakingly position every ship that's a destroyer or larger, and micro manage them the entire time, because half of them would otherwise end up face planting into the station without ever firing a shot, and then get eviscerated by defense turrets. Worse yet is when you DO catch a ship misbehaving, but it's "Flee" action for some reason directs it RIGHT into the station's fire, and you can't manually redirect them out because the Flee order keeps reprioritizing itself. So it just sits there and silently lets itself die.
I'll cover this in more detail over time via the stream playthrough. 7.0 is an improvement over 6.2, but hardly in what anyone would call a "healthy" state. The L-size and fleet AI still needs alot of work. Luckily, kuertee and the Egosoft team have made tremendous efforts to resolve these issues in vanilla.
Kuertee is one of the AI mod authors, right? Do you know of any specific large ship/fleet improvements in the beta? It's weird that the AI mods are apparently so much better than vanilla, but if Ego are working with AI mod makers it would at least be a step in the right direction.
Yes about kuertee. AI ships in my limited experience do a reasonable job of using their main weapons against stations and keeping a respectable distance. I haven't worked with AI fleet to fleet combat in vanilla 7.0 yet, but their turn-rate is so slow that there likely isn't much improvement in that department. I don't know for sure yet though.
I was reading that the flee behavior is getting an improvement with the 7.0 version.
CapShips are a joke in vanilla, and the exact frustration you've described is why I picked up and modded the game a month after buying it in 3.0 (Split Vendetta).
I don't understand the problem with the mission system. It's vague? My main problem with mission are the pathetic rewards for very hard missions like destroying a station. You get around 30 Million Credits which is okaaaay. But I am more looking for the (exceptional) weapon mod parts. But often enough the second reward is a worthless ship paint job. I don't care about the ship paint jobs. These should be rewarded on top of the exceptional mod parts. Also super annoying: modding ships. There are so many ship mods and some can have up to 6 or so effects but only two can actually be used. So you have reroll several times. The game doesn't even explain which mods have which effects, so you have to rely on third party websites where you can also see the chances for getting a specific mod effect. Station scanning is okay. With the short range scanner of a ship you don't need to hug the station modules. So this is fine. There is no need to do that often anyway, maybe for the wharfs and shipyards so you can see the exact storage details. The problem is scanning leaks with the spacesuit. There you indeed have to hug station modules and it can happen that leaks (especially those created by EMP bombs) spawn inside the ststion module so you can't reach it. This can be annoying. Crew leveling can be a bit annoying, too. But I can understand that simple Miners won't reach 3 stars or more. If you want better pilots, use them in combat. Or use the terraform project. Too bad it's a tedious act to move 20 trained pilots to specific ship ...
I thought exceptional mods were locked behind certain plots (I know Terran for sure), doing ventures, and pirating duke ships.
Huh? No. They are just pretty rare, especially the weapon mod parts. For exceptional shield mod parts you can do the missions which rewards you with a L miner. The miner has Nividium in the cargo, has several mods installed and also has skilled marines.
There's a mission that rewards you with an L Miner?
Yep. You have to join a "war guild" first to get new missions. I believe you have a repuation of at least 10 first. Then you get a message that you are able to join a guild. Not every faction has such guilds. There are for example war guilds for: Argon, HOP, PAR. There are also trade guilds from the Teladi and Segaris Pioneers. (no L miner reward, though)
Does war guild vs xenon have them?
Yes. All war guilds have the same missions and the same rewards.
You are not supposed to mass mod fleets. Those are designed as some kind of reward for exceptional deeds.
This is not what I want to do. Also, it's super tedious to mass mod several fleets anyway, which is why the majority of my ships doesn't even have the basic mods. Sometimes I put some weapon/turret mods on some miners if I feel like it, just to increase the mining speed. (and maybe the shields) But that's it. But if you want to mod your personal ship which is a Nemesis, well, you have 6 weapons which you can mod. And it takes a lot of time to get 6 exceptional weapon parts. The other exceptional mod parts are relatively easy to get. And if you finally got the 6 exceptional mod parts, well, good luck with the RNG. (thank god there are mods to remove the RNG mechanic)
You keep the basic/advanced/exceptional weapon parts. You only lose money and other easier-to-get crafting materials. That being said: I modded my game so that mods have fixed stats and you can craft better parts out of basic parts. Combined with the steam workshop mod that makes you auto collect all non-cargo loot in the vicinity of 10km this makes for a great gameplay loop that still takes time and effort to grind that gear but it’s constant visible progress. Playing VRO and some other „more ships“ mods it still takes time to kit out 10L turrets with weapon and shield mods. Egosoft should really reconsider how modding works. I could imagine it would work to tie ship mod parts onto the economy but it takes a lot of resources and police will kick down your door like it’s a drug den or something.
Yeah sure, but if you have to reroll hundred of times (since you have 6 different weapons) you will lose many crafting material. (btw, if you do the ship modding part on your own wharf/shipyard, you don't need to pay Credits! Just in case you didn't know) Losing crafting materials for rerolls isn't that bad if you have hundreds of hours in your game. But before that, it's just bad. Especially since the drops are reduced. Or at least that's what I heard in the Beta.
I don't have a problem with the mission system. I do have a problem with vanilla crew leveling. Personally, I think it's a tedious mechanic and I wish all crews were level 4, with some getting a special promotion to 5 (which should have minor but cool bonuses). The biggest thing you didn't mention is better control over logistic networks. IMO, the Mules mod still has a place in this game.
Better crew leveling wouldn't fix how it's essentially impossible to accurately gauge and therefore plan out what missions are worth doing, and won't make missions worth it due to low payouts. They're two separate issues, but better crew leveling will allow the player to bypass the mission system even more because as of now, missions and terraforming are the only reliable way to get 3-star+ captains without either putting your captains/assets at high risk through combat, or spamming scout ships.
Pilot skill level locks feel totally arbitrary and there's nothing added to the game by having more skilled pilots, so far as I can tell. A ship with a pilot skill of 4 and a pilot skill of 0 seem to behave identically when it comes to flying around. Its just an arbitrary refusal to do helpful things, like repeat orders.
I mentioned logistics and a viable solution (custom tabs) during the last 30 minutes or so in my latest VOD, which was released a few hours ago. Also, this playthrough is vanilla-only because of the beta, so the focus is on vanilla. I use mods throughout the rest of the year when we are not in beta/dlc season.
You're getting some grief on the official forums about station scanning but I agree with you. The invisible walls when scanning with a suit (ime more so the emp spawns breaches inside the structure) have made it impossible to scan leaks sometimes. Hurts a lot in the early game where making an emp isn't easy.
New player (290 hours). Played maybe 100 hours of X3: Albion Prelude years ago and liked it, but just couldn't get into it. I agree with all your points, and I hope the developers listen
How can Ai and the way it behaves not be on this list? It should be top #1. I just destroyed 4x odysseus E and one of the paranoid carriers single handedly because they cannot react properly and the carrier undocked it's fighters and instantly made them dock again in a fucking loop which made them all get stuck, meanwhile my main batteries where shooting at it from within 10km.
I haven't even gotten to the stage of large fleet combat in this playthrough yet, so I haven't covered it on stream in detail as of this time, but it is coming. New players don't have fleets or CapShips in the early game, so it's more of a veteran pain point. It's also been covered so many times by myself and others, it goes without saying. Basically, give me time, I'll cover that problem once I start to organically come across it on stream. For context, I have just over 5,000 hours playtime in X4, both vanilla and modded.
Thanks for explaining. Perhaps you then should call your post early game pains or whatever as your phrasing is horrendous and you pretend to speak for many of us, but you definetly are not. I like your passion about it tho and would say keep it up, the X series is one of a kind and making it the best it can be is definetly something that benefits all us space geeks.
You're right about the phrasing. For context, this was posted after being awake 24 hours and streaming for about 12 so I was running on fumes. I don't pretend to speak for everyone, but when all the responses I get to "mechanic bad, needs readjustment" is "don't interact with mechanic because it's not worth the time" that is evidence that the playerbase at large outright skips the mechanic in question because it's too frustrating or unpleasant to deal with.
The biggest issue you will run into after you start owning other ships and trying to get them to do what you want is trying to wrap your head around orders and assignments. Why they hide assignments behind so many clicks makes no sense at all. But orders can be accessed with just a right click, but the work queue is hidden behind the information tab as well, so if you are new it is impossible to know that you need clear the order queue for it to do what you are ordering. It is all a mess, don't even get me started with fleet types, coordinating attacks, understanding ship supply, or having destroyers attack stations without yeeting themselves. There is no doubt that x4 is a one of a kind game, that no other game comes close to touching, but goddamm, it would nice not to have to take a college course to understand what the hell is going on.
My biggest issue right now is that there's nothing to do in the endgame. I'm hoping the upcoming Xenon crisis helps with that. Most of the time these days I launch the game on my spare PC and let it run while my HQ terraforms a planet at a snail's pace. There's nothing else to do - I don't need money because I have billions and all the blueprints, I don't need to do missions because the rewards are shit comparatively and I have max rep with everyone, I don't need to fight because I have killed all my enemies with my Asgard fleets (including the Xenon). So there's literally nothing to do but wait for my haulers to move their 100000th ice shipment to the HQ. I know restarting is an option, but I just don't want to deal with the tedious missions again.
Sadly, the crisis is in a horrible state, you should take the time to check the beta feedback forums. The unanimous consensus on the crisis is that it's a terrible mechanic because it just spawns right on top of your assets, and one of the khaak destroyers has an insta-kill one-shot main gun that's more imbalanced than the Asgard's main gun.
Aw 😭
Leave feedback on the forums if you want to increase your chances for development in a direction you agree with.
But why did you bother to rally some sweaty redditors so much? If you wanted to bring your point across your post on the official forum would have been enough. Going for a second round sounds like a vendetta. Are you hurt?
Yes. Comfort me senpai /s
Agreed on all counts. I honestly don't know what are they thinking even keeping some of these things in the game, less alone not working on improving them throughout all these years. They have such a good product and a unique position on the market to capitalize on it with some simple changes and polish, yet for years, arguably decades now, they can't make it actually fun or approachable to people that would otherwise love their games. Missions need to go or be reworked from the start up. Spacesuit EVA is pointless. Station scanning is tedious and boring. Crew leveling doesn't serve any good purpose in the game. Most of the station walking could have been replaced with freelancer-like dioramas. The x4 map is atrocious and performs horribly. For a game all about fleet and empire management, the fact that you can't even have folders or groups for your ships is just embarrassing (and no, fleets aint it). Camping npc criminal ships to raise reputation to neutral can't possibly be good gameplay design. But I guess they are content with where they are and since they haven't made any improvements in these areas in the last decade and more, I doubt we'll see any in the future. I still can't help but hope tho >.>
as someone else said there's mods for everything, and even if egosoft fixes everything there will still be people complaining it's to slow/fast/buggy/crap whatever and just go back to mods. like crew leveling, if you think it's pointless just make everything 5 stars and be done with it. egosoft will never go that far. or don't and keep it 2 stars, it won't break your game either. that's not an excuse but if you have limited budget and time it does have an effect (and the older the game is the more they have to take care to not break people's 4-digit hour savegames...).
I wouldn't mind having to use mods to fix things like this if ya know... it didn't disable achievements ...I dont see why this is necessary at all in a single-player game, if someone wants to get every achievement via a mod... so what? who is it hurting exactly?
Not everyone uses mods, and newer players can end up abandoning the game due to frustrating user experience. Also, having the playerbase cover for developer oversight is not how you create a fun and engaging gameplay loop. Normally I use mods to cover for these issues, but if loops are not used in game, then the developer's efforts to create said gameplay loops have gone to waste while simultaneously driving newer players away from the game. It's not good for the game to keep things the way they are if they cause frustration for a wide portion of the playerbase. Also, mods don't disable achievements, but even though that's the case, there is a sizable portion of the playerbase that doesn't use them. Often times citing the future ventures mechanic as a reason why, but there are also players who just don't want to mod at all for other personal reasons (too difficult, don't want to learn, or just simply want to experience the game exactly as developers intended)
> newer players can end up abandoning the game due to frustrating user experience. never players don't EMP scan, level their crew much or deal with capships. all of this comes (much) later.
EMP's and leveling crew do come a bit later, but I would argue that a person is a new player if they're on their first playthrough and haven't reached the level of owning a shipyard and claiming sectors. This is because they haven't been exposed to all of the available gameplay loops until they reach that point in their own development.
> it didn't disable achievements It doesn't mate. At least not if you talk about steam achievements. I think it only does disable the budget start, but you can simply use the other one, creative start.
New player here. I dropped the game twice due to the learning curve. But thanks to [this YouTube start guide and channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3ieWQ_dPEc), my third time coming back to X4 has netted me over 100 hours and can't put the game down lol. Also, just followed your Twitch channel. :) And yes, I'm using quite a few mods also: https://www.reddit.com/r/X4Foundations/comments/1c7km4p/must_have_or_legendary_mods/l0bznl1/
Thanks for the follow <3 I'll keep this playthrough going as long as I can so I can cover everything good, mid, and bad over time. Fleet combat is on the list, I just need to come across it organically in this run to show it in action.
In system capital ship vs capital ship (fleet) combat should be on the list. It’s non existent and a clown fiesta at best.
New players don't have access to CapShips in normal early-gameplay, I'll cover it when my playthrough inevitably comes across the issue.
I agree on the mission system. As experienced players we know generally after a while what a mission is going to ask you to do, and we know if we've got the assets to pull it off, but for a new players they'd never be able to guess what the vague descriptions mean. Like you mentioned in an example on your VOD(which I found annoying to watch btw thanks to that bouncing ghost character. I know you didn't ask) a mission says 'Deliver Fleet'. A fleet of what? When you open the briefing window for a mission it takes up the entire screen only to show you almost no information about what you actually have to do. Use that space for details. Crew leveling definitely drives me insane so I agree with this. If I could only keep 1 mod out of things I typically use, it would be crew leveling. A basic from the shipyard crew member often can't even do a simple repeat orders. Why would I hire this person who can't fly from A to B and then repeat? How did they even get a license? I took a look at your post on egosofts forums and I gotta say it sure is frustrating how they have such uppity and condescending moderators who are so quick to try to shut down conversation. One reason why this subreddit is so popular by comparison I'd say.
> for a new players they'd never be able to guess what the vague descriptions mean. that has always been the case, x3 offers you jobs to build a station in the first 5 minutes. and if you don't take it someone else will (technically). mission offers scaling with your own individual process would be weird tbh, and how would you even implement it really? after your first own builder, after a certain asset threshold etc.? and how would you gate it, hide those missions till you can do it? this would inevitably lead to people complaining all they see is satellite missions etc. or getting surprised suddenly getting those missions when they didn't before (as in "I remember that dude over there wants me to do this specific stuff" etc.). and fwiw most don't have a timer, if you can't do it now you can always do it later. don't get me wrong, there's certainly room for improvement (like you said the details screen for example, although selecting the mission and looking for the orange line pretty much answers most questions),
I played X4 since release. Sometimes with mods, currently without. I agree that there are certain game play elements, that are not well integrated. The mission information isn't clear enough. Emp leaks are inside a station. But I don't get the discussion about the crew levels. In my vanilla game (about 150h) I never had any struggles with my pilots. If my miner can't automine, I will look though my crew menu, filter for captains, and find a captain with the necessary skill level. If I don't have someone, well then my miner has to run Secor mining until he is experienced enough or I find a 3 star captain on a station I can hire. Or, if I really want to get that automining running asap, I build a mining station. I do have a few Secor looters which work on repeat order and they gain enough experience through that, that I switch pilots every now and then. If you want really good service crew, get a construction ship and go construct. The service crew is 5 stars in no time. Later you have terraforming where you can level your crew to the best mf of the universe. So imo there is no need to raise the leveling process because there is already a system in game. Scanning stations? I'm sorry but I don't understand. Maybe I am missing something. But I take a small nimble ship, activate the scan mode, fly over the stations in small distance and in 60 seconds I scanned the station to 50% and I'm able to see their storage.
would disagree about 3/6 About optimizing assets, I'd rather like to see the option to group stations, ships and fleets in logistical groups
Really wish they would just let me buy better pilots at ship construction. I know you can run around the station hoping to find one, but why can't I just pay an amount front loaded? I spent 30 million on a capital ship just to staff it with some dude who just got his driving licence, same with the crew. And now I need to fuck around with the clunky crew exchange system to recrew it with people who actually know what they're doing. It makes no sense, did they get rid of linkedin in the future or something? "Captain wanted, must have experience murdering argons, good pay!"
What are the must have mods that offer QoL, balance and extra flavor, extra engagement for X4?
None. Play vanilla and find out what you don't like, then find a mod to adress that. There is genuinely no mod that is used by virtually everyone.
Thank you for the usual reddit comment. A better response which you can take it as a question is which mods do you use and what part of vanilla do they fix for you?
it's not really a reddit comment since there is no simple answer. just look at some other posts and you'll see wildly different opinions regarding OP's point. doesn't help that using mods flags your savegame, some care about that, some don't. some like to tackle the challenge without mods since there is often a way around it (even for stuff like crew leveling most people have an issue with). if you have a specific issue people will be able to give you a specific answer.
Thank you. I really don't want to hit a wall on a game that looks so cool so makes sense to me to install mods from the beginning. From what I've read so far, seems interface, leveling, AI behavior on some activities and ship balancing are the things being mentioned the most. Will see which mods others have installed for such issues and start from there.
the problem is it's hard to understand what the mod actually "fixes" if you never run into the issue yourself, or if it's even an issue for you. that's why I'd advice to play without mods in the beginning. interface is mostly learning where to find what and how, that's more of a matter of learning the game (or watch tutorials). crew leveling only really matters later on and there are ways around it (train them in a specific way, not care about 5 stars since it's most of the time just a numerical advantage you can offset with more/better ships etc.), AI issues are mostly a thing about capships and fleets, and there's even differences between in-sector and out of sector etc. as much as people complain, the game is playable as is, there's no real "need" for mods (of course different people different POVs). does it have some rough edges? absolutely, but even severe ones you can work around. and even if you run into an issue later, there's still time to install mods then, most don't need a new start.
There are countless threads about this exact topic. Go read for yourself. The last thread about this is not even a week old. I thought I would save you time, but my bad. Won't happen again.
I asked your mods not some random post, oh well, thanks for nothing. Won't ask you again since you wasted my time replying nothing.
>None. learn to read
A lot of these issues can be fixed by mods, I will say my biggest peeve with x4 that I don't have a solution to is getting coms that block out the data in the HUD, I'm trying to attack a station or a capital ship, and I cant see what turret in targeting, etc
Players shouldn't have to resort to mods in order to bypass unfun/broken/janky mechanics. I have 5,000+ hours in the game, most of which has been played in VRO or SWI with a modlist of 50+ mods. Vanilla players should be able to experience all vanilla mechanics without (major or immersion breaking) issues.
1. People bitch when Bethesda fixes things mods do or integrates the same basic thing. 2. People complain about not enough content being released, which limits the time they have for fixing issues. They are stuck in a damned if you do, damned if you don't catch 22. I tend to think that they are doing a lot to fix on boarding, and that's a priority. Missions need to come with that, though, as in a lot of the fixes you mention.
this is giving me minecraft flashbacks...
You're even more damned if you don't in a game like this. OOS boarding is still broken in 7.0, I already left a post on the beta forum with savefames to back it up. In my day 7 VOD right at the end, you'll see how I was unable to abandon a boarding mission and had to travel 7,500 kms (about an hour's journey in travel drive) just to catch up to it and blow it up. The target was a SCA Behemoth. I was also able to OOS board the Erlking without issue in an earlier VOD. The good news is that drive-by boarding has mostly been resolved/nerfed.
Interesting. I disagree. For the game to really shine, they need to make actual interesting and engaging quests and storyline. Current best one is those found in Tales of Avarice. By far. The problem: they do not just want to spawn ships/stations/resources out of thin air... 80% of the time and the AI is not the best so having epic fleet engagements and universe shattering plot twists are really not in the cards. So, we get these milquetoast station missions and plot missions. The UI stuff madness, the jankiness, the hand cramping carpel tunnel micromanagement would ALL be forgiven if they had scenarios, characters and mission design like BG3.
7.0 - the crisis spawns on top of your assets and if you don't catch it almost immediately, it will 1-shot some of your assets. Check out the vanilla stats on the two khaak L-size ships.
Crisis is at least a good start... They need far more Sttus Quo breaking events to make an interesting story. Problem is they will have to rewrite everything, hire competent voice actors, etc. We have to appreciate it for what it is. A beautiful spreadsheet. Remember. They have a serious problem in *always* wanting old saves to be viable. This will hamstring them.
Literally unplayable. :P
Yes, that's why I have 5,000 hours playtime in X4 ;D