Thread 2088485

Diplomacy update public beta out NOW

Have they fixed the UI being so cumbersome yet?
I cant get over how this game is so cool but would be much easier to control as if it were sins of a solar empire.

>>2088485 (OP)
Fuck yeah, dickplomacy

>>2088485 (OP)
It sounds like faction relations will only changed based on player input, can anyone confirm that factions will not change relations with each other on their own?
>>2088530
You just get used to it

>>2088768
>It sounds like faction relations will only changed based on player input
Really? That's not good.

>>2088530
>>2088768
Seconding this. You get used to it.

It could be better, but you get used to it. The game has a pretty intense level of functionality and designing a UI for it is a challenge for anyone.

I spend most of my time playing in the map interface nowadays.

Been trying the SWI total conversion lately. It's cool but I'm not sure it's actually better than the base game all in all.

>>2088485 (OP)
Fuck yeah dickplomacy.

good to be back.

How disappointed are we?

>>2088842
>It could be better, but you get used to it.
Compared to how even x rebirth was x4 has UI like a dream that's beamed directly into your skill like neuralink.

>>2088530
At some point, you'll start to realize that if you think you should be able to do something with a particular right-click dropdown menu, you probably can.
It's cumbersome to navigate, so to speak, but you there's a lot of redundancy as to where and how you can give orders, input units, etc. etc. for better or worse.

>>2089123
You couldn't even click on the map in X2.

>>2089123
I think it's pretty good all things considered, even compared to other games with similar levels of complexity.

Obviously I like the game, I have about 800 hours in X4 now.

One Argon run, one Terran run, one Boron run, now playing as a freelance republican industrialist / militia in SWI.

How does the diplomacy interact with the old diplomacy questlines?

>>2089017
batteries firing
plasmas flying
fighters dying
ass jiggling
another beautiful day

>>2088485 (OP)
I guess version 8.00 is probably going to be the last one, right? Is there any other DLC on the horizon?

>>2090192
There is
>one mini dlc
>some exploration update
>probably more
They are not actually done with x4. Sometimes I don't really think they have an off ramp because they don't know what to do with x5 on account of not being able to write stories for shit. They clearly want to try coasting on german grant money and mini dlcs as long as they can though.

>>2090288
What's X4 missing that previous games had? Corporations/minor factions with their own (short) quest chains/rank system/rewards and passenger ships/missions for 100+ passengers to do tours.

Maybe Aldrin and it's huge asteroid? The HUB? All the major races are in.

Actually, I'd love an Aldrin & unknown sectors + HUB DLC, make it so it doesn't require the Terran DLC but have interaction/quests if it does. Plus bonus points for the Springblossom.

There is currently a bug in the beta where if you buy blueprint/license from the ambassadors in your embassy, the cost gets instantly refunded after purchase. Meaning you can get blueprints for free

This game frustrates me with how tedious it is in certain sections. Why do I have to search around manually for comm data leaks to get a black market contact so I can smuggle illegal goods. It's just retarded.

>>2088768
>It sounds like faction relations will only changed based on player input, can anyone confirm that factions will not change relations with each other on their own?

As far as I understand, mostly no. Factions don't have the diplomacy features you as a player do. However, there is project Null which you can activate which adds occasional random events with associated relationship changes between factions. This an opt in feature tthrough an agent though. So you have to unlock diplomacy before activating it.

IDK if the player can be targeted by Project Null.

>>2090726
I have avoided black market stuff entirely because it's shit. I avoid piracy for much of the same reasons because it's shit AND brokenly easy. I just hope diplomacy fixed up faction logic so they can attack people not next to each other now. The boron fleet sent to the argon in particular was one of the most bandaid token things I have ever seen in a video game.

>>2091060
>>2090726
Would be nice if a black marketeer had a dialog option for "introduce me to another black marketeer", pay 10,000 and it'd start one of the black market introduction missions at a random station in sector.

Or some repeatable quest chain to setup your own black marketeers in a stations you choose. Would start in the PHQ and then require 1 of each hacking item, along with some crewmember with 3+ management and poof, new blackmarket in that station.

>>2090288
I'm hoping that the downscale to mini-dlc like Timelines and micro-dlc like the Hyperion (one ship per year lmao) is because they're actively working on X5. I can't believe they've got all the staff that used to be able to put together faction DLCs yearly just sitting around playing farm simulator.

>>2091190
Well, no. You might have noticed instead of a regular expansion they gave us a flight sim update and now this diplomacy update. We can probably assume those are rather complex.

The starwars overhaul is great

>>2091268
There are three cons
>bloatware rpg features like upkeep
>performance
>VRO balancing meaning no dogfights

>>2091277
I can't remember having any real dogfights in vanilla, everything dies quickly there too

>>2091289
It wasn't good at it but you didn't get sniped at 15km by beams either.

>more new unowned sectors
>more trade ports
I wonder why.

>>2091707
>more new unowned sectors
More places to explore.
>more trade ports
These are constant demand resource sinks for the game's economy, every hour they delete some of their resource stockpiles creating a floor of low level demand for all resources so the game's "GODAI" doesn't delete the last factory for drone parts or field coils.

Just got back into the game after a few months, and HOLY SHIT they finally added a command to let stations and fleets automatically order new ships from your shipyard when one gets destroyed.
This qol-feature was long overdue, especially for a retard like me who always forgets to buy new ones until I wonder why my stations don't produce shit anymore lol.

>>2091879
Actually the sector seems to connect hop and teladi.
It's neat but I wish they updated factions to be able to go through each other territory when applicable instead.

>>2091989
Connecting to Path to Profit? Seems the most logical place to link the two.

As it is I see too many Split/Teladi fly through Xenon territory to reach stations on the other side, so I think the AI needs to be tweaked to avoid hostile sectors more.

How do you hire more agents?

>>2092417
The game is rather unclear about that. I guess they hang around stations?

So I got a bit into diplomacy now. just the start.
>good end game use of resources like spacefly eggs
>blueprint stealing finally
>some more endgame stuff like war and peace
All good. Less good is
>fallen families are diplomatic but you can't really react to them
>Just started but they didn't seem to add many really unique events except one to make heretics end non neutral.

>>2093219
>blueprint stealing finally
How exactly does it work, what's the difference to regular EMP bombing?

>>2089017
dat ass

>>2093295
You can steal ships.

if i've never played an X game, where should I start and which ones should I skip?

>>2093578
X4 honestly.
The story isn't difficult to follow and 4 gives you exposition dumps through data vaults. It's also by far the most accessible

>>2093560
Oh, so you can steal ship blueprints? That's really cool.

Only ship blueprint I really want to steal is the Prometheus from Duke's Buccaneers. An all in one combat-trader hybrid.

>>2093578
X4, buy the base game first and if you like it get the DLC factions. Ignore the Timeline DLC as it doesn't really enhance the base game itself.
If you want to read up on the lore you might miss by not playing the previous games, read this:
https://www.scribd.com/document/355746917/The-X-Encyclopedia-Helge-Kautz

>>2093622
I think X rebirth actually has a decent story but you have to tolerate a lot of jank to play it.

>>2093968
An X:Rebirth 'remaster' as a DLC for X4, would be nice. Put it on it's own separate gate network, a few large interesting systems each with their own theme.

>>2093950
Tbh it's the community of planets edition or bust. Wait for a big sale when the entire pack is like $30.

>>2094108
That would actually be good. X rebirth was hated and probably quite skipped so a straight port with the ships would probably be less effort for them but also super easy to do thanks to the new and highly convenient timelines design system.

>>2093950
I like timelines. I like to rp with the ships they add and pretend they are my player faction ships.

have they touched weapon balance at all in the past year? or is it still hilariously unbalanced to the point where everything other than plasma and flak are just newbie traps?

>>2095266
>is it still hilariously unbalanced to the point where everything other than plasma and flak are just newbie traps?
I assume you're talking about turrets, but yes it is still that way.

>>2094108
>>2094143
There is already a mod that ports X Rebirth maps into a separate gate network.

>>2095426
Those are just the sectors. Not the meat of it.

>Want to try out if AI actually has improved
>Send a few destroyers to attack a Xenon defense station
>"Huh, they actually keep their distance while shooting, nice! Guess I'll send them back to where they belong now"
>Instead of keeping their distance while flying away, they just crash directly into the station and get instakilled
Guess AI hasn't really improved, but is now a bit more.. different.

>>2095693
A xenon N today was able to check me and took down my ares because I couldn't get away from it. That's a lot better than the start of the flight beta where it was unable to turn to face your ship and actually fire.

did they fuck with EMP suit bombs mechanism? I researched all the "chance to get x from leaks" tech but i haven't gotten ANY blueprints even after shitting out something like 12 EMP bombs.

>>2095693
They improved how the ai behaves in accomplishing a task, but it's incapable of doing that while managing other tasks.
They're good at fighting but terrible at being told to go somewhere while also fighting.

>>2096208
surely this is a solved problem in literally every other game

>Added new travel-mode bubble effect
???

I hate to say it but diplomacy is a little on the boring side.

>>2096605
Yep. I don't get why they refuse to implement the X3 system where improving relations with one group decreases your relations with their enemies. It's ridiculous that I can trivially supply enough arms to a faction to have them conquer the galaxy with no consequences.

>>2096657
I think we could go a bit beyond that and have the player align to a faction for benefits/rewards.
There is already a mod that implements relationship penalties and it was fairly clear to me that x4 isn't really big enough to support that. Even this beta they added a new sector that connets directly to the hop home system and it really showcases just how on top of each other the base game races are.

>>2096657
>>2096673
I'd make it so if the player takes ranks in a faction they become more 'of a public figure' that's known to both the faction and outsiders.

At rank 10, can do the promotion ceremony where they get access to "military" ships, or ask to work as a free agent. With the ceremony, double the reputation gains but lose with enemies, without the ceremony, prices of things unlocked like restricted ships, weapons and station modules are doubled but the player is still given access to them - and reputation gains are halved but with no loss from enemy factions.

I would also love more neutral "no man's land" sectors between factions. Neutral minor factions that don't claim sectors but offer unique ships or weapons, like the old X3 era corporations.

>pick up the game again
>completely forgot about how fucking awful and dysfunctional most orders are
>download the sector exploration mod so i don't lose my mind drawing circles in every fucking hex in the map
>completely forgot about how modded orders can randomly ignore travel blacklists because Egosoft autism
>lose scouts to Xenon stations despite blacklists telling my ships not to fucking fly there
this game sure is something huh
i bet we totally needed that fucking flight model update that made everything fly like fucking riced out tokyo drifters instead of an "finally finish implementing the basic fucking features after 10 years" patch.

>>2097106
>i bet we totally needed that fucking flight model update that made everything fly like fucking riced out tokyo drifters instead of an "finally finish implementing the basic fucking features after 10 years" patch.
I think Egosoft's design philosophy is to cater towards people who don't get too deep into the game and mostly just fly around doing contracts for a couple dozen hours. It's the only way I can explain their focus anyway.

Well yes, the flight model change was good because decoupling shields from boost was good.
I do agree that they need to fix ai exploration or give us an alternative like buying system info.

>>2097226
Yeah, it's why almost every single dlc except the first one just came with a quick onboarding plot and pretty low requirements.

>>2097226
i’m gonna object to the “couple dozen hours” demographic because you can run into the game’s serious issues long before hitting a single dozen hours, i.e. try to setup a miner with your adventuring funds and run straight into the absolutely broken orders system

>>2097326
it’s too generous to call them onboarding plots. i sure as hell had to look up what the REAL objective was for some of the missions even with multiple sandbox runs under my belt.

i can't be the only one who wishes torpedo replenishment would come with a capacity limit, or program a way to just fucking carry the extra torpedoes in carriers

seriously how did they not see any problems with a single fighter sucking up an entire freighter's worth of raw materials to max out its magazines? this makes torpedo bomber wings of any size basically a nonstarter even for massive fleets

>>2097349
Mining isn't even a problem. It's trading because all the automation orders either don't work or require extreme micromanagement all the way to manually buying and selling. I wish trading was as straightforward as mining.

>Vanilla has a hidden mechanic which checks if your mining ships are within 40km of a resource probe owned by you and silently applies a 50% penalty to mining efficiency if they are not. Thus, players are unknowingly hamstrung by this mechanic as there is literally no way to learn it exists in-game.
>Even when using a mod like Satellite Service to automatically blanket the entire sector with probes, it is still possible to receive this penalty because the probes are deployed on one plane. Therefore, you would receive the penalty if the ship moves >40km above or below the probes. Covering the entire sector with probes also reduces performance and visually clutters the UI.
what the fuck is wrong with germans

>>2097792
Does it really? I never noticed because mining is just a passive income stream and since they adjusted ai mining in 7.5 buy orders always dry up before mining rate becomes a concern.

>>2097801
>>2097792
Every problem like this is best solved by just making more ships. Which is a design issue.

>>2097846
yeah, but the game "discourages" that behavior by spawning cubed cocks on top of your miners, which is not annoying whatsoever and a great game design.

That one Split mission is STILL bugged? The one where you plant bombs on cargo drones and then have to pick up crates. I memoryholed how I never got to finish this mission over multiple runs and now I'm running into the issue again. Where's the fucking box??

>>2097792
>>2097801
A fix would be that mining ships deploy a mining probe when they mine, then recover it when they go to deliver their mined resources.

Incentive to give mining ships probes.

Or have 'survey sector for mining' as an order you can give ships, where the ship would need 10-20 mining probes and it'd deploy them in the sector raising a 'survey' stat which increases yield.

Or something like that big radar dish stations can have now, 'mineral survey module' which acts like a mining probe for the whole sector.

Or have sector mineral content be unknown until a mining probe is dropped there, after that as long as the probe is active in sector that sector gains 'survey data' score which increases the accuracy of the sector, going from "Ore detected" where mining ships can be assigned to the sector, to "Ore in the thousands to millions" mining ships mine 10% more efficiently to "aproximately 900,000 ore" 25% more efficiently to "925,700 ore" 50% mining bonus.

Could also buy the survey data from those Prospector ships that just patrol mineral rich sectors, make them useful for the player.

>>2098477
I personally gave up on mining when they weren't able to figure out how to incentivize the player to mine dangerous frontier sectors near xenon for big rewards.

>>2098597
Eh. As it is I have big mining fleets of large miners (who can fight off Khaak without losses) feeding 'mining outposts' which are just docks and storages which have their own mining ships hauling the ores to where the factories that consume them. Only times I mine myself is when I do one of those 'train npc' missions, and I have a medium mining ship specifically built for that - high speed with great maneuverability.

Don't know how Egosoft could make mining more interesting. And I'm more interesting in salvaging and exploring, I love finding those rare derelict large ships which have a crate or something inside them and I have to personally explore them; so I want them to work on EVA and zero-g movement. Rework the spacesuit into something less clunky, no chair, make it more like Space Engineer's spacesuit, add magnetic boots to walk on the surface of ships. And add more places to explore "on foot".

>>2098876
>'mining outposts' which are just docks and storages which have their own mining ships hauling the ores to where the factories that consume them
this sounds unnecessarily tedious to setup and potentially bottlenecked by docking bays due to having more ships floating around. does it provide tangible benefits over having mining ships directly mine for the consumers?

>>2098876
>Don't know how Egosoft could make mining more interesting.
One of the late timelines missions has you with an l miner and a small fleet defending against khaak as you mine and it's actually fun. That's peak mining. But the game isn't really set up in a way that has you doing that organically.

>>2097359
wait... carrier reload works for you?
I kinda dropped the game because missile reloading never really worked for me. The fighters were just in a perpetual Change Equipment state whenever they'd dock, never using the missile parts and other components I had loaded in the carrier.

>>2099119
they're stuck "changing equipment" because your carrier / aux ship doesn't have enough stuff to fully reload the fighter. if you have multiple fighters waiting for replenishment but the carrier doesn't have enough to outfit even one fighter, then all of the the fighters will stay stuck in that state.
this leads to hilarious scenarios like:
>have enough raw mats on carrier for 29 missiles (out of 30 that can be carried by single fighter)
>fighter stays stuck because there's not enough stuff to FULLY replenish itself
>another fighter docks, and waits because allocating resources is a SEQUENTIAL process
the most annoying part is that each missile takes a fuckton of raw resources to replenish. so from the player's pov, you see a carrier with 25-35% full cargo hold refusing to replenish the bombers for reasons invisible to you.

no, you can't decide how much each fighter gets to replenish. no, you can't feasibly bring enough carriers or aux ships to feed your bomber fleet. yes, it's the dumbest fucking endgame oversight imaginable and effectively locks you out of bomber wings.

>>2099264
I thought the solution was to swap to closed loop for the drastically lower requirements?

Is there any way I can assign ships to respond to my miners getting attacked within the sector as a priority alongside patrolling on a set route?

>>2098942
I set one up in Brennan's Triumph with large miners going around pulling in Silicon and medium miners autotrading it out to any station in management range. It's been printing money like nothing else and the docks issue isn't even that egregious if you plan out enough. My setup has a terran 6-dock ring for the large miners, and three docks for the medium miner-traders - 1 terran 4-dock disk and two commonwealth 8 medium dock sections connected directly to it.

What do you anons do to get past that midgame slump where you don't really have a fleet to fight but do have some growing factories and just mindlessly reinvest until you have a wharf?

>>2091190
Nope. Timelines was a literal scam to be eligible for government money, and Hyperion is testing the waters to see if they can get away with micro transactions.

>>2100992
Hyperion is really pushing it. They say the interior took months of work but the interior is also really uninspired. At least timelines came with a decent amount of ships.

>>2099345
lowered complexity, but not in quantity.
you can check the internal encyclopedia for their build costs. torpedoes are especially bad in the cost department. npc ships aren’t judicious enough with them, so even regular missiles can empty out your carrier of energy cells in a small battle.
i’ve even resorted to downgrading all the way to unguided missiles but in the end the hassle wasn’t worth it. “trade for commander” order doesn’t work for moving fleets so even if you’re willing to accept the logistical footprint you either have to drag your slow ass carrier back to base for replenishment or manually fiddle with traders and transfer wares by hand.

>>2099719
i think i'm gonna need more docks
also i intensely hate how hauling miners sit around doing nothing half the time because trading for commander uses the default trader order and it fucking sucks ass

>>2099719
i see this logistical configuration posted all the time everywhere but this has NEVER worked for me
>set up a mining outpost in The Void (or any other resource-rich zone)
>assign a bunch of traders and set their travel restriction to the corridor leading to my factories
>what the fuck? half the traders sit around doing nothing
>cut the mining outpost's price to the minimum
>factories are still starving while half the assigned traders are jerking off in the void
>get pissed off and assign 256 traders to the fucking station, surely SOME of them will start working
>trader idle rate is maintained at roughly 40-50% regardless of raw numbers
>factories are barely sputtering along and constantly starved of resources
literally what the fuck is the point of having these automated orders gated behind star ratings if they don't fucking work?

>>2104952
yeah. I have logistics stations set up that theoretically allow me to move material to any point in the network.... but out of 30+ ships assigned to a station only 3 of them reliably move at a time. The idea was I wouldn't be gated by manager lvl if I just set up a few relay stations. Didn't really work because traders just float there. Maybe they'd work if they were all 5 star crews, but vanilla crew lvling is fucked even with gate defense carrier fleets. And what the fuck is the point of the auto explore order that's been utterly useless since launch. You draw hexes manually until your hands start hurting and you cave and install a mod. I don't get how they expected to sell new sector dlc when exploring is such a pain in the ass in vanilla.

>>2095426
>>2095556
When will we get a mod that ports all the ships, including fighters? I loved the Falcon and the Harrier from Rebirth and their weird round designs.

I've waited for years for Ego to merge Rebirth with X4, and nothing has happened so far.

>>2091058
of course its fucking lame, no possible threat to the player, as expected. we dont wanna upset the players that sit around on seta and do nothing, thats not hecking comfy!

>>2105672
i don't want Egosoft in charge of implementing any sort of threat mechanism to the player because they're going to fuck up the cadence as usual and make it either completely unplayable without mods or completely ignorable.
>muh SETA
is that really the player's fault when it takes real life hours to set up a base in an unmodded game?

>>2100992
it also took them like 6 years to fix the game to a playable state.
egosoft as a company is garbage

>>2094108
IIRC, the Rebirth network has an inactive gate in Fields of Opportunity, which seems like it used to be connected to Grand Exchange. We could reconnect both universes together. And maybe find the other ancient gate in Sol and connect Toride to it.

I'd love to face Plutarch as a proper rival faction.

>automatic sell amount sometimes creates no sell orders
>have to manually set it to sell all but 1 before any freighters start showing up
i fucking hate that this trash is the only game of this type in the business

X5 will fix everything when it releases in 2030.

interesting. terran main batteries won’t fire in OOS combat. if you have terran capital ships with 4+ star pilots but without 8km+ range turrets, they will stay at standoff range but won’t do any damage to enemies. they’re effectively useless in mapmode combat until you get infra set up to mount paranid plasma turrets on them.
i don’t know if other factions’ main batteries are the same way.

>>2108139
It'd probably be like the Terran Conflict to X4's Reunion. All stuff from the original game and more.

>>2108139
I'm not buying anymore X games, each one gets progressively worse it feels. AI is STILL dogshit after having twenty five years to figure it out.

>>2108312
>AI is STILL dogshit after having twenty five years to figure it out.
It's worse than that. AI ranges from way too simplified on the faction logic to pointlessly overcomplex with destroyers so they spend so long positioning they can never actually fire.

>>2108538
i think their UI reflects their mindset. needlessly complex knobs that you can turn for every minutiae but ultimately most of them conflict with each other and never quite do what you expect them to do.
global blacklist is the biggest offender. how hard is it to just have a behavior dropdown with checkboxes for
>allow trade with other factions
>allow transporting goods by other factions' freighters
that alone would do away with 90% of the UI clutter.

>>2108312
Unfortunately X is the only game in this genre (I guess you could argue Kenshi is kind of X-adjacent, but has a lot of differences too), so we're cucked by egosoft until someone puts a competitor forward

>>2109231
There is bannerlord. But no space ships.

>try to board erlking
>forgot about the retarded boarding mechanics
>now i have to destroy the turrets to proceed
>can't tell where the fuck the turrets are located
yeah that's enough of this game for today

>Investigate: Xenon and Kh'aak incidents
can someone tell me wtf i'm supposed to do to "investigate" these random spawns? the game sure as hell ain't fucking telling me anything as usual.

>>2108312
they've abandoned AI and lategame in favor of casual gamer grabbers like "REALISTIC" flight model. i wish they'd focus on fixing the literally broken (i.e. not "it's bad" but unironically does not function anymore) stuff and the godawful performance issue.

>>2110872
Isn't this the warning for that god awful endgame crisis thing they implemented alongside Timelines?
tl;dr once you get rich enough the game spawns a billion xenon and khaak ships on top of all your shit, or you can pay boso 500 million to not deal with it

>>2110912
It seems to work for them. Every sale has a wave of new players.

>>2111475
wave of new players that leave immediately after trying to interact with the orders system. if they want a universe-gawking NPC world immersion game they should just go make one. hell, i’d play it if such game existed. but what they have at their hands now is a bait and switch trash that conflates complexity for depth.

>>2099264
I thought I'd solve this by bringing one of those AUX ships but holy shit its so bad. It legitimately took 20 minutes for it to dock and transfer resources to the carrier. Absolutely insane.

>>2114013
they sidestepped the aux ship docking issue by not fixing it at all and allowing freighters to trade for fleets instead (which also doesn’t work)

I just bought this game and OH MY GOD its perfect

>>2114975
Based

>>2114013
endgame carrier resupply is the reason why i think the devs NEVER played endgame and just eyefucked everything.

look at Heavy Torpedo Missile Mk1 for example. closed loop cost is
>122 energy cells
>5 hull parts
each hull part takes up 12 m^3 of cargo space. so, each mk1 torp takes up 182 m^3 of raw mats. that's an insane amount of stuff.
for context, carrier with the largest hold is boron Shark, coming in at 36,000 m^3. that's room for 197 torpedoes worth of stuff. that's not even enough space to arm 10 torpedo bombers (assuming 20 torps per each).
most aux ships have far less carrying capacity than that, so you're looking at DOZENS of aux ships worth of material needed for each engagement.

They are being really quiet on the next dlc. Not even a hint of what it is.

>>2116098
Egosoft with Rebirth had anomalies. The construction ship mammoth had a hefty cargo hold for a time. It was better to build a construction ship briefly to get that XL trader. X4 is rebirth remastered for the most part. I have no clue why they bothered with resupply mechanics. I assume it was to kitbash some new ships to pad out an update. Missiles and torps have always been mediocre at best in both games. It's nice to have for stationary targets. Hopefully, Egosoft improves if they ever do an X5. Looking at spacebourne 2 with a dev or small team plus AI I would assume they should be able to improve.

>>2117091
AI isn't really too useful for game development yet, is it?

>>2117255
Correct

>>2117091
>I assume it was to kitbash some new ships to pad out an update
they should've kitbashed some XL traders and super strong fighters instead. endgame is all about doing the most with the least amount of ships to avoid the performance bottleneck and not having XL/XXL traders seems like a huge gap in the roster.

i have mixed feelings overall about the ship roster in the game. it seems like they're trying to mimic the modern surface combat doctrine with the carriers being the main focus and all principal combatants being umbrella'd under the destroyer category. but they're missing lots of critical abstractions like letting carriers replace lost fighters autonomously or carriers being smart at all about when to launch fighters without micromanaging from the player. so we have individual combatant elements that should function as a modern navy should, but there are so many UI annoyances and stupid AI behaviors around resupply that relegates carriers to fighter screening role and destroyers taking the forefront in dealing damage.

lots of missed opportunities everywhere in this game. even in the game's twilight years, Egosoft can't help themselves but make stupid decisions such as wasting all that engineering hours on a stupid flight model instead of fixing the scripted AI behavior.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKZIE-Uvvhc
>The Envoy, a new stealth-ready frigate jointly developed by the Argon Federation and Teladi Ministry of Finance
>The mysterious Cypher, an unauthorised variant often found in pirate hands
>A new mission chain in your Open Universe that leads to the discovery and unlocking of the Envoy
>A new gamestart that immediately draws you into the Envoy's storyline

>>2117255
Spacebourne2 the AI is serviceable as a VA or voice actor replacement. I think it could be helpful in that regard. Art in a certain context. I'm not up to speed on the vibe coding thing or how good or bad it handles that. I assume it's best used in a support role like doing reptitive simple coding, translations, art, voiceovers, and smaller tasks.
>>2117631
I have to agree. They really should've focused on amping up the settings of the game so you could adjust things or turn them off. It would help on the performance end. It took them years to get custom starts somewhat fleshed out. We should be able to turn off asteroids fog and other such things that add up. I'm forced to use mods and turn them on or off as my saves get longer to eek out whatever blood from the stone I can from my current rig.

>>2118626
Are they still using AI voices for their mission updates?

>>2118626
After the hyperion I'm not very enthusiastic. There are only so many player ships I can give a fuck about. I don't need yet another.
It sucks they didn't go the better route with these mini dlcs of giving factions mini facelifts like a pirate destroyer/proper faction rules. Or battleships to give races more identity.
You know there is actually a pirate guild in the game? It serves almost no purpose but it exists.

>>2119048
I'd love a pirate corvette based on the X2 Argon Centaur.

I wonder how well the Terran DLC sold, because I'd love it if their ships got a facelift. Mainly the Rapier, hate docking in a Terran dock given how unwieldly tall that thing is.

browsing the mods section is a goldmine of hidden game behaviors and stupid fucking bugs

>In X4: Foundations, the Lost Ships Replacement feature was introduced in version 7.50.
>This feature allows the fleet to request a replacement ship if a ship is lost during the execution of an order. The replacement ship will be requested automatically, and the fleet will continue to execute the order.
>However, when you enable the Lost Ships Replacement feature for a fleet, the replacement ship will come with only a captain/pilot in place.
>In reality, there are some other crew members on the ship. This extension fixes this issue and reveals these "phantom" crew members on the ship.
did they... play this patch at least ONCE before releasing it?

>>2119048
They're working on X5 so this is X4 winding down. 8.0 may well be the last major update.

>>2118728
They definitely were for their Hyperion introduction mission. It feels like they're using extremely outdated AI models for it too.

>>2119260
>X4 winding down.
I wish they priced it like that. But i have noticed the ships are taking a different design direction with movable parts.
>8.0 may well be the last major update.
They also promise an exploration update. But diplomacy isn't really that major.
I am totally pirating x5 if they keep this bullshit drip feed of dlcs, mtx, and shitty AI up.

>>2119345
I'd completely forgotten about the exploration update, fair enough

>>2119345
You're almost always better off pirating X games until the first DLC. You'll get a bundle discount typically. X3 wasn't decent until Terran Conflict. Rebirth took over a year and several updates from crapping the bed or even destroying your saves. X4 Split DLC soundtrack has bangers and was overall good. Cradle of Humanity was where X4 popped off finally since X3 TC adding the Terrans. Rebirth i stopped playing after 4-6.0 around there I think. It was a hot mess for a long time.

>>2119260
Says who

>>2120214
Not him but it's just logical. But I think x5 will just be x4++ on the exact same engine.

>>2120214
Me

>>2120244
It'll probably have a graphical facelift with newer technologies built in from the start but yeah.

>>2120244
>>2120499
With the exact same shit AI.

if i like eve will i like this?

surely i can't be the only one who keeps running into graphical performance issues even in relatively quiet sectors.
this game runs like absolute dogshit for how jagged it looks. how did they make it look less like shit in the flight model patch promo material?

>>2120647
Dunno, the game runs fine for me with the only slowdowns being general latency related when things get busy.

>>2120654
i'm on Ryzen 9 7900X3D + RX 7900 XTX. this game is guaranteed to be sub-30fps lag city for me whenever i have a Raptor in my fleet with full fighters.

>>2120655
Yeah that's just the issue of carriers in high attention.

>>2120661
it not just that. it's low fps in general even when there's no combat.
i looked around for a bit and proton version of the game runs far better than the linux native client apparently. i copied over my save and doubled my fps basically instantly.
jesus fucking christ, what the fuck is egosoft doing?

>>2120647
You need a beast of a CPU to run it well, even my 14700k gets fucked in certain areas. Also turn down/off volumetric fog.

you should try adding more verticality to your stations. it introduces some interesting problems and forces you to adapt visually distinct solutions. try it once and then never touch it again because station-crafting UI is fucking terrible and elements always snap to whatever the hell they want.

>>2121305
you're bricking your save with mega stations. mods that increase production modules x10 x5 x100 whatever while increasing cost. you can keep smaller svelte stations while keeping your save for longer. traffic hasn't been an issue since rebirth as modules need no connection. you can reduce resources on your rig and cost to build by never using connector modules. waste of money.

>>2121011
Linux isn't really recommended for gaming, even if it's supported

The based nig deleter mod (Sensible Demographics) was just fixed for the beta.

>>2125322
link?

>>2125673
Steam Workshop

Is this anything like single player EVE?
I played EVE for like a week and it was fun, just disliked the whole online and time gated shit

I'm basically hoping it's a sandbox where you can do whatever you want in it from trading to go around sending ships out on raiding plaents or space stations or something

>>2126346
It can be that, yeah. There's even an Eve factions mod with a bunch of Eve ships.

>>2126346
Basically, yeah. It has its own issues separate to those of EVE, but in a lot of ways X4 is far more of an immersive space sim than EVE

>>2126346
Yes, you could say that. But in my opinion, as someone who played both, X4 is a better experience.

>>2121305
My design quirk is that I try to put solars so they face the sun.

>>2120244
Honestly, would be nice. X3 Terran Conflict was basically that for X3 Reunion, and it basically became the best X game before X4.

>>2127670
>X3 Terran Conflict
I put an untold number of hours on my disk for this game. Probably even more on X3 Reunion.

>>2119260
Why even release a new game at this point

>>2127670
X3TC was also helped by them hiring a bunch of the dudes who made the X-tended mod for Reunion which plays a lot like a prototype of TC when you go back to it. A lot of stuff added to TC was lifted directly from that mod.

>>2127687
New engine

>>2119260
next year march, that's when the government gibs run out

You think they'll charge the same price for the envoy pack or up it a little bit because it's two ships?

is there a mod that increases the number of docks for build storages? this shit takes forever to sort through the incoming traffic with bigger build orders.

>>2131425
I think the price will stay the same, they tested the waters with the hyperion and the new ships don't have as much history/hype if they are not bleeding cash they wouldnt be that stupid and upping the dosh

Looks like the new flight model broke AI docking in transit. I just have a trail of S ships behind my carrier now.

>>2132959
classic

>>2132959
I remember the flight model update meaning you could dodge most ships just drifting around them slowly.

Will I get a decent fleet battle if I terrorize the Earthlings? I've mostly been fighting Xenons and they never really attack with a massed amount of ships. It's at most 6 ships. I can mass produce carriers and their fighters now but there isn't anything to use them on.

>>2134671
If you want decent fleet battles just bite the bullet and mod in extra ship jobs.

I wish they'd add an option to let factions conduct diplomacy amongst themselves without player interaction so you get an evolving, changing universe.

>>2134671
Try going to war with VIG, they will throw about a billion ships at you

>>2137035
They won't do that because Egosoft is convinced that everyone loves their narrative quest content featuring total dogshit writing and the worst AI voice acting that you've ever heard

>>2137140
It's really hard to understand why Egosoft thought the scrap based pirate faction needed more ships and firepower than most actual factions and no enemies.

>>2137600
The issue is they are safe and never fight anyone aside from the occasional station raid, meanwhile everyone else prunes their own ships by fighting the yaki and xenon. Just stick a xenon gate in a vig system and they'll autoprune like everyone else.

How's the diplomacy update? Do you just go to some station and decide that two factions are at war now and that's it, or do you need to put in some effort like doing small quests to alter relations?

>>2141890
>Do you just go to some station and decide that two factions are at war now and that's it, or do you need to put in some effort like doing small quests to alter relations?
You have to collect caviar for the top tier stuff. But mostly it's just click button for reward.

How are the new ships?

>>2137608
huh
i wonder if devs browse this thread (probably not since carrier missile resupply still remain utterly broken)

>>2137608
I've seen MIN attack them before but apparently their relation is neutral and not enemy, which is odd

>built a load of stations
>nearly all are shit and produce fuck all
I may start over, I'm a noob. I'd see a hole in the market, start building a station, and by the time it's built and ready the AI have already built a station for it and I can't compete.

>>2142331
You may as well just start building a ground up shipbuilding supply chain served by your own miners, because the midgame is all about making racks of money from ships and ship equipment

>>2137141
I think their recently redone ai voices are a downgrade in general. The old ones had a sort of endearing quality. The split females also don't match with the males anymore. They all used to evoke a feeling of jersey greasers. Now the females sound like klingon knockoffs.
Reen also used to sound kind of inexperienced which fit her character, but now she's just kind of bland.

>>2142331
there are always holes for Hull Parts & Claytronics market, both of which are required for building ships and stations.
any other holes you see in the market are "secondary" holes, i.e. NPC factories trying to produce hullparts/claytronics and causing shortages of ingredients for both.
station building is broken out of the box. you need these mods:
>10x/100x production mods -- 10x/100x modules cost 10x/100x as much to build, so this isn't cheating
>minimum build time mod -- reduce build time of modules to 1 minute or you're going to spend IRL weeks waiting for something to finish building
>improved advanced trade (i forgot the name) -- reduces star requirement of advanced trade to zero so you can actually build a fucking logistics network

focus on getting up your hull part factory and all of the prerequisite factories first. keep all production in one station if possible to reduce number of freighters required for hauling ingredients.
once you have a station that produces hull parts and all of its ingredients internally, you'll be earning a small income selling those to NPCs. it'll take a long time to recoup the costs so don't think of it as a magic ticket to wealth. let it generate money while you go out finishing missions.

once that's done, move on to building a separate claytronics factory that also can produce the ingredients internally.

ideally, your early game logistics network should look like this:
>mining station -- located right in the sector where all the resources are. if you're lucky and the sector also has 75%+ ish sunlight, make your mining station double as a refinery
>production station -- located 1-3 jumps away from your mining station, closer to the "central" universe than the mining station, preferably somewhere with okayish sunlight so you can produce energy in-house. refine your metals/gas here if your mining sector isn't suitable for it.
>power station (optional) -- if you see a good spot for your production station but it has garbage sunlight, then look for a sector a few jumps away (as few as possible, to save on freighter costs) that has good sunlight, something like 175% or higher. set up a station there solely for the purpose of producing energy cells.

Did anyone actually try the new ships?

>>2142630
did Diplomacy add new ships? I didn't see that in the highlights.

>>2142632
It's a paid dlc.

>>2142159
There is permeability between networks, as much as we dislike it. People from ego's forums, discord and reddit do lurk here.

>>2093578
Egosoft games need about a decade to mature after release.
X3 is still the best, you should have about 3 years before moving to X4 from it.

>>2090297
On Aldrin (or the Free State of Solara as they call themselves), they were once part of the Argon Federation, but they seceded due to economic unrest from the Boron Campaign (When the Split tried to murder all the squids and ended up getting their shit kicked in).

For that reason, the Aldrians severed themselves from the gate network in 2504, 434 years before the Terrans reconnected them.

Also, the asteroid you see in X3TC isn't Aldrin. Aldrin is an Earth-like planet which they've wisely kept away from the gate, to protect it from potential Xenon incursions.

>>2143657
X3:TC is the best. X3:R and X3:AP are mid. X4 peaked at CoH as it hasn't really changed and actually got worse with each DLC. Best way to play X3 is to have Terran Conflict installed with mods ready to install. X4 Split CoH DLC plus mods.

>>2143657
>>2143739
X2 Is the best. X3 is hot garbage. X4 is okay.

>>2143739
>X4 peaked at CoH as it hasn't really changed and actually got worse with each DLC.
I really wonder what went wrong here. COH was really good and Terran were all over the network. the next two dlcs added pirates and boron who barely interact with the world.

>>2143739
I've been playing AP recently having started it for the first time a few weeks ago, 55 hours in and it's a little bit bittersweet. Mechanically and balance-wise it's a straight upgrade from TC, but the plots are worse and Omicron Lyrae keeps eating my universe traders because it's a war sector and there's no blacklist function. I'm also pretty torn between how much I want to end the war. Losing UTs periodically is a pain, the Cutlass is my favourite dogfighting ship in the game that I don't have native access to with this start and I really want to explore the Terran sectors and abuse their economy, but it's also pretty fun having sectors full of guilt-free targets that aren't Xenon and my combat/trade ranks are high enough that I can occasionally loot expensive weapons and shields from the constant capital ship battles.
I can definitely see why "TC plots in AP" is one of the most popular mods for it.

>>2144189
I can't go back to x3 or even rebirth due to how shit the UI and commands are in comparison to x4.

>>2142614
build power station in mercury,
build supply depot on the ring core highway.
have 1 freighter ship from mercury to depot
a single M trader can easily supply 5-10 stations from there

>>2143877
>X2 Is the best. X3 is hot garbage. X4 is okay.
I can sort of agree X3 reunion was a hot mess. TC made it good.
>>2144057
yea it's frustrating. glad they added boron but they're not in the right area and require map mods to make them part of the universe. the queefanots are another one. pirates are smack in the center for whatever reason and do much of nothing.
>>2144189
agree that AP is fine. TC is what saved X3 or happened to at the time since reunion was a hot dumpster fire for a bit. what i recall in my headcanon anyways.

>>2144189
>Mechanically and balance-wise it's a straight upgrade from TC
10 hours later in AP and I spent ~170 mil on buying and outfitting a Megalodon only to find out this game's anti-capital missile spam is insane, to the point of rendering destroyers useless. I think I like TC more at this stage in the game.

The missiles were bullshit tier strong in TC too, though I believe the ai didn't usually spawn with them, or failed to use what it did spawn with. I'm pretty sure someone at ego forgot that the fragmentation option didn't actually split damage amongst submunitions when they made that one ATF anti-cap missile. A single ATF missile dealt more damage than an entire volley from a commonwealth ship, and it can fire volleys too.

>new start is a teladi health and safety inspector
Goddamnit egosoft is tempting me.

>>2143739
>X3:R
This is the X3 game I sunk the most hours into as a kid.

>>2144563
Part of me miss m7m capable of obliterating stations and capital ships on whim, but holy shit they were beyond broken.

>>2144615
This is the only dlc I didn't buy. i got the hyperion and just never used it. It has a cool dock but you pretty much never need to swap down to a smaller ship like that and the AI cannot fly it worth a damn.

The only time I would swap into a smaller ship is if they AI was flying a floating fortress filled with turrets it can't really fuck up.

>>2144837
>>2144615
I like the idea of more corvette sized ships with full interiors, not sure I'd want to pay 10ish dollars for just one (well two) more ships.

Argon did need a Corvette to fill out their roster. Would love if the Teladi got some medium combat/freighter hybrid like the BUK Prometheus.

I'd love more quests and missions, stuff to do in the game with my fleets.

This game is fucking awesome. Over 100 hours in now and some annoyances (destroyer AI, no outlines on unbuilt resource probes wtf, some mystifying trade/logistics issues) but otherwise it's everything I ever wanted from a game.

Might start a new save now that I have some idea of what I'm doing, how is the new start with v8.0/Envoy?

>>2145935
After a few thousand hours i am pretty jaded about how shallow some parts are. Especially when mods fix them so easily.

>>2145961
Do you have mods you would recommend? I don't want to change a lot, mostly looking at QoL stuff like better satellites. I also changed my cursor color to green because I kept losing the default cursor. I saw the 10x/100x module module mod mentioned here but I feel like that could fuck an early save and make it take a lot longer to start up your first couple stations.

>>2145986
There is either mules or tatertrade(I forget the name). This is needed to have traders use their entire cargo holds and actually work effectively.
But the absolute most important mod is apologize for attack which lets you tell ships you attack that you didn't mean to do it. Another great one is headhunter which adds a surprisingly in depth bounty system to make combat rewarding.

>>2145986
>I saw the 10x/100x module module mod mentioned here but I feel like that could fuck an early save and make it take a lot longer to start up your first couple stations
The module mods are fine. You can always build/grind normal until you have the cash and resource flow. Nothing stops you from rebuilding your original station(s) anyway, with completely different layouts or modules. Just keep an eye on your docking situation. Modules require no connection to work so docks at plot edges are fine if necessary. L/XL docks can be a bottleneck.

>>2145991
>>2146132
Thank you both, going to install a few tomorrow and try them out. Spent the evening collecting my timelines ships and exploring some of the extra sectors, really need to finish that up.

>>2145991
the trade mod is called DeadTater. i personally found that it works very well until it doesn't. i don't know exactly what the triggering condition is, but when i assign a large fleet to it (100+ freighters), it either fills all the needs or something like 20-50% of freighters sit idle doing nothing.

i think that anon should definitely download it, but Autotrader Skill Rebalance is also required. it removes star requirement for autotrade and automine, but the range still scales using default logic (minimum floor set to 1 range) so it's not a cheat mod. i found that advanced autotrade tends to win out against DeadTater when the problem i described above starts happening. advanced autotrade is very inefficient about freighter space usage and he'll definitely see large freighters carrying stupid loads like carrying 50m^3 of irrelevant shit to nowhere.

one thing i should say about 10x/100x mods is that they're still bottlenecked by the vanilla build storage's two-dock limit and the stupid docking logic that it entails, which doesn't seem to be moddable. if builds aren't planned carefully especially with 100x modules, you'll easily end up waiting 4-5 hours in SETA speed just on the materials to finish delivering.

>>2146152
>bottlenecked by the vanilla build storage's two-dock limit
What two dock limit?

>>2143739
This is just nostalgia talking. X4 is a much better game than X3 and it isn't close.

>>2146152
50% idle rate isn't much different than vanilla, can't be worse than the cloud of idle traders sitting around my trade stations currently.

Do I understand correctly that I assign the traders directly "unassigned" to any particular station?

>>2117255
It has its uses, but a lot of people are wary of it. If AAA doesn't collapse in the near future, their games will probably be fully made with AI.

>>2144753
AIEEEEEEE M7M-SAMA I YIELD! I YIELD!
My jumpdrive didn't activate in time

>>2146255
build storage only has a small number of docks. apparently there's a mod to change that too:
https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/1673

>>2146542
you form a mimic fleet and set the lead ship to use autotrade/deadtater.
suppose that you have 10 freighters numbered 1 through 10. you:
>shift-select freighters 2 through 10,
>right click on freighter 1 and click on "mimic commander's behavior"
>wait for fleet to form with freighter 1 as the "commander"
>give autotrade/deadtater order to freighter 1
the rest of the fleet will mimic 1's orders provided that they meet the skill reqs.

>>2146485
>This is just nostalgia talking. X4 is a much better game than X3 and it isn't close.
I would agree, but X4 took several years to reach its current state. Close to half or a full decade. If you want the true X4 experience, go ahead and disable all DLC and remove half the game starts including custom. Highway must remain on as there was no toggle. Now enjoy.

>>2146890
Excellent, thank you homie.

>>2147111
There is nothing wrong with highways.
>If you want the true X4 experience, go ahead and disable all DLC
Even then you still have wharfs and shipyards added. Along with less shitty capital ships and AI that is significantly less dumb. You also have to do zero plots. Because base game only had one that lasted 15 minutes and gave you all tiers of teleport because research requirements were added later. The entire base game was build a factory and you're done because fleets barely worked and factions crapped out a lot. It was quite amazing.

>>2147223
>There is nothing wrong with highways
they're gay af. no jump drives another gay af retcon.
>but but
no all improvements are gone for several years. your right click context menu will be vastly different. anyways i'm not gonna whine about ego more atm. figured we would be further in late 2025 already with some actual meat and potatoes.

>>2147111
>compare the launch state of a game in a series notorious for needing a few years to cook before it's good to the fully realized state of its predecessor
Yeah, no.

...Bros?

>>2148689
I should buy the dlc and play it from the start.

>>2148689
I could continue blogposting X3AP but this is an X4 thread and I don't think it would drive much discussion

Is the stealth functionality from the new ships fun or useful, or is it just a shallow gimmick? The full interior seems really nice.

>>2149486
I never got into interiors myself. I can understand wanting it, as X Rebirth mods were adding a bridge while docked. X4 I was always on the map for the bulk of my time, even when on a fresh save.

Started as a terran cadet.
Investigated some station thing.
Now I'm fucking lost in space in a scout ship. Fuck.

I remember playing X2 ages ago and liking it even though I didn't understand much of it. What's the best way to get into X4?

>>2149486
>The full interior seems really nice.
To do what though? The Astrid was fun to stand in but only because you got it after you had "won" and needed to spend a lot of time managing stuff.

>>2149486
I got the envoy. Wonderful interior, and can 'cloak' as any faction. So fun and useful ig. Im considering making it my 'main' ship.

>>2149867
Do you like the pack in general?

>>2149623
Terran start is most handholdy, if you want something sort of resembling a tutorial. After I got teleporting like this anon >>2149612 I just started completely ignoring the story and doing my own thing.

>>2149867
I've found that with teleporting instead of jump drives, I completely ignore personal ships.

There was an AMA. I don't think they are really planning x5 anymore. The ships seem to be working out for them big.

>>2151370
i hope they learned their lesson
>release a reasonably stable and functional dlc platform on day 1 and you can milk it for years with ship packs instead of wasting all that lifecycle on fixing the thing
it's fucking insane that "please release a stable dlc platform" is a step up from their usual modus operandi of retailing an alpha and slowly fixing it in production

>>2091058
>random events that 'just happen'
I yearn for the day we have a game that simulates dynamic factions, even a BIT so I can watch the hyper faction A death war against faction B while they were once friends many moons ago

>>2151849
While the diplomacy update mostly worked even if it was lackluster I'll never forgive them for the low effort slop that was their crisis implementation.

anons I wish to seek your council, what exactly is causing my GPU to cook off? it's a 2080S so it should be fully capable of rendering this game

>>2154588
Shadows and reflections are always massive resource hogs. Rule of thumb is high textures, some AA and turn down all the other useless shit for every game. Glow makes the menu's look horrible on top of using more resources.

>>2154588
>2080s
You might just need to clean or do a repasting. 2080s should handle the game maxed out.

>>2154588
I turned off SSAO. I can't tell a difference and now the game doesn't cook my GPU. Try that?

>>2154821
>>2155309
that's helped quite a bit, cheers anons
>>2155099
yeah reckon I'll have to take a look at that, a cursory glance would suggest it isn't that dusty, but it's been a while since I've given it a proper deep clean

I've really enjoyed the diplomacy expansion. Envoy/Cypher are very useful for diplo. There's something that the high prestige ships do that isn't obvious: they heavily reduce the time required for the mission, maybe by 40-50%. They have neat insides that you can use to sit while not seeing outside so there's less lag late game. Furthermkre, you can start a teladi v Argon war and the like to get the heat off HOP. What really surprised me was having PIO go hostile to ANT. Antigone Memorial got absolutely thrashed. HOP is now eating the new sectors all the way to Ore Belt. With the economy changes, some gigafactories donated to factions via build missions and the Xenon overtaking the north, there is so much fighting going on it is insane. At any moment there are 1-3 fleet fights with 5-8 destroyers and 20+ other ships involved. Very fun to watch. Hyperion is easily my favorite ship for running around and watching these fleets and the occasional Xenon stomping. Maybe at some point I'll build a sector with many gigafactories and start purging the fleets. I think you can make peace afterwards too.
PS. Yaki women have best models. RIP are good too. The PIO skirts with glasses might be best.

If you use custom budgeted, get 27 rep with Quettanauts of Fallen Families. They have really great skins you can apply to your ships. Buccaneer is better, Tempest is pretty cool but you can't unlock buccaneer for all your ships and if you form Tempest you lose out on farming purple mods.

>>2156713
Are they envoy and cypher the same ship? I wanted to assume not because they charged more for this.

>>2156727
I wish they did more with fallen families. Every dlc really deserved a fleshed out pirate faction you can interact with.

>>2156906
>Are they envoy and cypher the same ship? I wanted to assume not because they charged more for this.
They're visually very similar, share the faction disguise mechanic, share the same unique main weapon + turret combos and are both high prestige. Inside they seem to be the same. Which again is really cool but hyperion did it better imo. The way you unlock the Cypher is the best part. You cannot unlock Cypher or its unique Autocannon Turret without making one bail. Which are found randomly throughout the map disguised as some other faction, usually TEL. They're made by SCA I believe. You find them in ZYA territory or alongside BUC in PAR territory. I didn't have much problem making one bail using an Asp Raider. There are other small changes between Cypher and Envoy like the Cypher being faster, more maneuverable but just smallish stat changes.

>>2156953
I expected the higher price point to mean they were different. At least a little.

>>2157411
I suspect the Cypher is perma-cloaked. As in, it cannot enable or disable cloak mode and it is always on. The Envoy can toggle. I don't know how to check. I might be just hallucinating it. Envoy is just a Cypher with the wings out. But it is higher mass and other stat changes. I'm gonna see if Cypher is better than Envoy at envoying. I think it should be because it's faster. Supposedly the speed and prestige affect agent mission times, but nothing else. So Cypher, being faster, should also be faster.
Unrelated:
The Diplomacy section of X4 is as follows: everything consumes way too much time. Use Envoys or Cyphers as agent ships to speed it up, but some ships like Hydra Regal are supposedly also high prestige. You lose the ship when the agent dies, which is rare for me. You start by cultivating influence (negotiation) and then build intelligence network (espionage) to build up influence to a max of "very high." You then spend this influence raising relationships, stealing items/blueprints or initiating diplomatic interference. Once you initiate interference, you get a set of 2-3 options to raise, lower or status quo relations. If you do nothing, something happens. But this is where your trained agents come in: higher levels = better chance to get the outcome you want. This is also where most of my agents die. This also takes fucking forever like 3 hours and you can't do multiple on the same faction pair, some are locked by missions (ie hop and par) but you can initiate many at once (like tel pio and tel arg). So basically you can have PIO take over the world. Some factions like ALI aren't eligible for interference at all. Diplomacy takes fucking forever and everything needs space caviar.

>>2154588
The suggestions are a good start. Some mods will also improve performance. Fog removal. Asteroid movements or superfluous ones. Mass traffic turned off. Turning off ToA DLC or removing Vigor/Rakers also helps.

gay lag game
t. gay lag game noticer

>>2158628
>Turning off ToA DLC or removing Vigor/Rakers also helps.
Apparently they reduced vigors ship counts a lot in 8.0

Left game on for a week lads. It finally crashed after 7 days or so uptime. Can I get some Fs?md0sd

Are there any mods yet to tweak the diplomacy update to allow for it to happen without player interaction?

>>2158701
Just get a very expensive CPU and you'll be fine, that's what I did.

>>2162209
Null Protocal is supposedly like the dead-air diplomacy randomized diplomacy actions. I think it pops up random interference actions that you can nudge into one path or the other, or ignore. So it is automated but you can help nudge if you want.

It feels like they made it much harder to get seta components

>>2163790
They've been nerfing item drops since 6.0 because I guess they don't want people doing get rich quick grinds. But for whatever reason among every get rich quick scheme they nerfed, piracy still uses the dumb hull value ratio to determine how fast someone bails.

>>2164090
Asp Raider #1. 2x bolt/pulse/whatever weapons and 1x ion = best bailing ship there is. So maneuverable too!

whats out of zone combat like in this game?
as in when fleet combat takes place in a different area than the one you are in and it autoresolves i suppose
i quit X3 i remember cause it was so stupid there

>>2166492
Simplified 2d combat with 100% hit rates.
Certain ships and weapons are tailor made for oos combat while being dogshit in high attention.

>>2166492
>>2166574
I didn't realize until I started looking into mods that turrets only fire 30% of the time OOS. Once of the reasons Xenon always get stomped since their destroyers lack main guns.
So I found a mod that doubles it to 60%.
I'm going to rest and see if this also makes the Jian viable as a anti-fighter gunboat, as I love the idea of gunboats.

>>2166580
I noticed they have changed xenon to build destroyers far less. I kinda like it, a lot more constant raids now instead of destructive events.

>>2166492
>i quit X3 i remember cause it was so stupid there
Wish I knew what Egosoft was thinking when they designed the Xenon Q
>"Hey Bernd, we're gonna make an M7 class of ships that are between M2 and M6 in size"
>Cool, how much firepower are they going to have?
>"Not much more than an M6, just with more turrets"
>Sounds great
>"Also the Xenon Q is going to be able to wield Photon Pulse Cannons that let it one-shot all capital ships except the Terran Osaka in out-of-sector combat, and we'll make it so they roam the universe"
>MAGNIFICENT! This'll be the best game yet!

Tip: you really want to corral the Xenon into a corner of the map. The idea is to keep their supply lines all internal. So if you blow up all their stations except the ones in Tharka's Cascade through Savage Spur, they'll build all their wharfs and shipyards in those places, which produce the SEs that then fund their warmachine and long story short Xenon have taken Hatikvah 1 and I keep seeing Xenon fighters pop up all around the highway and there's a graveyard of L freighters on the HAT gate.

I just built my first wharf.
Why does it take an estimated 8 minutes to build a small fighter when a NPC wharf can do it in 1?

>>2167888
Alright I figured that out. Apparently a wharf needs a new kind of drone called builder drones.
Now I've tried to make a ship to sell. Selling the ship at a NPC wharf nets me 2.6mil. But if I first have the wharf strip it of all it's parts THEN sell the ship, it's 2.8mil. That's stupid.

>>2167817
This should happen naturally now anyway. The xenon are really on the back foot now.

>>2167817
>>2168305
I got that mod from the workshop that buffs the Xenon economy by making solar power production modules and SEs only cost 1 and build in 1 minute. It also buffs the SE by giving them super mods. It should keep their economy from shutting down.
It also makes trying to cap SE super worth it.

I just the game and most of the dlc. Are there any mandatory mods? W-What about the one that >>2089017 is using?

>>2175563
Just rawdog it at first. The issue with the mods a lot of people suggest is that they also have quirks you have to work around. Sector explorer for instance has a habit of getting your explorers killed by exploring enemy sectors.

>>2166599
Fun fact, Ego considered bringing the Q back in Rebirth as a bomber, but they never went through. All that remains is a description from the ship ai voice.

>start up a new game
>they removed the first mission from the hatikva storyline
For what purpose? I loved grabbing the callisto as an early courier for the player hq. Now it feels disjointed as fuck because you just show up with reen and dal acting like they've seen you before.

>>2176717
It wasn't jank enough to fit with the rest of the game so they fucked it up a bit and gave some shiny AI voices to the npcs. Egosoft are a passionate developer and are willing to rework old content for free to bring it up to the quality of the rest of the game.

>10 negress marines on one station
t-thanks egosoft

>>2180313
This is why I use the ?Sensible Demographics mod.
I edited it though so the Yaki are 80% female.

So, not only does assuming cover as a faction allow you to board their vessels with no rep loss (it's balanced because the Envoy can only have 8 marines, so without 3+ stars you won't board shit)...
But it also allows you to teleport to the faction's stations, because technically you are over 27 rep with them. So you could theoretically halt all wharf/shipyard production for your enemies, periodically. Or just stop the Teladi from eradicating all Xenon on their own.
Any other uses for the cover mechanic, besides modding for radar stealth and cloaking mid-battle (an official mechanic as per Egosoft's forums)?

>>2181107
How much does the cloak cut down your radar signature?
Is the hull mod that also reduces it additive or multiplicative?

>>2181112
Can't find the forum post but I think it was additive, and I can't really test it because the game won't give me good RNG rolls today, sorry.

Do docked M ships no longer fire their turrets?
Is the parked Jian an obsolete tactic?

Sensible Demographics mod author here. Just pushed a few updates this week:
>Diplomats are sensible now
>Refined and stylized the sensible story NPC portraits
>Added a helmetless marine trooper armor variant
>Removed the retarded green hair

>>2183142
Are diplomats fixed, or randomly generated?
Asking because I've already called some to my HQ.

>>2183296
Random. Already spawned NPCs won't change.

>>2183304
And you can't dismiss them, right? I don't think I've sent he option.
Though so far all the ones I've been sent have been sensible except the Patriarchy sent me a female split. Guess she's an obedient curb.

>>2183142
Update your rentry so I don't have to use the workshop pls.

>>2183142
He looks like a thinman.

>>2183142
Can you please add this >>2089017 yaki female armor to every human faction if you haven't already? I remember I had to fix that manually last time.

>>2183914
No.

>>2183914
Just do what I did and change the Yaki service crew to 90% female.
I keep a ship parked at their station just to increase my harem since you can transfer crew from anywhere.

>>2183945
Why not? It's already been there, they just removed it because of censorship.

>>2183956
Because it's my mod and I think coomers deserve the rope. Do it yourself if you so desperately need to be aroused while playing an autistic space economy simulator.

>>2183964
Ok, so you are an underage shartycuck, I see. Very ironic considering the kind of mod you make.
And again it was added there by the devs, whether you like it or not.

>>2183967
I made a mod that removes most of the female NPCs from the game and you think it's ironic that I don't care to invest my time in restoring coomer outfits for the remaining females so you can jerk off while playing a game? Ok retard.

>>2183967
y even argue with the guy anyways? the mod is easily edited to tailor to your needs. the xml is ez enuff for a child to edit and understand.

>>2183998
Because I hate newfags and zoomers who never even played original games. Might as well call that mod "SJW censorship demographics" at this point.

>>2185140
>even played original games.
Those games were close to unplayable. Even rebirth is a jank fest compared to x4.

>>2185140
You're throwing a tantrum because he won't mod the game to suit your particular tastes. That's really pathetic behavior, anon.

>>2185140
>Might as well call that mod "SJW censorship demographics" at this point.
Lust isn't right wing, anon. It's actually very Jewish.

>>2185140
how is it censorship if he didn't actually remove the outfits? they're still on yaki females no?

>>2185147
The fuck are you talking about, zoomer? X2 is still the best game in the series.

>>2185218
Read the fucking thread, I said I modded it myself, holy shit.

>>2185259
No point arguing with sjw retard who supports censorship. Go on, delete picrelated outfit option too, you virtue signaling underage moralfag.

>>2185324
That armor variant was on all females, but devs pussied out due to sjw pressure and removed it from everyone except yaki (because cyborgs are corporate safe horny and it's okay). If you support this, you are a literal reddit cancer. The game already has a severe lack of outfit variants, and you remove the little that's left. I merely fucking suggested restoring them back for everyone's convenience, but the moralfag started throwing tantrum.

>>2185689
>Read the fucking thread, I said I modded it myself, holy shit.
Then why do you throwing a bitch fit about him adding it to his mod? Really strange behavior.

>>2185689
>Read the fucking thread, I said I modded it myself, holy shit.
Then why are you throwing a bitch fit over him not adding it to his mod? Really strange behavior, almost - dare I say - SJW-like.

>>2185689
>X2 is still the best game in the series.
so why aren't you playing X2?

>>2183967
get a grip, I go into the mod after every update to remove all the niggers he added to the yaki so I'm sure you're capable of doing to same to play dressup

New player here, have a base in heretics end with a graphene station in the next system over and hull parts and refineries in heretics end. What should I do if hativka's choice and family Zhin get completely controlled by xenon? What remains of the Zyarth is a hollow shell and argon doesn't seem particularly interested in destroying the base in hativkah, so I'm currently stuck blockade running valuable electronics and claytronics through xenon occupied sectors manually, with help from the rare NPC resupply ship actually making it through from argon space, but I don't think I'll be able to do enough to re-establish high tier crafting to supply the systems that are currently cut off before xenon starts invading. Only just now have managed to prevent workforce collapse by aggressively mining ice for water in paranid space and manually fighting a literal constant unending horde of M, N, B, LE, and PEs trying to destroy the mining ships, waiting for branch 9s to start showing up and demolishing what little is left of the defense stations and fleets. Should I just flee to the galactic south and use the income until the xenon destroy the bases to rebuild a different set of stations? Restart entirely?

>>2185689
If possible, could you upload this mod somewhere? A catbox is fine.

>>2185868
I removed the nigger Yaki (I only did it that way initially because I thought it was funny) like a year ago. They're predominantly Asian now.

I'm playing mostly Terran.
Are the L bolt turrets good enough for a defense station or should I use L missile instead?
If I set it to closed loop it can self-produce missiles with just solar panels right?

>>2187494
Yes

Which DLC's soundtrack is your favorite? For me it's pic related and it's not even close.

>>2187795
Okay then next question.
Should I go for dumbfire or tracking?
Dumbfire do way more damage and have twice as much range. Are they actually able to hit anything from 10-20km+ away?
I've never actually used dumbfire missiles and only ever used tracking in the timelines missions, but those were obviously all ship mounted.

>>2188240
dunno how modded your game is but bear in mind friendly fire. i've done missiles on some stations in the past they were plenty strong. i had mods that added some variants though.

>>2188741
I'm not using any weapon or ship mods. Just QoL features and a few "lite" versions of Xenon strengthening mods. (Jobs, and Economy)

>>2188197
Cradle of humanity has a great song that really brings up my space fascist patriotism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jNsenxtC54
The music went a bit backwards since then too. Mainly because it almost never gets used. Like the kingdom end music that plays in a dead end sector.

>>2190104
Rise of the Protectorate is the best single track for sure.

>>2088485 (OP)
It's been years since I last had an actual fully engaged game going. I kept poking my head in after a DLC but kept getting distracted. Last time I played fully was I think before the Boron DLC and I remember scrapping everything togheter for blueprints to make a wharf but then the AI barely bought any ships at all even after getting every single blueprint

Is modding still dead in the water beside the starwars one? I remember some trying to export the X:reborn ships but that mod kept breaking and getting abandoned for ages.

>>2190104
X4 has some crazy bangers if it wants to. Just sucks that it isnt used effectively
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhd5Fl2TTQY
This goes hard.

>>2088485 (OP)
>Fucking love Boros
>Wanna go full Boros
>Worst placement ever
it's not fair bros...

>>2190837
>it's not fair bros...
Don't you mean
>it's not fair boros...
?

>>2190829
Oh for sure. I was locked in at release then split and cradle of humanity dlcs. That was peak for me. Everything afterwards was worse than mid. Speaking of building a wharf or shipyard it's about building your own ships for selling. You setup a loop of some kind and all extra resources that aren't sold outright elsewhere for profit go into building ships to sell to NPCs. It's much more effective with the ship selling nerf reversions mod. Zyarth buys a lot ships compared to other factions fwiw.

>>2190837
I mean, they're supposed to be isolated. You could always use mods that add more connections to Boron space.

>>2190829
>Is modding still dead in the water beside the starwars one?
Huh? X4 has a very active modding scene. Do you just mean total conversions? If so SWI is the only true TC. There's a growing Star Trek ship pack as well as an Eve Online ship/faction pack.

>>2190877
It surprises me no "XTM" or "Time of the Truth" equivalent has appeared yet.

>have 50+ PE, F, and B stored at HQ
I can't decide if I should recycle them for parts or make a Xenon only fleet with them.

>>2190875
>they're supposed to be isolated.
The war economy of the game is based off groups not being isolated So having boron be totally isolated is illogical. It was a prime time to add major khaak attacks as their unique thing.

>>2195059
So just use Boron connection mods; there's a bunch. It's not a big deal

>>2195127
I want to connect with nila ti and the queen

What the fuck.
Is there really still no "apply to all" button when designing a station defense module load-out?
I have to go through each one and manually change it? Even loading a saved preset, that's too fucking much.

Do you guys ever run out of resources, like ore or methane when you get a large empire running?

>>2198260
But resources respawn. You mean getting limited by respawn rate? That's the game's way for force you into far unexplored sectors with high resource production.

>>2198260
I've only had issues shoving enough resources into stations via my miners/traders. Meaning too few ships or some sort of holdup glitch.

>>2200558
That's only a problem for station building, because there's only 1 (one) docking port for that separate building inventory. For normal trading and goods exchange you can squeeze as many docking ports as you can fit.

>>2198260
I read about it happening a lot but it seems nearly impossible to trigger in game. So I think the only people pulling it off are people with thousands of hours and huge mining fleets far beyond anything you could ever need.

>>2200671
Some sectors are quick to run out. Like I've run out of gas in blackhole sun before just mining for ai stations.

So does the "Use Station Setting" in a station's logistic overview not work?
I have the station set to a custom trade rule, but the "Use Station Setting" is always "No Restrictions".