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queeb posted:lol multiplayer is dead in the water
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Apr 18, 2023 17:43
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Haven't played the game since the split dlc, and oh boy forgot everything about how to play this game. If I were to do the boron start, can I still do the other story missions, I realized that bald advisor is missing while I'm figuring out how to start the gate network.
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Apr 18, 2023 18:06
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Despite having sunk a day or two worth of hours into my game I’m getting the odd urge to restart using what I’ve learned to do it faster and better. This is a problem(?) I have with many games lol. Maybe I’ll just finish the boron plot line and restart as the unlocked Queen Emissary start. Then again as much as I love the Boron I dunno if I wanna BE one (not that it matters at all).
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Apr 18, 2023 18:06
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Being a Boron is great because your suit makes a little whoosh noise every time you jump.
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Apr 18, 2023 18:07
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 rip the split
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Apr 18, 2023 18:09
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Despite having sunk a day or two worth of hours into my game I’m getting the odd urge to restart using what I’ve learned to do it faster and better. There is not strictly anything stopping you from just dismantling your stations and shipping the parts out elsewhere, it takes a while but is a good use for a shuyaku. You get 100% of the parts back.
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Apr 18, 2023 18:10
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queeb posted:
Split stay losing
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Apr 18, 2023 18:20
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Then again as much as I love the Boron I dunno if I wanna BE one (not that it matters at all). With the number of games that either have 3rd person cameras or at least plaster your player portrait in half the menus as a reminder, it's always a bit of a jolt when your emotionless PC shows up in a DLC-added plot cutscene in this game after not seeing yourself for the last 50 hours of playtime Less Fat Luke posted:I think much like Skyrim and other big moddable games the vast majority of users play vanilla. They almost certainly have analytics on that. I'd be more curious about the ratio of "people who've put more hours into the game" to "has mods installed"-- I don't know how many fresh vanilla players to this game of all games are going to be interested in competitive/cooperative async multiplayer on their first playthrough, and I wonder how many are willing to put up with the lack of QoL in vanilla on their subsequent ones
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Apr 18, 2023 19:49
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Silly question; say you’ve got a ship assigned to loot a battlefield and it picks up some items, the non-“wares” kind you use for crafting and such. Do they just hold onto that and I have to go collect them or is it automagically added to my inventory?
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Apr 18, 2023 20:03
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Silly question; say you’ve got a ship assigned to loot a battlefield and it picks up some items, the non-“wares” kind you use for crafting and such. Do they just hold onto that and I have to go collect them or is it automagically added to my inventory? I believe they are held in the ship, and you can tell the ship to drop them off at the PHQ which has a safe in the science lab and your office where you can collect them. There is even a filter in the property menu that lets you look for ships with inventory items on them.
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Apr 18, 2023 20:05
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I have a single xenon blockade, with a courier assigned to fly in circles and collect drops. When it gets to about 1,000 inventory items i usually just teleport over and grab them from the pilot (you have to talk to the pilot personally.)
TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 20:10
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There's also a mod that lets you set a ship to run around picking it all up from your ships for you
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Apr 18, 2023 20:23
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hmm i think one of the mods i have running is turning off the transaction log on stations, i click it and the menu closes without bringing anything up. time to figure out what it is
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Apr 18, 2023 21:28
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OwlFancier posted:I believe they are held in the ship, and you can tell the ship to drop them off at the PHQ which has a safe in the science lab and your office where you can collect them. More specifically, they're held on the pilot-- which means if they end up in a Bad Situation you can swap the pilot out from OOS and ensure the inventory doesn't vanish, or jump on their ship, talk to them directly and demand they turn out their pockets before leaving them to their fate Just be sure that if you have a ship collecting inventory near a perpetual battlefield, you either own the sector or have their default action when scanned set to "run", otherwise they'll just randomly perpetually dump most of the good stuff when a cop scans them and demands they drop their illegal cargo
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Apr 18, 2023 21:35
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I remember being able to search the map for stations somehow, like I would enter "claytronics" and zoom out a bit and only the stations having "claytronics" in their name would be visible. I'd have to pick just the right zoom level, since they wouldn't show when zoomed all the way out. I can't seem to figure out how to do that now, was something changed? I also seem to remember being able to type in parts of a ship ID and it would work the same way, as long as it was currently visible on the map, but I might just have used alerts there. I used this to hunt down stations with the production module I wanted to steal. Edit: Nevermind, it's in the trade filter, it's just that you cant spell out the full ware name since it then shows the trade info for the ware itself instead. So "claytronic" works but not "claytronics". Ship IDs work there too. sloppy portmanteau fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 21:40
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I've put a lot of thought into the game design and mechanics of X4 the last few weeks. I've come to the conclusion that the biggest sin of the game is probably travel drive. Specifically, travel drive, the geography of the universe, and how they interact. XL class wall of text detected in sector Goonforums. Feel free to skip this if you just wanna chat about the game. TLDR: Travel drive drastically limits the ability of ships to interact with eachother. Because ships are spending most of their time boosting at very high velocities, they effectively only end up interactable at gates and stations. /TLDR You can really see the problems this causes when the game tries to do things like escort quests: sure, this mining ship is being attacked by Khaak, but the miner could just travel drive away and ignore them and it wouldn't be an issue. In fact you can often complete the quest that way. Similarly, the only reason pirates are a threat to many ships is that they don't just ignore the pirate and keep moving. The pirate interaction causes the ship to stop and do a signal response, but turning and boosting a random direction is not very effective when they could just have left the sector before the pirate even gets mad. Pirate (and for that matter Police) radio calls doing this is a necessary bandaid to make these interactions possible in a game with travel drive, but by the nature of requiring it reveal the base-level mechanical flaws in the game. Additionally, in practice, universal travel drives make the role of carriers strictly limited. Primarily, carriers biggest use is organizational rather than functional. Sure, they function as repair pads, but so do Auxiliaries and equipment docks are never that far away. And the primary protection of ships is their shields anyway. S-class pads on ships other than carriers are basically pointless, as fighters do not need carrying. To the extent they do get used, it's primarily so that the larger vessel protects the fighters from damage (which is a bit backwards in a lot of ways lol.) Interaction with ships in travel drives can also be pretty difficult for the player specifically. Scanning or planting bombs on a ship at travel velocities is fraught with difficulties and jank even if you manage to reach the ship. Attacking is less difficult, but often still ends up with the player de-locking and having to boost or travel themselves to catch back up with the target. Even interacting with other ships at gates is less significant than it used to be at game launch. The change where capital ships now 'jump relay' through gates rather than fly through was necessary to deal with the very long travel times capitals were suffering from, but it also meant you no longer had that time of interaction with ships going through the gates. They fly up, and often just immediately jump out. And on the other side they are almost immediately igniting their travel drives. Your window of opportunity is very slim. The great ring highway is the logical conclusion of this problematic method of interaction. At launch, the ring highway dominated the map. And if you want to get from Argon Space to Grand Exchange I, autopilot navs you through the entirety of HOP space along the highway, even if you are blood enemies. And why not? HOP can't do anything about it. This hostile territory is effectively flyover country. Only when a ship leaves the highway can other ships interact with it. HISTORY OF X-SERIES INSECTOR MOVEMENT When thinking about this it is useful to look at how the X series has evolved. In the X2/X3 era, nothing resembling travel drive existed. Ships had to travel at their normal drive velocity, so they all interacted on a direct level - trying to run a freighter through a pirate sector was always fraught with danger. The closest thing to insector fast travel was SETA - time acceleration - which made *all* ships travel faster. At high SETA levels you could sometimes skip encounters because of the janky limits of trying to run a game simulation at 10x speed (causing projectiles to pass through you or never get fired), but that was about it. This was a primary reason that the first M6 class ships - the predecessors to X4's Frigates - were extremely popular. There was a lot of utility to having a fast fighter at hand when you needed one. The X2/X3 era came to an end with Albion Prelude, which experimented with an extremely large sector and high travel speeds. This was clearly in line with their thinking for the future of the X series. X Rebirth featured extremely large Sectors that had within them a number of separate 'Zones'. Zones were small enough to easily cover with conventional drives, and usually featured 1-3 stations and/or a feature such as a resource field or jumpgate. Stations within zones were connected by the Mass Traffic system, and could even share resources without the need for ships. Zones were very far apart conventionally, and to move between them in a timely fashion required either the use of highways (for smaller ships) or travel drives (for Capital ships). This worked pretty well, except that you needed highways basically everywhere and the playerbase was, well, not sold on highways. At times, this also meant kludging in highways just to ensure M ships could move around - it was often pretty weird how abandoned or unexplored areas still had highways, for, uh, reasons. Still, the basic mechanic of a capital ship Travel Driving into a sector and then interacting with it on a conventional drive level worked very well. In many ways, this mirrored how old space combat games worked, where ships would jump into the map but didn't have very good mobility outside that. Additionally, highways as implemented in X:R could rarely be used to skip hostile areas, but you could still juke enemies with them. X:R also saw the first introduction of the Booster mechanic, with the same somewhat dubious shield-consuming battery as in XR. The booster was fast enough and lasted long enough that you could use it as an impromptu travel drive, exploring empty space. That was pretty much player-only though. Capital ships had boosters but it was just as suicidal for them to use them as it is in X4. X Rebirth concluded with the Home of Light DLC, featuring a huge sector that was effectively zoneless and served as a dangerous and unmapped exploration area. It also featured a separate sector with a ring highway which frankly was never very interesting. (but man someone loved the ring highway.) This brings us to X4. The Zone mechanic was abandoned, and the game returned to undivided Sectors. Travel Drives proliferated from capital ships to all ships, which now all use travel drive for all forms of point-to-point travel. My take here is that Travel Drive, originally conceived for Zones, is not well suited for Sectors. It makes it difficult for ships to interact with one another, and by virtue of being the most important means of travel the stat is overridingly important. It doesn't help you to be fast in normal drive if the other guys can just catch up in travel drive because theirs is better. THEN WHITHER TRAVEL DRIVE? I don't think Travel Drive is bad to have. I think it just needs to live in a context that makes it work for the game rather than work against the game. My magic wand fix is a hybrid of the X4 and X Rebirth geographies: Sectors are again divided into Zones. However, most M class ships retain travel drives, as do a few S class ships (primarily scouts.) M class travel drives are very slow compared to L class - at least without modifications. Thus, while highways are not necessary like X Rebirth, they are still beneficial. Travel drives may be low-functional within zones themselves - you don't want to stop the player from engaging it really, but it could be 'slow' - unable to function well as escape or pursuit very effectively - until you get outside the zone where your velocity is allowed to really build up. Capital ships still spend their time in between zones boosting, but theres never any expectation you'll interact with them in that space. They can be as fast as they want there, but they'll spend a bit more time in the areas where they are intended to interact - zones that actually feature points of interest. And, ideally, they would have a bit rougher time just 'skipping' areas. With travel drives being balanced purely for long range interzone travel, boosters can be balanced around more typical space combat sim flight speeds within zones and the shield drain effect can be dropped in favor of a heat meter or Elite-style boosting. Ideally, ships fall naturally into niches, allowing them to fall into cost bands reflecting their utility: S-class ships are only suitable for usage within zones, or in highly built up areas with good highway access. They are however very cost efficient at that purpose compared to larger strategically flexible vessels. The currently lacking Scouts gain strategic flexibility and exploration utility with powerful travel drives. Specialized fighters like pirate ships may also use travel drives in order to conduct raids from deep space, but slowly and not very efficiently. The role of Carriers becomes much more clear in this context, since the efficient S-class fighters have difficulty moving between zones by themselves. Even the advantages pocket carriers (ie Frigates or Behemoth) hold become much more clear, even if they cant follow up on the repairs. M-class ships become the kings of average, able to gain the advantages of built up areas with highways but still able to function in areas with poor infrastructure. In my imagination, M-class ships generally have very poor travel drives compared to scouts or capital ships. They pay a cost premium over similar S-class vessels for this flexibility. Player-controlled M-Class will be able to modified for much faster travel drive of course, or as is typically the case with Egosoft they can make available a few OP player chariots for this purpose. Fighter carrying frigates role becomes more clear by virtue of being able to move fighters between zones, albeit inefficiently. Capital-class ships change little. Once they enter a zone they won't be engaging travel drive except to leave the zone. I do envision some more advanced uses for carrying S-class ships. For example, perhaps L/XL class mining ships function more as mobile carriers than direct miners themselves - they travel to a remote ore belt, then launch a number of S-class mining ships that do the actual job of mining. This naturally opens up opportunities for combat and for missions, both for and against such a 'mining carrier'. And if you wanted to do some mining yourself as an activity, you could drill out the ideal nodes while other ships run the cargo back to the m Zone-based geography also offers some potential mechanical advantages. For example, you wouldn't have to measure how close you are to the nearest station to determine if you were in police detection range when pirating. You could just check if you were in a policed zone. Station plot rental prices could be zone-based rather than the really arbitrary and easily gamed system used currently. There's also a lot of flexibility in the structure - zones do not have to be identically sized, much like sectors are not identically sized in X4. Some particularly 'urban' sectors could be one large zone, albeit to work it would have to still be a small sector by X4 standards. With mining areas a bit better defined, it might be easier to also define and control how much ore output/hour a given mining zone is worth, attempting to make expansion for industrial purposes beneficial rather than aesthetic. Imagine the rich ore belts in populated space are in specific zones, and those zones have a mining license requirement attached - you can mine there and many do, but the licensed ore forfeits 30% of its sale profits to the licensing organization. You could of course mine without a license, with the attendant dangers of getting caught. Or you could explore and find distant unmonitored ore belts, perhaps less rich, perhaps with some easily-pirated wildcat miners - and pirates looking for same. Distant unknown zones would be home to exploration content, pirate bases, and so on and so forth. In the case of specific example brought up earlier, like the escort mission: since travel drive would function best between zones - being greatly slowed down by dust or w/e within zones themselves - even with theoretically ideal piloting the mining ship pilot would have difficulty escaping the zone without taking fire, making the need for the players help much more evident. There's also potential for a whole range of zone-wide effects. Expensive satellites that specifically scan the entire zone, so you only ever need one. Travel drive blockers, pirate comms jammers, or annoying weird Khaak/Xenon technologies screwing up the zone that can function as fodder for missions or war objectives. Zones that explicitly have short visual and/or scanner ranges. Stuff like that, much more understandably seperated into zones than into the unfortunately often not that helpful x4 map. TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 22:05
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Sir nukes mod api thingie has people saying that it's not working right in 6.0 I've no mods running that rely on it currently, but does anyone else have an issues? I know a lot of mods rely on it.
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Apr 19, 2023 00:42
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no issues so far in my game, a restart fixed the transaction log not showing on my stations edit:  my asteroid belt now  silicon carbide time aaaand microlattice station is starting to kick into gear  and so is the protein processing plant  once the carbide goes into gear ill use that to fund the blueprint for the computronic substrates and bam, we got a stew going on queeb fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 01:10
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You guys are all so much further into this than I am..I'm a little jealous.
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Apr 19, 2023 01:33
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I've had this save Cradle of Humanity lol
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Apr 19, 2023 01:37
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OwlFancier posted:
Ah yeah, my salvage megacomplex is pretty similar. I've kept expanding it though, and now it essentially builds the rest of my stations, after it finished building itself! (Right now it has an entire wall of solar panels, seeing as it needs so much juice  )Doesn't make any money like yours though, most of the time. But it's saving me a lot of time and money, since I know there's always gonna be a heap of claytronics and hull parts available for me 24/7. (Even if the latter is made from recycled cans and patio chairs!) But yeah, I'll have to take a screenshot soon, as it's gotta be my biggest station in X4. Possibly rivals my drug'n'booze megacomplex in X3TC, too. (Just working on an IZWF side-project atm. After that though, I reckon it's X4KE time!)
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Apr 19, 2023 01:44
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queeb posted:edit: What kind of orders do you use to ship intermediaries between the resource stations and the factories? "Trade for Commander" assignments?
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Apr 19, 2023 01:50
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Galaga Galaxian posted:What kind of orders do you use to ship intermediaries between the resource stations and the factories? "Trade for Commander" assignments? yeah i have a couple M miners on each factory set as trade for commander, they'll go out and nab resources from the mining hubs when needed
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Apr 19, 2023 01:52
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queeb posted:yeah i have a couple M miners on each factory set as trade for commander, they'll go out and nab resources from the mining hubs when needed Yeah, this is the way to go. Additionally, if you happen to want protection for the miners or traders, from memory I think it's easiest to tell the escort to defend the commander (miner/trader), then tell the miner to trade/mine for the commander (station). That way there'll be a little 'nested' fleet for the miner, under the station's hierarchy.
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Apr 19, 2023 02:15
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While your points are generally valid in identifying where there are problems, I don't see the travel drives as the real source of the issue. The hyperlanes are absolutely a problem and shouldn't exist. I get their purpose, I get why people would like them for their own usage. But their effect as an invincible middle finger just does not fit or function at all. Especially because they can really screw up the AI patrols who see "enemy in system!" and waste time and break formation and maybe even open up a hole in defenses because AI is bad. But as for yeehaw drives breaking interaction? I see that as more down to AI issues dealing with the larger scale systems and being aware of things within that system and how they approach identified threats. Compare the relative speeds (Normal for X3 and Travel for X4) between ship classes in X3 and X4 and they're not really all that different in ratios (Besides that large trading ships were faster than smaller ones in X3). The time it takes to get across sectors was significantly longer, but relative size and spacing really isn't that wildly different between the games. The comparative intercept location isn't all that different if you (and I stress YOU, not the AI) were in the middle of a sector chasing something that came through a gate in either game. And if the script is flipped, it feels just as dangerous flying through a hostile sector in either game, IF something is likely on your travel path. The difference I see is how the AI reacts if you're not buzzing right near them. If an interceptor saw your little trading ship on radar in X3, they burn right at you, and can adjust when you take evasive measures making it unlikely to get away. X4, they will burn at full impulse towards you usually like in 3, but their usage of travel drive to close the gap effectively is sorely lacking. If they were to kick that on and actually try and close in immediately, you're in danger, but it often takes them so long to enable it that it's too late. Even on the occasions they do react properly and kick up the speed asap, they can't adjust their angle well without shutting it down and kicking it back on, so if you get unpredictable, they just break down. But you don't really even have to do much of that since they come out of speed to start shooting, so it's just a matter of getting them behind you and then laughing as they turn their drive on and off and take shots that you're out of range of shortly as soon as they fire. I definitely strongly prefer not having to tell the game to run 10x faster every time I just want to go to the other side of the room, so I see travel drive as a good thing, but they need to adjust the AI to handle it more intelligently. It should mean sector travel is more dangerous, not less. Put the main patrol forces around the gates, or between the travel lanes, and then the central sector is patrolled by interception force. If something breaks through, the interception force can run it down, NOT DISENGAGE the travel drive unless it knocks it's target out of warp, and just keep the target slow until the main force arrives. Most ships in travel drive are not faster than s class weapons, but because they fire so far away and slow down to do so rather then getting up your rear end and firing where it'll actually hit before running out of distance, it's just not a worry unless you're in a huge ship that shouldn't make it through a gatecamp anyway.
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Apr 19, 2023 02:23
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I don't think the hyperlanes themselves are an issue - Freelancer had similar. The difference is Freelancer had regular nodes that enemies could shoot out to intercept you, THEN try to pirate you at, in the middle of nowhere, instead of just calling you up and asking you for spacebux while you hit shift+f1.
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Apr 19, 2023 02:26
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RBA Starblade posted:I don't think the hyperlanes themselves are an issue - Freelancer had similar. The difference is Freelancer had regular nodes that enemies could shoot out to intercept you, THEN try to pirate you at, in the middle of nowhere, instead of just calling you up and asking you for spacebux while you hit shift+f1. Yeah, that's true. It would be nice if AI pirates (or you) could disable those highway nodes (which they have ingame, for the big ring! Those things with ads around them, and the like) to drop suckers out of travel mode, ready to rob! It might even be a good use for EMP bombs Since yeah, it would definitely make highway travel a little more interesting/risky rather than being 100% safe all the time, even if you can still try and keep away long enough to blast away with your travel drive, to get to the next node. Freelancer really hit the nail on the head, with that
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Apr 19, 2023 02:32
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Major Isoor posted:Yeah, that's true. It would be nice if AI pirates (or you) could disable those highway nodes (which they have ingame, for the big ring! Those things with ads around them, and the like) to drop suckers out of travel mode, ready to rob! It might even be a good use for EMP bombs Freelancer ALSO had emp missiles to turn the travel drive off! Really, more games should just be like Freelancer. It really got it in one in a lot of ways.
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Apr 19, 2023 02:39
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RBA Starblade posted:Freelancer ALSO had emp missiles to turn the travel drive off! I know, right! It got so much right, for a game of its day. It seems crazy that nobody ripped it off in a slightly more modernized package. Such an impressive game - I honestly wish it was given a remaster and put up for sale on Steam, or something. That being said, it's real hard to figure out whether I like Freelancer's or X's gameplay features better, overall. X has the endgame of having a huge industry and fleet, which very much appeals to me - I love going from being a mercenary courier to running the biggest private military in the galaxy. So I suppose the sheer playtime in X3+X4 wins out over Freelancer by a mile, but drat I wish they'd steal some of Freelancer's ideas to make X even better. They could just copy a whole lot exactly, and I don't think anyone would mind! 
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Apr 19, 2023 02:45
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X4 does have EMP missiles that pull things out of travel drive! (and Interceptors, now, which are like weak swarm missiles and go like 55 km/s (no typo)) But they don't always hit, literally no NPCs use them, and they didn't have an encyclopedia description until patch 6.00. Highway ambushes by pirates would be grand. I remember thinking exactly that in XR. I dunno in X4 because there's really no highways where it would make sense other than the one in Nopileos Fortune II, which is a utterly pointless highway anyway. You would want highways through no mans lands for it to make sense. Big neutral sectors and such. unfortunately even if the map had those, they'd be colonized in relatively short order most likely. You'd have to carefully balance how faction expansion worked and was limited if you wanted that to make sense. Though if you used a zone approach it wouldn't be hard for those to exist, they could even occur outside the framework of zone boundaries so there'd always be a piratical no mans land built into the geography in that sense.... Uhh more detailed reply later @slickdrac.
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Apr 19, 2023 02:52
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sold some bullshit and robbed all my stations of their operating budget but its started construction! didnt quite have enough but it'll get the first couple modules done and then from there its gravy train time. I'll probably try one of those huge scrap stations next
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Apr 19, 2023 03:00
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Is there a good way to identify holes or bottlenecks in the production of local stations? Right now I'm kinda just checking the stations in a handful of sectors seeing if they're mostly at high demand for various things.
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Apr 19, 2023 05:06
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I'm sure there's a proper way to do it but my quick and dirty is to see how many destroyers I can order at a shipyard before I get put on the waitlist, and what materials it says I have to wait for
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Apr 19, 2023 06:08
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I made friendly with the Split faction directly north of my Boron-start HQ but my Boron Queen couldn't get good relations with them so my HQ constantly has Split and Boron battling each other, talking poo poo all the time... and it's adorable. I love it. It's like little kids trying to make fun of each other. "You think I'll take that swimming horizontally?" "Split want your stuff!" Now that I've got a hull parts factory running, I gotta say: Using the EMPs to get Boron-specific buildings is really hosed if you don't have the bluetooth spacesuit mod that increases your sensor range. There are buildings that spawn the data leaks perfectly flush against the curved surface... but your personal collider is 10 meters further back than that so you can't actually get into range. RBA Starblade posted:Freelancer ALSO had emp missiles to turn the travel drive off! Yeah I was really hoping Everspace 2 would be the Freelancer 2 we all wanted and it's not. It's still decent but it's not Freelancer 2. DaveKap fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 07:52
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Price is directly a function of stock levels, so if you notice stations are paying max price for wares, that means they are undersupplied. You can see stock levels if you scan stations (flying around the structure in scanner mode), but you often don't need to if you can see their trade offers.
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Apr 19, 2023 07:55
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I agree with the criticism that both travel drives and highways cause interaction problems, but my solution would just be that you should be able to have a station module (and ship ability) which can selectively pull ships out of the highway and the travel drive, basically an interdiction system. Doing it to ships randomly should be considered a hostile action unless you have police authority, much like scanning used to be in X3 (doesn't seem to be as much the case in X4 for some reason?) and for stations you could have it so each module added allows the station to do it at longer range. And you should be able to set per-station which factions or ship types it is done to automatically, like you can with police authority controls in your sectors now. I think that would basically solve all the problems with the system, as traversing a hostile sector with a traffic control station would have to be done at your normal ship speed or using your booster engine, either you give the station a wide berth or you risk flying past it. Maybe add some mods which shorten the range at which you can be interdicted or give you a countdown warning before it takes effect once you're inside the area, so you can spec your ship for blockade running if you want to. Maybe also make the interdiction area have two layers, the outer one which warns the player they are approaching the inner one, which actually does the interdiction effect. I think the highways and the travel drive are both very good for removing the reliance on SETA, the game flows much better in many respects because of them, but it does cause issues with hostile factions not really interacting with each other properly, and I think just allowing ships to force each other out of those movement modes would solve it. For ships, you could make it based on size class, so large ships can interdict smaller ships, or if you spend a weapon slot on an interdiction module, you can do it to one size class up for each one you install, so you could make specific interdictor ships (which then, of course, the player could choose to target if they are trying to get away) if you wanted to but random individual pirates can't pull you out of travel mode. I would probably replace the disabling effect of weapons fire with this system too, so if you knock out all the enemy interdiction capability in an ambush you can burn away at full speed. For larger ships you could simply fly away from them, and it also potentially gives a use for things like carriers, which snare targets for their fighters and render their fighters immune to interdiction by smaller ships when moving strategically. I think using size classes would be a quite tidy way to do it, fighters can't normally do much to each other but a fighter group with a frigate can snare other fighters, destroyers can shut down frigate groups, carriers can shut down destroyers and would be largely immune to interdiction effects from other ships, being the largest size, except possibly stations with a lot of modules assigned to the task. You could do one module per size category for stations. I think that would give a lot of reasons to compose patrols carefully and make a number of combat ship size categories more significant than they currently are. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 08:26
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OwlFancier posted:I would probably replace the disabling effect of weapons fire with this system too, so if you knock out all the enemy interdiction capability in an ambush you can burn away at full speed. That would be great.
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Apr 19, 2023 09:00
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Couple of Qs for the thread: Are the previous entries in the series worth playing at some point or are they just basically worse versions of X4? Is there any sort of time limit in X4 in the sense that if left long enough without your input, it will reach some sort of conclusion? Just thinking along the lines of like the Xenon will eventually destroy everything and that save file is toast?
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Apr 19, 2023 09:02
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Maybe ships should use those 50 km/s missiles that temporarily disable the travel drive more often.
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Apr 19, 2023 09:14
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Xik posted:Couple of Qs for the thread: X3 is an interesting game, but its simulation quality is strictly worse than X4, ships and stations are less detailed both visually and mechanically, there are no submodules or anything on ships, just one big brick with a HP bar. The economy is also not properly simulated, wares appear and disappear out of nowhere and there is no dynamic control of sectors, they're fixed to who owns them and ships respawn at faction home sectors. The only thing I would say can be better, is the combat. Which is more just... different. X3 has a quite different balance where things are much deadlier and fighting larger ships as smaller ships is basically suicidal. Destroyers can and will delete fighters instantly that get anywhere in their weapons range. The fighter vs fighter combat can be better, more high stakes and tense, but I would say on the whole X4 is more approachable and in some ways more fun, you can fight a big ship in a smaller ship in X4 if you are methodical about it, you can't do that in X3. Also if you think X4 has issues with its interface them oh my god you have not seen X3, the station building system is virtually unusable. There's a reason I was gushing about the X4 station designer when the game was in prerelease. - X4s universe is pretty random, how it goes is basiclally impossible to predict because it's based on a whole bunch of factors including player activity. I would say the faster you get your empire up and running, the sooner you are pumping out wares and helping the economy of other factions, the more ships they will field and the better they will do against the xenon. The split up north usually end up collapsing fairly quickly, but the other factions often do quite well at holding off the xenon and they have a lot of territory to fall back into, so while you may see disruption in sectors like hatikvah's choice, you probably won't see wholesale collapse outside of the northern sectors. In theory if you let it run for ingame weeks you might see some pretty big changes as factions conquer each other, but I would say you will probably lose interest in the save before that happens.
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Apr 19, 2023 09:18
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