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Yeah. The AI is really the only sore thumb in the game now as far as I'm concerned, but I understand how they'd be leery of big changes in a years-old game with lots of DLC and mods. I'd buy an X5 with only AI improvements, though. Maybe it'd be possible to mitigate the pileups by having a queuing system for each station/gate where the ships waiting in line find a random parking spot well clear of any other objects, and having separate incoming/outgoing corridors that AI ships could stick to. Transport death could be mitigated by having the faction remember combat death locations/enemy capital ship spottings for up to an hour and marking those areas off-limits, but it'd probably have to be shown on the map or you'd be scratching your head wondering why your ships stopped moving when they can't find a safe path. Fast escorts should move ahead of their escortee, while slower escorts stay close. Wings must figure out if they actually have a chance of beating an enemy before engaging. All ships should make more informed fight/flight decisions (e.g. is flight even an option, or would it be if the escort could buy some time?). When attacking a big target like a station, a non-dumb attack vector needs to be chosen. Routes need to be reevaluated periodically to ensure they're still good. Etc. More complex AI behavior would also make it more inscrutable, so when it does something dumb it'd be harder to figure out why. Feedback to the player must be detailed without being overwhelming. So they'd need to think carefully about it, plan it out and do a lot of testing/simulation with all the moving parts.
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Jan 28, 2024 20:23
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Doing anything more than minor tweaks seems like it'd be best saved for X5 yeah. Having separate entrance and exit corridors would require completely redesigning most of the docks I've seen in person, for example.
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Jan 28, 2024 21:28
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X4 has the name Foundations - I understand this as foundations for at least a few more games on this engine, like X3.
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Jan 28, 2024 21:28
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Polikarpov posted:There is also a lot of coded-in stupidity that is hidden from the player. Trade scripts have built in delays between runs, and will pick worse routes sometimes based on an RNG roll. Station managers can get hyper-focused on missing wares like drone parts and will force all their traders to only look for that ware. This can lock up a station if the ware isn't available at a profitable price. I really like these details but in a simulation with so much going on, it can be hard to tell the difference between flavour and broken AI
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Jan 28, 2024 21:28
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I really hope X5 doesn't use travel drive again.
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Jan 28, 2024 22:31
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Or pilot skill levels where poor AI scripts can be hand-waved away until nerds dissect everything to show that no, ships really do have problems pathfinding on the vertical axis (as one tiny example).
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Jan 28, 2024 22:56
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On another note though I'm currently finishing the last two terraforming missions and holy moly what a grind. Will post a bunch of screenshots when I'm done - I'm basically at the point where any sector I zoom in on in the whole map is covered in my own ships and stations.
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Jan 28, 2024 22:58
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Less Fat Luke posted:Or pilot skill levels where poor AI scripts can be hand-waved away until nerds dissect everything to show that no, ships really do have problems pathfinding on the vertical axis (as one tiny example). I'll take this moment to plug KittenMittens excellent X4 In-Depth FAQ to the thread. It has some great tidbits such as quote:This code has a logical flaw resulting in higher skilled marines taking up to 100x longer than unskilled marines, resulting in stage 2 potentially taking over an hour and 20 minutes to complete! quote:When attempting evasive maneuvers, a ship with shields above 50% can use boost to aid their evasive maneuvers (where appropriate) with a chance equal to the combinedskill of the ship. This game is such a fun mess of hidden values sometimes, as it isn't told anywhere the Terran pilots do that! Personally, I've taken the brute force approach and use the mod Learning All The Things from Nexusmods to just have everything be 5 stars in a reasonable timeframe. Is it cheaty? Yeah, but that makes me not have to think about "Was this caused by poor AI, or by low skill on the pilot?" 
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Jan 29, 2024 00:12
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Oh yeah I'm very familiar with all the workarounds and have contributed some too, haha. Though I've never seen that FAQ, very cool!
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Jan 29, 2024 00:36
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Skill stars have been a force for evil since they were introduced Although a lot of these issues like boosting are downstream from mechanics issues
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Jan 29, 2024 00:49
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Started my new game and I'm having a great time. I'm having to get used to all the little things I'd forgotten about making an empire work. One thing was auto traders. I thought I remember them being ok before after giving them some time and levels, but now they don't seem to do anything. They just go to a station, buy a ware, sit for about 5 minutes, then sell the ware back to the station for the same price. I've tried the in game advanced auto trader and Tatertrader. All of them do it. I have satellites up all over the place. Do those not provide trade info anymore?
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Jan 29, 2024 01:43
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Travic posted:Started my new game and I'm having a great time. I'm having to get used to all the little things I'd forgotten about making an empire work. If this is your own station, my first instinct is that you've potentially misconfigured the pricing (if you've adjusted it from Automatic to Manual). If it's an NPC station, something odd is going on. The way the auto-traders work is that they *must* queue up both a buying place and a selling place with a profit before getting an OK for executing the trade route. Does Tatertrader (I'd recommend using the newer Deadtater behaviour instead of Tatertrader - it comes with both) post anything in the ship logbook about the trade? Edit: Oh, regarding satellites - a station needs to be in range of the satellite for it to count as updating trade offers. If a station is "Solid" on the map, you've got up-to-date trade offers (a ship getting a station in radar range also keeps them up-to-date for 5 hours). If it's slightly transparent, you (and your traders) don't know its pricing anymore. Edit 2: I'll also throw a quick recommendation on the Egosoft Discord - https://discord.gg/ZwctxzXhhG . There's a very helpful community that can help out with most issues in a growing empire. Lamquin fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Jan 29, 2024 |
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Jan 29, 2024 02:02
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Lamquin posted:If this is your own station, my first instinct is that you've potentially misconfigured the pricing (if you've adjusted it from Automatic to Manual). If it's an NPC station, something odd is going on. The way the auto-traders work is that they *must* queue up both a buying place and a selling place with a profit before getting an OK for executing the trade route. It's NPC stations. It is possible I'm reading the transaction log wrong. I'll start them back up and get a picture of the transaction log. I meant Deadtrader instead of Tater. Sorry. :edit: Here we go. 
Travic fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Jan 29, 2024 |
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Jan 29, 2024 02:21
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The traders are working fine, but there’s no reason you would have known that  The transactions are shown like they would be in an accounting ledger. Every transaction has to display a credit, and a debit of equal value on the other side. A properly balanced ledger should have a remaining sum of zero, which yours does. (It’s really unintuitive because the logical thing would be to display the revenue) I think at one point Egosoft had considered implementing a proper ledger but stopped halfway through. Would have been nice to get an overview of receivables, break down income from traders/stations etc by year or whatever. I literally want more spreadsheets and ideally some line graphs in this game. 
Fruits of the sea fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Jan 29, 2024 |
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Jan 29, 2024 06:53
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I think what is going on is... let's start from the bottom. It determines it wants to purchase something from GSO-272, and obtains 218k from your funds to do this. It then purchases the items, then sells them to SNU-149 for 308k, then dumps that back into your funds. So it is making money. Not a lot, but money.
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Jan 29, 2024 14:18
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Ok thank you. I saw the pluses and minuses in equal amounts at the same station and the 0cr overall sum and came to the wrong conclusion. Like you said I was expecting an overall "Your trader has an X net gain." Thanks for clearing that up.
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Jan 29, 2024 15:27
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Fruits of the sea posted:I think at one point Egosoft had considered implementing a proper ledger but stopped halfway through. Would have been nice to get an overview of receivables, break down income from traders/stations etc by year or whatever. For sure. The double-entry accounting is a nice touch, maybe even necessary if you're trying to keep track of a large empire with lots of accounts. But it's missing the "report" functionality of irl accounting software to interpret it. For instance, it'd be nice to be able to see the return on investment for a particular vessel/station. I shouldn't have to read raw logs to try to figure out if I broke even on a particular vessel, or where to expand/downsize.
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Jan 29, 2024 16:03
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Yeah the transaction log for traders is one of the more indefensible choices, I have no idea who greenlit this. It's more understandable for miners because they never buy anything, only sell, but why would anyone want this as the *default* for a trader?
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Jan 29, 2024 16:14
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I think just starting out you're better off going into mining than trading, anyway. As you'll notice those aren't large profits, and putting more raw materials into the economy means more gets done overall. Plus you can retask them to supplying your own factories when you start making those.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:01
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Yeah my mining fleet makes far more money than the traders. That's part of what threw me off. I looked at the line graph of my cash for the hour before and the hour after I cancelled my autotraders and there was little/no difference. I think what I'll do is put them all back on auto traders until I get my first station running then assign them to my stations to make actual money.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:31
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Yeah once you have finished goods to sell, having some traders to sell them without waiting for NPC traders to show up can be helpful. Or move things around from one of your stations to another.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:48
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I think stations do at least give you a sense of profitability because you can just look at the transfers out of the account, which they do when they have too much surplus.
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Jan 29, 2024 19:25
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The secondary thing a fleet of small traders do is train your marine fella's and grind up some standings with whoever you trade with, plus you are keeping stuff going generally, even if you don't see a material profit much over time, more stuff is getting moved around, resulting in better stuff getting made. better stuff being available to trade means greater profitssssss.
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Jan 29, 2024 19:42
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The economy is holistic, after all. Over investment will lead to saturation of the market and stagnation of profit. The most important thing is to identify shortages and fill them. Working towards getting a 7 module hull parts forge online with all the supporting ships it needs is always a safe investment though.
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Jan 29, 2024 19:59
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RIP Syndrome posted:For sure. The double-entry accounting is a nice touch, maybe even necessary if you're trying to keep track of a large empire with lots of accounts. But it's missing the "report" functionality of irl accounting software to interpret it. For instance, it'd be nice to be able to see the return on investment for a particular vessel/station. I shouldn't have to read raw logs to try to figure out if I broke even on a particular vessel, or where to expand/downsize. FrickenMoron posted:Yeah the transaction log for traders is one of the more indefensible choices, I have no idea who greenlit this. It's more understandable for miners because they never buy anything, only sell, but why would anyone want this as the *default* for a trader? Especially frustrating because adding a human readable report function and a cumulative revenue column for the ship or station’s transaction is a problem that has already been solved a million times over. Like, I’m an amateur moron and I’ve done those things in Excel and it wouldn’t be too hard to do it in Python, or just get Chatgpt to do it for me.
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Jan 29, 2024 21:18
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Check this out. Went digging through the menus and found this: Deadtrader: Thumbs up!
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Jan 30, 2024 03:09
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Travic posted:Check this out. Went digging through the menus and found this: Wait, where's this?! Is it a view that's available in vanilla, or was it added as part of some mod? Looks handy to have, either way!
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Jan 30, 2024 03:51
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Major Isoor posted:Wait, where's this?! Is it a view that's available in vanilla, or was it added as part of some mod? Looks handy to have, either way! Im using the Deadtrader mod. I'm not sure it's on the standard autotrader but for Deadtrader its on the "Logs" tab.
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Jan 30, 2024 04:32
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Alright trip report, just finished all the terraforming missions unmodded. Goddamn what a slog; it was interesting though and I enjoyed it but it takes soooooooo long. By the end of the game I had about twenty non-defensive stations supporting the empire to produce all the goods. Started in a pretty normal start and managed to resist stealing a million ships (ok except that one abandoned destroyer). Basically started everything by first building up the basic component modules at the HQ that I knew would be most needed for Terran space and terraforming missions, then just kinda steamrolled from there. Everything except the Boron TF mission and the one "impossible" rated one at Atiya's Misfortune was pretty smooth. I basically ignored all Kha'ak and spammed L miners for all the resources needed, and if I misplanned how much I needed for each bucket of wares I'd assign 10-20 L freighters to try and buy out the whole galaxy of a ware (hello spices!) The Boron quest though, holy poo poo it requires so much ice. I learned the hard way that each station has a maximum of 256 subordinates so I ended up pre-building a gigantic ice collection factory in the target sector with about 150 L miners mining, and about 25 L miners for trading to help speed up the ice collection and that ended up working pretty well. Atiya's Misfortune was similar, so much methane was required I did the same trick there. This site helps a lot if you wanna spitball how much resources you'll need: https://www.qsna.eu/x4/terraform I used it loosely but not as a total prescriptive solution. Anyways by the end the HQ looked like this:  Surprisingly the game still runs at a decent FPS (maybe 70 in normal sectors) but in the HQ vicinity it drops to about 10. The game still performing this well with 50b credits in the bank and every single sector full of my own ships when I zoom in made me respect the codebase a lot more as I'm often pretty quick to poo poo on the technical aspects of the game... so hats off Egosoft! Ended up with over 60,000 employees in the empire and pages and pages of 3 star pilots which I guess is nice if I ever revisit this save (which I will not):  Also they play this little clips when you complete each mission showing the results which is kinda cool but also clearly farmed out to an intern:  All in all pretty fun challenge, really cool to push the game to the max like this. P.S. there's also some magnate trader achievement and I have no idea how you'd ever get it since it didn't pop while doing this, I literally spent probably 20 billion with the other factions in the game LOL. Edit: OK looking at my save XML I need to literally 12x my "trade_score" LOL, never gonna do that poo poo. Less Fat Luke fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Jan 31, 2024 |
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Jan 31, 2024 16:37
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I just got far enough in my playthrough where I can start playing with all the new guns in VRO and wow. It's amazing. The amount of new weapons is daunting, but they completely change the feel of the game and combat is so much better.
Travic fucked around with this message at 08:50 on Feb 8, 2024 |
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Feb 7, 2024 18:49
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Oh right, I meant to do a more thorough VRO playthrough once I got a new computer. I now have a R7800X3D with a RX7800XT that runs the game exceptionally well, so maybe it's time.
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Feb 9, 2024 11:46
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Game is crazy CPU limited. Upgrading that makes the biggest difference.
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Feb 9, 2024 12:29
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FrickenMoron posted:Game is crazy CPU limited. Upgrading that makes the biggest difference. The larger L3 cache probably also helps, as it does on anything simulated, since those don't tend to fit inside the cacheline - but it's difficult to prove, because AMD doesn't have a R7800X chip that's exactly the same speed, with just the standard amount of L3. BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 13:20 on Feb 9, 2024 |
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Feb 9, 2024 13:17
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I've got a 5950x and I kinda regret it and wish I'd waited a bit longer and got the larger cache CPUs. I don't use half my cores tbh and a lot of the dumb games I play only use a single core.
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Feb 9, 2024 13:44
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I'm thinking about upgrading my computer as well. Currently using a Ryzen 5 3500 and it runs ok, but is a little jittery from time to time. Is there a glitch with SETA and small/medium ships? When SETA is active they melt my destroyers and defense stations. Could be some interaction with VRO, but when SETA is off they stand no chance. With SETA on they destroy everything. Just watched two Falx strip the shields off a Xenon K. Travic fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Feb 9, 2024 |
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Feb 9, 2024 18:30
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Travic posted:I'm thinking about upgrading my computer as well. Currently using a Ryzen 5 3500 and it runs ok, but is a little jittery from time to time. Simulation granularity, maybe? I imagine a fast ship and destroyer bullets may just skip right through each other instead of colliding at high timestep values, so small/medium ships become impossible to hit, while big ships, being slower and occupying a bigger volume, don't. Relatedly, I tried to exploit this in X2 by making a ton of cheap Pegasus M5s with max engine tunings. Capital ships couldn't hit them, but unfortunately, at 1000m/s they wouldn't be able to get off any shots of their own before having to break for their next attack run. So they'd just buzz around the target uselessly like a swarm of angry bees.
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Feb 15, 2024 00:23
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RIP Syndrome posted:Simulation granularity, maybe? I imagine a fast ship and destroyer bullets may just skip right through each other instead of colliding at high timestep values, so small/medium ships become impossible to hit, while big ships, being slower and occupying a bigger volume, don't. Got it. I did end up ordering a new cpu so that'll be fun. May even help with the SETA problem if it can handle the calculations faster?
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Feb 15, 2024 16:08
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Travic posted:Got it. I did end up ordering a new cpu so that'll be fun. May even help with the SETA problem if it can handle the calculations faster? Maybe. Likely it'll get better but still give you different outcomes. Gotta confess though, I mostly stopped using SETA when we got travel drives. Too immersion breaking and tempting to turn the game into a waiting simulator. Or maybe I'm just that much of a masochist
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Feb 15, 2024 23:49
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RIP Syndrome posted:Maybe. Likely it'll get better but still give you different outcomes. Gotta confess though, I mostly stopped using SETA when we got travel drives. Too immersion breaking and tempting to turn the game into a waiting simulator. Or maybe I'm just that much of a masochist Yeah, same. These days I only use SETA if I'm waiting for my Asgard's main weapon to recharge, or for ships to move to a set location to progress a mission, or something. Speaking of Asgards though, I've recently returned to my X4 save after a bit of a break. I know they improved station assaults a fair bit some months ago, but how about for Asgards? Since IIRC AI-controlled Asgards have always been a bit funny about not using their main beam weapon properly, OOS. Is that still an issue? Since I've been taking up ~$40mil contracts for taking out xenon stations in formerly-Split space, so that the Argon can claim the sectors. But if I can palm that off to the AI rather than needing to do it manually, that would free me up tremendously
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Feb 19, 2024 05:00
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There's a good reason why they initially removed SETA from the series. It's a crutch that messes with the simulation. I do wish they would bring back Rebirth style jump drives. Those were cool, especially due to that one mission where you exfil from a battle by landing on a capital as it charges, and you get to stand on the flight deck with tracers and explosions going on overhead while the jump drive activates and teleports to safety.
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Feb 19, 2024 09:11
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