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Flowing Thot posted:The idea of launching your fighters from your carrier several sectors away is blowing my mind and I wish I knew about that earlier.
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Dec 27, 2023 04:03
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| # ? May 21, 2024 05:42 |
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Having a grand ol time in my by-yearly X series revival where I go on an insane binge and do nothing but play whatever the current X game is. Custom start with a Discoverer, 10k to my name and the HQ unlocked and past he early day hurdle with 4 super basic ARG stations (wafers, refined goods, ice and coolant). I’m surprised how much pushback I’ve gotten in Second Contact VII, with the Khaak reliably chewing through my M Drills, despite adding more and more Elites and Discos as escorts and interceptors. Hoping that new ARG frigate will do it, as they managed to take me down below 1 mil in my account and forced to rebuild the Ides manual trading fleet to quickly bankroll my losses. I’m having a great time.
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Dec 30, 2023 00:00
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I've decided to go for a Boron themed privateer run. Queen's Herald Start, I got the Sanctuary of Darkness mission out of the way, boosted a Split Alligator mining Methane in Watchful Gaze which is now working for me mining Helium in Atreus's Clouds, sold my starting Thresher for an Irukandji ( I really don't like flying the Thresher ) and I'm off to find more Split miners to liberate.
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Dec 30, 2023 01:39
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So boosting Split Alligators and Boas in Watchful Gaze and Argon space has been working great, just don't ask me where the Mercuries and Sunder came from ( I also managed to boost a ship out of Family Kritt without raising ire from Sector police which shouldn't seem possible ). Need to build a Boron diplomatic outpost in 18 Billion and no one is delivering hull parts? No matter, nab Boa's traversing through Silent Witness and sort those orders yourself. My mining fleet is going gangbusters in Boron Space and it looks like I need to start supplying hull parts so I can buy myself a Ray or a Guppy once my standings hits 20.
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Dec 31, 2023 04:57
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Okay so I have not played X4 since 2018, but decided to buy all of the DLC because its on sale right now for a good discount. Going to give X4 a try again now that its been updated a lot and still receiving support. More than can be said for Elite Dangerous, and I really want to try a new space sim. I still see a lot of people recommend X4 to this day too, so it must be doing something right still.
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Jan 1, 2024 00:46
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I said come in! posted:Okay so I have not played X4 since 2018, but decided to buy all of the DLC because its on sale right now for a good discount. Going to give X4 a try again now that its been updated a lot and still receiving support. More than can be said for Elite Dangerous, and I really want to try a new space sim. I still see a lot of people recommend X4 to this day too, so it must be doing something right still.
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Jan 1, 2024 01:42
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I'd counter that by saying that there are a lot of activities to be personally done while your empire is ticking away in the background. I may have an Energy Cell factory under construction in Meneleus Oasis and research happening at my HQ, I could be overseeing the delivery of construction materials but I'm far better off capturing more prize ships to help invigorate the Boron Economy or knocking out the last of the Queen's Herald Missions before kicking off a war between the Argon/Antigone/Boron alliance and those perfidious Terrans, although I think I should send the Xenon into Terran space first. There'll come a time when the Split won't be around to donate their ships to my royal cause and I'm done bailing them out every other game and maybe this time I'll trigger a Paranid holy war against the commonwealth.
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Jan 1, 2024 02:12
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At this point, if you start a brand new game without any of the expansion pack specific lines, there's a metric poo poo-ton of missions for you to do while in a single ship - and quite a few of them will reward you with various ships that you can use as your personal ship to great enjoyment afterwards. Geometric Owl is my favorite ship - because if you get lucky with the mod rolls, it goes faster than the highway ring.
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Jan 1, 2024 02:37
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I still think Egosoft should just raid Frontier and take their ship handling and sound engineering. It's completely wasted on Elite, just take it and discard the rest.
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Jan 1, 2024 16:44
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I say this every two years in this thread, but again - take the ship handling and the galaxy from Elite, connect the industry simulation to it and Bob’s your uncle.
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Jan 1, 2024 16:47
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Mokotow posted:I say this every two years in this thread, but again - take the ship handling and the galaxy from Elite, connect the industry simulation to it and Bob’s your uncle.
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Jan 1, 2024 17:26
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Antigravitas posted:I still think Egosoft should just raid Frontier and take their ship handling and sound engineering. It's completely wasted on Elite, just take it and discard the rest. They don't even need to raid, Frontier is laying everyone off but management anyway!
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Jan 1, 2024 22:15
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Steal Homeworld's fleet management while you're looting
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Jan 1, 2024 22:23
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just need to steal Star Citizen's funding
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Jan 1, 2024 23:23
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Slickdrac posted:They don't even need to raid, Frontier is laying everyone off but management anyway! Are they really? Not that surprising but sad nevertheless. Incredible how mismanaged that game is/was.
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Jan 2, 2024 02:11
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Their Warhammer game that they barely marketed at all did extremely poorly, to everyone's surprise
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Jan 2, 2024 02:59
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They did a warhammer game?
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Jan 3, 2024 07:35
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Flipswitch posted:They did a warhammer game? This. I heard nothing about it at all.
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Jan 3, 2024 08:08
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Chaos Gate? Technically I think thats a different studio Frontier just published it through some greenlight like program. Its competent but nothing amazing. Gets repetitive as its worst offense. So Frontiers bread and butter.
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Jan 3, 2024 08:50
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So I got bored with being a naughty Boron so I'm giving Xepocalypse a spin ( with the Faction War Enhancer added as reportedly the Xenon are rather passive otherwise ). The entire Commonwealth has been taken over by Xenon, bar the Sol system and it's up to me to restore the Universe to it's proper order.
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Jan 3, 2024 09:57
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The new age of sigmar RTS, which I'm honestly surprised by because it looks exactly like a relic produced RTS - you know, squads, cap point based resources, micro heavy poo poo. I genuinely thought it was a relic game until I looked up frontier to find out what 40k game they'd made. Has there been anything resembling a release date for timelines? Late 2024 or whatever, I'm not expecting an explicit date.
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Jan 3, 2024 10:41
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AFAIK the Warhammer game is published by Frontier, but it’s not their development (hehe). I want to say I saw Timelines spring mentioned somewhere as a possible release date, I think that’d be on par with the previous ~6 month announcement/expnsion cycle.
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Jan 3, 2024 10:55
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I expect April as every other dlc.
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Jan 3, 2024 11:16
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ZombyDog posted:So I got bored with being a naughty Boron so I'm giving Xepocalypse a spin ( with the Faction War Enhancer added as reportedly the Xenon are rather passive otherwise ). The entire Commonwealth has been taken over by Xenon, bar the Sol system and it's up to me to restore the Universe to it's proper order.  I just know this person has opinions about things ready to go.
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Jan 3, 2024 11:25
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Flipswitch posted:They did a warhammer game? Mr. Crow posted:Chaos Gate? Technically I think thats a different studio Frontier just published it through some greenlight like program. Mokotow posted:AFAIK the Warhammer game is published by Frontier, but it’s not their development (hehe). Woops sorry, forgot I posted that in the dead of night. Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin is the one they just released, which at least everywhere I can find is an internal Frontier bit. It actually looks decent enough but they just didn't market it at all and Warhammer people have opinions about Age of Sigmar, let's say. Plus it's apparently just a bit light on content. Orv fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 13:08
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Mokotow posted:
I thought the exact same thing when I clicked that link and It took every fibre of my being to not post something to trigger them.
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Jan 3, 2024 13:25
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I've been watching videos on YouTube in anticipation of starting a new game. It's been a while since I've played, but it seems like the combat AI is better but still iffy. Specifically it seems to have a problem with travel mode. Is there any benefit to just disabling it and going back SETA'ing everywhere so the AI can handle combat?
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Jan 6, 2024 01:34
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Travic posted:I've been watching videos on YouTube in anticipation of starting a new game. It's been a while since I've played, but it seems like the combat AI is better but still iffy. Specifically it seems to have a problem with travel mode. Is there any benefit to just disabling it and going back SETA'ing everywhere so the AI can handle combat? I'm a little dense on this, but as you're not the first to bring it up, what is it the ai is a bit dense re: travel mode exactly? The closest I can come up with is capital ships using short bursts of travel drive when repositioning on a station or trying to cover short distances to bring their guns in range to engage enemy capitals ( the dreaded capital two step ). Typically in small craft engagements ( in my experience ) travel drives aren't a factor unless you're desperately trying to evade a superior force that keeps boosting into their optimal weapon range and preventing you from travelling out ( while making it hard for you to boost away because you have no shields ). The exception might be trying to knock out fighters from travel drive that are running your blockade at a gate or trying to intercept a group of fighters in travel drive before they reach a destination. In the first example it can be difficult to get your ships to interrupt blockade runners in time, but higher skilled pilots and beam turrets make the defender's job a lot easier and in the second, yes the ai sucks at intercepting ships already in travel drive so you're better off meeting those ships at their destination ( because you'll have a really good idea where they're headed ). The capital two step is a harder problem to get around. If you have a fleet of capitals you want to use to attack a station, and you just issue the attack command they will drop out of travel drive outside of weapon range and then space themselves out while also moving into optimal weapon ranges to engage the station ( make sure you have your M turrets set to engage fighters and not all targets otherwise your capitals will try to position themselves to use those short range batteries as well ). The problem is that your capitals are slow and so the ai calculates that the most efficient way to get into desired range is to spool up the travel drive for a short hop ( or boost, which is bad bad bad, although I do believe that boosting has been patched to being a lower priority solution so you don't see it as much as you used to ). Your capitals will also want to reposition themselves as stations are large and as they destroy closer sections they'll find the undamaged sections are out of range or occluded by station wreckage so the captain will try manouver around, leading to suicidal charges into Xenon L Graviton Turrets ( which is bad bad bad ). I find the co-ordinate attack function especially frustratingly slow as your already slow ships take forever to arrange themselves into the co-ordinated attack pattern before they engage ( oh yeah it get's worse if your target is mobile ). Bombarding stations far easier to manage if you do it OOS, issuing individual move orders to your ships around the station until the station is inside your weapon range ( but preferably you're still outside it's range ), dragging those move to commands on the map closer and closer to the target, and dragging them out if you get too close. You won't get the benefit of any main batteries until you issue an attack order, but if your fleet has enough Paranid L Plasma turrets it'll get the job done ( you could go for the superior range of L missile turrets but there's the whole issue of logistics - there is a mod to fix that ). The only time I need to intervene in person is if there's enemy capital ships on the field and they need to be dealt with as a priority. In capital on capital engagements the AI will prioritise on using the travel drive to get into range, as again it makes that calculation that travel drive is going to be more time efficient than slow boating ( and less suicidal than boosting ), but once the shooting starts the travel drive is off the table until the captain decides it's time to flee and they will try to beeline out of the fight and fire up the travel drive ( which if there's any strike craft on the field or they'e pulled all the aggro they aren't going to live long enough to escape ). There are mods that disable travel drive completely, but they are either horribly outdated or specifically for VRO, the current travel mods mods focus on reducing spool up times and/or the attack times ( that is the time it takes a travel drive to reach full thrust ) or placing limits on when a ship can enter travel drive based on proximity to enemies. [edit] I probably should have prefaced this by saying that I typically beeline to having my own fleet of capitals before I start getting deep into combat, and until then I'm doing most things myself in my overtuned corvette. I don't really bother with fighters for escorts for my industrial ships ( I might set up multi fighter patrols in systems that I'm heavily invested, like say Asteroid Belt, but when the Khaak start being a problem is around the same time I'm replacing my M miners with L miners so that problem becomes moot ), and when I do use them it's in a wing assigned to a protect position command or position defense when attached to a carrier and I don't interact with them outside of replacing losses or repositioning them if they're needed elsewhere. ZombyDog fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Jan 7, 2024 |
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Jan 7, 2024 02:12
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They're always improving the AI. It's honestly pretty decent at the tasks of flying and fighting. The worst AI problems are where Egosoft has made it really hard on themselves with questionable game design decisions. Destroyers getting killed by wandering too close to stations is a constant issue because even a single case where that happens is extremely noticeable and frustrating to players. But the root cause there is that stations are overwhelmingly powerful inside their range, and that destroyers only defeat stations by outranging them with frontal guns, the combination of which has a lot of issues. Especially when it interacts with the crew skill system.
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Jan 7, 2024 04:47
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I suspect being able to shoot through and ignore station module wreckage would go a long way in stopping the suicide charges.
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Jan 7, 2024 06:53
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Thank you for the detailed posts. Yes, the main thing is the travel drive short hops. Especially on mobile things. Destroyers will spool up, travel a short distance, stop, spool, hop, stop, repeatedly. I don't want to be too hard on Egosoft. I'm honestly just thinking about things I can do to make the AI's job easier since it seems to be struggling with the travel drive. I'm surprised it doesn't just say, "My guns have a range of X. I'll travel drive to X + 2km." Though maybe that's difficult to code and I'm wrong. Also the face-planting into stations. That is silly. Love the game. Just want to help the AI perform better. 
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Jan 7, 2024 07:03
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This may help, I haven't tried any cap based stuff since installing the mod so I can't sa I've noticed huge changes. I have noticed that with Khaak escort missions, your escortee will engage travel drive meaning escort missions are over quickly but you're going to miss out on bounties and loot opportunities as a result.
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Jan 7, 2024 08:59
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ZombyDog posted:This may help, I haven't tried any cap based stuff since installing the mod so I can't sa I've noticed huge changes. I have noticed that with Khaak escort missions, your escortee will engage travel drive meaning escort missions are over quickly but you're going to miss out on bounties and loot opportunities as a result. Oh that's cool. Thank you very much.
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Jan 7, 2024 15:03
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There's an interesting thread where a new dev at Egosoft acknowledges some of the AI problems and kinda (IMO) ignores some of the others: https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=146&t=459426 Unfortunately sounds like it is not a priority to fix any of them.
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Jan 8, 2024 01:22
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I wish they would just let you use mods without flagging your save as modified.
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Jan 8, 2024 01:57
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I mean achievements still work fine in a modded game (which is a first in the series IIRC) so just mod away friend! The only downside is the custom start won't take into account progress.
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Jan 8, 2024 02:14
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The fundamental issue is that the game world is complex, and the AI design is way too simple. Example: An X4 station isn't too different from an airport, except there is no ATC, no concept of approach lanes, go-arounds and loitering, and the pilots can't talk to each other. Everyone just tries to get close to a docking spot while pathing around obstacles in a kind of brownian motion. Incoming and outgoing traffic are in the same space. Of course it devolves into a huge pileup. They've tried to add higher-level control with fleets and faction AI, but now each unit gets saddled with conflicting goals which are resolved by simplistic rules, which makes ships either die trying to stay in formation, die due to being left behind, or the entire formation being prevented from moving. It's a hard problem. Without the AI there wouldn't be much of a game, and the AI must avoid cheating to sustain the (very good imo) level of immersion, so it's also extremely visible. Obviously there are also issues with simpler fixes, like miners being filled up with wares they never offload, but they're probably getting lumped with the other issues that're effectively unfixable in X4.
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Jan 28, 2024 17:17
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i mean none of that really sounds unfixable, it just sounds like they need to take more of a guiding approach to x4 and have ai with hierarchical goals
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Jan 28, 2024 17:46
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They would need to completely redesign how NPC work, which will break all scripted missions and lead to the most fascinating bugs. Like the economy suddenly collapsing after 40 hours of play and other fun stuff. It's probably still woth attemting, but NPC behaviour runs very deep.
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Jan 28, 2024 17:53
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| # ? May 21, 2024 05:42 |
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You also run into the problem that more complex AI routines consume more resources. Not a problem for a single ship, but when you have thousands across the galaxy it adds up. The Mules mod, for instance, is very effective for player logistics but can noticeably lag games as you scale up. 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. Combat ships cant even use flares or do certain evasive maneuvers if the pilots are too low level. L combat ships are obsessed with staying at the same Z level as their target with a consistent orientation, and will take their main guns off target to do useless maneuvers when they could simply pitch or yaw into alignment.
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Jan 28, 2024 19:49
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