What is the most fustrating experience u constanty get by playing this game..

[Flippi]

Here are my two cents for this subject.


First topic:

It's the lore and the settng as it was (re)done. Egosoft has written themselves into a corner in countless areas. Starting with the complete lack of mentioning the jump drives (most important plot device of the franchise), going over the currently existing sectors and how Egosoft forgot how they are supposed to be (numerous missing jump gates, wrong type of planets, missing colonies or even missing entire planets). And of course loads of plot holes regarding the teleportation technology (literally more cheaty and more difficult to make sense of than the JD ever was) or regarding certain factions (Zyarth's claim as Grand Patriarch) and probably a lot more things.

Luckily for Egosoft, most people don't care. And you can always use the 'unreliable Narrator' trope to explain certain inconsistencies. But it doesn't always work on every topic. And the moment people start thinking about it, it may ruin their experience with the game.

In my opinion, Egosoft should have ended the X universe back when they planned to initially and start the Y-universe or whatever with XR. But I admit that this part is more of a nerd rage type of thing for me. As I mentioned before, most probably don't give a damn about it.


Second topic:

Mod tools. Or the lack thereof. Back in X2 and X3, I liked to make my own Sectors and later mods. With X3TC I started modding more frequently with some actual releases. In X4, modding is simply a pain in the rear. Being forced to unpack everything with the cat tool is bad (you could read and edit stuff without doing that with the x3 editor 1 and 2 back in the day), not having a galaxy editor is worse. And no, Notepad++ isn't a replacement! I did modding like that in X3AP (for my own, highly specific mod where it was necessary) and it was horrible!

There are people who would like to make Character mods, so they don't look like straight out of 2009, but they can't because of third party tool issues. In terms of scripting, there are some who like the MD, others don't. But no internal Script editor exist, which is a bit of a shame.

Pretty much every single time I play X4, I am thinking to myself "I'd like to add more sectors here and there" or "There's something I'd like to change or add" but I can't do that, because the tools aren't really that great. They waste my time instead of helping me achieve the results I am looking for. And the number of mods for XR and X4 compared to any X3 (in a similar time frame btw.) should be quite telling.


Third topic:

The encounter mechanic (transporting ships to the player when reaching 'the edge' of a sector). It shouldn't exist, period.


I could write a few more things, but won't. The post is already too long anyway. And other people posting before me have covered a good amount of stuff anyway.

[Mr.Killer]

Another frustrating thing, which I hope will be available in future updates for L and XL ships, is spawning in. During Xenon and Kha'ak incursion, Boso Ta has a different voice, annoying, but ok... The spawning occurs also with bigger ships through gates. I find this so weird, they point at a gate they need to go, It takes a lot of time to gain speed and close to the gate they steer out of focus, park behind the gate, get a hamburger or something, then warp to the other system and the story repeats itself.
I had once two similar ships both going to the same point, I pilotted one of them and the AI pilot the other. I gave him an advantage, he travel drove off, and I plotted the same course and let only the guidance work for me, I controlled the ship. It took 20 minutes after I arrived for the AI pilot to arrive... That is how efficient the warping is, NOT!

Devs have for sure an explanation.

PS. If the devs think to add this in the game for bigger ships, I hope they destinguish it from X3 where it needed energy cells to run, how about the engines? the turrets? main guns? are they also needing energy cells? How about the hull plating with solarpanels then? It is so weird, awkward even...
(They might think of a powercore, for it's energy to move, shield and shoot.)

[temetvince]

As a predominantly vanilla player of X4 and someone who loved modding X3 so much that I spent countless hours on overhaul mods, there is very little that drives me nuts about X4; otherwise, I would simply mod it. Egosoft has addressed many of my former pain points over time, the latest being the addition of satellite ranges prior to deployment on the map with v7 beta.

There are three areas where X4 suffers in my opinion, not including the lack of X-Studio for X4 (I'm not a language elitist, but undocumented raw XML?):

• Managers/Fleet Commanders should be able to automatically reorder destroyed subordinates. Managing a late-game empire and regularly checking every ship to ensure none are missing is annoying. This issue will likely be even more apparent with the endgame crisis added by v7.

• Patrol Command needs some love from Egosoft. I want a functional patrol command for both the AI and the player. It doesn't need to be overly complicated or overpowered like Reaction Force. I understand Egosoft has many reasons not to create elaborate command logic, and almost all of them are good. Look at the Explorer command – it works fine for me even if other players sometimes complain. But Patrol? It's too minimal to be useful.

• The Xenon have, perhaps unintentionally, been nerfed to the point where I am considering modding to beef them back up. However, it is possible that I have improved a lot at the game and thus find them less dangerous subjectively.

[SirLosealot]

Also, pirates can be made obsolete currently already by using military ships as freighters which I like to use. They will never be targeted by the pirates.

Early game, trying to get any L-sized military ship for trading purposes is quite difficult to get to (outside of that one abandoned Oddy, I suppose.) That's the time where you deal with Pirates the most.
Later-game when you can afford to do that, you can also afford to just slap Mirage mods on every civilian freighter for a similar effect (granted they still won't be as hardy against Xenon/Kha'ak.)
And honestly, all you need for the latter is a decent Fighter/Corvette and a satellite -- drop one in BUC space, kill every fighter it spawns trying to destroy that satellite, collect near-infinite purple chassis mods, and Mirage takes zero rerolling. This process can even be automated fairly early-game.

Either way, I think this is fine because it's a later game thing, and is a result of active counter-play against the pirates.

That said, imagine if they actually used EMP missiles properly... Yikes.

I don't believe L sized ships, military or not, can be targeted by pirates. No I mean using M sized military ships as traders. I personally like to use Minotaur Raider but any M sized military ship would do actually.

[GCU Grey Area]

I don't believe L sized ships, military or not, can be targeted by pirates.

L freighters are targeted by pirate destroyers, pirate S/M ships however do seem to leave them alone. It's one of the reasons I pretty much exclusively use L freighters for external sales. There aren't all that many pirate destroyers in the universe at any given time, so encounters are comparatively rare. Pirate destroyers also tend to be slow lumbering beasts which are easily evaded, particularly if those L freighters have been modded to improve travel speed (to that end I install Polisher chassis & Reaver engine mods on all non-military L ships).

[SirLosealot]

I don't believe L sized ships, military or not, can be targeted by pirates.

L freighters are targeted by pirate destroyers, pirate S/M ships however do seem to leave them alone. It's one of the reasons I pretty much exclusively use L freighters for external sales. There aren't all that many pirate destroyers in the universe at any given time, so encounters are comparatively rare. Pirate destroyers also tend to be slow lumbering beasts which are easily evaded, particularly if those L freighters have been modded to improve travel speed (to that end I install Polisher chassis & Reaver engine mods on all non-military L ships).

Huh, I did not know that. I always see pirate destroyers go for stations instead of L freighters and then being blown up by security some time later or being captured by me . I have some S & M civilian traders and they were constantly being harassed so I moved them all to Terran space and use only M military ships (Minotaur Raider) and L freighters anywhere else. Seems to work out well so far.

[Koizuki]

I can confirm that pirates do harrass my L-size Shuyakus if they aren't fitted with the Mirage mod; Usually it is the destroyers that do so, but I think (might be mistaken though, so not 100% sure on this particular point) that the M-size Minotaurs have also attempted to jack them once.

That said, you're right -- I forgot about using those bailed Minotaur Raiders for trading, since they're kinda slow-ish and not very efficient, but they are indeed classified as gunboats still, so pirates will leave them alone. Honestly though, I still think farming a few BUCs is far easier; I've bailed over 100 Minotaur Raiders at this point and it's still more effort than dropping a satellite and blowing up a fighter that spawns to chase it down, and they drop that purple Chassis mod like 99% of the time. I have a setup of a couple Katanas defending a spot where I've just placed a dozen satellites with one ship set to collect drops, and I just hop over every couple hours and collect 100 more of those Chassis mods, plus the occasional bonus mods from a Prometheus that wandered into range. Still, not everyone does this, so I understand.

The only "military" ship I usually think about using for trading is the Barbarossa (and Erlking, but that one's unique,) since its speed and moderate capacity makes it much more efficient than the Buffalo, but for high-capacity hauling I still generally favor the Shuyaku.
Otherwise I also have a couple highly-trained pilots running autotrades in Cobras for crew morale training, after they've maxed their Engineering via builders. I think those are the only two "military" ships running trades in my game.
I do run a bunch of captured Prometheuses for trade as well, but they're still classified as a Transport, so pirates still target them, unfortunately.

Either way you do it, the original point was that you can go out of your way with either method here to counter pirates -- meaning, counterplay. It's not something you can't do anything about, but they will harrass you if you choose to do nothing about them.

As far as Terran space goes, there's very little pirate activity there because TER generally has nothing to do except scan every damn ship that flies through their space, so they filter out pirates pretty quickly. I've had some Couriers and Demeters operating in Saturn 1 since the beginning of the game and they've never been harrassed.

[Mr.Killer]

I think the whole storyline about the 'protectyon' is totally BS, because after either comply with those twins or going against the grain, the story... where is it? I see dead stations and live stations in Avarice, so, there must be this protectyon (whatever the name is) available, but who is selling, dealing, I do not see anything that I can produce, get, or, ..... It makes no sense at all. Also the VIG. Unbelievable that they can build so freaking many ships and absolutely do nothing with it. It defys all logic, so the devs should reconsider this totally BS part of the game. Either make it more convincing, or scrap the whole part.
The latter is preferable. VIG has more ships than all factions together, How is that possible without resources, and don't tell they are that good, they are not. I get mad that you devs cheat under our noses and wave all comment away, it is simply unfair politics. No way to get to a data storage because they rain down on you every damn time.

And then they blame us if we use a cheat, while they started!

And it is annoying as HELL that we can hear them pilots cry that they get hit, DUH! Enemies should not be heard, period!

[GCU Grey Area]

VIG has more ships than all factions together, How is that possible without resources, and don't tell they are that good, they are not.

You can blame the Teladi Company for all those resources. None of the other factions like VIG but Teladi will trade with almost anyone, having only 2 enemy & 3 hostile factions (none of which are VIG). Quick screenshot of all the TEL freighters actively trading in VIG sectors in my game right now: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0l8bepbp ... 60cpp&dl=0

[Alan Phipps]

@ GCU: True, but the MIN patrols and stations in TEL space like to pick on the VIG traders and escorts so the trade can get a bit a messy if the player is IS and stray shots are hitting assets they weren't intended for.

I see a lot of dead and dying Barbarossas in TEL space in my game, plus firefights going on that are nothing really to do with VIG but started because VIG ducked a few shots that hit somewhere else.

[Mr.Killer]

@ GCU: True, but the MIN patrols and stations in TEL space like to pick on the VIG traders and escorts so the trade can get a bit a messy if the player is IS and stray shots are hitting assets they weren't intended for.

I see a lot of dead and dying Barbarossas in TEL space in my game, plus firefights going on that are nothing really to do with VIG but started because VIG ducked a few shots that hit somewhere else.

And why is this normal: Yesterday I was in Avarice and was close to a station of RIP (why RIP, why not RTR that is the shorter name? - Rip Tide Rakers) (Sounds morbide) This Barby started to shoot at me with L plasma guns, I duck and cover behind the station, wanted to see if the station got annoyed and started to blast their arsenal at the Barby. Nope, but when I shoot accidently at it with my pea gun, It warns me, and I know, if I keep doing so, regarding my status of +13, they can get angry towards me, so I was baffled why?!

VIG is not a friend or ally of RIP, neither is RIP a friend or ally with VIG, so how come the rules don't apply to them?

[GCU Grey Area]

VIG is not a friend or ally of RIP, neither is RIP a friend or ally with VIG, so how come the rules don't apply to them?

VIG have police authority over RIP.

[Socratatus]

And it is annoying as HELL that we can hear them pilots cry that they get hit, DUH! Enemies should not be heard, period!

Yea, you should not be able to hear enemies, but what they could do is have a `change frequency` type-button or some kind of futuristic hack, so you can tune in to what the enemy is saying. IL2 does this and it's a really nice touch.

[Mr.Killer]

Another splinter in my finger is build storages. Enemy ones are not being picked up by my turrets, all other building blocks that are enemy they do.
When I want to select my own storage, and dock there, it is so frustrating not being able to select it nor the docking option is not there at most of the times. WHY??????
We do want to drop picked up cargo there? and if I release my control and say to the ship/pilot to dock there, it works as a charm!!

Did nobody find this annoying as Hell?

[Alan Phipps]

I would guess that build storages cores being invulnerable and not targetable is a game design choice. Constantly losing their resource contents to any passing enemy patrol would mean that their stations can never finish building or repairing properly and the game trade economy and faction system might quickly stagnate.

Also it might double the number of long-term station-based conflicts based around invulnerable build storage cores that may keep attracting both NPC traders and attackers and so impact on the PC system's X4 game performance.

[Mr.Killer]

VIG has more ships than all factions together, How is that possible without resources, and don't tell they are that good, they are not.

You can blame the Teladi Company for all those resources. None of the other factions like VIG but Teladi will trade with almost anyone, having only 2 enemy & 3 hostile factions (none of which are VIG). Quick screenshot of all the TEL freighters actively trading in VIG sectors in my game right now: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0l8bepbp ... 60cpp&dl=0

I was wondering how they could afford it, all those stations, ships, not that they have much stations or money, and if they have, why build so many little ships and not a varaity of battleships to protect areas, that is what many human players do, so why does that cheating AI do it like this? Everything goes wrong but this is ok? How many AI's are really active in X4?

[GCU Grey Area]

I was wondering how they could afford it, all those stations, ships, not that they have much stations or money, and if they have, why build so many little ships and not a varaity of battleships to protect areas, that is what many human players do, so why does that cheating AI do it like this? Everything goes wrong but this is ok? How many AI's are really active in X4?

They use the closed loop manufacturing system - everything's made from energy cells, claytronics & hull parts. This greatly simplifies ship production, reducing the chance it'll stall due to lacking a critical component. Suspect they mostly build fighters because it's far easier to assemble all the necessary resources to make an S ship than an L.

With the way the economy works in X4 while the wharf's active it'll frequently be consuming resources, raising the prices it'll pay for resources above those offered at the shipyard, which needs to fill to a significantly higher stock level before it can start production. This will tend to make the wharf a more tempting trade opportunity for all those pesky Teladi traders. In my current game the VIG wharf's idle, with nothing in the queue, presumably because they've completely filled their quota of S ships. Their shipyard however has stalled with a couple of ships in it's queue (unfortunately don't have the rep to ascertain exactly what they're building) because it lacks sufficient resources to start production.

VIG don't have any battleships at all, let alone a variety from which to choose from (aside from the Erlking, which they've never got to work). Closest they've got is their armed L freighter, which is no substitute for a proper warship - may have 4 L turrets, but has no main guns & very weak shielding. Nevertheless they do build them when they can - here's a screenshot of Barbarossas owned by VIG in my game: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/d9pgoyve ... b0pfr&dl=0
Possible there might be a few more in Avarice, haven't got round to deploying sats there.

[pittlebelge]

Turrets always missing their first shot is incredibly frustrating, especially for high damage, low fire rate ones like the paranid plasma turret.

[jlehtone]

Turrets always missing their first shot is incredibly frustrating, especially for high damage, low fire rate ones like the paranid plasma turret.

I like it that the Xenon Gravitons don't hit me on first try.

[SirLosealot]

Turrets always missing their first shot is incredibly frustrating, especially for high damage, low fire rate ones like the paranid plasma turret.

I like it that the Xenon Gravitons don't hit me on first try.

That's nice and all, until you realize that Asgard also fires prematurely and missed its shot against a station. I think a better approach to make the AI more "human" would be to make them hesitant (a short delay) to line up their shot and fire instead of recklessly and prematurely firing like now, especially for slow recharging guns.