X4 is just amazing for its width of gameplay... a game where you can solve everything:
- You can do long questlines, exploring the universe in your own ship.
- Don't like piloting yourself? Leave your seat, and leave your relief pilot driving your ships everywhere you want (from the map).
- It's still too slow? Buy a faster (M) ship, and mod it until it gets to 10K+ Km/s travel speed
- [i]Still[/i] too slow? Research teleportation, send ships to dock everywhere in the galaxy, and teleport to your ships whenever you need to. Here we solved the limitation of space itself
- Research SETA, take the gunner seat in your M ship. Activate it. Now you can tell your pilot to move around, and times goes 6 times faster
- Ok, you're doing quests by yourself, but at some point you're asking yourself "what if instead of wasting my time, I wasted the time of other people and ripped all the benefits for myself"? You can! You can do many quests in the game by ordering ships to do actions, like dropping satellites, killing things, prospecting etc.
- Ok now: how can I be the richest man in the universe?
1) Active income
- Randomly generated quests: Building stations/fleets, destroying mines/turrets, deploying consumables, scanning ships/stations, taxi, opening (those f*cking) lockboxes, killing criminals, destroying ships/stations, boarding ships, supplying stations, delivering/crafting items, patrolling sectors, repairing stations, bringing stranded ship back, prospecting
- You can make money by trading things yourself, mining resources, stealing other ships, crafting/selling items, rarely finding derelict ships by exploring
2) Passive income
- Buy mining ships and make them mine somewhere (eg: mine silicon next to a silicon wafer station)
- Buy trading ships, and make them buy low & sell high automatically. Or do so manually through repeat orders (if obvious shortage).
- Buy a scout/fast fighter ship and have them collect drops next to a war zone
- Making stations: the game has a DEEP industry/economy system, mostly built around making ships, but some goods are consumed by the station population (drugs & food). It is by far the best way to become filthy rich in the game.
- Once you have a decent passive income I would focus on heavy questing, but again, you do you. Some questlines lock ENTIRE gameplay mechanics behind them
- And now the cons:
1) The UI is atrocious. The main problem is doing things in bulk. The UI is not adapted to late game.
Example: Pilot skill level is important. In some cases, you need a high pilot skill for the NPC to be able to do something. It takes 10 clicks. I have ~400 ships currently, I would need 4K clicks if I assigned pilots for everyone
2) The base building tool is an untamed beast
- It does whatever it wants. Most of the time it does what it should do. Sometimes it decides to autorotate a piece by 90°. Sometimes it doesn't want to snap. Sometimes it shows you that NPC ships won't be able to land on a dock/pier, when clearly they could (and can, there's just nothing in the way). Sometimes it doesn't show you that NPC ships won't be able to land, when clearly they couldn't
- When a part is placed (ready to be built) it becomes WAY too transparent. Sometimes I have to get up my chair and squints so hard at 20 cm of my screen, that I must look like that meme of an asian guy looking at a tiny piece of paper
- I noticed that the fastest way to place modules is to copy paste modules or sequences -> there is NO SHORTCUT for that (CTRL+C CTRL+V??)
- There's no way to know if you placed a piece at the center of your station. I realized my docks wasn't centered, so I removed it, it made my docked ships explode (it's a feature)
- Golden rule: avoid using CTRL to place modules without linking them
3) The station building takes AGES
- Maybe it's a balance choice, but come on... here it takes DAYS (irl days yes!!!) to build a small shipyard
4) Fleet combat is like managing toddlers
- The tale of "the first time I attacked a station".
I placed my ships manually, far from the station. At some point I miscalculated a path and my Asgard got slowed down by the station shooting at it. I thought "ok, he has more than the time to just boost and flee". But after it's shield got completely removed, I worried. I thought "Is it... too stupid to use its own boost?" ([spoiler]yes[/spoiler]). And so I still see it clearly, my character teleporting to the ship, sprinting to the command of the ship, looking at my 4 stars pilot, the cream of the cream, with a mix of cold rage, stupor and contempt, snatching the ship controls from his useless hands, and just pressing "boost", saving the ship at 30% hull.
- Just imagine you're managing suicidal toddlers and take actions accordingly
- Golden rule: overwhelming power beats strategy. You know what can correct most mistakes? Overwhelming power
5) The game still needs many external resources to be learnt
- I did all the tutorials, and starting a new playthrough I was honestly lost.
- After many trial and errors, finding resources such as qsna.eu/x4/map or roguey.co.uk/x4/ships/ , crawling reddit, youtube, asking chatgpt, I finally reached a point where I have a decent understanding of the game. It would have been nice to learn those things in game
6) Late game is boring, peace is boring, we need more war and chaos (in game)
- The game has a Mount & Blade vibe, and it would be the perfect setting for this, but it's just too peaceful. At least by default, most factions are peaceful to each other and will go to war with you only if YOU choose so.
- The Xenons (rogue AI hostiles to everyone) in games are just slightly dangerous, and if you poke them a tiny bit too hard it might wreck their economy until all the factions (at peace with each other) all bully the Xenons together. At some point I just pitied them and installed a mod to buff them ([b]Xenons Jobs[/b] mod) and now they were much stronger, could defend themselves and even take a few sectors if I don't help. I'm not sure how bad it would be in the early game but one thing is for certain: Xenons badly need a buff, especially once the player gets access to ship making
[b]Conclusion/TLDR[/b]:
- X4 is a space game with many gameplays available
- first person combat, trading, mining, exploration and questing. The game is beautiful (I mean for a game that complex to be this beautiful is impressive). The musics are amazing. Sometimes I just observe an enemy ship getting peppered and explode with F3, just for fun (I'm a simple man)
- station building
- from the map: empire management, which includes fleet combat, station production and trading configuration, ship automated behavior configuration, ships questing for you, ship loadout configuration
- diplomacy and agents (well it's not that deep but it's here too and can have a big impact on gameplay)
- there is some particular emotion with a game that deeply stimulated that you can still interact with in 3D.
When you enter a station that you created by hand, you enter your docks that you placed here and see your hard work "from the inside". Then you see one of your mining ship landing next to you, that you built or bought. That mining ship is here because your station needed precisely that resource. Oh, you hear an explosion? It's not background noise: if you open your map, you can see a fight happening closed by. Maybe it's one of your trader being attacked by something? If you open a livestream view on it, you might be lucky to see an enemy ship being obliterated by the dozens of long range turrets you placed on your station. If the trader is in too much danger, you can order combat ships closed by to help and observe them do it in 3D, or just fly away in your own ship to do it yourself.
