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OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

I have noticed that my builder only seems to deploy 30 at a time so I guess that is the functional limit of their utility.

Which is a shame really as I'd like to be able to use more.

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Major Isoor
Mar 23, 2011
Hey, got a couple of quick questions: firstly, if a ship I own (but one thay I'm NOT controlling. i.e. I have it set to patrol/protect a station) opens fire, misses its target and hits some random Argon/whoever ship, will that decrease my relations with them? Since hopefully if there's any retribution, it's only against the idiot pilot who took the shot. :v:

Also, seeing as I've bought a Cerberus (well, still waiting for it to be built), if I have my trusty Nodan docked on its back, could it be destroyed in a fight? And if so, is there any way I can retract the landing pad, so that it's inside the ship? I'm sure I've seen an AI capital ship do it, although I could be mis-remembering.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

1. Not actually sure about that, but there's no friendly fire out of sector, at least.

2. In theory the dock will retract if another ship tries to dock on it, and put the ship into internal storage, however the cerberus can only hold one ship, so sadly, not that I know of. It would be a nice feature though because yes you can damage ships docked on other ships. If you have another fighter, try docking it on the cerberus while your current one is docked, see if it works, I'm not sure if the 1 ship capacity means one ship internal capacity or whether it just means it can dock 1 ship at a time, on the pad.

Beefeater1980
Sep 12, 2008

My God, it's full of Horatios!






OwlFancier posted:

It is also worth noting that the 3d space navigation is vastly better than it was in X3, because in X3 the only way the AI could handle station was to fly towards them, turn around when it got too close, fly sideways a bit, then fly towards them again. It literally could not path around objects other than by trial and error. Whereas now they can actually fly around quite complex stations, they just sometimes bump into them and other things. But it's still miles better than it was, it just looks like the pilot is a bit drunk sometimes rather than being actually a floor turtle that somehow found its way into a spaceship.

It’s still horrific though.

Getting back into the game, I decided to start young gun and use my initial crystal grabbing profits to buy a miner and generate some passive income. For a laugh I joined the miner on its maiden voyage, and noticed:

1. You still can’t sit in the copilot seat if not flying, or do anything really other than hover over your captain’s shoulder like the galaxy’s worst micromanager.

2. Although maybe you SHOULD be micromanaging, because your captain, being ordered to mine silicon, will just fly around a bit and blow up some empty asteroids.

Then again maybe she just hates being bossed around, because as soon as I go OOS the situation improves.

3
Aug 26, 2006

The Magic Number


College Slice
The Nodan is also one of the worst possible ships to pair with a Cerberus because it's comedic height will mean that if you're actually manually controlling the frigate, you'll maybe be able to see the top 10% of your field of view at most.

Krogort
Oct 27, 2013
I am surprised to see that the online user manual for the game has a lot of details and that Auxilary ship have a real role with specific commands and are not just big freighter/carrier hybrids.
Check this out https://www.egosoft.com:8444/confluence/display/X4WIKI/Resupply+Ships

Anybody tried all of this ? does it...work ?

Krogort fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Apr 19, 2020

Shalebridge Cradle
Apr 23, 2008


Beefeater1980 posted:

It’s still horrific though.

Getting back into the game, I decided to start young gun and use my initial crystal grabbing profits to buy a miner and generate some passive income. For a laugh I joined the miner on its maiden voyage, and noticed:

1. You still can’t sit in the copilot seat if not flying, or do anything really other than hover over your captain’s shoulder like the galaxy’s worst micromanager.

2. Although maybe you SHOULD be micromanaging, because your captain, being ordered to mine silicon, will just fly around a bit and blow up some empty asteroids.

Then again maybe she just hates being bossed around, because as soon as I go OOS the situation improves.

Mining is one of the worst offenders for IS vs. OOS behavior. It is wildly more efficient to be somewhere else when your ships are mining for many reasons.

Shrimp or Shrimps
Feb 14, 2012


Regarding weapon mods, got a couple of questions. I've finally completed the research but I assume now I've got to find blueprints. Do they only drop from xenon? How rare are the enhanced mod blueprints?

Also, if I put a basic mod on my weapons, can I then upgrade it to an enhanced mod?

Shalebridge Cradle
Apr 23, 2008


Krogort posted:

I am surprised to see that the online user manual for the game has a lot of details and that Auxilary ship have a real role with specific commands and are not just big freighter/carrier hybrids.
Check this out https://www.egosoft.com:8444/confluence/display/X4WIKI/Resupply+Ships

Anybody tried all of this ? does it...work ?

I used resupply ships before the 3.0 patch and they worked poorly, but there were a bunch of patch notes since then mentioning improvements. I haven't used them since then, however. One important thing to note: if you want a ship to resupply missiles you need to buy the blueprint for that missile.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Beefeater1980 posted:

It’s still horrific though.

Getting back into the game, I decided to start young gun and use my initial crystal grabbing profits to buy a miner and generate some passive income. For a laugh I joined the miner on its maiden voyage, and noticed:

1. You still can’t sit in the copilot seat if not flying, or do anything really other than hover over your captain’s shoulder like the galaxy’s worst micromanager.

2. Although maybe you SHOULD be micromanaging, because your captain, being ordered to mine silicon, will just fly around a bit and blow up some empty asteroids.

Then again maybe she just hates being bossed around, because as soon as I go OOS the situation improves.

The game abstracts mining quite heavily if you're out of sector which means it works signfiicantly faster than it would if you (or your AI) tried to do it in sector.

Which is probably for the best given that you'd need absurd numbers of ships otherwise but it does have the unfortunate side effect of making it a bit crap to do in sector. Finding the specific nodes is pretty decent as far as minigames go but picking up the rocks is tiresome and the mining drones for larger ships are painfully slow. It might be better if they sped the drones up a lot and greatly expanded the cargo holds on the large ships so you could just drive through a field blasting everything and shoveling it all into your cargo hold.

Shrimp or Shrimps posted:

Regarding weapon mods, got a couple of questions. I've finally completed the research but I assume now I've got to find blueprints. Do they only drop from xenon? How rare are the enhanced mod blueprints?

Also, if I put a basic mod on my weapons, can I then upgrade it to an enhanced mod?

If you complete the research it unlocks blueprints by tier, you fit them at a ship production facility for that size of ship, go to the ship dealer on the dock and there's a special workbench there.

You can not upgrade mods but if you recycle them you get the core component for that level back as well as a portion of the additional components, so core components are more "you can have this many mods in your fleet at once" while additional components are "you can reroll crafting them this many times"

Krogort posted:

I am surprised to see that the online user manual for the game has a lot of details and that Auxilary ship have a real role with specific commands and are not just big freighter/carrier hybrids.
Check this out https://www.egosoft.com:8444/confluence/display/X4WIKI/Resupply+Ships

Anybody tried all of this ? does it...work ?

I haven't tried doing ammo resupplies but the interface works, I use my fleet tender for repairs quite a bit. But yeah they do have that role and will stock up on resources for resupplying ships if you let them. I'd personally recommend one rather than a superfreighter for your first big freighter purchase as they function as one pretty well and the repair function is handy.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Apr 20, 2020

Shrimp or Shrimps
Feb 14, 2012


OwlFancier posted:

If you complete the research it unlocks blueprints by tier, you fit them at a ship production facility for that size of ship, go to the ship dealer on the dock and there's a special workbench there.

You can not upgrade mods but if you recycle them you get the core component for that level back as well as a portion of the additional components, so core components are more "you can have this many mods in your fleet at once" while additional components are "you can reroll crafting them this many times"

Thanks. It appears I have probably borked my save with aggressive modding and liberal cheat script usage.

I've unlocked the 3 tiers of weapon mod research, but only showing on the crafting bench are "basic" recipies. The second and third tiers show nothing.

It's good to know that I can remove an upgrade mod to a weapon (by recycling it) and then install a better upgrade.

Now... to find out a way to get those better upgrade blueprints if they didn't automagically come when I completed the third tier of research.


--

On another note, I've built up a wharf, manually stocked it with supplies, and have only bought 3 ship BPs (both Alligator miners, plus a Boa M freighter), and ZYA are placing orders like crazy.

I put the wharf in Argon Prime.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

pretense is my co-pilot

auxiliary ships work, i'm just bitter since carriers really should at a minimum be able to do munitions resupply for S and M ships.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

auxiliary ships work, i'm just bitter since carriers really should at a minimum be able to do munitions resupply for S and M ships.

Can't they? I thought that was added in the same patch that added auxiliary ships. Carriers can't handle L/XL ships resupply but they can resupply S/M ships as far as I'm aware? Not that I've tried as I don't own any.

Shrimp or Shrimps posted:

On another note, I've built up a wharf, manually stocked it with supplies, and have only bought 3 ship BPs (both Alligator miners, plus a Boa M freighter), and ZYA are placing orders like crazy.

I put the wharf in Argon Prime.

Yeah this is a weird behaviour that probably should be looked at, or have some sort of consequences, because you can totally sell ships to enemies of the sector your shipyard is in :v:

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

pretense is my co-pilot

Maybe auto resupply works. Carriers have storage divisions for missile components, ecells, and (?) w/e the other ware is. i can't manually buy missiles on them when i repair my ships though.

e:

Hm, I should double check that I have the blueprint.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

You do need the blueprint, yes.

I'd probably use missiles if you could like, load up a fighter with rocket pods or something and just dump them all into a capital ship point blank on one pass.

Sillybones
Aug 10, 2013

go away,
spooky skeleton,
go away
I see the expansion is out. I played a few patches into when it was first released. Worth picking up now? Is it considerably better and less clunky?

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

I think it's improved a lot, the plots and extra content do add a fair bit, I think. Depends whether you like the core loop of building an empire and fighting wars with people.

Try the base game and see if you like the refinements and then buy the expansion if you want a bunch more sectors and ships to play with. Also try the mods, VRO/Faction Enhancer etc to see if they improve it for you too (use the beta branch to make them work properly)

Sardikar
Sep 27, 2004
I cant think of anything to put here.

The people complaining about not seeing where you are going...you realise you can hide your cockpit by hitting control-H right?

It's the magic of camera drones!

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

I paid for the drat cockpit so I'm going to use the drat cockpit, and complain about the design of my drat spaceship in the process!

Also actually out of curiosity, does that actually hide docked ships too? It disables the model of the player ship (including in third person which is extra weird) but I'm curious if it does that to docked craft too.

Shrimp or Shrimps
Feb 14, 2012


Sardikar posted:

The people complaining about not seeing where you are going...you realise you can hide your cockpit by hitting control-H right?

It's the magic of camera drones!

What in the world.... drat!

chglcu
May 17, 2007

I'm so bored with the USA.

OwlFancier posted:

I paid for the drat cockpit so I'm going to use the drat cockpit, and complain about the design of my drat spaceship in the process!

Also actually out of curiosity, does that actually hide docked ships too? It disables the model of the player ship (including in third person which is extra weird) but I'm curious if it does that to docked craft too.

It does, but you can still click on the invisible ship and target it accidentally all the time.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Shrimp or Shrimps posted:

What in the world.... drat!

Bernd mentioned that this has been in since release but apparently it was so unknown they added it to a tutorial.

Major Isoor
Mar 23, 2011
Alright, SO! I've finally finished my admin/defence station (after needing like, 15k turret components...I'll have to make a turret+shield component factory later on, before building a defence platform at the other gate) and I've started building my big hull part complex.

So, while that's slowly being built, I noticed the venture station components in the list...are there any good guides about the basics of what you need, to send ships on ventures? (And I guess what sorts of ships should be sent. Like, big freighters? Or a frigate or something?) Since I wouldn't mind building a little venture station up in a corner of my sector, as a side-project to my current construction. But yeah, I just do NOT know where to start. Do I just need the venture gate, thing? I dunno (sorry, not helpful I know! :v: )

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

I've never done them because you need to sign up with an account I think and you need an unmodified game.

As far as I know it's limited to small and medium ships and you just... get rewards for doing it? I've never really looked into it. Or seen a venture ship in my game for that matter.

Domattee
Mar 5, 2012

Krogort posted:

I am surprised to see that the online user manual for the game has a lot of details and that Auxilary ship have a real role with specific commands and are not just big freighter/carrier hybrids.
Check this out https://www.egosoft.com:8444/confluence/display/X4WIKI/Resupply+Ships

Anybody tried all of this ? does it...work ?

There used to be a crippling bug with missile heavy ships or all capital ships where they could lock up the auxiliary, but that was fixed. They work pretty well when used in their own fleet as a sector-auxiliary, but they have suicidal tendencies when attached to an actual fleet that does combat. Possibly missile cap ships can still not properly rearm from them, I haven't tested it, but all M and S classes should work.


Major Isoor posted:

So, while that's slowly being built, I noticed the venture station components in the list...are there any good guides about the basics of what you need, to send ships on ventures? (And I guess what sorts of ships should be sent. Like, big freighters? Or a frigate or something?) Since I wouldn't mind building a little venture station up in a corner of my sector, as a side-project to my current construction. But yeah, I just do NOT know where to start. Do I just need the venture gate, thing? I dunno (sorry, not helpful I know! :v: )

You need the venture gate and that's it. It will add an extra destination in the station teleporter, thats where you do the venturing from. There are five or so different "mission"-types which require a specific shiptype and seem to always succeed if you send the correct ship type. Never tried sending a wrong one. I don't think the ships need any other equipment at all. The ship is then gone for the duration of the venture, which is in IRL time, so the 64 hour freighter mission doesn't require 64 hours of playtime. If it was successful the ship comes back and you can collect your reward.
A ship has to be docked at the venture gate to be available for sending, and you can only have one ship docked there.

Domattee fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Apr 20, 2020

timn
Mar 16, 2010
Stopped by the trader station to unload some junk and noticed I had accumulated enough spacefly eggs to make 7 caviars. It was like finding a $20 bill in my space couch.

Antigravitas
Dec 8, 2019

Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:
To do ventures you need to register your game, i.e. go into the properties of your egosoft.com forum account and link your steam account to it. You then use that account to log into the game.

Then you get a venture blueprint, which is pretty inexpensive to build. You send S or M ships on long or short (real time) trips to parallel universes and they come back with ship skins and inventory items.

It's kind of cute to have the lore literally state that you are sending expeditions into parallel universes. Those parallel universes of course being other people's games. There's a map filter for highlighting those visitors in your game if you have enabled online functionality.

There's nothing revolutionary hidden behind the feature but it's a lot less fussy than, say, the way you send expeditions from freighters in NMS.

Also, I love the Contact reference of the venture station with its giant rotating rings.

Ass_Burgerer
Dec 3, 2010

You can do ventures on a modded game with this mod: Ventures. They're actually "offline ventures" where you send ships/fleets to scripted scenarios of varying difficulty.

I have a question though; do venture ships from other players still visit my modded game? How do I get that working?

Taerkar
Dec 7, 2002

kind of into it, really

They will visit a modded game if you turn it on. I leave them flagged with generic name so I don't get subjected to the depths of the internet.

Visitor69 is enough.

Antigravitas
Dec 8, 2019

Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:
But my witty ship names… :(

Beefeater1980
Sep 12, 2008

My God, it's full of Horatios!






Here is how to understand X.

You are an ambitious young [InsertSpeciesHere] in a collapsing alliance of several factions of various species that collectively own most of known space. It is well known that dangerous killbots prowl the borders and would like to wipe out all organic life, but that threat has for a long time been considered beaten, and therefore less important than factional interests.

As the factions start to devote their energies to fighting each other, the resurgent robots seize the moment to attack on several fronts. Left to their own devices, the robots will eventually wipe out all life by slowly but inevitably destroying the organics’ infrastructure, crippling their economies and outproducing them.

The only way to prevent this is for the player to build their own centrally-planned economy that initially plugs the holes in the dynamic global economy, and then becomes WW2 America + Russia Voltron, churning out impossibly huge numbers of warships with the best technology of every species to defeat the AI threat.

This is the ultimate goal of every game in the X series. Amazingly, it’s never explained anywhere and is left to the player to intuit.

Less Fat Luke
May 23, 2003

Exciting Lemon
Given the above too what I'm loving about X4 (specifically now after bouncing off it on release) is that unlike the other games the stakes are pretty high; they've tuned the Xenon threat so that it is actually a threat too and if you just left a game idling for a few days they'll faceroll a bunch of factions. For the first time outside of Litcube's Universe for X3AP I feel like my actions really matter.

It's also the first time the economic and universe simulation feels real too - out of sector combat and actions are still a little weird versus in-sector but the fact that all the goods are actually used now for things like creating weaponry, stations and ships is really awesome and you can see your effect on the economy (not to mention the Xenon's).

Krogort
Oct 27, 2013
I'm doing the Split quest and I have an objective to "deliver fleet".
Then when reading the briefing there is something ludicrous like 5 destroyer, some auxilary and a ton of corvettes.
Must I buy all those ships to progres? this seem ridiculous ! i don't have half of that as my own fleet !

Alchenar
Apr 9, 2008

Sounds like you need to do more capitalism

Thom12255
Feb 23, 2013
WHERE THE FUCK IS MY MONEY

Krogort posted:

I'm doing the Split quest and I have an objective to "deliver fleet".
Then when reading the briefing there is something ludicrous like 5 destroyer, some auxilary and a ton of corvettes.
Must I buy all those ships to progres? this seem ridiculous ! i don't have half of that as my own fleet !

Believe it or not, when you get this kind of quest in the faction war quests, it's actually easy money.

Beefeater1980
Sep 12, 2008

My God, it's full of Horatios!






It’s not really a capitalism simulator so much as a logistics one. You can have all the money in the game but if there aren’t enough weapons, energy cells and hull parts at the shipyards when the Xenon and *ahem* Kha’ak come calling, they will grind the factions down eventually.

Thom12255
Feb 23, 2013
WHERE THE FUCK IS MY MONEY

Beefeater1980 posted:

It’s not really a capitalism simulator so much as a logistics one. You can have all the money in the game but if there aren’t enough weapons, energy cells and hull parts at the shipyards when the Xenon and *ahem* Kha’ak come calling, they will grind the factions down eventually.

I noticed that it's just pronounced Kha now.

Antigravitas
Dec 8, 2019

Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:
What I find interesting is that you can boost a faction's strategic position by plugging holes in their economy. And there are holes left open for the player to fill, but factions will try to build new stations as well. I think I've seen unproductive stations get deleted as well.

You don't always need your own fighting force. Just nudge a faction back to competitiveness by identifying and fixing supply chain issues. That's actually pretty compelling.

Vietnom nom nom
Oct 24, 2000
Forum Veteran

Shrimp or Shrimps posted:

Thanks. It appears I have probably borked my save with aggressive modding and liberal cheat script usage.

I've unlocked the 3 tiers of weapon mod research, but only showing on the crafting bench are "basic" recipies. The second and third tiers show nothing.

Try doing the mods at a wharf of a faction you have 20+ reputation with.

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Alchenar
Apr 9, 2008

Oh, also what control scheme do people use?

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