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It does push the game a bit more towards being like earlier games which I think is probably why I like it, the internal generators and the way it generally treats combat feels more like X3 which is good in that I think X4 is a bit... well I don't like the combat to be honest. I don't even know if it's arcadey because X3 is pretty arcadey too it's just also more high risk high reward, and I don't necessarily dislike arcadey combat it's just X4 (and rebirth) is almost mindless sometimes. I think the shield change is sort of a holdover from before egosoft improved the performance of capital ships because they used to be killable by anything, so a flat, unstoppable regen was a solution to that (and one I think egosoft partially adopted because I think shield regen was made far more constant at one point, it used to stop if you took any damage which was absolutely stupid on capitals because a single fighter could stop your entire shield regen, again a change that brings it back to X3 which did have constant regen. I think it has taken steps back towards subsystem targeting again though because you can at least shoot turrets off and most of the shield volume depends on the main emitters, so shooting them off will still make ships quite susceptible to capital weaponry.
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Apr 2, 2021 01:54
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The balancing in the Star Wars Interworlds mod is pretty interesting because fighter torpedoes can partially penetrate shields and their targeting prioritizes subsytems, so capital ships are genuinely vulnerable to getting disabled by S class bombers. They need either escort from corvettes and frigates, which are themselves vulnerable to capital ships, or support from their own embarked fighters. This is particularly glaring in the Imperial Star Destroyer II, which has like 80% of its DPS bound up in 8 octuple turbolaser batteries that murder capital ships but are too slow firing and tracking to ever hit a fighter. Hit it with a Y-Wing strike before your heavies go in and its not nearly as scary. It is a shockingly pretty mod and has a YT-1300 with a fully modelled interior, as well as custom bridges on the Imperial ships.     
Polikarpov fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 02:15
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VRO sort of has that in that some of the gunships like the minotaur have a special plasma bomb launcher in the front that entirely bypasses shields. There are also some guns that do it including capital guns which gives you an interesting choice of loadout for your craft. I will have to try the star wars mod at some point, it's the same guy who makes it, I think.
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Apr 2, 2021 02:18
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Rhjamiz posted:Some of the ships it adds are pretty seamless, like the Argon Frigate or some of the Teladi ones, but some of them are very obviously ripped and adapted from X3 and they're glaringly out of place. Additionally, VRO takes the approach that X4 combat is too "arcadey", whatever that means, and adjusts this by having everything have an internal shield generator so that targeting shield modules is now pointless since you have to be able to beat the regen. I kind of feel like X4's combat is fine as is. I certainly agree with the X3 ships as they really don't work with the new weapon mechanics, especially the hyperion. Shield-wise I'm definitely with Owl Fancier in that I think the changes are good but I can understand why they're not for everyone.
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Apr 2, 2021 02:20
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I wish they would put back in things like weapon generators from X3, a big part of the issue with balance in X4 is that weapons have their own power, so more guns is always better and you always want to fire all of them. In X3 you had a finite energy for your guns and you could budget that between various loadouts, you generally had a lot more mounts than you could run constantly and it allowed individual weapons to be very potent because slapping more than one on a larger fighter without a weapon gen to match would not double your firepower. It was usually case that you would just carry some guns and you didn't feel like you were wasting the slots if you didn't use them all the time, because it was entirely possible to have a couple of weapon sets for different roles but each one would use the full capability of your ship's energy output. It would dovetail well with the option of swapping out shield gens for weapon gens or more engines etc. With X4 you could even extend it to cover turrets and let you pick which turret arcs you want to focus on and use the other slots for more generators or other utility stuff, really don't know why they're so limited with the module system. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 02:24
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Didn't some guns in X3 have ammo, too? Like, you had to buy bullets for them?
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Apr 2, 2021 02:35
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Yes, the teladi in particular had a range of shield piercing ballistic weapons that shot actual bullets. Which I choose to believe was mostly because the teladi would obviously prefer a gun that gives them more opportunities to sell things. I dunno if I could be arsed with that in X4 as I can't even bother with missiles but maybe they could make it work, like a proper ammo counter for the gun that you can refill when docking with a carrier or something rather than taking up cargo space. Maybe a unified missile/ballistic ammo space on ships that you could allocate space to and then it handles refills automatically. Also give me rocket pods I can use to do strafing runs on enemy ships. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 02:39
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I wouldn't mind more supply oriented combat due to being able to sell more products, but only if egosoft had provided a M or a L sized auxiliary ship.
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Apr 2, 2021 02:42
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They used to have something like that in X3 too, the TM class which was basically a freighter with a bunch of hooks on the bottom that you could attach fighters to, I think it was intended as a sort of munitions and jump tender for fighters in the early game and also as an armed transport ship. The need to have all the docks do the retractable thing seriously hamstrings M ship design and I wish they would just drop it and add a surface only dock or even an umbillical style design where you can't leave the ship. They already do it for the build storages and for docking piers and every ship already has a dedicated cargo port on the bottom because that's where the animated cargo pipe connects when you land on a pad. If you haven't already done it by the way go stand on a docking platform and watch ships land, there's a little doodad that slides out of a slot and positions itself uniquely for each ship as it comes in for docking, and extends a clamp to connect with a point on the bottom of the ship, and this is modeled for every M and S class ship in the game. All that effort for something you would barely notice and they don't use it for actual ship to ship docking. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 02:50
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OwlFancier posted:I wish they would put back in things like weapon generators from X3, a big part of the issue with balance in X4 is that weapons have their own power, so more guns is always better and you always want to fire all of them. I very recently discovered this isn't 100% true. Having multiple guns cooling down at once significantly penalizes their cooldown rate. It's very obvious on a Dragon if you test firing 6 guns at once and letting them cooldown vs. just 1 of them. But like with most other things X4 ditched from X3, fussing with power consumption and weapon loadout composition to that degree was just tiresome. The way things are in X4 makes it much easier to directly compare the firepower of different ships and focus on making loadout decisions based on the unique properties of the weapons themselves. The best thing Egosoft did with X4's design is that they identified all of the systems in X3 where less would be more and put it on the chopping block. VRO was a big disappointment for me as well because it just brazenly makes the game worse in that respect.
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Apr 2, 2021 03:07
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timn posted:I very recently discovered this isn't 100% true. Having multiple guns cooling down at once significantly penalizes their cooldown rate. It's very obvious on a Dragon if you test firing 6 guns at once and letting them cooldown vs. just 1 of them. Correct, I read somewhere that every ship has the same cooling rate of 2000 or something. This means pulse lasers get better the more guns you have
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Apr 2, 2021 03:18
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I mean, trying to do anything with X3's interface was horrible, do not speak to me about trying to read the loving weapon compatibility pips while being colourblind. But I feel like that isn't a flaw with the simulation but rather the interface, the X4 interface gives you plenty of capability to show information but a lot of it isn't enormously relevant. And I really do dislike the combat changes because in vanilla it is hard to see the point of loading anything except as many basic lasers as you can stick on. And the heavier weapons also suffer from the issue that you fire them and then you spend a very long time just waiting for them to cool down, which makes the pacing of the combat just... not good IMO. I can never see the point in using plasma guns for the main weapons because they don't do enough alpha damage to kill things you can hit with them and the cooldown once you fire them is atrocious. About the only guns I do find at all interesting are shield piercing guns because they let you target subsystems better. X has never had great combat but I definitely find X3's dogfighting to be more engaging than X4 or Rebirth's, despite the fact that it's basically just a jousting match, slugging away with near identical pew pew lasers for protracted periods of time just doesn't do it for me. I appreciate the changes they made to the AI to make it be a bit more interesting but it feels hamstrung by how slow and anaemic everything feels. I could even deal with something like everspace's combat which at least feels quite high intensity and high stakes, despite being very arcadey. Like for the most part you shoot at stuff in that and it dies. VRO is far from my ideal implementation but I still find the degree of variety in its weapon choices to be at least something. And I spend quite a lot of time in X4 looking for ways to get more creative with the tools they give you. Which is why it often seems odd that many of the systems give you choices but the choices often feel a bit meaningless because there is one optimal decision to make and they seem quite averse to letting you make actual major customizations or tradeoffs with a lot of the systems, especially in ship design and weapon loadout. I dunno, I guess in some respects it is a bit of the rebirth problem where you can see these very interesting systems but they just do so little with them, and I don't really understand why when they clearly put so much effort into making them. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 03:34
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OwlFancier posted:Snip
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Apr 2, 2021 04:13
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If I was making one myself I definitely don't think I would make a lot of the changes VRO makes, but I would probably make similar ones in some places. I don't know that you need extra ships or the built in generators any more, and I think I would focus more on differentiating the weapons that already exist. I would like to keep the range variety and bump the lethality up generally, and I would probably also transition away from guns with weird burst patterns built in, because they handle weird and I prefer continuous fire guns. It is a shame that it's kinda the only big game in town for major combat overhauls though.
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Apr 2, 2021 04:23
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To be honest combat in X4 is so much less of a focus it doesn't really matter. You can change that eventually but by that point, your fleet is doing the fighting for you.
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Apr 2, 2021 04:24
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I guess in some respects that is something X4 does a bit better because in X3 if you got in a fighter anywhere near a fleet engagement you would just get loving obliterated in a blink. X4 makes fighters in mass engagements a lot more survivable.
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Apr 2, 2021 04:27
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OwlFancier posted:Yes, the teladi in particular had a range of shield piercing ballistic weapons that shot actual bullets. Which I choose to believe was mostly because the teladi would obviously prefer a gun that gives them more opportunities to sell things.
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Apr 2, 2021 05:08
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I think I'm about done with this X4 run, but I'm still hungry for more. What's the best way to play X3 these days? I only ever tried the original X3: Reunion and didn't get much further than a single solar power plant and a couple of AutoTraders (TMs?). What's the best way to tackle that game these days, I have X3:Reunion, Terran Conflict, & Albion Prelude in my steam library.
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Apr 2, 2021 05:28
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The burst weapons are very odd because the burst doesn't reset if you don't fire a full burst. Weapon has a burst of six shots and I fire four but stop because the target is dead? Next time I fire it does the last two shots of that burst, no matter how much I fired.
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Apr 2, 2021 05:29
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sloppy portmanteau posted:I think I'm about done with this X4 run, but I'm still hungry for more. What's the best way to play X3 these days? I only ever tried the original X3: Reunion and didn't get much further than a single solar power plant and a couple of AutoTraders (TMs?). What's the best way to tackle that game these days, I have X3:Reunion, Terran Conflict, & Albion Prelude in my steam library. I strongly recommend the Litcube's Universe mod. There's also a Star Wars variant called SWLU. It adds a ton of automation features for your empire building needs and a big scary endgame enemy to fight once you have a big fleet.
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Apr 2, 2021 05:35
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One thing I like about VRO is the extra ship icons it adds. For instence, scouts, interceptors, and heavy fighters each have their own icon, so you can tell if it's a dinky ship that will pop when you get in range, or if it's a bigger fighter that'll pop you. Otherwise it's all the same triangle. However, there's also a bunch of other icons for the other ships which I don't seem to get, like destroyers/frigates or whatever. Some ships just get fancier icons for some reason? Kinda also floods the map with too much IMO. But yeah, don't like the shield changes, boost change, travel drive change, missile changes, and badly implemented ships with tons of clipping issues. Like, there's ships that don't cut a hole out for the S/M docks or elevators, and I have a ship whose cockpit is being clipped with the outside of the ship. It's like this poo poo was just slapped together.
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Apr 2, 2021 05:47
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Taerkar posted:The burst weapons are very odd because the burst doesn't reset if you don't fire a full burst. Yeah that's the really annoying bit, if it reloaded the burst once you stopped firing I would like it a lot better.
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Apr 2, 2021 05:51
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Uh a xenon I has shown up and it appears to be larger than the station it's attacking.  EDIT: and one of my ships was in the station but I managed to get it out safely and send it for repairs and well away. EDIT: I need to scan more stations and hack more module BPs because it looks like there's going to be some holes in the teladi economy I can plug soon. Zereth fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 07:20
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Shrimp or Shrimps posted:So if you want to speed up saving and loading times is it better to turn compression off? And if you do what are the downsides? Huge saves and increased write wear on your ssd? I highly doubt it'll help with load times. Decompressing my save (880MB of XML) takes 3.5 seconds. Save times though: Compressing with gzip takes 20 seconds (101MB) Compressing with lz4 takes 1.3 seconds (173MB) Compressing with zstd takes 2.2 seconds (93MB) So it's very tempting to turn off save compression in X4 and instead use my file preferred file system that supports transparent compression.
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Apr 2, 2021 07:39
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Polikarpov posted:I strongly recommend the Litcube's Universe mod. There's also a Star Wars variant called SWLU. It adds a ton of automation features for your empire building needs and a big scary endgame enemy to fight once you have a big fleet. Seconding this. LU is basically my ideal X3, and while you're going to be spending some time reading the wiki to understand the ton of new systems and mechanics, it's worth it. X3's arcane menu systems will seem clunky at first, but it won't be long until you can mash Shift+C-->4-->2-->3-->1 or whatever to issue commands from memory. X3 engagements are so different because of jump drives and M7Ms (missile boats that just poo poo out missiles). LU really takes advantage of this by allowing you to jump in entire fleets in specific formations, and have your combat moves progress in 'waves' with just hotkey presses and each wave can target specific things. So like I'd jump in my missile boats and spam the missiles that break apart into 12 projectiles and then spiral in (can't remember their name) to take down enemy mediums / fighters, and then once that phase is done, have them all jump out and next is second phase of missile boats coming in with heavy torps to blow up the capitals, and then they jump out and final wave is cleanup with the light destroyers and a bunch of M6s. It was honestly extremely satisfying executing an attack like that and coming away with minimal losses. It can be a bit unfair though because the enemy doesn't take advantage of jumps in the same way, but what they lack in tactical versatility they make up for by being absolute units. The biggest OCV ships can tank multiple M2s without breaking a sweat. LU also has a bunch of fleet supply and logistics automation built into it (like said missile boats returning home to resupply on missiles, and then your shipyard is resupplied from your missile factories automatically etc.). I really like X3LU. However, you can get to the point where your logistics chain is so efficient and you're making so much money that the end game 'boss' becomes fairly trivial, and is just about spamming ships at it, the most efficient being missile boats, and then it is just slowly pushing back. I got bored at that point, but LU is definitely the longest I've ever spent on a single X save and has the best 'end game'. -- Semi-related, but the mod "Rise of the Ossian Raider" adds another big bad to the X4 universe that will absolutely take sectors from the main races. It comes with a bunch of new bigger ships, too, which is good or bad depending on your preferences. Their most recent update added the SR2 from Mass Effect which I kind of don't like because while it's a cool looking and well-modeled ship, it just sticks out. In my last save, they had basically obliterated the Argon. As a second big bad paired with the Xenon, it made for a very war heavy and dangerous and less predictable universe which was fun, if anybody is looking for that. For my current playthrough which I just started (Terran Cadet), I had forgotten how much I enjoyed the early stages scrapping for cash money. Taking every destroy mine and satellite repair I can get just so I can lay down a basic satellite network in Sol system and get my first couple of traders and miners going was fun. Looking forward to being able to consistently do build defense station and build fleet missions so I can fortify terran space and their war fleets, but that's a ways off. One thing I don't really like is not being able to by rng or earn ship blueprints from other factions without the rep grind. There is a reverse engineer mod where each ship you feed it will increase the chance that you unlock the blueprint, but I've never capped a capital before and having to do it multiple times... could be an end-game goal. Shrimp or Shrimps fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 07:39
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Antigravitas posted:I highly doubt it'll help with load times. Decompressing my save (880MB of XML) takes 3.5 seconds. Do you know if the majority of the save time is being taken up by writing the XML file, or the compression itself?
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Apr 2, 2021 07:40
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Thee other really good mod for X3 is Mayhem 3. It modifies a ton of game systems to turn X3 into what you could almost call a 4x roguelike. Its all built around building your own faction and economy and has a lot of really cool systems for fleets and economic automation.
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Apr 2, 2021 07:47
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I can virtually guarantee that most of its time is spent turning game objects into XML and Egosoft may very well do the compressing in a different thread after the game has resumed. I'll have to actually test this.
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Apr 2, 2021 07:58
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So if I want to support shipbuilding in general, just make it so whoever i'm selling to is more able to build ships to fight, for example, Xenon... What kind of resources should I be producing? Besides the obvious hull plates. Advanced electronics? Weapon/Turret parts?
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Apr 2, 2021 08:06
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Antigravitas posted:I can virtually guarantee that most of its time is spent turning game objects into XML and Egosoft may very well do the compressing in a different thread after the game has resumed. I'll have to actually test this. I wish they'd move away from text-based save files and just went with binary dumps (or had that as an option) since that'd make saving so much faster. Egosoft seems to have a weird love relationship with XML though. Still can't believe X3 mods were done via XML "scripts"
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Apr 2, 2021 08:39
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Saving my game: Savegame compression on (99MB): 76.7 seconds Savegame compression off, no file system compression (882MB): 59,4 seconds Savegame compression off, zstd3 file system (119MB): 62,7 seconds I used a btrfs image sitting on a local SSD for this. So, I guess I've finally found a use for btrfs? To be honest, I think I should just write them a mail because this is some really low hanging fruit. Falcorum posted:I wish they'd move away from text-based save files and just went with binary dumps (or had that as an option) since that'd make saving so much faster. Egosoft seems to have a weird love relationship with XML though. Egosoft has said they prefer XML because it is much easier to ensure compatibility with ancient saves that way, and they have a much easier time debugging with a format that has so much established tooling already. Afaik most of the time is spent on the actual serialisation/deserialisation work, whereas parsing or writing XML is so well-trodden ground it's not meaningfully slower.
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Apr 2, 2021 13:24
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X3:R has its own mods with X-Tended being the big one. It adds Terrans and a whole lot of other stuff, including M7/M8/M0 ships, TMs (called MTSs), boarding, not-quite-ancients (in an extremely limited endgame fashion), player HQ with configurable jumpgates, more missions and other things besides. It's also AFAIK the biggest modding project there's been across the X series, and a lot of things in it inspired future features in TC/AP and later. Here's the blurb for it from moddb: X-Tended posted:The X-Tended Mod is a large addition to the existing X3:Reunion universe and is the only major mod that has been hosted by the creators of X3:Reunion, Egosoft, on their own servers. (Only 2 mods have been hosted by Egosoft in total.) Many of the ships and ideas from XTM were added to the next game by Egosoft - X3:Terran Conflict. A lot of the XTM team also worked with Egosoft in creating Terran Conflict. This mod massively expands the universe and the game itself, adding over 90 new ships, almost doubling the size of the universe, plus adding many new missions, stations, and things to find. For X3:AP there's a mod called "TC plots for AP" which adds the X3:TC missions into the game, so you can play both at once without losing progress. Probably not compatible with LU (though most of the good LU things are scripts that can be installed individually or have replacements anyway). e: added links, also I thought this trailer showing off x-tended was the coolest thing ever when I was a teen: X-Tended 0.7 trailer (seriously it's great despite the low resolution by modern standards, also the extremely flashy small ship near the end is the aforementioned pseudo-ancients - you can capture one but it takes a good few dozen M2s and boarding ships, not to mention it angers them something fierce, and you need to get through a lot of missions to even get the chance). Also note that Xtended for X3:TC is a completely different mod from X-Tended for X3:R, despite the name. It also had lofty ambitions but never got a tenth of the traction and does not share any content to the best of my knowledge. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 13:53
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Wow, wharfs... certainly print money. And here I thought Claytronics was the end all be all, goddamn.
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Apr 2, 2021 16:10
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Less Fat Luke posted:Wow, wharfs... certainly print money. And here I thought Claytronics was the end all be all, goddamn. Believe it or not, they just got nerfed this month.
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Apr 2, 2021 16:14
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Antigravitas posted:Saving my game: Even an efficient XML reader and writer - which I seriously doubt this is, because Egosoft - is going to be quite a bit slower than a decent binary format. Versioning binary data is also not especially difficult and a tools to view the data would not be hard to write. But yeah, without actually hooking up a profiler to it, it’s hard to say exactly where the slowness really is.
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Apr 2, 2021 16:25
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I have Holy Order vs Argon and Holy Order vs Paranid guild mission offers. I should only take those if I want to actually wage war with one or the other right?
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Apr 2, 2021 16:30
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RBA Starblade posted:I have Holy Order vs Argon and Holy Order vs Paranid guild mission offers. I should only take those if I want to actually wage war with one or the other right? It doesn't make a difference to your relations with any of the factions, it just lets you help out HOP as a freelancer. Edit: Well, it won't make a difference to your relations as long as you don't do the missions that involve destroying the other factions ships. But you can do all the building ones no problem.
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Apr 2, 2021 16:32
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Thom12255 posted:It doesn't make a difference to your relations with any of the factions, it just lets you help out HOP as a freelancer. Oh cool, I'll pick those up then. I'm surprised I haven't hit any X vs Xenon ones yet, tbh
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Apr 2, 2021 16:42
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Thom12255 posted:Believe it or not, they just got nerfed this month. Yeah I remember the change so I've been adding as many habitats as possible (up to 40,000 now out of 57,000 optimum). Takes forever to fill but worth it.
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Apr 2, 2021 16:52
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It's far better than it used to be, I think workforce used to grow at a flat rate but now they added details and if you build more habs they fill out faster, certainly I'm filling up factories much quicker. Also just about finished the basic structure for my HQ!  
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 17:47
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