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Thom12255
Feb 23, 2013
WHERE THE FUCK IS MY MONEY

RBA Starblade posted:

There's some nice QOL stuff in here but wow it's hard to play compared to X4

I guess I misunderstood that trailer a while ago, I thought we were going to be the Winterblossom. Instead you start as a rando lol

e: Don't alt-tab, FL doesn't like it

Also lol what does "Station Manager" do in x3

That trailer had zero relation to the game besides explaining why Farnham has a system named after him lol. Not sure why they bothered.

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Fruits of the sea
Dec 1, 2010

RBA Starblade posted:

Lol bounce isn't in the game

Nooooo




Good memories of feeling like king poo poo after repairing two lovely m5's, adding them as wingmen and then watching them kamikaze into a trading station the first time I tried to dock.

My mission to play through the X3 iterations in preparation for Farnham's got delayed after I figured out how to edit to use the editor to gently caress with spawn settings though. Hopefully someone mods bounce in soon.

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

This is pretty cool so far, you definitely feel abandoned, though it's an odd choice giving you the hq instantly essentially, I guess since you have to make the beacons yourself. (Don't sell the HQ wares right away)

e: Encountering the Paranid opens up the sandboxes btw, so pretty early on in the plot. Different starts between the two sandbox mods; one start includes 4 million and a small fleet, the other an "advanced spacesuit" only lol. There's also a Terran start with a Saber and Baldric.

e: Lol the spacesuit start puts you in an empty sector next to a Xenon one

RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 21:07 on May 4, 2021

Taerkar
Dec 7, 2002

kind of into it, really

Punch asteroid to make ship.

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

Taerkar posted:

Punch asteroid to make ship.

I wonder if there's a mod for that :v:

I don't remember how to make money without just salvaging wrecks with the salvage suite mod in X3 lmao and the guild only let me trade with them once so far

Oh nvm the Demeter you can salvage has hundreds of thousands worth of guns in it

RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 01:13 on May 5, 2021

Sky Shadowing
Feb 13, 2012

At least we're not the Thalmor (yet)
Streamer I've been watching play Farnham's Legacy, it doesn't look that amazing, the streamer wasn't having much fun and when I poked him about it he admitted he hates it so far.

Seems VERY heavy on the grind and pointless tedium.

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

Sky Shadowing posted:

Streamer I've been watching play Farnham's Legacy, it doesn't look that amazing, the streamer wasn't having much fun and when I poked him about it he admitted he hates it so far.

Seems VERY heavy on the grind and pointless tedium.

I'm enjoying it so far but the BoFu station it wants you to make seems like a colossal turd to invest in that can never recoup its losses lol, I can sell the product for maybe 380, but the primary resources, energy cells and BoGas, are 16ish and 440-460ish respectively. I did figure out that Station Manager does automatically have your ships assigned as its home base buy and sell, but it won't actually tell you when it's doing it.

RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 01:15 on May 5, 2021

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

It has been a long time since I played X3 but I think bogas produces multiple bofus per unit.

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

OwlFancier posted:

It has been a long time since I played X3 but I think bogas produces multiple bofus per unit.

I'm not sure how to read it (I've ever had one good station in X3 lmao) but I thought it was saying it makes six fu for six gas and however many cells? There's several 6s next to things

Less Fat Luke
May 23, 2003

Exciting Lemon
Is the music new? I don't recognize the tracks in the first few sectors.

Edit: Also thank goodness you can save without insurance

Double edit: No wait you just start with some insurance, haha goddamnit.

Less Fat Luke fucked around with this message at 01:44 on May 5, 2021

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

RBA Starblade posted:

I'm not sure how to read it (I've ever had one good station in X3 lmao) but I thought it was saying it makes six fu for six gas and however many cells? There's several 6s next to things

They might have changed it, I just have a vague memory of bofu having a slightly odd production chain where you make a valuable thing into several less valuable things.

buglord
Jul 31, 2010

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Buglord
Can someone explain why I can稚 produce bofas? Seems easy enough to acquire 2, but others take a lot more time.

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

I'm dumb and was confusing volume for amounts required/made lmao, so that explains the station issues

How often am I supposed to be seeing the explorer's guild? I've seen them once to get 100k credits from them.

RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 14:59 on May 5, 2021

buglord
Jul 31, 2010

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Buglord
Like X3, I think X4 is going to cause me to burn out because 70% of this game feels like I知 traveling from 1 point to another and looking at my phone in the mean time. Does the SETA module work in conjunction with travel mode?

Ice Fist
Jun 20, 2012

^^ Please send feedback to beefstache911@hotmail.com, this is not a joke that 'stache is the real deal. Serious assessments only. ^^

buglord posted:

Like X3, I think X4 is going to cause me to burn out because 70% of this game feels like I知 traveling from 1 point to another and looking at my phone in the mean time. Does the SETA module work in conjunction with travel mode?

No. You can only have one ship mode active at any one time. This precludes using SETA and Travel together.

Get teleportation. Send small/fast travel ships to places you're likely to go or to your destination ahead of time and teleport to them as needed.

Sky Shadowing
Feb 13, 2012

At least we're not the Thalmor (yet)
X4 as of late has very much been an idle sort of game for me, alt-tabbed in the background (there are commands you can put in the command line to make it run at full resources and have sound) as I work on other things.

I'm trying to figure out how to print money, a wharf is profitable (now that I've installed the mod that makes it so they are 100% profitable when making ships for an NPC faction, not 30%... Egosoft seems very keen on nerfing things to drag out the G R I N D) but I want MORE.

MORE.

M O A R.

Ice Fist posted:

Get teleportation. Send small/fast travel ships to places you're likely to go or to your destination ahead of time and teleport to them as needed.

Really need to send a small ship to every faction representative location, just so I can teleport freely between them.

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

I thought for a while The Void in FL and X4 weren't the same thing but I'm pretty sure they actually are now despite the Boron around lol

e: I was wondering about why it doesn't happen in X4 and lol you can be boarded in FL, based on the cheevos

RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 17:19 on May 5, 2021

buglord
Jul 31, 2010

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Buglord
What QoL mods do you guys use? I知 not rich enough to own a warf yet but I値l likely be installing the warf mod to get more profit.

Sky Shadowing
Feb 13, 2012

At least we're not the Thalmor (yet)

buglord posted:

What QoL mods do you guys use? I知 not rich enough to own a warf yet but I値l likely be installing the warf mod to get more profit.

Station mules and such (haven't set up any warehouses yet but much easier to make my wharf get its hull parts from my hull parts factories), the wharf 100% profitability one, one that makes crystals spawn at their launch rates (currently purple crystals are overwhelmingly common and when you mine any crystal that isn't purple it prevents non-purples from spawning for a time), and one that makes asteroids with crystals glow a lot brighter.

Some others like sector satellites, an automated exploration mod...

Wish there was a mod to let me put different logos on different ships, so I can put one logo on my "security forces" and another on my "economic division" (miners, traders).

Richard Bong
Dec 11, 2008

buglord posted:

What QoL mods do you guys use? I知 not rich enough to own a warf yet but I値l likely be installing the warf mod to get more profit.

faster crew leveling the base crew leveling is glacial and I hate it.

unskilled auto trade having it locked behind a grind wall is annoying.

Apologize for attack - for when my turrets miss.

Mules, supply, and warehouses extended - are a must.

Sector satellites - gets around some annoyances with the resource probes and finding stations/gates. I致e never used the interdiction or hostile probes though.

Universal defense bounty - some incentives to play space police vs khak and xenon

1 min module build time - stations still take a good amount of time, but I can finish one in a play session now.

I also play with Star Wars interworlds but that痴 not for everyone. It changes all the ships and factions to Star Wars stuff and rebalances the entire game economy and combat.

Rakeris
Jul 20, 2014

Wharf profitablity mod? What is that?


Sky Shadowing posted:

X4 as of late has very much been an idle sort of game for me, alt-tabbed in the background (there are commands you can put in the command line to make it run at full resources and have sound) as I work on other things.

I guess this isn't necessary a down side for me, I enjoy being able to do that at times and if I want to pay 100% attention I can.

Rakeris fucked around with this message at 01:22 on May 6, 2021

frogge
Apr 7, 2006


I picked up this game on a lark earlier this week and I already have three small ships doing trade. Is it better to have one or two big trade ships or a good fleet of small trade ships? My goal is to eventually build some sort of trade station, but to be honest I'm still pretty new and I'm figuring it out as I go.

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

So as a tip don't even bother doing empire stuff in FL until you end the plot, it's just to move you along

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

frogge posted:

I picked up this game on a lark earlier this week and I already have three small ships doing trade. Is it better to have one or two big trade ships or a good fleet of small trade ships? My goal is to eventually build some sort of trade station, but to be honest I'm still pretty new and I'm figuring it out as I go.

Free trading ships are... well in all honesty I have never been able to get them to make a lot of money either way. I would suggest not going too much on trade ships until you have something to produce and sell. A better investment is probably mining ships to mine ore, silicon, or gases and sell it to stations which need it, as that essentially directly converts your ships working time into money without much conditionality, as minerals always have some value. You can also try to mine nividium but it is harder to find and only sells in small amounts at trade stations due to having no industrial use, so you will likely tap that market quite quickly. If you are making money with your trade ships that's good but I would definitely suggest trying miners for future purchases and see if you do better with them. You can repurpose any miners or traders you buy to work for stations once you build them.

As to whether to go large or small, to an extent that is a complex question because there are a few considerations, large ships can sell larger loads at high prices (as a station is better stocked the price it will pay for goods goes down, but you always pay the unit price when you sell, so selling 2000 units in 4 loads of 500 will cause the price to be lower for each delivery, whereas selling all 2000 at once will allow you to get the initial higher price for all of it) but this is contingent on there being large sales to make, which there aren't always. And large ships are generally slower and more unwieldy to traverse the gate network so you don't want to use them if there are only small sales to make. On the other hand large ships are a combination of more and less survivable, they can shrug off small attackers with their raw shield and turret power, but they are very susceptible to being destroyed by large enemy ships because they are slow and can't get away, also they are a big loss if they get destroyed so they are generally best suited for mining/trading in relatively safe areas where the main threats are pirates and khaak raiders. Anything that takes you near a xenon incursion route should probably use smaller ships because they can use the highway loop and accelerate quickly out of gates.

As a general rule I buy a few M miners early on and set them in grand exchange to mine for the stations there, then I transition to setting up some refined metal/hull parts factories which the miners then go on to supply, I then try to transition to L miners (because they can fend off khaak raiders which specifically target mining ships) and I usually use swarms of cheap courier craft or M traders to trade for stations. If they get blown up it doesn't matter too much and they can capitalise on trade offers quickly across a wide number of sectors. And if some of them end up doing dumb poo poo because of the manager AI then that also doesn't matter so much because there are enough of them that the setup works on aggregate.

Another viable option in the latest update (and possibly depending on what expansions you have) might be an energy cell factory which I think you start with all the blueprints for. It produces energy cells out of nothing and people will come buy them or you can sell them via traders. It's not a huge amount of money but it's there and you can add more modules onto it later, as all other production modules need energy cells to operate. And this also helps feed into the labour theory of value model the game has going, produce the energy cells yourself and use them in your own production processes and you are essentially converting them to a more valuable form. This approach becomes very obvious once you get into the station building side of things.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:01 on May 6, 2021

Sky Shadowing
Feb 13, 2012

At least we're not the Thalmor (yet)

Rakeris posted:

Wharf profitablity mod? What is that

Apparently egosoft made it so that when a faction buys a ship from your wharf, they only pay you 30 percent of the price.

The way around that is either selling the ships yourself, building them then selling them at a wharf, or a mod I can't link since I'm on mobile but is on Nexus that makes them pay full price.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

I will say that once I got a wharf set up and some blueprints it still prints money, just the ability to convert all your production directly into cash I think supercedes that they don't really add value.

Basically at a certain point I think the bottleneck ends up being ship production rates, so being able to produce them yourself and throw large amounts of resources into that really makes it a money printer rather than trying to get all the factions supplied, you can just set up ship production facilities and churn out ships for them all in one place. To say nothing obviously of being able to produce ships for your own use for basically free.

I never had one before this version but I don't think I would want to buff it given how powerful it already seems to be.

Ice Fist
Jun 20, 2012

^^ Please send feedback to beefstache911@hotmail.com, this is not a joke that 'stache is the real deal. Serious assessments only. ^^

I just set up a wharf in Jupiter selling only to TER and PIO. I've gotten almost no orders from the AI for S/M ships. Either they don't need anything, which is possible considering I've been supplying the Terran economy for a while now with boatloads of silicon carbide and computronic substrate and it would appear that the Terrans are an absolute juggernaut and if they were so inclined could murder the rest of the galaxy with ease except they don't appear to be at war with anyone and are content to just chill with 50-60 destroyers in Savage Spur gate camping the Xenon that come in there. Or they just don't feel the need to buy from me.

I had momentarily considered building and selling the ships directly, but that seemed to be alot of clicking and I was preferring the AI to automatically hand me their money.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

The terrans have a really simple economy but need huge amounts of raw resources, so if you feed them that they will do really well yeah. Also they don't have any real enemies at the start so they tend to hit their fleet cap and just sit there, whereas the other factions have a bunch of wars they're in against the xenon and the HOP and stuff.

They sometimes buy from me but I think it is mostly just because they don't lose any ships because they are in such a strong location.

Ice Fist
Jun 20, 2012

^^ Please send feedback to beefstache911@hotmail.com, this is not a joke that 'stache is the real deal. Serious assessments only. ^^

Yeah I'm definitely kicking off the Argon v Terran war just for shits and giggles. I want to unleash this juggernaught I've created. Then I think I'll finish my work with the Paranids and unite them and watch as chaos reigns. Maybe a massive paranid vs terran war to see how this all wraps up.

Ugh, X4 - you're so frustrating yet everytime I think I'm done with the game I want to do just one more thing and I keep going.

Ardryn
Oct 27, 2007

Rolling around at the speed of sound.


Ice Fist posted:

Yeah I'm definitely kicking off the Argon v Terran war just for shits and giggles. I want to unleash this juggernaught I've created. Then I think I'll finish my work with the Paranids and unite them and watch as chaos reigns. Maybe a massive paranid vs terran war to see how this all wraps up.

Ugh, X4 - you're so frustrating yet everytime I think I'm done with the game I want to do just one more thing and I keep going.

I honestly wish, and haven't found, a mod that just let you trigger those end state wars and mergers, because I tend to restart a lot when I stop playing for a while and I don't really want to go through the entire storyline again. I know there's at least a mod in my list that lets me influence a faction diplomacy if I get up to allied.

frogge
Apr 7, 2006


Thanks owlfancier for that. That makes sense. I have three small trade ships just roaming between stations trading, one miner doing it's thing and going to a station to sell off the ores.
If I'm not mistaken- once any of the crew hit level three I can set them to auto trade and I won't have to manually set each trade? Or is it just the pilot?

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

The pilot. Which is another mark against free traders because it can take a bit of effort to get level 3 pilots, you will likely have to use a couple of seminars to make them. Pilot leveling rates are very slow (a lot of people like to use mods to accelerate this)

You can get around that limitation by using stations, as station trade range is affected by the manager of the station and managers get XP I think based on how much money passes through their station, like how much poo poo their station sells etc. Either way a large station will train managers quite easily up to level 5, and it doesn't really matter if the pilots die. You can set up trade stations if you want to but I think there is generally enough NPC trader traffic to handle most distribution, and if you make your own stuff they are better served selling directly so that you can get the best price (as you can sell at other station's buy prices rather than having to put up your own lowest price for NPCs to buy from you)

There are also alternative trading scripts you can get such as the station mule scripts which allow you to set ships to work over much wider ranges and a bit more intelligently, the basic AI is a little dumb and kind of relies on having quite a few ships to sort of work on average even if individual ships derp out.

frogge
Apr 7, 2006


Interesting. So far I haven't put in any mods while I figure out the base game. I think as soon as I can I'll start to build more miners and go that route. I don't think I need to get rid of any of my small freighters. They're doing a good job of making cash on the side while I start to build up a fleet of miners then maybe build a fighter for me to go tooling around in while my shifty trade empire builds.

frogge fucked around with this message at 06:26 on May 6, 2021

ZombyDog
Jul 11, 2001

Ere to fix yer gubbinz
I'll put hand up and say that while I have the 1 star Autotrader mod installed, I never use Auto traders. I transition from running sector autominers ( using repeat orders if the resources and refineries are in different sectors ) to my own refineries and warehouses, and I let my station managers deal with the trading.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

frogge posted:

Interesting. So far I haven't put in any mods while I figure out the base game. I think as soon as I can I'll start to build more miners and go that route. I don't think I need to get rid of any of my small freighters. They're doing a good job of making cash on the side while I start to build up a fleet of miners then maybe build a fighter for me to go tooling around in while my shifty trade empire builds.

You don't need to get rid of them no, especially not if they're working out for you and you can always retask them later, I only caution against the X3 approach of just buying traders because X4 makes real production much easier to get into and also much more central to the economy of the game, traders will likely have diminishing returns quite quickly and are difficult to set up en masse.

Ice Fist
Jun 20, 2012

^^ Please send feedback to beefstache911@hotmail.com, this is not a joke that 'stache is the real deal. Serious assessments only. ^^

To put it in perspective how long the pilot leveling is in the vanilla version of this game: I'm several days worth of game time in, I've made like 16 billion total worth of trades, have 23 stations, probably 200ish miners, 250ish fighters, a smattering of destroyers, a couple of carriers, had one of my fleets permanently gatecamping a xenon sector where they kill hundreds of xenon and I still haven't naturally produced a single 3 star pilot. It's very clearly an exponential curve where going from 0-2 is quick, but once a pilot hits 2 stars their xp gains per action absolutely plummet. I have a whole crap load of pilots with 2 3/4ths stars, but not a single one of the pilots I've hired, some of whom have been working for me since the very start of the game, has reached 3 stars on their own. My only two pilots that are 3 stars or over are the free pilot you get from the HQ plot who is exactly 3 stars and the dude from the yaki who is 4.8ish stars.

This is of course loving ridiculous. They *really* want you to collect seminars. But it's unbelievable that through repetitive action these people can't master on their own.

The same is not true for managers. Managers level up very quickly. I have a whole crap load of 4.8ish star managers.

Edit: one more thing to add - because of how good stations are I haven't felt the need to level my guys up that much. Because managers can get really good on their own, and the managers skill extends to the pilots they control in terms of orders, your stations will do a lot of hard work for you.

So if you really wanted to get trading going in vanilla without interacting with the monumentally stupid restrictions that have been placed on pilot leveling you could create a trading station, pick the wares you want to buy and sell, set the prices manually, and assign a bunch of traders to it and they'll probably hit 5 jumps for trade searches really quick.

Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 15:03 on May 6, 2021

Valhawk
Dec 15, 2007

EXCEED CHARGE
So the thing about XP gains is that they work very counter-intuatively. It's basically a flat payout every time they complete an order. So things like Explore where it's one long order don't pay out much XP. So if you want to grind XP (outside of just doing combat) you need commands that give lots of little orders. Hilariously, the Trade Subscription Explorer mod is unintentionally great for grinding pilots from 2-5 relatively quickly because of how its structured that each station visit is a separate order.

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

I'm pretty sure Station Manager in FL either doesn't sell wares or sells wares for zero credits. Don't use it, just sell the ware with Sell Wares to specific factories instead. Everywhere in the region wants this BoFu for 80 more credits than the manager thinks it can sell for and won't send any ships to do it, and the two times it did, I received no credits in my or the station's account.

e: Also just checked the empire trade report Bofu is in fact selling for half as much as it costs to buy the materials for it, lol

e: Oh figured it out, the auto price adjuster is bugged not the SM. It'll keep creeping down then crater once the goods leave, keep it turned off

RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 19:26 on May 6, 2021

frogge
Apr 7, 2006


Just built my third M miner ship and yeah this makes money a lot faster than three S freighters doing trades all around what I've explored so far. I suppose at some point I'll want to start making fighters to deal with xenons and pirates.

Edit: that is insane how pilot leveling works. At least with mining I can build and forget and generate passive income for now.

frogge fucked around with this message at 20:43 on May 6, 2021

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Rakeris
Jul 20, 2014

Yeah one of the first mods I downloaded was a pilot leveling one, as it's just really dumb how it work imo.

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