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FrickenMoron posted:The problem with all of this stuff is, that weapons ultimately have a short range and OOS damage is only applied every so often so very fast ships can just zoom past any damage calculations. That’s how I blockade run in bigger ships, from OOS.
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# ? Dec 17, 2021 14:05 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 05:10 |
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Also beam suck rear end. Garbage weapon.
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# ? Dec 17, 2021 21:06 |
Beams look cool, though.
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# ? Dec 18, 2021 10:35 |
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Beams are good, actually, if you can get enough of them to zap a fighter per volley. Other turrets have an atrocious hit rate until a fighter turns wrong, beams don't waste that time.
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# ? Dec 18, 2021 16:12 |
More beams look more cool.
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# ? Dec 18, 2021 20:52 |
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I have a solar power plant in mercury, how do I start making silly bank from this?
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# ? Dec 21, 2021 12:13 |
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TescoBag posted:I have a solar power plant in mercury, how do I start making silly bank from this? You don't. The returns from selling energy production on the market are super bad. Solar power plants are best used so that you don't need to buy energy cells for your production factories.
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# ? Dec 21, 2021 15:17 |
TescoBag posted:I have a solar power plant in mercury, how do I start making silly bank from this? You don't but don't worry, it's certainly not a waste. It'll save you a ton of money and time in the long run as you expand this station. At this point just get more sector miners around the universe and slowly expand your station. Idk about Terran space but hull parts are usually pretty decent.
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# ? Dec 21, 2021 15:42 |
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Mercury is pretty bad for a full size production facility imo if only because it's pretty far from the the major local sources of ore (The Asteroid Belt and the Oort Cloud). I *did* build a very large power plant there though and eventually it was supplying my major production which was in Jupiter. That's far enough away though that I had to setup a warehouse station in Mars as a halfway point. Ships assigned to the power plant would deliver to the warehouse and then traders assigned to the production facilities would go and grab any energy cells there. It wasn't the most efficient setup, but it worked.
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# ? Dec 21, 2021 16:09 |
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If you set up a production in Mars you'll be fine. Just make a rule to buy wares only from your faction and apply it to the ecells required there. But yes, E-Cells dont make money and its a market that gets oversatured quickly. The best way to make money with them initially is having one in brennans triumph that can supply all the energy starved terran sectors. This will make profit for a few ingame days before the market gets saturated and the price drops.
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# ? Dec 21, 2021 16:53 |
Ice Fist posted:You don't. The returns from selling energy production on the market are super bad. EDIT: which means NPC ones never stall out, which probably has something to do with the market getting easily flooded. Zereth fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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# ? Dec 21, 2021 17:36 |
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Ecells can sell decently since a couple of updates ago, but yeah they are not a very valuable ware so they will never make that much compared to a diverse factory. I built a giant solar facility near the segaris/outer sol gate though, because that is literally the only power source closest to the whole outer sol system, it doesn't have as good output as mercury but it is supplying half the terran sectors, and I expanded it into a shipyard. It doesn't fill up but it does sell at near rock bottom prices so it's more that I am deliberately undercutting the other producers in the hopes of eventually creating a monopoly. Because again this is space capitalism simulator lol.
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# ? Dec 21, 2021 17:44 |
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My Mercury and Segaris facilities have infinite ecells and together make 1.5 mil with the cells I don't use every time I look at the accounts screen lol
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# ? Dec 21, 2021 17:46 |
The other posters are all correct, just don't get discouraged. I did the same thing back in X3 where they're also not very profitable and thought I messed up and wasted a ton of time, but it turned out fine. I start literally every factory nowadays with a energy production module just so I'm never short on energy despite it being cheap. If you want you can add some base material production to it also like silicone wafers and refined metals, then go from there. If it takes you a long time to come up with several million, just buy a new sector miner every time you hit 400k until you make it fast enough that you can really develop your stations quickly. Grand exchange, where your PHQ is, is a great start for mining silicon (make sure you put satellites near buyers). http://www.x4-game.com/#/station-calculator Make sure you use this tool
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# ? Dec 21, 2021 17:48 |
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An ecell facility is a nice first station. A Low initial investment can net you around a mil/hr. It also helps prop up wherever you decide to throw it down.
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# ? Dec 21, 2021 19:05 |
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One option for a mecury ecell facility would be to set up some small warehouses throughout the sol sectors and set up shipping routes to move ecells from mercury to those stations, then use them as distribution points. Particularly areas that are a couple of jumps away from a viable ecell production point could do OK with very little setup cost, just a storage module and a dock (and a pier if you want to use big ships to move the cells there) They would also be potentially useful points for expansion of other production facilities if you felt like it too.
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# ? Dec 22, 2021 08:32 |
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Never forget that greasing NPC factories that may have to pause due to ecell shortage means you can sell more stuff. You generally want all factories to never stop producing so you can sell them wares and so their outputs fill up so you can buy cheap wares.
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# ? Dec 22, 2021 10:19 |
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As someone whose never played any of the previous X games, how the hell am I meant to play this game? This thing feels so drat dense and between the hostile UI & groggy tutorials I'm just completely outta my depth... I tried doing some quests but eventually got 1 shot by some random alien guy demanding I empty my pockets once I tried to go to a quest spot another time I road around a galactic highway for a bit only to eventually meet this same fate once I got off said highway. I'm just lost man, and the ship I seem to start off with seems to be dogshit as well so I'm truly lost as to how I'm meant to get off the ground, and really what I'm even meant to do to achieve that liftoff. I'm trying to play/view this as a 3d version of starsector but maybe that's where I'm going wrong? Are there any good youtube LP's or whatever that dumb down the game enough to be made palatable to someone who hasn't played this series before?
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# ? Dec 23, 2021 12:07 |
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https://www.youtube.com/c/JKNinja/videos This channel has some good no nonsense videos about the game. I dont know which start you picked but you have something in your cargo bay that pirates want. If you can get rid of that they wont really bother you at all. I don't know if you have any of the DLCs but imo just take it easy and fly around, explore a bit. If you find something interesting like "how do mine" etc. look it up and ask either here, on their discord or look for yt guides. The first and foremost thing you need to get to grips with is just how the universe works and what you actually want to do. As for how to get started: There's imo 3 ways to get off the ground. 1.) and the most boring one: Crystals. In Asteroid rich systems stare reaaaally hard at the rocks and if theres a white sparkle theres a crystal on them which you can shoot and then collect to sell for moneys. Incredibly boring imo and not recommended from me. 2.) Missions If you fly past stations you sometimes can hear a high pitched noise on the map, that means theres a mission offered at the station. They will have icons on the map. If you go into the "mission offers" tab on the map you can see what they have available. Here's some missions you can always easily do with any ship: -Destroy criminal traffic / destroy mines - open lockbox - Transport person from one place to another - repair satellites / data leaks Give em a try, this will get you more used to other game systems. You can also receive missions from data leaks but they usually involve killing someone or hacking station panels 3.) Loot from War. The game starts off with several factions being at war. knowing which ones helps a lot because they will start to throw fleets at each other in their bordering systems. You can profit from this by looting the items left behind by the battles. A good and easy to find system for this is "Second Contact II" where ARG and HOP duke it out usually. Good luck and feel free to ask any questions. FrickenMoron fucked around with this message at 12:45 on Dec 23, 2021 |
# ? Dec 23, 2021 12:22 |
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Captain Collins on Youtube does quite a few X4 videos to cover a lot of the core concepts. Here's an older one that's pre Cradle of Humanity DLC that helped me get started ( and if you don't have CoH is still relevant ). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCXy9gQGp1Y I'm a serial game restarter and generally lose interest in a game when you get to the point that you're building up to become your own serious faction, and what I don't recommend is trying to rush into the plot missions as soon as they are presented to you - almost all of them require a bit of time pottering about building your wallet, having a much better equipped ship than what you've started with and positive faction standings with most the other factions you encounter beforehand. The Cradle of Humanity Terran Cadet start is probably the most generous in setting you on your way, with fairly quick access to a decent Corvette ( Katana ) and then Destroyer ( Syn ) - but there will be some really tough fights if you haven't taken a breather between plot missions to gain standings, build your war chest and invest in some upgrades. There are a few of the plotlines that are designed to get you into building stations and industry but you'll need to have a bit of capital before you can actually get into them. Every one has their own method of getting the ball rolling and invariably for me it means finding systems that fairly rich in crystals until I have several million credits, while also grinding standings with most factions by shooting criminals at stations so I can dock, then use AI miners to further build up standing so I can eventually buy and equip a Corvette ( but if you're doing the Terran Cadet Start you can have one given to you as dilemma I prefer the Katana over the prototype Yaki fighter you can choose to keep instead ). A lot of X grognards are anti making it too easy to get started with Crystal mining, preferring the slower grinding by mining and running easier transport missions but I can't get into the whole space rock sucker / trucker gameplay as it's just too tedious for me. Getting your own AI mining fleet does give a reasonable passive income early on but the newer Khaak mechanics make it a bit more risky than it used to be. On the topic of crystal mining being boring, it is going to depend on your luck in ferreting out the higher value ones and ignoring lower value ones, and I will put my hand up and say I do use the Crystal Rarities mod to improve my chances of success, but if you want to run an unmodded game then it's going to be a lot grindier and a lot less interesting. ZombyDog fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Dec 23, 2021 |
# ? Dec 23, 2021 12:55 |
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War loot is so much quicker and easier money than crystals will ever be but it requires more confidence in what you're doing because youll pick up items in areas where lots of people/ships get shot to pieces. I personally cant stand crystals cause its squinting really hard at stuff and my eyes are bad.
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# ? Dec 23, 2021 12:58 |
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FrickenMoron posted:War loot is so much quicker and easier money than crystals will ever be but it requires more confidence in what you're doing because youll pick up items in areas where lots of people/ships get shot to pieces. I personally cant stand crystals cause its squinting really hard at stuff and my eyes are bad. To be honest I'd be fine with just this mod just because of the crystal colour coding and glow, but to hell with respawn timers imo. But you are right in that you can make mad bank with some of the higher value drops from looting a battlefield.
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# ? Dec 23, 2021 13:06 |
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FrickenMoron posted:War loot is so much quicker and easier money than crystals will ever be but it requires more confidence in what you're doing because youll pick up items in areas where lots of people/ships get shot to pieces. I personally cant stand crystals cause its squinting really hard at stuff and my eyes are bad. War loot has worked out twice for me without any issues. Choose allied/neutral warzones (non Xenon fronts), buy a couple of min preset scouts with pilot and a couple of advanced sats. Deploy sats, order scouts "collect drops" on repeat and mind your own business. Every now and then order the ships to a station, talk to pilot, gimme all your poo poo, get back to lootin'. Theoretically your scout could get hit by a volley of hot plasma, but the chances are quite remote.
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# ? Dec 23, 2021 13:35 |
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madfury posted:Theoretically your scout could get hit by a volley of hot plasma, but the chances are quite remote. Additionally: - Make sure the response to attack is "flee" for that ship - Complying or Escaping from police interdiction is an explicit choice to be made-- the former means it'll drop and destroy any "illegal" pickups, the latter means it'll run and keep the cargo (but you temporarily lose faction rep with the cops) (this is a moot point if you own the sector you're looting in) - If you use anything beefier and mid-sized at any point, make sure the turrets are explicitly disabled - There's value in clogging up their ship inventory with some cheap resource like energy cells-- if you're too close to a station that gets hacked by a pirate faction and your ship collects loot from it, you'll lose faction rep and probably instantly lose your ship to station turrets e: also worth noting is that you can basically do this for "free" at any place where it's factions you're not hostile with vs. each other, but squatting on xen combat locations means if your scoutship has the bad luck to be the first thing a K or I sees when it drops in, it'll probably be vaporized and you'll get a "we're taking serious damage" warning popping up with a view of an already-destroyed wreck of a cockpit Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Dec 23, 2021 |
# ? Dec 23, 2021 13:58 |
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X4's on sale on Steam - is it a decent buy for $30 Tim Horton's Canadian Tire monies? Is it a better game than, say, X3:Albion Prelude?
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# ? Dec 23, 2021 22:14 |
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Better? That’s hard to say. It’s different, to the point where I’d say it’s another take altogether on the same subject. Having said that, if you’ve spent more than 40 hours in X:AP, don’t think, just get it.
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# ? Dec 23, 2021 22:54 |
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Dr. Honked posted:X4's on sale on Steam - is it a decent buy for $30 Tim Horton's Canadian Tire monies? Is it a better game than, say, X3:Albion Prelude? yeah, definitely. people will quibble over the details but no serious person would say otherwise if nothing else, x4 is way more stable in moddability. at one point with x3 I had so many extensions that the game would just crash on the hour every hour on the dot. but even overall its an order of magnitude improvement
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# ? Dec 23, 2021 22:55 |
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Hell yeah I'm in. See you in space, commandos
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# ? Dec 23, 2021 23:17 |
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yeah i find x4 amazingly good, and the star wars mod is like, wowza good too.
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# ? Dec 23, 2021 23:38 |
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So what do all the various software modules do? And should I upgrade to the police scanner vs the basic one or buy the trading module/docking module? I wish there were more detailed descriptions of these and googling it brings up results from previous games or unclear answers... doing the terran cadet start and upgrading my basic ship before advancing the main story so just curious if I need these things or not.
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# ? Dec 25, 2021 15:12 |
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Docking Computer 1 vs 2 determines how close you have to get to the docking pad before it autolands you. The police scanner allows you to scan ships I think the Trading Module allows you to buy/sell things remotely.
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# ? Dec 25, 2021 15:18 |
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I wish more stuff was tied to software instead of crew, even with mods it's a tedious system
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# ? Dec 25, 2021 15:25 |
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Speaking of crew should I be hiring them in this ship? Or do they only really function in AI controlled vehicles?
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# ? Dec 25, 2021 15:36 |
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Taerkar posted:Docking Computer 1 vs 2 determines how close you have to get to the docking pad before it autolands you. Specifically, if you have no docking computer you have to align the ship in the center and correct rotation of the pad. If you have DC1 you only have to do part of that, if you have 2 you can just get near the pad and it will stick you to it.
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# ? Dec 25, 2021 16:16 |
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OoohU posted:Speaking of crew should I be hiring them in this ship? Or do they only really function in AI controlled vehicles? Service crew do repairs over time, marines are used for boarding/fending off boarding (the latter of which I've never seen initiated by NPCs, ever) most of the time "just the pilot" is fine, especially early game when you're scraping credits
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# ? Dec 25, 2021 16:43 |
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Iirc crew skill also has an impact on the effectiveness of the ship's turrets The ai will never board, it's a player specific thing. Farnham's Legacy added some ai boarders though Did they ever fix that game btw
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# ? Dec 25, 2021 17:09 |
People online say that AI mining ships benefit from crew but I don't know if that's just talk
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# ? Dec 25, 2021 17:15 |
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RBA Starblade posted:Iirc crew skill also has an impact on the effectiveness of the ship's turrets Yeah the main author released another patch a few weeks ago with a lot of fixes, even I had submitted several bugs and all were fixed.
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# ? Dec 25, 2021 17:55 |
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a7m2 posted:People online say that AI mining ships benefit from crew but I don't know if that's just talk Service crew absolutey affect the ships in a minor but noticeable way. They become more maneuverable and faster and tasks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW7UOMdDbJg
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# ? Dec 25, 2021 18:27 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 05:10 |
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Less Fat Luke posted:Yeah the main author released another patch a few weeks ago with a lot of fixes, even I had submitted several bugs and all were fixed. Cool, the main plot was fun but in my game the larger universe was totally dead lol, the economy wasn't working at all, more than usual for X3. It's really hard to go back now lol
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# ? Dec 25, 2021 18:43 |