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Yeah I'll try and write one, gimme a sec. OK, so, I guess first off, all the guns are just... their own thing. Before you buy one you want to look at the ingame stats for the gun. They're fairly intuitive in that the gun looking guns shoot bullets, plasma is usually slow and powerful, lasers and beams are good for fast targets, bomb launchers fire... bombs... you get the idea. But you will ultimately just want to have a look at the guns you can install and figure out what you like. If you know previous X games that helps too as they inhert the names for some of them. Also there are "high power" guns which can only be mounted in some weapon slots, so even a ship with few mounts might be able to mount better guns so you want to look for what tags the slot can hold when buying a ship. This variet is part of the appeal, there are lots of choices of loadout and you get to fight against and play with all of them. Second, all the ships have different roles. Scouts are actually scouts, they have a boosted radar range and high mobility. Interceptors are fast and seem to use few, but high powered guns. Fighters are generalists and come in heavy variants, often mixed loadouts and many guns/shields. M ships are split between gunships and corvettes, gunships have special anti capital bomb launchers, corvettes are just medium sized craft with medium guns and some turrets, the old frigate models are now a type of corvette. Frigates are now a large craft, but generally using lots of medium turrets rather than large turrets. Basically good for point defence but not necessarily good at blowing up capitals. There's also a couple of weird specialist ships in there too. Destroyers are generalist ships, big turrets but not piles of them, frontal batteries etc. Capitals are split between carriers and battleships, carriers are carriers, battleships are dediated long range bombardment ships with lots of L turrets. All ships have an internal shield generator and shields generally have no recharge delay, the internal generator means some ships are just beefier than others independent of their actual shield module count. Again look at the stats of things before you attack/buy them. Generally big ships and big guns have very long range and do a lot of damage, and they are necessary to overcome powerful shield generators. This is offset by the presence of weapons which can penetrate shields and allow you to disable the components of large ships with smaller craft. Also missiles are heavily overhauled and can be extremely powerful, much like they were in X3, so things like torpedo bombers are an option. Really I think the easiest way to pick it up is just install it and start a game and watch other ships fight using the livestream and F3, you will see the kind of ranges and power levels involved as well as the limitations of the various weapons. The weapons have descriptions in the ingame encyclopedia and you can see rates of fire, projectile speeds, shield penetration effects etc. You can also just try different loadouts when you have some money, just swap them in the equipment dock, see what you like the feel of. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 22:20
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Dude that was perfect and very helpful, thanks a bunch. Looks I'm restarting again..
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Apr 28, 2023 22:40
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So I need some help figuring out how to station because I'm still a bit lost even after watching a 26 minute YouTube video. I set up a refined metal factory with energy cells, refinery, and a L storage/container for each. I have a fleet of miners operating in the sector and put two M assigned to the station along with two M dolphin traders in another squad. I want the two miners to fill the ore storage, energy cells to fill themselves (working), and my traders to sell the refined metal (working). My problem began when I noticed my manager putting in buy/sell orders for energy cells and ore. I couldn't find how to stop that from happening so I just set the buy price and the number to buy to minimum. I also didn't want them to sell the ore and energy cells so I set the sell price to max and told them to sell nothing (sell all except set to the max it holds). I left the refined metal at auto sell/price and that seems to keep my M traders chugging along ok, although it took me a bit to realize the profits are deposited into the station instead of my wallet lol. However now it seems that my ore traders assigned to the station won't unload ore because I ran out. I set the buy/store amount to like 10k with the price at minimum... but now my other miners in the sector are dumping their cargo there instead of selling it. So how do I set this up so that the miners assigned to the station fill the hold, the station manager doesn't sell the raw materials, and my other miners in the sector don't dump their ore at the station? I'm still not super rich so I don't want to lose my mining income stream entirely while I'm setting up production. My Google is failing me and I'm going cross-eyed trying to get these menus/settings straight. Also, is there a way to have profits from the station automatically deposit to my main account, preferably while leaving the minimum in for operating expenses? Finally, what exactly does a pier offer? I built my station with just a dock and it kept warning me I didn't have a pier. Is that only something to worry about when I start investing in large ships? My M ships seem to be doing OK there, ore-depositing problems notwithstanding. Thanks for any help because good lord is this confusing.
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Apr 28, 2023 22:52
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It doesn't really help I feel because ultimately you do just have to loving read everything. There's gonna be a learning curve remembering what all the guns do. But ultimately even if a gun isn't perfect it should still work. A lot of it is just playing with it enough to get a feel for it. It will feel very different but shouldn't be so much so that you can't get a foot in the door. Just be careful engaging things that are bigger than you, size matters quite a lot in VRO because bigger ships have bigger shields, and shields regenerate all the time, so your raw firepower needs to be a certain level in order to be able to effectively damage bigger ships. Either you need specialist weapons for taking on bigger targets or you need numbers.
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Apr 28, 2023 22:57
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Hakarne posted:My problem began when I noticed my manager putting in buy/sell orders for energy cells and ore. I couldn't find how to stop that from happening so I just set the buy price and the number to buy to minimum. I also didn't want them to sell the ore and energy cells so I set the sell price to max and told them to sell nothing (sell all except set to the max it holds). I left the refined metal at auto sell/price and that seems to keep my M traders chugging along ok, although it took me a bit to realize the profits are deposited into the station instead of my wallet lol. However now it seems that my ore traders assigned to the station won't unload ore because I ran out. I set the buy/store amount to like 10k with the price at minimum... but now my other miners in the sector are dumping their cargo there instead of selling it. You want the "global orders" page located here:  You can use this to set trade rules which your stations will follow, such as:  Which you can then set as the rule for a ware on your station in the logical overview where you set prices and such. This will cause them only to accept your own ship trades. This screen is used to set up all sorts of behavioural restrictions which you can assign to specific ships, stations, wares, or as defaults for everything you own. If you set the buy price to the minimum, your free miners should prefer to sell to other stations first, while your station miners will sell to the station, and if you use the trade rule then no NPC ships will be accepted for trades on that ware. You can restrict selling to NPCs using the same trade rule. Stations will automatically transfer money to your account when they get sufficiently over their desired budget, but for large stations this can mean millions sitting in the station account for no real reason, it's annoying but there's not much to do other than maybe if there's a mod? Piers allow L ships to dock. They are actually useful on all stations because there are NPC L traders roaming around who won't be able to trade with you if you don't have one, it increases your customer base. But the piers are expensive to build so focus on getting your production up first. If you aren't having trouble shifting everything you make then you don't need a pier yet. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 23:04
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OwlFancier posted:You want the "global orders" page located here: Thanks, that helps. The weird thing is my other free miners will dump all their wares at my station even with the buy order set to minimum. There's a station in the same sector buying for above minimum, and it looks like there's no actual credit transfer when my free miners do that either. IDG why they're going there when the station already has assigned miners but whatever!
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Apr 28, 2023 23:10
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Hakarne posted:Thanks for any help because good lord is this confusing. The magic is in how you restrict the sell orders. When you're in the logical overview screen of your station and click on an individual ware the bottom option allows you to set restrictions on who can buy/sell that ware. When I begin doing stations I created three trade blacklists in the global orders section of the player menu. 1. My Faction Only - The manager will only buy/sell from my own stations. This is for setting up supply chains and protecting inputs so the AI won't buy your stuff because you intend to use it yourself. I set this as the default 2. Everyone But Me - This one is pretty rare and it's basically to prevent downstream stations from re-selling stuff I've moved down my supply lines back to my own stations. 3. Totally Restricted - Nobody can buy anything. This is also rare-ish but will prevent the manager from doing anything at all with the stock. Useful for intermediate products at a complex station and also for working on building stations where you don't want the build storage accepted orders. Kind of a pause button where I can save my work without committing anything to it. tbf the station build wallet being zero also helps, but I've found that my own ships will happily fill the orders if I have the product. 4. No Restriction (already exists but it's pretty important) - Go hog wild, it's anybody's game. The key is making sure the inputs you want gathered to the station but not sold to have a "My Faction Only" restriction and either not have a sell order or set it to totally restricted. iirc manufacturing stations are usually pretty good about avoiding adding sell orders to inputs, but they'll definitely put them on intermediates if there's more than one step. (Nobody buys intermediates imo so I usually just leave them open for the taking for the random ship that wants a few thousand) Re: auto-deposit. This is a little tricky, but stations WILL auto-deposit in your account after performing a pagan ritual known only to the X4 devs. I'm exaggerating, but once your station has fulfilled it's entire allotted budget aka the money it thinks it needs to continue operating uninterrupted (this amount will include the money you'd theoretically need to purchase your inputs even if you're providing them with your own miners) and it's gone up an additional 40ish percent, your station will send the excess to your account and level off its balance. This will take a while. imo if you need cash now there is nothing wrong with raiding a station that holds alot of cash on the books and just letting it refill over time. A pier lets L and XL sixed ships dock. You absolutely want them on basically all but niche stations. Alot of NPC traffic is L freighters and they won't buy anything if they can't dock. You also need to make sure your station has cargo drones once you build the dock. This is done in the logical overview screen as well, just set the amount, open the trades to everyone and at some point they'll get filled and your station will automatically build the drones. I found this annoying, especially for drone components so I grabbed a ship and just manually bought like 200 of the things and have that ship sitting around waiting for new stations to pop up because nobody was selling me drone components in the rear end end of the boron space.
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Apr 28, 2023 23:10
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Hakarne posted:Thanks, that helps. The weird thing is my other free miners will dump all their wares at my station even with the buy order set to minimum. There's a station in the same sector buying for above minimum, and it looks like there's no actual credit transfer when my free miners do that either. IDG why they're going there when the station already has assigned miners but whatever! Yeah when your miners drop off at your own station there is no credit transfer as far as I am aware. And yes some ships will sell at your station even at lowest price. I don't know why but it is possible the ships don't have up to date intel on the other stations, as ships won't trade with stations they don't have recent LOS on, that goes for your empire too, if stations are greyed out they won't be considered, you need recent visibility on them or a trade subscription. I would say, at least, that you almost always want to process materials yourself, each processing step adds value to the inputs, so your miners would likely be best assigned to your station as soon as you can process their outputs. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Apr 29, 2023 |
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Apr 29, 2023 00:06
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OwlFancier posted:But the piers are expensive to build so focus on getting your production up first. So unless the station is starting off very small and/or you only have M miners I would actually suggest ensuring that you have at least a temporary 1-dock pier right off the bat if for no other reason than it allows your own L miners to dock. I make sure my L miners have their own drones so I don't need to worry about that. All of my stations start with a M dock of whatever size or flavor (for borons it's always the luxury dock for aesthetics), some form of pier and the storages I need. Then I go right to production modules from the bottom up. For me housing is always the last thing because they take so goddamn long to build. I once made the mistake of making a teladi claytronics mega station and it took literal game days to get production moving because of my hilariously bad build order. Also, as a trick, you can manipulate the build order of your station by disconnecting and reconnecting a section. All those modules immediately go to the bottom of the list. Helpful if you're trying to figure out layouts and such but don't want the build order to make you wait an age to start working.
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Apr 29, 2023 00:38
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If you're using L miners then sure, but if you're just starting out I would not suggest that your first purchase should be a 1 dock pier blueprint or to build a 3 dock pier on your station, your first money should be spent on money making modules that your ships can utilize, which probably means processing modules for mineables and S/M docks.
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Apr 29, 2023 00:46
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Ok, VRO feels very different. Did a custom start so I'm not starting from bugger all again and basically set the game state up somewhat similar. A bunch of large miners, medium miners and trading ships. Gave myself a hydra to start with which immediately feels so much slower than non VRO. Also added a gate connection mod to make borons less isolated and set up the Arg/Ant/Bor against Terrans as that's what I'd done previously. Borons are getting curb stomped by Terrans. Lost 3 sectors, a shipyard and a trading station in the first 2 hours. RIP. Edit: also set my HQ up with 3 of each module so I've got a minor trickle of everything to just stave off the shortages and let me be somewhat self sufficient from the start.
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Apr 29, 2023 01:39
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Ice Fist posted:I make sure my L miners have their own drones so I don't need to worry about that. Funny, my L Miners carry no cargo drones, instead they max out on Mining drones and rely on the station's many cargo drones for unloading. I wonder how much of a difference it makes.
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Apr 29, 2023 02:52
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Can sectors (or even specific areas in a sector) run out of asteroids/materials to mine? It seems like my auto miners are starting to clump the more I mine an area and I'm wondering if I need to drop resource probes in different spots.
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Apr 29, 2023 03:54
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Resources are depleted in sectors but they are 'refilled' by the AI script on a schedule. There are a couple of mods that speed up the resource refill time. I don't know if specific areas of sectors can be depleted, but I'd assume so.
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Apr 29, 2023 04:07
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Funny, my L Miners carry no cargo drones, instead they max out on Mining drones and rely on the station's many cargo drones for unloading. I wonder how much of a difference it makes. I don’t think it’s a noticeable difference. Edit: for clarities sake I go with 2 cargo drones and 8 mining drones
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Apr 29, 2023 05:18
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The ANT shipyard randomly went hostile on my trade ships and I'm trying to figure out why. This happened while I was OOS, and it killed 3 dolphins before I noticed. The shipyard was under attack by 2 terran Osakas when it happened. I've spotted one of my station traders try and pick up dropped containers once, so my best guess is that the osakas had caused the shipyard to drop something and one of the traders decided to pick it up which caused the hostility. How do I prevent my traders from doing this in the future?
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Apr 29, 2023 13:31
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  My new game is insane. It's about 100 times more fun than the last one. I'm 4 hours into it and the Boron are being invaded from all sides and there's nothing I can do about it.
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Apr 29, 2023 14:42
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Send help I'm drowning in Kha'aks
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Apr 29, 2023 23:19
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That bomber fleet is looking quite light on bombers.
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Apr 30, 2023 01:06
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Ragnar Gunvald posted:That bomber fleet is looking quite light on bombers.
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Apr 30, 2023 01:08
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OwlFancier posted:Yeah when your miners drop off at your own station there is no credit transfer as far as I am aware. And yes some ships will sell at your station even at lowest price. I don't know why but it is possible the ships don't have up to date intel on the other stations, as ships won't trade with stations they don't have recent LOS on, that goes for your empire too, if stations are greyed out they won't be considered, you need recent visibility on them or a trade subscription. Oh wow I never thought about the AI needing to see your station first to know it should trade to it. This might explain why some of my stations I put in some dead areas on sectors don't get much traffic...
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Apr 30, 2023 01:43
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They do seem to know where your stations are, somehow. Not sure if the player is an exception or whether or not they just do have eyes on your stuff. I have noticed NPCs dropping satellites near my stations, presumably to keep tabs on them.
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Apr 30, 2023 02:02
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Oh, so that's why some stations look different to others. It's the trade data thats out of date. Huh
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Apr 30, 2023 02:51
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OwlFancier posted:They do seem to know where your stations are, somehow. Not sure if the player is an exception or whether or not they just do have eyes on your stuff. I have noticed NPCs dropping satellites near my stations, presumably to keep tabs on them. The Sector Explorer mod works by having ships fly around to each station first, then doing the spiral of revelation, so yeah, the AI can definitely know where stations are.
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Apr 30, 2023 09:32
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Ragnar Gunvald posted:
How are you getting on with VRO by the way? Hopefully with all the chaos it's proving interesting.
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Apr 30, 2023 14:01
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kingturnip posted:The Sector Explorer mod works by having ships fly around to each station first, then doing the spiral of revelation, so yeah, the AI can definitely know where stations are. Well the scripts can do anything, up to and including mass changes to the world, so that just depends on how it's coded rather than being some inherent ai limitation.
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Apr 30, 2023 14:01
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kingturnip posted:The Sector Explorer mod works by having ships fly around to each station first, then doing the spiral of revelation, so yeah, the AI can definitely know where stations are. Speaking of spiral-exploring, how do you all set your scouts to explore sectors? If I'm just after a bunch of sectors to be slowly scouted out I'll use the inbuild exploration function of course, however if I want sectors scouted in a time-efficient manner, I think making big 'S' patterns is the way to go. (Or... squared-off zig-zags, I guess you could call it?) Since I find that to be more efficient than a spiral personally, since the more time a ship can spend in one leg using its travel drive, the better. If it's stopping to turn a lot on the other hand, (such as for a spiral) it takes a lot longer to map out the sector, I feel.
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Apr 30, 2023 14:38
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OwlFancier posted:How are you getting on with VRO by the way? Hopefully with all the chaos it's proving interesting. It's different and interesting. I've had to change weapons on ships a few times and learnt I cant use a Hydra to fly around all the time as it's too slow. Got a fair way to go yet. It enjoying the over all feel of it so far. Edit: do you guys do like, one ore station for ore and one for silicon then distribute it, or do you a generic mining outpost and distribute all the ores from that one point? Same with gas? Can just do one with loads of storage for all the mineable stuff and just distribute it from there? Ragnar Gunvald fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Apr 30, 2023 |
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Apr 30, 2023 17:07
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Some people report issues with the priortiization of miners if you combine mineables. As in you can run out of one and the station won't properly assign miners to fill it back up instead of mining stuff you already have lots of. I haven't found that issue myself, however. So it's up to you if you want to risk it or not.
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Apr 30, 2023 18:42
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what gate connection mod are you using? I'm going to restart with VRO now that it's going so adding a ton more connections sounds dope too
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Apr 30, 2023 18:52
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Thank God I followed the advice to do the Hatikvah plot early. It looks like the Xenon blew up the drat station right as I was finishing Breakdown.  At least I think that's what happened, there was a K destroyer near there and after I finished that mission the station had disappeared on my map. It's not blown up as part of the plot is it? Because the timing was perfectly aligned with the SCA twist lol. Also, is there a weapon set up that can actually outstrip a Xenon K's shields on a M ship? I Googled how to kill them so I'm not learning to play in a Xenon-infested wasteland and the advice I saw was to fly onto their blind spot and shoot from there. I can get onto the blind spot but the shield regenerates faster than I can drain it with my weapons. I thought destroying the XL shield generators might help but those also have shields that regenerate faster than I can strip them...
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Apr 30, 2023 19:21
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A L/XL ship's primary shield generators share shield levels with the hull, so the only way to take them out without downing the shields is to use shield-penetrating weapons like the Thermal Disintegrator. IIRC, even then, it only disables the shield regeneration, it doesn't down the shield entirely. If the K is isolated from support, the easiest way to take them out is to punch out the turrets (plasma cannons or heavy missiles are good at this) and then whistle up some buddies to finish the job. Some fighters like the Pulsar Vanguard can mount like 6 plasma cannons while still being very cheap. E: One thing to note is that missile weapons generally have a damage radius. The heavier the missile, the larger the radius. This means that against surface element groups, they can deal damage multiple times, drastically increasing the amount of shield damage they deal (as well as also hitting the hull/primary shields at the same time). This is especially noticeable with the heaviest missiles such as torpedoes. It's also important to note that just like every other weapon, missiles inherit the velocity of the ship they are fired from; a heavy torpedoes engine only propels it like 80 m/s so its helpful to give it a boost in this way. Hrm, i never really thought about it, but a missile weapon fired against the shield generators on a capital should deal a lot more shield damage through multi-hits. TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Apr 30, 2023 |
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Apr 30, 2023 19:28
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Yeah shield piercing weapons are basically designed for knocking out surface mount stuff, and yes it won't actually disable the shield just stop it from regenerating, so you still need quite a lot of firepower to destroy them. You can really help destroy large ships by knocking out components, but you would generally want to start with the turrets first as they use smaller local shield generators and are much easier to kill. Trying to actually blow up the ship by yourself in a medium is just very tedious though so i wouldn't recommend doing it if possible. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Apr 30, 2023 |
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Apr 30, 2023 19:53
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Huh ok, some good stuff to consider. Some people mentioned torpedo boats as a cheap way to deal with them so maybe I'll try that. As far as the Hatikvah station being destroyed, will they rebuild it? I just realized I had the Boron queen mission to deliver ships to them and now the quest marker is sitting in the empty space the station was in. I hope I'm not forever stuck with a hanging quest.
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Apr 30, 2023 22:03
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If the faction HQ station gets destroyed the representative moves to another station of that faction, but for HAT that is quite probably going to be a quasi-pirate base in a random sector. If you ask a HAT person where to find their faction representative they might point the way. I don't know how it interacts with missions though unfortunately.
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Apr 30, 2023 22:21
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Does anyone recognize this auto collect behavior? This station trader is looking for quantum tubes, and it sees this container of tubes floating in space and automatically goes to pick it up. The problem is this is turning stations hostile when they've been dropped due to attack. Is this vanilla behavior or one of my mods? I just can't find any info on this anywhere and I really need to get rid of it. I've been looking in to my mods too but it doesn't seem to be from them either.  Edit: Incidentally, how long do stations stay hostile for? I've been out of sector for a while but this one is still hostile.
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Apr 30, 2023 23:03
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Do you have your global orders set to collect wares in space? I suspect that might be a mod beause I don't think ships nomally collect floating wares unless they're told to.
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Apr 30, 2023 23:14
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Man it looks like the Boron are pretty boned for water, there are no systems nearby with ice. I'm on a mission to get their production going so I'm long-hauling from my factory in Paranid space. I'd like to automate distribution a bit though, it's so far away so I can't autotrade and I'm running individual ships to stations to sell with repeat orders. Before I invest in a new station, I just want to confirm it's possible and make sure I know how to smartly set up a distro hub in Boron space. I'm thinking repeat orders from my water factory to the Boron hub, then I'm thinking assigned ships from that hub should handle distro ok right? For hub placement, do those smaller hexes in Kingdom's End count against the sector limit for autotrade from the station? I'm wondering if setting one up in Great Reef will effectively cover all of Boron space or if I'll need one on each side of the Sanctuary of Darkness for autotrade to cover everything.
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Apr 30, 2023 23:47
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smaller hexes inside a big hex (EG: the three Grand Exchange hexes) all count as a single sector.
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Apr 30, 2023 23:48
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The boron have ice in rolk's demise and the other easiest place to get it would probably be the northern sector of morning star. The provinces adrift don't have any though it's true.
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Apr 30, 2023 23:51
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