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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. ^^

FrickenMoron posted:

Is there any way I can place buy orders for resources on my PHQ for the research? Or do I have to buy a trading ship and tell them to manually buy and deliver them?

When you start research your HQ automatically places buy orders. No need for any intervention on your part besides having money in your account.

That said, I found that the resources were gathered faster if I had my own traders for the station.

Edit: To be clear by "my own traders", I wasn't manually controlling them, I just had the station manager figure it out.

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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. ^^

FrickenMoron posted:

How much money should I set aside for my first stations? And I'm also a bit curious whats the best way to obtain station blueprints. I remember them being rather expensive.

Station modules are actually somewhat reasonable outside of habitats and fabrication bays. Still don't buy them initially. Steal them instead. You can steal the blueprints for any station module outside of fabrication and maintenance bays which you must buy and they're pricey (150-250 million range).

1. Unlock the research options that allows blueprint theft.
2. Find a station that has the module you want.
3. Get pretty close to the module in question with your ship
4. Get into your space suit
5. Drop an EMP bomb on the module you want to steal (either craft the bomb or buy one from a free port)
6. Detonate it
7 Scan the resultant data leaks. I think 4(?) spawn, at least one is guaranteed to have a blueprint in it.
8. This action can make the station mad, so get out.

Rinse and repeat until you have the blueprints you need for your station.

As for starting amount. Modest stations are actually fairly reasonable. I'd guess maybe 10 million to be safe? That should get you a decent production station going. Stations don't start getting really expensive until you start adding a bunch of habitats and weapons to them. Fully fitted out defense stations are actually extremely expensive, even if they're small. There is a lot of material that goes into the shields and turrets so you can go pretty crazy with how expensive they become.

Don't worry about adding habitats right away. You don't need a workforce to have the station work. Later on, when you add one they'll provide a production bonus for any attached production modules, but it varies depending on the item. For instance, I think computronic substrate only gets like a 10% maximum bonus, but something like protein paste gets a 50% bonus. So the workforce bonus is better for intermediate items and less good for end products (but it's still basically free products over time and it adds up).

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. ^^

RBA Starblade posted:

Egosoft I'm but one man

This station the Paranids want needs more turret components than has literally ever existed in this galaxy

:negative:

e: gently caress you the blueprint is 500 million for the faction capital!

You aren't even at the worst part of the questline yet. Buckle up!

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. ^^

RBA Starblade posted:

Hoo boy

e: lmao I looked gently caress that I'm not hunting crystals

I thought you'd be more concerned that Boso wants a cool billion credits to continue his research.

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. ^^

So I noticed that for some time the Teladi had claimed a xenon sector, then lost it back to the Xenon. A little while later I noticed that the FRF were losing stations and since I hadn't finished the split quest yet I didn't want to let the FRF take any more damage so I intervened on their behalf. Sure enough an I and two Ks were tearing the FRF apart. I took a fairly large fleet to go get a handle on the situation and ended up blowing up seveal xenon fleets and 4 xenon defense stations with the loss of just a single fighter. I thought to myself, hmmm, these stations are mysteriously devoid of defense drones. So when I noticed that the Xenon had created a solar plant in Fires of Defeat I went to go kill that too. These station attacks had been pretty boring so far so I had a large chunk of my firepower in the form of an Asgard, 2 Syns and 10 Osakas go do something else and I went to go eat lunch while this attack led by a CV, 70 fighters and 5 Osakas went down. I came back and most of my fleet was dead the remaining ships were getting torn up by defense drones and I was floating in space.

Good thing I had a save because boy I am save scumming that outcome.

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. ^^

Why the gently caress are groups of fighters so loathe to use their travel drives in sector when given attack orders. I sent 50 fighters to move from the gate they were camping to an unfinished xenon station maybe 100km away and they're slowboating the entire way and this is OOS behavior. Meanwhile, my Asgard and her 12 destroyers were happy to use their travel drives to move ~50km from the same gate to attack a defense station. :iiam:

Edit: They finished killing the station and happily travel drive'd back to the gate :cripes:

Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 18:07 on May 22, 2021

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. ^^

How profitable is drug production in this game anyway? I recall it being pretty lucrative in X3

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. ^^

quote:

Improved flight pathing for small ships docking at Tokyo.

This was driving me insane. I never hung out with my Tokyos insector because of it. Going to have to log in and see how good it is now (it's probably still really bad)

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. ^^

Oh poo poo. I think this is going to warrant a new save

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. ^^

OwlFancier posted:

I wonder if they might adapt the salvaging system to also work with asteroids? As it would IMO be a much more sensible way to mine is by just towing rocks to a station.

:hmmyes:

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. ^^

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.

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. ^^

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.

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. ^^

OwlFancier posted:

The gate shutdown caused a major technological shift, with different areas of the universe having developed or retained different pieces of technology, the X4 region apparently forgot how jump drives work I think is the explanation. In Rebirth they had them but only on large ships, the fighter scale ones being unable to be replicated.

Hot dropping enemies in X3 was super fun and although I understand why they wanted to get rid of jump drives, I will miss them.

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. ^^

Going to need to start a new game of this once the next expansion hits.

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. ^^

That came quicker than I thought. Pumped to start a new X4 game.

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. ^^

Wondering if someone has an answer for this. I destroyed a xenon defense station. It's was basically right where I want to drop my own defense station and it looks like the plot for the destroyed xenon station is preventing me from building.

Any way to get rid of that?

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 am super enjoying re-remembering how to play this game after basically reaching infinite money a couple(?) years ago

It's just the perfect mix of awesome and completely frustrating.

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. ^^

Does anybody want to know what happens when you do something really silly but you don't realize it's silly until much later as the simulation runs long enough to expose how silly your plan was?

Welcome to hell:



Edit: This is a silicon collection station with 9 L docks. But it has 90 miners working from it. And it is the primary source of silicon for my 2 Computronic Substrate facilities next door. Traffic jam of the century.

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. ^^

Sample_text posted:

Can someone unironically explain to me how is this better than eternal meme machine Derek Smart's "universal battlecruiser line of defense in the sand" games?

I feel for you my dude. Like I said literally the post before yours, this game can be mega frustrating and there are tons of times I'm sitting there like 'why isn't this working'. But when it works, it's beautiful. Getting more of those moments is what keeps me going even when my ships do something stupid like park on top of a xenon defense station and lose 3-4 destroyers.

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. ^^

Sample_text posted:

What a fitting end to a lovely game lol .

Okay bye!

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 re acquainted myself with the game over the last few days, but I think I'm done until the expansion so I don't burn myself out. I was making like a billion credits every few hours of game time and I just don't have the patience, at least with this save, to continue doing the various objectives and terraforming stuff.

I'll start a new game with the boron expansion knowing way more than I did when I started the previous game. It'll be fun dealing with scarcity again and working my way up to all-powerful space amazon again. I

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. ^^

queeb posted:

3 mining outposts set up in the asteroid belt, one set for ore with like 20 miners on it, one set for silicon with another 20 on it, and one set for the gasses, with 20 miners, and then L haulers set to ship from those outposts into my factory. I liked doing it that way because then just my mining outposts were swarmed by a ton of ships docking rather than my factory which gave more room for NPC traders to dock and buy.

This is my preferred method as well. Early on when credits/ships are still a little scarce, I'll assign miners directly to stations, but I found that as a station grows and as its required input rate increases, it's simply better to have what I call "collection" stations, assign miners to it, and restrict their activities to that sector (to prevent them from running off a dozen sectors away because they fuckin' will do that the assholes). Then, as you said, you assign L miners as traders at the factory stations and they'll just go and pick up what they need.

Just make sure you uhhh, have enough docks at the collection station, (or more stations)



And yeah - computronic substrates are an incredible source of income. It's hard to beat.

Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Apr 4, 2023

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. ^^

Major Isoor posted:

Looks good! But you've committed the crime of not formatting your station names in a way that aligns with the ingame factions' naming conventions.

A serious crime indeed :colbert: (SURELY I'm not the only one who does this? Like "MAJ Solar Power Plant" for example)

All of my stations are named in code something along the lines of

[Abbreviated/Initial of Sector Name][Abbreviated/Acronym of Item Produced] Which gets us some fun names like

JSCAR - Jupiter Silicon Carbide
JCOMPSUB - Jupiter Computronic Substrate
JMICLAT - Jupiter Microlattice
TXXIVHP - Tharka's Ravine XXIV Hull Parts
18BAdvElec - Eighteen Billion Advanced Electronics

etc.

I have like 50 stations or something, they must be neatly organized in a list for my sanity.

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. ^^

Holy poo poo yes. I am 100% doing a boron start. Cannot loving wait.

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've never played with VRO, but I think I might start a vanilla run with boron and hopefully some QoL mods - I can't live with the crappy vanilla pilot EXP system anymore - I need the mod this time around.

Then I might restart with VRO because it sounds great.

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 woke up this morning hoping to jump into the expansion, but I have to wait 4 hours :(

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. ^^

Forgot about the need to save pretty often when you're fragile.

I placed the nav beacons and was like, "well what now" and started to fly back to the previous sector. On the way back I saw the freighter and its escorts and was like 'hey cool I'll just follow them, they won't plot armor their way through a hazardous region after I just placed a path of nav beacons for them right? ... right guys?"

Died and had to reload an earlier save and have to place the beacons again.

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. ^^

Hey maybe having one of the key sectors of the expansion be a hazard trap with pretty narrow safety lanes wasn't the best idea. It's not the end of the world, but it's definitely annoying. Autopilot is pretty good at getting you through it, but it's not perfect and if you're passing through Sanctuary of Darkness you have to be paying attention.

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 love as a player feeling my empire grow from nothing. I'm still early and making peanuts, but when you first get something like a couple of miners going and the passive income begins to roll in it feels awesome.

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. ^^

Ragnar Gunvald posted:

I wish one day egosoft manage to do a similar pass on their character models and animations though.

Honestly I think the boron are pretty well done. But yeah the rest of the characters are pretty :stare:

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 was on vacation all last week and I finally got back into the X4 saddle. I now have an ice refinery and a hull parts plant running in rork's demise. In case it wasn't apparent, the boron are extremely water hungry. I've overbuilt the refinery for station building and eventual med supplies/bofu needs so I'm not selling faster than I'm building but it's still selling at like 1.5mil/hour which is pretty drat good imo and that's including alot of selling to myself. Hull parts are hullparts. They're always a decent seller. Now I have two of the three station building wares for boron stations automated. Not quite sure when I'll get around to claytronics, probably going to get habs/meds/food going now for my stations.

Also boron stations are real cool looking.

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'd like to lament the fact that there aren't more faction specific station modules. I just put together a medium sized complex for making bofu and boron meds, and all of those production modules are boron specific so they look really cool and blend well with the station. None of the other production modules though look nearly as seamless. It's obviously a minor quibble but ~my immersion~

Also station building has never been easier. Still a bit quicky, but not like it was before the expansion.

Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Apr 27, 2023

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. ^^

Is there any benefit to scanning a station above 60% or whatever the breakpoint is to see the logical breakdown?

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. ^^

Subjunctive posted:

I thought at 100% you got to see more about its trades and such.

It occurs to me that I'm still in the starter ship because I haven't decided what else to get, but I should really get in something faster if I'm going to be scouring the universe for antimatter cells.

For me, a scout with the best travel drive you can slap on it is basically a must have from the get go. The irukangi is pretty good for this, 10km/s at max speed. My last playthrough I basically lived in a rapier.

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. ^^

Scouts are great utility ships, especially early. You move around fast and you can even do decent missions in them. Clearing mines and laser towers was how I earned enough to get my early miners and jump start passive income. The laser tower missions in particular the game kind of overvalues. They'll throw you like 750k-900k for shooting some of them and the stations will help you blast them.

Even once you get started, I have like 3-4 of them running around scouting stations and sectors and dropping resource probes and satellites if needed. Later game they're great for sending somewhere as a teleport destination.

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 the behavior of the explore command is baffling. But it does eventually work and I don't need to babysit it.

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. ^^

tokenbrownguy posted:

i'm trying to steal blueprints with EMP bombs, and I've got 3/4 nodes scanned. but the model for the station is smaller than the invisible hitbox so I can't get within 5m to actually do the final scam. :smith:

I've been having an issue with this as well - with boron modules because that's what I've been stealing. My best guess is that the curved sections of the collision boxes are weird, so I try and find flat surfaces for the emps. This has mostly fixed the issue.

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. ^^

Major Isoor posted:

Also, before I dive back in for the latest expansion, which sector is the best/safest to set up an ice mining operation, to help fuel the Boron economy? Since I know you guys have mentioned that they don't have nearly enough. I remember reading here about a sector that's a pain in the neck to get through, so I guess setting up a refinery on the commonwealth side might be best, so that the Boron have to come through to get water, rather than my miners having to brave the storm to bring ice to the refinery?

I have a pretty big one in Rork's Demise (16 Water modules). It's a sector on the boron side of Sanctuary of Darkness - the one with the ridiculous amounts of ore in system and it prints a respectable ~2ish mil/hour although I'm now siphoning it off for my own purposes so overall it's not directly contributing to my wallet like it was. My goal is eventually to use a trading post and use L freighters to truck water through SoD and sell on the other side. They basically give no shits about the hazard zone.

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. ^^

Ragnar Gunvald posted:

So with the Terrain plot, where you make them go to war with ANT/ARG... They've added BOR to the list too, so it's a 3v1 war and something to move to boron economy a little.

Yeah I was planning on triggering this. I can't wait.

For the record, although I don't have anything to compare it to really - the boron economy hasn't been slow at all, at least for lower tier goods. I was nervous about it, but they're gobbling up most of what I'm making without complaint.

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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. ^^

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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