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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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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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Hakarne posted:Also also I appreciate all of the advice from the thread, there's so much to wrap your head around and little quirks to figure out jumping into this. Like supplying raw materials for the station is really obtuse, I feel like there could just be a simple checkbox for "Buy Ore, Mine Ore, or both" instead of having to set up global rules and/ore manipulate pricing and storage levels to make it so that only your own ships bring raw materials to your station. I'm sure I will find more weird poo poo as I get further along too! No doubt that X4 is a doozy to wrap your head around. However I think once you wade through all the bullshit once you'll find that setting up stations properly isn't all that difficult - especially if you're supplying all the inputs yourself. I've reached a point where I have a global default for all stations that only allows my own ships to trade. I almost never touch the storage levels or the price.* I just assign whatever miners/traders the station needs, set the output to allow the AI to purchase it and then just check back every so often to make sure there aren't any issues. The game is pretty good about getting the AI to just handle everything for you while you just provide boundaries for their activity. What will really make you worry is when everything is set up correctly for a station, but nothing is being delivered. In my current game the culprits for this are my water plant and medical supply/food plant and the problem is that I don't have enough subordinates assigned to those stations so they might all be busy when I set up another station to need water or food. *There's a weird behavior with buying station materials that I haven't seen before where wares will ignore the global price modifier and begin lowering their price as materials come in. Suddenly station construction grinds to a halt because nobody is delivering any materials for building because nobody is going to sell to you at minimum price, but I've been able to work around that. OwlFancier posted: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 tried a combined "mining station" that's bringing in pretty much everything. I think the only real issue is that if you're not using the raw materials fast enough and the storages fill, miners will only be able to partially unload and then the station manager will have them go mine something else if it needs to. So you'll have miners with like random amounts of both ore and silicon, and gas miners with basically every kind of gas in their holds. Then if storages are full and your miners can't unload and you add a new ware, it might take a while for your miners to sell what they have on board to the station to make room for the new ware. But from a practical perspective I haven't had any issues. The mining station is filling the goods I need and my production stations are supplied so 
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May 1, 2023 02:54
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WebDO posted:The AI is weird sometimes New thread title that succinctly sums the game up
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May 1, 2023 16:44
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tokenbrownguy posted:i got to figure out how to scale up my income. modules seem so expensive, but I think the only way is to go past silicon wafers and into something else Unless you're doing a gimmick run of some kind I highly suggest stealing the blueprints if you haven't started doing that already. If you want to start expanding your stations and you already have silicon wafers I would suggest microchips. They only require silicon wafers, sell at a decent clip all on their own and they are an intermediate for claytronics. Claytronics is one of the 'I have now won the game' wares where if you get a decent station making them you're just printing money. I just finished setting up my initial claytronics station (honestly pretty modest imo) and it's already making 6-7 million an hour - all my other stations combined are making a little over 6. Another option is hull parts. Hull parts will always sell like hotcakes. The added benefit of either of these options is hullparts and claytronics 2 of the 3 (or 4 if you're doing boron stations) building blocks for all stations so you'd be making your way to producing the parts for your own stations yourself. Which means another good option is a power plant. Anything which brings you closer to vertical integration is going to be a good choice. Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 18:08 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 18:04
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ughhhh posted:How many hull parts/claytronics production modules do you have running on a station? I'm just working on those and trying to figure out how many modules I should have at the end to make a decent amount of cash. So before I answer I want to mention that I always start my stations decently small and then double them when I feel I'm able up to a certain arbitrary size at which point I'll build a whole new station. I've gone down the megastation route before and I found I prefer multiple medium-ish stations to one very large one. Also, initially speaking I would completely ignore habitats. They're expensive to build, their blueprints are wildly expensive respective to early in the game basically requiring you to steal them, take a while to build and require upkeep in the form of food and meds. Until I feel I can afford it and can supply my own food, I just leave them off the station. Eventually it's just free product, so I add them to everything because why not. My current stations are (in the order I built them): 1x Solar power plant - Meneleaus' Oasis (280% sunlight) 9x Solar modules. It started with 3 and I expanded later. 1x Ice Refinery - 16x water modules: I started with 4. Doubled it twice. I'm somewhat close to needing another one. 1x Hull Parts - 18x modules: Started with 9 and additionally I added habs later after I built the food station. 2x Bofu/Boron Meds - 10x Bofu and 10x Boron Med Supply modules. At this point I was wealthy enough I didn't both with doubling just plopped it down and started building it and I have an identical one under construction. Each station supports ~30 L habitats 1x Microchip plant - 14x Microchip modules. Started with 7 and I doubled it to cover the amount of claytronics I needed to cover when I doubled the size of the claytronics station. 1x Quantum Tubes - 14x quantum tube modules 1x Claytronics Plant - 8x Claytronics Modules 1x Engine Plant - 5x Antimatter converters and 5x Engine Parts (under construction and I'm trying to figure out why my own stations aren't delivering water and energy cells) All of my stations are in Rork's Demise except for my solar plant in the Oasis and my engine plant which is in Towering Waves. Additionally I have a mining station bringing in basically every resource in Rork's Demise and a Trading Station in Great Reef that is bringing in Water, Energy Cells and Hull Parts. With the exception of a storage module, a dock and a pier I've left my HQ alone. It will be my ship yard later in the game. At this point my big money makers are the claytronics plant (when I'm not building a station) and the Trading Post - Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 15:54 on May 2, 2023 |
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May 2, 2023 15:42
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The best part about having enough rep to see a factions ship orders is that when pirates hide under that faction they'll dutifully reveal that they are indeed, pirates.
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May 2, 2023 17:52
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OwlFancier posted:I mean they also usually have their ship job title as "pillager" I know. Plunderer etc. Pirates are always pretty easy to spot. Lone Corvettes or Destroyers just unescorted in the middle of of a sector. I just thought it was funny they're running around the sector with a little sword icon above them happily revealing their orders even though they're not really boron. Was absolutely beating myself up trying to figure out why my power plant wasn't delivering energy to my new stations 2 jumps out. I don't really know why, but the manager I installed there at the very beginning of the game hadn't gain any skill at all. Just a 1.5 star manager unable to send ships out as far as needed. I have the XP mod installed, but even with vanilla managers were always the guys who gained skill in their field the quickest so maybe that character was bugged? Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 20:09 on May 2, 2023 |
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May 2, 2023 20:07
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Major Isoor posted:EDIT: Question of my own. After properly diving back into X4 I'm just halfway into building an ice refinery with eight water modules in Morning Star III, intended for shipping water into boron space. For that count, would three Magnetar L miners be enough, or should I get another? I'm a bit rusty, still The answer is as many ships until there isn't any water at the station and your ships are starting to wait around. Real talk this is a hard question to answer. My personal rule of thumb is I'll add transport ships in multiples of five and freighters in multiples of two (depending on how rich I am and what I have access to) until I feel like the station is well served. If ships end up waiting around with orange colored failed orders you know you've hit the limit and can re-assign them somewhere else. Edit: I thought you were talking about transport ships for selling stuff, but honestly the rule still applies. I would guess that 3 L miners would be sufficient. Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 21:59 on May 3, 2023 |
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May 3, 2023 18:45
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ZombyDog posted:L freighters don't handle Sanctuary of Darkness all that well I have ~25 Sturgeon L freighters making the trip between towering waves and great reef and they handle SoD no problem.
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May 4, 2023 14:56
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Subjunctive posted:I got an EMP and stole a blueprint for silicon refinery, and then immediately started trying to design a station. I was still in my spacesuit so I eventually ran out of oxygen and got a game over, losing everything I’d put together. Ah, me. lol I did the exact same thing this playthrough. I had completely forgotten you can run out of oxygen.
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May 4, 2023 19:04
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Is it intended behavior of the new carrier position defense that if one position is attacked all the other positions converge on the attacked position? I was messing around with position defense because I noticed the AI had some position defense orders that spanned like, 12 sectors and thought it might be neat as a kind of trade route defense. But if any other position ends up in a fight, all the other ships in the fleet abandon their positions with a "Attack all within range" order with a destination of the position that's under attack until they physically reach that location. They revert to their positions after their order. But it all defeats the purpose of what I was trying to accomplish.
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May 7, 2023 19:25
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Oh man, hard disagree. The best thing about those components is that they have multiple attach points so you can just stack them. The bo-gas one is my favorite, because it looks almost exactly like a long connector section and it blends really well. I'm also a very big fan of their habs, because they perfectly connect into large circles. Edit: 
Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 19:42 on May 8, 2023 |
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May 8, 2023 19:39
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Danaru posted:So I just got my first mining ship and crewed it with a bunch of minimum wagers, my captain has two stars in piloting so sadly I can only local automine. I set him to do his thing in Argon Prime since I don't have many other sectors well mapped out (and also I had like five minutes before I had to leave for work wilderthanmild posted:I don't think they absolutely need the resource probes, but I think they work more efficiently with them. It's this. Keep in mind that resource probes have a very wide range. You only need like 3-4 to cover the entire sector. You can see what your coverage is by entering the map and hitting the "Mining" button with the on/off symbol in the upper right of the screen. Even then, you'll notice your miners all congregating in weird spots. Also, there's nothing wrong with local automining. It's basically the patented way to get your passive income off the ground. In vanilla, captains gain piloting skill at what I consider a glacial pace that I've modded out of my 2nd playthrough. But don't be surprised if, initially, your income is supplied by a small fleet of local autominers.
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May 9, 2023 19:30
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Speaking of the ToA plot, uhh, how do I get my ship out of Leap of Faith? Some context for this question: I went into LoF, did the thing, sided against the twins, promptly stole the astrid and took the astrid out of the sector. How do I get my original ship out. The captain of that ship must be like "guys? GUYS?" I can't teleport to the ship. I was thinking maybe spacesuiting into the wormwhole or something? Not sure if that would work. I'm already very space rich so this isn't the end of the world, but for MY IMMERSION I would like to rescue the crew.
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May 10, 2023 17:40
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Lamquin posted:Max rank of teleportation should allow you in, but if you want to do it in an immersive way, you can go through the anomaly with an L/XL ship that has whichever dock (S or M) that is required. Duh. Should have thought of that. Thanks!
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May 10, 2023 17:49
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I created a defense platform gatecamping the Tharka's Cascade gate in Hatikvah's Choice. It's awesome. When I'm in sector, the sheer volume of fire is hilarious to watch and when I'm out of sector it kills ships so quickly it sometimes appears that the gate is just shooting wrecks into Hatikvah's choice.
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May 12, 2023 14:18
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HiroProtagonist posted:whats bofu Boron food
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May 15, 2023 17:46
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quote:Fixed Boron Ray sometimes not firing main battery when it should. Yessssss
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May 15, 2023 21:44
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Hakarne posted:I tried making a daisy chain of warehouses to get materials in stock from the core systems but it just doesn't seem to work reliably for keeping materials stocked. I smashed my head against this wall for a while. Setting up decent warehouse to warehouse transfers in vanilla is do-able, but extremely tedious - involves alot of manual repeat orders. If you're down to use mods, I highly recommend the mule mod, which solved all my issues and makes something like a supply line of warehouses trivial.
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May 17, 2023 20:55
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If all you're trying to accomplish is moving goods between your own stations, the mule mod isn't going to really give you any benefit over regular old station traders. I have the same thing you do, a separate microchip station and all you need is to make sure your trade rules and subordinate blacklists allow for the trades and you should be good. There's a couple other gotchas in there like I always make sure my stations have at least a few million in the account and you need to have enough traders to meet throughput demands, but all in all I'm not using mules for that. If I was, I would set up a 'Station Supply Mule' set its source as the Claytronics station, Set it to 'Serve Source Only', Select Microchips (plus any other inputs you needs) and lock the ware list. Then have a bunch of other traders mimic the fleet commander mule. The problem I'm trying to solve with the mod, is I wanted to collect all the goods I was making and put it into a trade station warehouse. But I didn't want to restrict the AI from buying directly, and I didn't want my own traders selling wares back downstream to my own stations. There wasn't really any good combination of trade rules or blacklists to make that happen and when I started doing manual repeat orders I immediately hated setting it up. But the mules basically let me assign a fleet of ships to go and grab what the trade station needs from own own stations and everything still works. Later on the mod will also help when I move goods between a future warehouse I build.
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May 18, 2023 00:11
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Drunk Badger posted:Without too many spoilers, are there certain plots I should avoid? Or do you mean I can save when there's a fork in the mission path, and see where each side leads to? It, uhhh, can take a while to really feel the effects of some of the plot choices. If you're worried, just google the outcomes but you should generally know which choices will benefit you (war is always good for you if you're selling to one [or both] sides)
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May 31, 2023 20:08
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Destroying a station with a pile of Rays is an incredibly  event ...so long as they don't bug out and all stop firing and need to be re-engaged
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Aug 4, 2023 20:39
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Ahahaha I probably killed the ZYA So my playthroughs in this game have been relatively peaceful. I did a Terran run where I (probably stupidly imo) just made peace with everyone. In my current game I'm an argon who set up almost his entire economy deep in boron space initially before expanding. I've made my fortune selling stuff to the borons with their incredibly safe and resource rich core space providing shelter, but it's also kind of a boring way to play because the boron don't really do much. Much later on I began branching out, setting up more economy in the provinces adrift and developing my HQ in Heretics' End. During this time I had no idea how the Split were doing. I know they traditionally have problems with the Xenon, but I hadn't bothered to venture out and see if they were still ticking. They were holding on, but barely. I ended up helping alot by setting up gatecamps on both ends of Tharka's Cascade XV and eventually dropping defense stations on the gates before eventually just clearing the xenon out of the system and claiming it. I needed to do something with my giant pile of Rays. At the same time I sent a fleet of traders out and had them supply their wharf in Wretched Skies because I noticed they had like zero military ships. In fact, they had almost no ships at all of any class. This gave them a boost and they seemed to somewhat recover - building multiple defense stations and equipment docks. I even put a fairly large hull parts plant in their space. Then I noticed the argon and split were fighting by my HQ. Well I can't have that so I banned the ZYA from buying anything at my HQ. Then I decided I had enough cash on hand to expand ship production at my HQ shipyard and Shipyard in Great Reef to Argon ships because my eventual goal is to ignite the terran v Argon war and for fun just murder the terrans. So I bought the blueprints for all of the Argon S/M ships and associated modules. What followed was hysterical. The boron hardly ever purchase ships from me, probably because they're never losing anything except for the odd fighter or hydra. But the moment I got those blueprints, the Argon immediately bought hundreds and hundreds of ships. And then sent them all to ZYA space. The Argon are absolutely obliterating them. And because I didn't expect this, I didn't even have time to help the Split and play off both sides. There's an Argon fleet blowing up the Split Shipyard right now. I should have been doing full on war profiteering for fun much sooner.
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Aug 7, 2023 20:05
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Zereth posted:I believe mining ships are usually a better way to get startup capital than traders are. They're both pulling the things they're selling out of thing air to sell to the processing stations, and are usually doing so close to the processing stations so they're less likely to get attacked by pirates or something during transit. Important to note that pirates won’t attack miners. Ever. Probably because they can’t do anything with the cargo. That’s what the Khaak are for. Another important note: L miners are essentially immune to the Khaak. It’s not impossible for them to kill one, but I think in hundreds of hours I’ve only ever lost one L miner to a unicorn event where 3-4 spawns somehow converged on one miner. I reached a point where I now ignore the Khaak completely. I don’t even bother shooting their hives unless I’m bored.
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Nov 21, 2023 07:21
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sloppy portmanteau posted:Don't the Khaak absolutely kill L efficiency though? They wont ever get up to travel speeds if they're constantly being shot at. In my experience it's a blip. Something you might be concerned about early game, but as you get more miners, one of them getting its shields scratched isn't really worth reacting to. As I can afford it I will set up a small group of M3s to patrol these sectors and if I notice a miner getting hit I'll manually sick them on them. Frankly, the whole system sucks. Both AI pirating and Khaak raids are imo hyper underbaked and they ultimately become irrelevant as player strength grows. Hence, I'd rather just let the Khaak shoot one of my L miners and ignore it and I'd rather just lose the occasional M transport that gets caught then to stop whatever I'm doing and manually tell my patrols to shoot them. Additionally, the game makes it really hard, difficult - especially as the player gains more and more ships - to implement any kind of active defensive measures. I'd be neat if I could assign escorts to my traders, but lol at doing that when I have hundreds of them. I'd be somewhat neat if you could do a convoy system. Even something as simple as "hey, you ships respond to distress calls of miners/traders" would be neat, but that's basically impossible in vanilla. Unless I've missed something huge, my own defensive ships can only ever attack things in their own radar range. Meanwhile the AI is happy to sic every police ship in the sector from any distance if someone calls the cops. Also the AI cops are super dumb anyways. SCA destroyers and corvettes will explode transports as the police are shooting them, activate their camo and the police will be like "sorry sir, you're clearly not a pirate" and gently caress off back to whatever it is they were doing. It's infuriating/hilarious to watch. I'm sure some of this can be fixed with mods, but in vanilla at least it's a crapshoot. I'd rather not interact with it and deal with the occasional lost ship especially once I reach the point where I have basically infinite wealth.
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Nov 21, 2023 22:01
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:Force-feeding their shipyards directly is probably the best approach if you don't have shipyards yourself It's this, to start. Set up some traders to go out and grab whatever they need (preferrably from your own stations). I might be thinking of the mules mod, but I was able to set the ZYA shipyards as the home base for a substantial trading fleet and if they're in a tight spot like I found them then they'll make ships faster than you can bring in goods. If you do have shipyards, just be careful about who you open them up to. I have a post a while back about the hilarity that ensued when - in the course of trying to help the ZYA back on their feet - I allowed ARG to buy ships from my shipyards. They bought hundreds and hundreds of ships and sent them all to ZYA space and they promptly wrecked the poo poo out of them capturing several sectors. To be clear I don't really care and just sat back laughing my rear end off. But I wanted to save the ZYA first, and then fuel everyone involved in their forever wars.
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Mar 1, 2024 19:12
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thunderspanks posted:How did I put 400 hours in this (by standing in a station playing galaxy manager simulator) 
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Mar 29, 2024 18:58
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