What new game mechanics would you like to see?

[pref]

1. Fix police - it's kinda unfeasible to be at war with any major race due to asymmetric police logic not outlawing attackers of player. Real PITA to avoid constant rep loss and having to endure/evade all the time to keep rep with other factions.

2. Player policing: current implementation has no gameplay benefit imo - this feature should eliminate/reduce pirate threats (perhaps not perfectly but by a large margin). Police should scan ships actively and respond appropriately.
Police should be able to retaliate without rep loss, even if a friendly faction's asset is attacked by another friendly ship.

3. Pirating. Being able to befriend pirates, use cover mechanic to be able to plunder and sell goods like them, pirate mission chain, unique pirate ships, pirate shipyard.

4. Defence scripts that consider all visible space in target area (sats or full sector if owned) both for AI and player. Scanner range limit is so bad and makes AI look much dumber then it is.

5. Hook response commands on alerts.

5. Local conflicts that operate with temp rep changes limited to the area and do not affect global rep: to end contested sector ownership, to avoid stalemate in faction expansion, to punish player for 'friendly' sector takeovers etc.
These should only last until their goal is achieved and any rep loss should be gone when leaving the sector.

[Falcrack]

Add ability to assign multiple build ships to station production to speed it up. Because nothing is more fun than waiting 24 hours for your mega-complex to finish using a single build ship!

Also, ability to fire a construction vessel in the middle of building. Because it is also super fun to have production go at a snails pace because your hired builder is short on builder drones, and not be able to fire them after finding out!

[Nort The Fragrent]

Stop the lift doors from slamming shut just as i am going to go through.

Turn off dock landing hologram numbers once docked.

Permit 180 landing direction on docks.

Have space fly eggs hatch.

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

The ability to tell a station manager what goods to prioritise.

Priority lists for buying and selling of goods by the station traders.

Priority lists for mining of resources.

Or something along the lines of mine the following resource until storage is at X%.

The temporary assignment of a trader to build storage. Once the current build has completed they return to station trading.

Better control over buying resources for shields and turrets. I am really tired of seeing a station lack shields and turrets after 20 game days.

[Hasimere]

MOVE PHQ

[alexthespaniard]

- Boarding stations like you do with ships. This could add personnel transport ship's.

- Sector Taxes for products (This would be so much fun for Comerce and pirates).

-If the factions will declare peace or war by their own between them and not in a pred way (That would be awesome a good game mechanic example is BANNELORD or stellaris) .

- If there will be any containment for infinite growing ships with no sense like a crew salary.

- War Missions like “support the main fleet attacking this station or sector. The mission will start in 20 min.” Or Support the Destroyer attack... and with a range of 50km or 100km they can pay you for ship destroyed.

- Military access treaty (For carriers and Dstry): sometimes I had next to a main faction station 2 carriers more than 10 DSTRY and they don’t care. Is like NATO having 1000 tanks next to Snt Petersbur and they doing nothing. This treaty could work with time (you have 20 min of access). If you have a good relation free if not for money. And a max limit time if you don’t pay or you don have the treaty -5 rep Every 10 minutes. The limit of Carr or DSTRY could de 4 at time in one sector.

- Power Balance: Again some times feels like you are being the new super power and any one cares about it. That could be set with market or power quotes. If you are in good relation with faction nothing happening but if you have a normal/low rep with them and you are getting their resources or being a commerce threat for their hegemony this should decrease relations between factions.

[Raptor34]

Destroyed ships list to be in a seperate list in the log, so we don't have to scroll through tons of pages to find witch one that was lost and where it was allocated too.

If you type the word "destroyed" in the log search bar, it will only bring up log entries for stuff that has been destroyed. Very handy!

The first problem is needing to do that in the first place. The second is that it doesn't tell you anything about what it was doing, so if you didn't allocate stuff in even numbers then good luck hunting down where you need to replace what you lost.
Incidentally typing in "los" allows you to quickly filter for reputation loss."Des" and "los" are what I generally use to hunt down any ship/rep losses. Doesn't help with stations though as those either don't generate log entries or use something other than destroyed as a keyword.

[phrozen1]

Economic Integration of Planets

Via Planet-Trade Stations.
Planets could produce and demand special expensive wares/resources which you then have to bring in from often very distant places.
Then you would have very expensive cargo and a perfect target for pirates so you would need to defend the Transport.

Now that we get Terraforming it could increase the production of certain wares on the planet and/or unlock new wares.

[kroobzh]

2. NPC boarding ops. NPC pirates actively and capably board other ships, including player ships. It would give a reason to keep a few marines on your ships.

This is a really great idea. Why only the player can handle these ships? This is not fair to pirates. This process takes place under the control of AI. Perhaps you won't have to invent anything new.

[ms06f2]

clone. I don't like watching on ships. I want to fly a fighter. Add clones. Death no longer requires rereading files...

[alt3rn1ty]

+1 for salvaging wrecks, with random salvage items.

I just took over Scale Plate Green and the place looks like the biggest scrap yard you have ever seen, blur your vision and you would swear it's densely populated with asteroids.

I had a few more ideas a couple of days ago .. But Egosoft already have them covered in the AMA

[Imperial Good]

Consumer (non-war) economies. Such as recreational stations, tourism with tourist/liner ship class and planetary trade hubs to send wares down to planets, such as those we terraform.

[Retrox]

Personally, i would like to have more touches on the 'empire gameplay'. Its quite annoying to manually man e.g. a carrier with many small ships. To solve this issue, i would put op a building plan, where you can select everything, you could also manually for e.g. a carrier with its ship group, like the equipment on the ships, the commands for them and so on. This plan could be saved and be used multiple times. Also, by defining a plan to e.g. a carrier group, you can also put up a 'rebuild lost ships' feature, that improves micromanagement. By doing so, its necessary to determine the shipyard/warf, who will build them, so a selection of either owned or friendly locations is also important.
You can also link it with a 'select custom jobs feature', that let you define certain jobs like a sector patrol, that can be rebuild by the predefined building plans every time, its destroyed (similar to the NPC races). Thus, the we have less micromanagement and more fun.

[Althalos]

+ for move HQ
+ for salvaging

But also ship recycling/deconstruction and analysis. I know there is a mod for that, but this one really needs to get official.

[aard00]

But what are some new game mechanics which would you would like to see in X4? Here's my list

Beat me to it! Been mulling posting a similar topic!

2. NPC boarding ops. NPC pirates actively and capably board other ships, including player ships. It would give a reason to keep a few marines on your ships.

Great idea! Definitely need a defensive reason for marines on ships.

I also want an end to that blasted Teladi in his Osprey torpedoing to smithereens the Phoenix I've just spent the last 30 minutes whittling down to a boardable state. Right-click "Broadcast intent to capture" that goes through a player rep check + some combination of the npc attacking party's stats (to see if they comply) + rng (so always a chance to be out of luck). Success = npc's back off for x minutes. Failure = play back the "Negative" sample. Also limit how often you can trigger this action, perhaps by some multiple of x.

3. Increased benefits of sector ownership, such as collecting sales taxes.

Yes. Hardly seems worth owning a sector right now, other than not paying for plots.


I also want to see:
. NPC race matching habs on stations. If you need a mix, build a mix of habs. This way, your shipyards can also crew your ships accordingly.
. *All* events going to the log. Including *always* logging the ship/station registration and adding subordinate info where appropriate e.g. Ship x of station y was destroyed.
. A useful ticker. It's too small and info flashes by too quickly. And you have to be in cockpit view to see it. Which for me is about 20% of the time. Expand it on mouse-over? Scroll bars?
. Sectors going to Neutral after last owner's Admin is destroyed. Then and only then apply current ownership rules. (Yes, I have posted about this before )
. Fleet-wide paint mods as rewards, i.e. these add to the default schemes you can apply across your empire.
. And actually for your fleet just being able to choose a colour from a colour wheel, maybe with gloss/matte slider.
. An end - *somehow* - to that camp squealing voice that invariably waits until the moment you're about to get your booty blown to bits by the fleet of Ks and Is and everything in between to express that situation-critical nugget of information "I was asked to drop my cargo..." . Yes, I know you can set them to flee, but you still always have to break away just to check they're not fleeing *into* the approaching SCA Behemoth. It's annoying as heck!
. Fixed NPC AI docking at wharves/carriers
. Better/clearer fleet/wing management options

[jannix]

The order queue system we have now is quite an improvement over all previous X games and I am loving it. A little bit more control would make it amazing. So a few features I would love would be:

- Specify some form of attack stance. For example, I want to be able to assign a wing of S or M ships as torpedo boats and have their attack order be to launch all munitions at range, then go to their default behavior. So if these fighters are carrier based, they should maintain distance and empty out their ordinance, then go back to carrier/auxiliary and dock up to resupply. That would be amazing imho.

- Sync travel drive speeds to the slowest in the group. This could be a stance as well potentially, in case some people prefer the current behavior. I really would love the ability to escort traders with anything faster. Escorts with this stance should stay in formation and not go ahead or lag behind what they are protecting.

- Ability to get a cumulative earning statistics for ships (miners/traders) and stations. It doesn't need to be too detailed imo. If I could pick any such ship or station and see total earnings in the last hour, 24hours all lifetime earnings (just a few key metrics like this), that will tell me everything I need to decide whether the current strategy is working or not.

- Jump drives or some form of faster travel mechanism for L and XL ships. I am fine even if I have to restock ecells or some consumables to allow this. Also fine if it takes some effort to craft/research the capability in the PHQ. I just miss the jump drives a lot

[taztaz502]

Consumer (non-war) economies. Such as recreational stations, tourism with tourist/liner ship class and planetary trade hubs to send wares down to planets, such as those we terraform.

+1

Sadly even developers have no idea what they want to do with terraforming other than the fact that they can change the shaders to change the visuals of the planet so they will and call it a feature, throw in a bogus quest with little/no reward, huge cost/time sink for ultimately no purpose according to the recent dev interview.

even on of the first questions in the Q&A was a better idea than everything we seen in the cradle of humanity trailer, bar from the terran ships.

"Will 4.0 have a death alternative or auto-eject to avoid “game over” and push us to recover from potentially big losses rather than reload?"

[Raptor34]

Consumer (non-war) economies. Such as recreational stations, tourism with tourist/liner ship class and planetary trade hubs to send wares down to planets, such as those we terraform.

+1

Sadly even developers have no idea what they want to do with terraforming other than the fact that they can change the shaders to change the visuals of the planet so they will and call it a feature, throw in a bogus quest with little/no reward, huge cost/time sink for ultimately no purpose according to the recent dev interview.

even on of the first questions in the Q&A was a better idea than everything we seen in the cradle of humanity trailer, bar from the terran ships.

"Will 4.0 have a death alternative or auto-eject to avoid “game over” and push us to recover from potentially big losses rather than reload?"

Sounds more like you just want to do things without risk than developing situational awareness or playing cautiously.
With that said there are reasons to give an auto-eject/teleport for the current gamestate, but I'll rather see what comes out than give a suggestion at this point.

[MHDriver]

I would like to see actual control over claimed sectors. Not what we have now which means nothing. I would like to be able to set what is legal and what is not, who can build and who can't, how much to charge for build permits, tax on NPC faction stations earning, hostilities allowed or not for factions at war just to name a few..

[Retrox]

I would like to see actual control over claimed sectors. Not what we have now which means nothing. I would like to be able to set what is legal and what is not, who can build and who can't, how much to charge for build permits, tax on NPC faction stations earning, hostilities allowed or not for factions at war just to name a few..

To think your thought further, having the ability to name factions as forbidded to enter would be nice as well as scanning ships automatically, to use ships to force them out of the sector. Especially these annoying hidded SCA ships...