why x4 is so boring ?

[Halpog]

is it just me, or is x4 just boring ?

i mean the only faction that is realy active and agressive are xenon
every faction is restrictet to use there owen ships and a spezial ammount of them
no faction realy is in war to each other.. unless the sectors are next to each other...
there is no central plot like in x3 with the khaaks.....
pirate factions are absolutly passive .they fly arround a bit with 1 or 2 ships and attacking station to plunder them...
only the plot pirates are aktive ..yaki and the ones from the paranides.
fleet controll.. is absolutly no what it should be ....
the AI is not even close to the one of x3 ...
in a fleet when u set 40 ships to defend there carrier....they all attack the same ship untill it is destroyed.....
why they dont attack 40 other ships instead ?
the AI of capital ships regarding attacks for example a station is not even "there"
they flay and attack with 2 or 3 lasers , even if they have 100 of them ...
this terraforming stuff...and the restrictions that comes with it was absolutly not needed in any way....
borons are still missing....
walking arround stations is nice but the FPS dropps we get with them is horrible...same counts for the grafik itself.. after 2 mins on a station players says there eyes start to hurt ....
scanning ships stations for blueprints was the worst idea ever.......u fly arround a station for hours to scan it while it stucks at 8% or 99%.....
the economy is a horrible thing with that ammount of materials, needed to produce another material, to produce the next one to be able to produce a ship or a product to sell ...

sadly i have more negative stuff to talk about han positiv stiff ...
positive in my view is definatly the station builder even if he lacks a lot of stuff and needs to get worked on a lot ...
we still missing the propper keys to "turn" modules.. this auto turning with view angle and mouse movement is not good and should not be like that....
the snapping and auto connection with modules is horrible...for 70% of my building time i try to connect a module to another place where it gets auto connectet ....
the ammount of modules we need for a propper self running shipyard is verry bad....we have to build massive mega complexes and this ends up in a massive FPS dropp...or even in criticals when we enter a sector.
the managment of station regarding sell and buy is realy poorly designed, and not verry clear ....

the UI in map modus is thnx to the filters we have aceptable.. since ( at least me ) i turn of all filters to have a clear view on the map modus ...
sadly we cannot put ships to a fleet only to sort them....we have to give them fleet commands if we try.. this is stuff that wont work for transporters for example ....
when i have 50 transporters flying arround and want to put them ot a fleet i cant just do that....i also cant just press a button to minimize a list with all transporters... like in x3....this "list of ships" was top notch

ship design is ok ....well i dont udnerstand why mostly all ships needs additional or "extra" larger stuff on them ...like the moreia .....or the terran s ships.....some ships would look so damn hot without them......
weapons and the fact the weapons we fit to a ship stick out for 100 meters is ... bääähhhh.. for optical reasons not good....

weapons and turrets so far are fine ( and i talk only about the vanilla stuff here ) even if it lacks a lot of stuff...

what iam definatly missing in this game is the fact that we need reduced ammount of "different " materials for ships....
why electic components cant cover field coils or micro chips , smart chips too ? .. why everything needs to be seperatet and split inot so much stuff ?
we need to fit some materials products together to have less of them

we also should be able to "disable" the predictet undocking and docking lines in the station builder.. since they mostly cover the view and the snap points in the station builder.

and we need to get ridd of the restrictions regarding how far or how much sektors a ship can trade, collect ressources, and so on....
we also need a jump drive
we need companys or smaller faktions inside a race like in x3 with otas with there owen special ships

there is a lot we need , and a lot that can be done better ....so far the only top of the notch stuff we got here in x4 is the station builder.i wish we would had that in x3 already.....
unleash x4... it could be so damn great without all this restirctions.....we dont have a universe we have many sectors and each soctor is its owen universe and has nothing to do with each other ..... there is no feeling in a sector when u fly to it .. there is basicaly no life.. just some stations and a fleet and some traders .. thats it ....

[dtpsprt]

While I agree with many things you post, it was explained to me that these decisions are based on a major poll that took place during the time of X Rebirth (if I remember right) or the end of X3/AP.
So, it seems that many(?) users of that time were OK or wanted these changes from X Universe mainline that far.
The notification for the poll was made through the Egosoft Newsletter, so the players should be subscribed to it. I was not (and still am not) because I have a very busy inbox that can not allow to get not business related material.
Don't forget that every player has his/hers own view and it seems mostly well liked as it is...

[Metran]

The Paranid factions, at least one of them, can be quite aggressive in their [Religious] war against each other. Also the amount of ships available to a faction is proportional to the resources available to that faction, mined by it's own ships or by Player.

In my experience even the Xenon can be quite tame from time to time, other times they've taken over most of the universe before you, Player, have even gotten a foothold yourself.

[Skeeter]

I cant remember a poll, and ive been here since 2000 ish i think. And i get the newsletters. Tho granted i might have forgotten but has anyone got the number issue for the newsletter for me to look at from the archive on the site?

[surferx]

is it just me, or is x4 just boring ?

The next hour I play will be my 6,666th in X4, and I am not bored with the game at all. So.......

scanning ships stations for blueprints was the worst idea ever.......u fly arround a station for hours to scan it while it stucks at 8% or 99%.....

No need to scan for hours, use the EMP bomb directly attached to the production module you require, and it will create data leaks containing blueprints.
Take more missions.

[Smart_Bomb]

Add a few mods and all your troubles go away.

[Fulgrymm]

If vanilla is too boring, then mods will be your only salvation. I recommend the Star Wars one, it's very lively with the constant Imperial vs. Rebellion battles happening.

[adeine]

i mean the only faction that is realy active and agressive are xenon
every faction is restrictet to use there owen ships and a spezial ammount of them
no faction realy is in war to each other.. unless the sectors are next to each other...

Factions definitely are/can be at war with each other; the problem is they're bad at effectively conquering and controlling territory, somewhat by design. In some past versions of the game Xenon and HOP were more effective at this, and people complained as factions were largely wiped out without intervention. The result is that in subsequent patches the universe ended up being a lot more static.

there is no central plot like in x3 with the khaaks.....
pirate factions are absolutly passive .they fly arround a bit with 1 or 2 ships and attacking station to plunder them...
only the plot pirates are aktive ..yaki and the ones from the paranides.

Pirates always have been a bit underdeveloped in X games. I feel like the main thing that's missing compared to earlier iterations is proper sections of pirate controlled space that actually matter. The other problem is that having access to travel drive made ambushes difficult or impossible.

fleet controll.. is absolutly no what it should be ....
the AI is not even close to the one of x3 ...
in a fleet when u set 40 ships to defend there carrier....they all attack the same ship untill it is destroyed.....
why they dont attack 40 other ships instead ?
the AI of capital ships regarding attacks for example a station is not even "there"
they flay and attack with 2 or 3 lasers , even if they have 100 of them ...

Not sure which version of X3 you played but without mods, fleet management is a lot better in X4. Getting even a handful of ships to coordinate in X3 without crashing into each other and flying straight into enemy fire was similarly if not more frustrating, and using docked ships was only really possible thanks to docking computer magic. Even then, a lot of ships died due to collisions.

walking arround stations is nice but the FPS dropps we get with them is horrible...same counts for the grafik itself.. after 2 mins on a station players says there eyes start to hurt ....

Station walking is definitely one of the more demanding aspects of the game (not sure exactly why) but on decently powerful hardware performance is acceptable. Not great, but then X games never were a particularly smooth experience with the given hardware available around launch (if anything, X4 is better in this regard). It's a shame more wasn't done with the immersion potentially afforded by station walking and a lot of it is copy & paste even across factions, but such is life (and budget limitations).

scanning ships stations for blueprints was the worst idea ever.......u fly arround a station for hours to scan it while it stucks at 8% or 99%.....

Not really a thing you need (or are expected) to do. EMP bombs are the way to get blueprints within seconds, 100% guaranteed. It's so quick and consequence free that it almost makes buying blueprints completely pointless.

the economy is a horrible thing with that ammount of materials, needed to produce another material, to produce the next one to be able to produce a ship or a product to sell ...

If anything, the economy is a bit oversimplified. Getting rid of different cargo types (well, except for mining ships) and discrete wares for equipment made things a little samey compared to earlier games in the long run. While X3 didn't have different types per se, there was still a distinction between different cargo ships in container size, whereas in X4 you can pretty much use any ship of any class for everything. I wish we had more faction dependent construction chains and wares instead of just one for Commonwealth and an incredibly bare bones Terran one which thanks to its simplicity is just flat out better.

sadly i have more negative stuff to talk about han positiv stiff ...
positive in my view is definatly the station builder even if he lacks a lot of stuff and needs to get worked on a lot ...
we still missing the propper keys to "turn" modules.. this auto turning with view angle and mouse movement is not good and should not be like that....
the snapping and auto connection with modules is horrible...for 70% of my building time i try to connect a module to another place where it gets auto connectet ....

Completely agree on rotation being needlessly awkward. I don't fully understand why we can't get standard 3D modelling axis based rotation controls - having to guess which camera angle the game wants to be able to rotate things the way you want can be very painful, and downright impossible if the module starts out at a weird rotation to begin with. That said, the editor has come a long way since the initial release of X4, so there's hope that eventually this can be addressed.

the ammount of modules we need for a propper self running shipyard is verry bad....we have to build massive mega complexes and this ends up in a massive FPS dropp...or even in criticals when we enter a sector.
the managment of station regarding sell and buy is realy poorly designed, and not verry clear ....

I think it's fine to require a lot of infrastructure to have self-sufficient money printing complexes. One issue with the way this is handled in X4 is that we're limited to one construction vessel per plot, which really discourages you from building large stations (since it takes so long to build or rearrange them). Building several smaller ones allows you to parallelise construction time, so past a certain size is almost always preferable.

ship design is ok ....well i dont udnerstand why mostly all ships needs additional or "extra" larger stuff on them ...like the moreia .....or the terran s ships.....some ships would look so damn hot without them......
weapons and the fact the weapons we fit to a ship stick out for 100 meters is ... bääähhhh.. for optical reasons not good....

Yeah, the modular components have some issues with how they're sized (not the least that ships have to be quite limited in terms of hardpoints, which makes missiles and other special weaponry a liability).

and we need to get ridd of the restrictions regarding how far or how much sektors a ship can trade, collect ressources, and so on....
we also need a jump drive

Hard disagree on both points. The range limit makes logistics somewhat relevant, and you can extend your reach with trade stations (even if it's a bit fiddly). I think it's great that we have to think about where to build production lines to take advantage of resources and still be able to service the desired system(s). Tying range and auto trading to the experience system is a bit of an issue, given that it can still be quite frustrating to get or train suitable crew, but having a limit is definitely a good thing for gameplay.

Same is true for the jump drive. Its absence makes fleet logistics relevant where in past games it really didn't matter. Being able to teleport between your own ships takes out the player's pain in getting around without making distance irrelevant strategically. It's a major improvement over earlier titles.

[Waltz9]

The only reason why I think X4 is boring is because I don't see the point in playing this game because there isn't really a goal and once you get to powerfull then there is not challendge anymore.

I love space games. And from all the space games I played, the X-games always been my favorite.
But my problem is just that I can fly endlessly without having any goals.
Yes I do plot missions etc... but other then that there isn't much to set a goal for.

You can capture lots of sectors but once you have them, what do you do with it. What is the point in owning sectors except for your own police?
You don't gain taxes if someone build in your space etc ...

Once you get a powerfull army you can conquer anything you want but with what benefit?
You could wipe out the Xenon but then the game will become to stable and the trades won't be interesting anymore.
The game needs the wars for the trade part to work.

its at the part where you become to powerfull that it really gets boring because I never know what to do next.
I think it would be interesting for example to create an alliance and request assistance in an ongoing war.
Or if IA would be smarter and would actually have there own battle plan and act on the progress you make.

For example the terrans often send ships to xenon sectors but what if they encounter a shipyard, they sent automaticly more ships to destroy it.
Or when you are in war with faction that they would actually have a battle plan to counter your forces.
But I gues this won't ever happen since IA already fails to just fly.

[GCU Grey Area]

Or if IA would be smarter and would actually have there own battle plan and act on the progress you make.

They do. My favourite way to play X4 is to pick a faction (preferably one with a war guild to generate missions) & do what I can to assist them with their conquests. I don't claim any sectors for myself, however I do get a buzz when my NPC allies are doing well & can paint chunks of the map in their colours. This for example was very satisfying: https://www.dropbox.com/s/of5c7jag3frma ... 1.jpg?dl=0. Argons would give me missions to demolish Xenon stations then, when the sector was neutral, they'd build their own stations to claim it. After it turned blue I'd start getting missions to go & bash the Xenon in the next sector & so on.

[dtpsprt]

The only reason why I think X4 is boring is because I don't see the point in playing this game because there isn't really a goal and once you get to powerfull then there is not challendge anymore.

...................

its at the part where you become to powerfull that it really gets boring because I never know what to do next.
I think it would be interesting for example to create an alliance and request assistance in an ongoing war.
Or if IA would be smarter and would actually have there own battle plan and act on the progress you make.

....................

I'm totally with you on that. As for my part, I have concluded on using some mods to "shape" the game to my liking (actually taking out tedious tasks) and then dive into the game editor (Creative) and play out different scenarios I think about and fancy. When I reach the "too powerful and too rich" sttage I just start another scenario...

[cherbert1701]

For me its immersion. Even with Rebirth's limitations I find myself going back to it more and more. X4 has no atmophere quite like Rebirth. Rebirth's universe feels alive. I feel annoyed when I see these huge ships and they have zero interiors to get immersed in. The huge map screen is more like an RTS style of play than Rebirth's that engages me into the world by making the menu's and screens feel like part of the ship. For me immersion is everything. X4 is amazing at having you able to seamlessly land and get on and off ships but something just doesn't feel right. If Egosoft went back to Rebirth and just added some of the X4 tech and fixed some bugs it would amazing IMHO. Even though it's almost a decade old - how and why does Rebirth visually look like the better game?

[dtpsprt]

For me its immersion. Even with Rebirth's limitations I find myself going back to it more and more. X4 has no atmophere quite like Rebirth. Rebirth's universe feels alive. I feel annoyed when I see these huge ships and they have zero interiors to get immersed in. The huge map screen is more like an RTS style of play than Rebirth's that engages me into the world by making the menu's and screens feel like part of the ship. For me immersion is everything. X4 is amazing at having you able to seamlessly land and get on and off ships but something just doesn't feel right. If Egosoft went back to Rebirth and just added some of the X4 tech and fixed some bugs it would amazing IMHO. Even though it's almost a decade old - how and why does Rebirth visually look like the better game?

In my humbliest of opinions a look at the design of NPC's will tell you the reason.
Comparing the Argons of Rebirth with the Argons of X4 v2.6 and the characters of Starpoint Gemini 3 you'll find them almost identical... and, of course, nothing like the Argons/Terrans/VIG in X4 V5.10. This tells me of a designer moving from Egosoft to LGM. Also the fact of changing engines in Starpoint 3 tells me the same story. It's probably a copyright thing.
Of course a cursory look at the dev team in Rebirth, early versions of X4, current X4 and Starpoint will reveal something.
As far as I know Rebirth was almost ready when Egosoft "took it over" for use as a "testbed" for future X Universe games.

[CBJ]

Of course a cursory look at the dev team in Rebirth, early versions of X4, current X4 and Starpoint will reveal something.
As far as I know Rebirth was almost ready when Egosoft "took it over"...

Here we go again, with you making up complete nonsense and trying to start false rumours. Egosoft did not "take over" anything from anyone, and there is no relationship between Egosoft's games and Starpoint.

[Eagle_Four]

For me its immersion. Even with Rebirth's limitations I find myself going back to it more and more. X4 has no atmophere quite like Rebirth. Rebirth's universe feels alive. I feel annoyed when I see these huge ships and they have zero interiors to get immersed in. The huge map screen is more like an RTS style of play than Rebirth's that engages me into the world by making the menu's and screens feel like part of the ship. For me immersion is everything. X4 is amazing at having you able to seamlessly land and get on and off ships but something just doesn't feel right. If Egosoft went back to Rebirth and just added some of the X4 tech and fixed some bugs it would amazing IMHO. Even though it's almost a decade old - how and why does Rebirth visually look like the better game?

100% agreement !

The radio messages alone, I always had to smile about the radio messages in XR. Also the graphics are still much better in XR. Explosion effects, weapon effects, the stations look much better. The trading system was much better and not to mention the map. I have never seen such a cluttered and chaotic map in any game. If there were at least sliding windows and clearly delineated windows to the map. It's all kind of a mud.
In X4 I always have the feeling of working with Excel spreadsheets for hours. In XR I had the feeling of being part of the universe. The immersion is missing for me in X4. X4 is cold, lifeless and heartless, unfortunately.

[adeine]

100% agreement !

The radio messages alone, I always had to smile about the radio messages in XR. Also the graphics are still much better in XR. Explosion effects, weapon effects, the stations look much better. The trading system was much better and not to mention the map. I have never seen such a cluttered and chaotic map in any game. If there were at least sliding windows and clearly delineated windows to the map. It's all kind of a mud.
In X4 I always have the feeling of working with Excel spreadsheets for hours. In XR I had the feeling of being part of the universe. The immersion is missing for me in X4. X4 is cold, lifeless and heartless, unfortunately.

The art direction is miles better in X4. It's a little bare bones in parts (especially effects) but for the most part, it's a much better looking and believable universe. From the oversaturated colours to solid space noodles going every which way, Rebirth has issues in that regard. That's not to say it doesn't have its strengths, obviously more effort went into immersion, interiors and "life" (though arguably, an easier job due to the universe being a lot more static).

[jlehtone]

The only reason why I think X4 is boring is because I don't see the point in playing this game because there isn't really a goal and once you get to powerfull then there is not challendge anymore.

There is a goal: remain able to invent yourself reasonable goals. Once you reach the omnipotent stage that goal becomes harder to achieve. (Corollary: you can't "win". The question is how long it takes for you to lose? The longer the better.)

[Alan Phipps]

The beauty of feeling too powerful is that it is far easier to lose most of that excess power and capability than it was to gain it in the first place. Just hand all control of your fleet of doom to the AI for a few hours and send it unmonitored on some bold and risky tasks - I'm sure the results may prove to be an exercise in humility.

Cash is easily spent, especially if you wish to strengthen your potential rivals through spending it. Cash-cow mega-complexes and ship construction sites are easily decommissioned, perhaps only after their products are diverted to strengthen your potential rivals.

You may then have ample opportunity to reassess your goals for your 'glorious comeback'.

(Alternatively and far more simply, just start a fresh game under different circumstances and/or with different self-imposed rules.)