Jumpdrives got me into X3, highways just dropped me off XR, and we're legion

[Sandalpocalypse]

So make the AI use the jumpdrive too. Was it really that hard to think of this?

I'm not sure you know what you are asking for.

The AI is deliberately crippled in x3, if they all used the same scripts as player have access to, there would be little TRADE at all.

So only in favour of those who prefer FIGHT, but not TRADE.

TRADE is what's *by far* most trivialized by jump drives in x3. The dynamic economy is completely flattened by, essentially, the removal of distance as a factor.

[Falcrack]

So make the AI use the jumpdrive too. Was it really that hard to think of this?

I'm not sure you know what you are asking for.

The AI is deliberately crippled in x3, if they all used the same scripts as player have access to, there would be little TRADE at all.

So only in favour of those who prefer FIGHT, but not TRADE.

TRADE is what's *by far* most trivialized by jump drives in x3. The dynamic economy is completely flattened by, essentially, the removal of distance as a factor.

I've never bought the argument that if the AI had access to the player trading scripts, and jumpdrives, that trade would be eliminated. It would certainly be more competitive, and profit margins would be more thin, but it would still exist, both for players and NPCs.

What I think a good solution to the jumpdrive overpowered issue would be to have players and AI have and use jumpdrives, but greatly limit the number of gates in the universe. You can use the jumpdrive to jump to gates, which mostly serve to connect different solar systems. But within those systems, there would still be vast distances to cover which would be handled by highways or boost drives. So limit the number of systems, make each system bigger which necessitates non-jump drive travel, and allow jump drives to jump to gates, so that at least some component of travel (travel between systems separated by multiple gates) is reduced.

[Graaf]

So make the AI use the jumpdrive too. Was it really that hard to think of this?

I'm not sure you know what you are asking for.

The AI is deliberately crippled in x3, if they all used the same scripts as player have access to, there would be little TRADE at all.

All I'm asking for is that the NPC's are playing with the same possibilities we do.
I'm not asking to remove the infinite money cheat NPC stations use. That would really break the game.

So only in favour of those who prefer FIGHT, but not TRADE.

TRADE is what's *by far* most trivialized by jump drives in x3. The dynamic economy is completely flattened by, essentially, the removal of distance as a factor.

Well, at least in X3 distance is a factor. In Rebirth you can buy and sell without even having your ship at the station.

[LittleBird]

What I think a good solution to the jumpdrive overpowered issue would be to have players and AI have and use jumpdrives, but greatly limit the number of gates in the universe. You can use the jumpdrive to jump to gates, which mostly serve to connect different solar systems. But within those systems, there would still be vast distances to cover which would be handled by highways or boost drives. So limit the number of systems, make each system bigger which necessitates non-jump drive travel, and allow jump drives to jump to gates, so that at least some component of travel (travel between systems separated by multiple gates) is reduced.

The problem still exist.
You can buy goods in solar system A and sell it in B without distance between A and B. The only distance you have is inside the solar system.
By game logic goods in solar system A are rarer in B. If not there would be no point in different systems.
Also you can jump from A to C,D,E,F,G. If solar systems are huge and you can jump to few gates only then jumps cover large distances.

[GCU Grey Area]

Well, at least in X3 distance is a factor. In Rebirth you can buy and sell without even having your ship at the station.

Completely incorrect.

Although in XR trade deals can be initiated remotely, freighters still have to physically travel to stations to collect & deliver wares. The distance between the stations at each end of a trade run in XR is a critical factor in determining how profitable the trade run is. Unlike X3, freighters in XR have to travel through each & every gate along the route when engaging in long distance trade. Needs careful consideration to determine whether a single high margin long distance trade will make more profit than multiple lower margin short distance trades.

Takes several times longer to do a trade run between, say, Omicron Lyrae & Home of Light, than to trade between adjacent sectors in one of those systems, whereas in X3 all that matters is the distance between the destination station & the nearest gate. Doesn't matter where the ship's coming from, next sector or the other side of the universe, if you use a jumpdrive the flight time will be identical.

[spankahontis]

Well, at least in X3 distance is a factor. In Rebirth you can buy and sell without even having your ship at the station.

There is no distance factor in X3, once you've explored everywhere, you can fly from Argon Prime to Getsu Funei on a full tank of energy cells?
Makes having so many sectors pointless.

[Honved]

I see the removal of the jump drive, and its replacement by long-distance "teleporting" as a necessary evil. I don't like it, but it solves a lot of balance problems by making the player and AI use the same rules.

So make the AI use the jumpdrive too. Was it really that hard to think of this?

Thank you for ignoring the reasons I stated as to WHY letting the AI use jumpdrives is a problem.

As I said, the jumpdrive allows a single combined fleet to defend or attack any place in the known universe on a moment's notice. The only way one can defend against that is to create a similar monster fleet, and jump in to defend wherever they jump to attack. That creates one enorma-battle that decides the fate of the galaxy in the first couple of hours of the game. Any other course of action really makes no sense, since NOT concentrating your fleet will guarantee that you lose every battle against any flee that DOES concentrate.

Removing the ability to jump entire fleets over long distances removes the problem, and then the new issue is how to restore the player's freedom of movement. Teleporting personnel without the ships seems to cover that base at least semi-adequately. I can't think of a better solution off the top of my head, so I'm willing to give it a try, as long as the "highways" aren't a required mini-game.

[CBJ]

I've never bought the argument that if the AI had access to the player trading scripts, and jumpdrives, that trade would be eliminated. It would certainly be more competitive, and profit margins would be more thin, but it would still exist, both for players and NPCs.

It's not an "argument", it's based on empirical evidence. Way back, I think it was during the development of X3R, we tried putting independent traders into the game running the universe trader scripts. We were somewhat surprised to find that it only took a handful of these to completely wipe out almost all trade opportunities for the player.

[Graaf]

Well, at least in X3 distance is a factor. In Rebirth you can buy and sell without even having your ship at the station.

Completely incorrect.

Although in XR trade deals can be initiated remotely, freighters still have to physically travel to stations to collect & deliver wares. The distance between the stations at each end of a trade run in XR is a critical factor in determining how profitable the trade run is. Unlike X3, freighters in XR have to travel through each & every gate along the route when engaging in long distance trade. Needs careful consideration to determine whether a single high margin long distance trade will make more profit than multiple lower margin short distance trades.

Takes several times longer to do a trade run between, say, Omicron Lyrae & Home of Light, than to trade between adjacent sectors in one of those systems, whereas in X3 all that matters is the distance between the destination station & the nearest gate. Doesn't matter where the ship's coming from, next sector or the other side of the universe, if you use a jumpdrive the flight time will be identical.

But in X3 you first have to get a ship at the destination before you can buy or sell. And between the gate and the station you still have to compete with competition already in the system.
All you do in Rebirth is pick up and deliver. Distance is only relevant in the time it takes to get there and start the next one. No chance someone makes that profitable trade before you do. That has already been done. If there is any distance involved it is by choice.

There is no distance factor in X3, once you've explored everywhere, you can fly from Argon Prime to Getsu Funei on a full tank of energy cells?
Makes having so many sectors pointless.

As a trader I don't see a reason to go all the way to Getsu Fune. There are better places to buy and sell far closer to Argon Prime.
The only reason Getsu Fune will get any attention is when there is a direct connection through the Xenon Hub. And given the trade possibilities between AP and GF, I see no reason to hurry then.

Thank you for ignoring the reasons I stated as to WHY letting the AI use jumpdrives is a problem.

As I said, the jumpdrive allows a single combined fleet to defend or attack any place in the known universe on a moment's notice. The only way one can defend against that is to create a similar monster fleet, and jump in to defend wherever they jump to attack. That creates one enorma-battle that decides the fate of the galaxy in the first couple of hours of the game. Any other course of action really makes no sense, since NOT concentrating your fleet will guarantee that you lose every battle against any flee that DOES concentrate.

Not really.

I usually don't have a Universe Conquering Fleet in the first couple of hours of any game.

But once we do, this will happen:
- If I go first, the other ships will wait with jumping in until the gate is cleared before the next one comes in, etc, etc. So you will have to get clear of the gate, the enemy fleet will have to get clear of the gate and you have to be lucky no random neutral party is trying to get through the gate.
- If I go last, I have to watch my ships fight OOS, and when I do get there, collision detection will kick in and scatter all ships to a safe distance from each-other. Not really helpful if there are also asteroids in the system.

And that is the scenario with jumping in with a Jumpdrive. Try to do that with a fleet going from Argon Prime to The Wall with conventional travel. They'll never get through the gate unless you get OOS.

[thrangar]

Have ES given any info on OOS combat and how,( if it is in this version of X4?)
Transporting will affect its application?

[PowerPC603]

If the npc's were to use the jumpdrive as well, trade would come to a halt because every other station is stocked almost immediately with all the wares they require.

Right now, they have to undock, fly through several sectors and then finally from the last gate to the station. This might take over an hour sometimes.
Here are many opportunities for the ship to get destroyed (Xenon fleet, Khaak, pirates, collissions, ...) and outrun it with your own trading ships.

If they would use the jumpdrive, they would undock, jump to destination sector and fly from gate to station and dock. This only takes 2 minutes or so.
This takes alot less time to transfer the goods from one station to another and there is less chance (next to none) for the ship to get destroyed.
It also gives the starting player no chance at all to trade because he doesn't have the money for a jumpdrive yet, while all other npc's constantly beat him to the destination.

Also, with every npc jumping around, the universe itself would appear to be much more empty because you barely see anyone fly around anymore.

And like it has been said before, try to have 50 universe traders as max level and find a trade opportunity yourself.
You'll find none.

Goods are being transferred almost instantly, as if all the stations in the universe have been connected to eachother by complex construction kits.

[GCU Grey Area]

But in X3 you first have to get a ship at the destination before you can buy or sell. And between the gate and the station you still have to compete with competition already in the system.

That's precisely the problem. The only competition you have in X3 is the occasional rival ship which is already in the sector & a bit closer to the station you're planning to trade with. It's trivial.

In XR you face competition from ships all over the system (even a few which are in a completely different system in the case of inter-system traders). If one of them completes their current trade run, looks for the next & identifies there are wares for sale it can snap up the trade offer straight away, no matter where they are. They don't need to travel all the way to the station to initiate trade either.

All you do in Rebirth is pick up and deliver. Distance is only relevant in the time it takes to get there and start the next one.

Hardly, it's a vital consideration in the Trade game. Long Distance trade can be reliably profitable due to the different shortages & surplus production in the various systems. However it carries a significant opportunity cost due to the long flight times. In the time it takes to fly that far you can miss out on many other potentially lucrative opportunities.

No chance someone makes that profitable trade before you do. That has already been done.

Tell that to all the people who have griped about how difficult it can be to buy the Fusion Reactors required at a certain point in the plot. There have been innumerable threads over the years in the XR forum on precisely that issue. They're not impossible to obtain, however competition for a commodity as profitable as FRs is savage. I'm sure I'm not the only pilot to occasionally resort to outright piracy to get them after NPCs beat me to the trade offer.

If there is any distance involved it is by choice.

Exactly! Choice is important. There are pros & cons to both long distance trade & purely local trade. It gives the player something to think about & make meaningful decisions about which trade opportunities to take up. Certianly find it more interesting than X3 where any distance aside from that between a station & the nearest gate is utterly irrelevant. Have played 1,000s of hours of both games & Trade is one of the bigger reasons I have no desire to back to X3 after playing XR.

[A5PECT]

Exactly! Choice is important. There are pros & cons to both long distance trade & purely local trade.

The thing about X3 was that there was no long distance trading. Once you had a jump drive, every sector was right next door to every other sector in the universe.

This was because the act of jumping was trivial itself. It took 10 seconds and the energy cells to fuel it were dirt cheap and took up inconsequential amounts of cargo space in trade ships.

If jumping actually had tangible costs things would be interesting. If fuel were actually a commodity (increased price, increased consumption per jump, and/or increased cargo volume), jump drives wouldn't trivialize the size of the univerese and you'd have to choose between completing trades faster or making more profit per trade.

[Graaf]

But in X3 you first have to get a ship at the destination before you can buy or sell. And between the gate and the station you still have to compete with competition already in the system.

That's precisely the problem. The only competition you have in X3 is the occasional rival ship which is already in the sector & a bit closer to the station you're planning to trade with. It's trivial.

In XR you face competition from ships all over the system (even a few which are in a completely different system in the case of inter-system traders). If one of them completes their current trade run, looks for the next & identifies there are wares for sale it can snap up the trade offer straight away, no matter where they are. They don't need to travel all the way to the station to initiate trade either.

But it doesn't matter how you got in that system. Some NPC can beat me to a very profitable run, despite starting 20 sectors away and several hours ago. It's all a matter who get into the station first. A Docking Computer is far more relevant. Or being very confident that you can manually dock faster than the AI.

Besides, even if NPC's would use a Jumpdrive, they can only do so if there is one installed on their ship. And that usually is a low percentage of them. And I wonder if they ever upgrade.

No chance someone makes that profitable trade before you do. That has already been done.

Tell that to all the people who have griped about how difficult it can be to buy the Fusion Reactors required at a certain point in the plot. There have been innumerable threads over the years in the XR forum on precisely that issue. They're not impossible to obtain, however competition for a commodity as profitable as FRs is savage. I'm sure I'm not the only pilot to occasionally resort to outright piracy to get them after NPCs beat me to the trade offer.

Sure. But I bet they didn't beat you because they got to the station first!

If there is any distance involved it is by choice.

Exactly! Choice is important. There are pros & cons to both long distance trade & purely local trade. It gives the player something to think about & make meaningful decisions about which trade opportunities to take up. Certianly find it more interesting than X3 where any distance aside from that between a station & the nearest gate is utterly irrelevant. Have played 1,000s of hours of both games & Trade is one of the bigger reasons I have no desire to back to X3 after playing XR.

The inability to choose which ship to fly and the FIGHT-oriented way how TRADE is designed as a side activity, is the reason I have no desire to buy Rebirth. Now, they may have made an improvement on ship choice, but I don't see it in regards to TRADE.

Honestly, the only interesting part at the moment is BUILD. And that alone is not enough.

[Axeface]

I completely and utterly disagree with the OP. Jumpdrives are a gameplay problem, the lack of them is going to fix so many gameplay issues and bring NEW gameplay.

And highways are fine once you actually take the time to learn some of their quirks (like moving to the top or bottom to never hit anything, turning off mouse control, and press backspace to exit) - and I've repeatedly made suggestions for changes that would make 90% of people at least able to tolerate them - perhaps even like them.

They were:-

- make all traffic move at the same speed (no collisions)
- make boost allow the player to choose to go a LITTLE faster than traffic.
- disable mouse control automatically on highway entry (of the 3 people i've showed this game, they all didnt figure that out and hated highways... first impressions are important in these days of kneejerk reactionism).



OP also seems to be ignoring so much of what XR did right. Stations for a start - they are on a completely new level than the tiny stations in X3. System sizes. Exploration. Combat. Flight 'mechanics.
X4 seems to be fixing all the things XR did wrong - especially ship variety and ship customisation.

Removing JJ's is absolutely necessary to move the game forward, just like removing SETA in XR was necessary, but for some reason that was braught back rather than fixing other systems to compensate for 'slower' gameplay.

I want X4 to be a better game, actual game development - not X3 with better graphics.

[Sandalpocalypse]

Trade isn't designed as a side activity in XR at all. It's flying freighters thats a side activity. The two are in fact distinct; my x3r game started with me remotely running goods to and from Soja fabs by manually ordering about my starting freighter and then others I acquired. While a freighter is executing a trade, you go look for more trade opportunities. There are problems with Trade in XR, but that is not one of them. Ironically, one of them is too much competition from AIs....

[Jeraal]

I completely and utterly disagree with the OP. Jumpdrives are a gameplay problem, the lack of them is going to fix so many gameplay issues and bring NEW gameplay.

And highways are fine once you actually take the time to learn some of their quirks (like moving to the top or bottom to never hit anything, turning off mouse control, and press backspace to exit) - and I've repeatedly made suggestions for changes that would make 90% of people at least able to tolerate them - perhaps even like them.

They were:-

- make all traffic move at the same speed (no collisions)
- make boost allow the player to choose to go a LITTLE faster than traffic.
- disable mouse control automatically on highway entry (of the 3 people i've showed this game, they all didnt figure that out and hated highways... first impressions are important in these days of kneejerk reactionism).



OP also seems to be ignoring so much of what XR did right. Stations for a start - they are on a completely new level than the tiny stations in X3. System sizes. Exploration. Combat. Flight 'mechanics.
X4 seems to be fixing all the things XR did wrong - especially ship variety and ship customisation.

Removing JJ's is absolutely necessary to move the game forward, just like removing SETA in XR was necessary, but for some reason that was braught back rather than fixing other systems to compensate for 'slower' gameplay.

I want X4 to be a better game, actual game development - not X3 with better graphics.

When I eventually get this game at a discount, I will be looking for a JD mod. I like JD's.
The problem I have with highways is the fact that they even exist. When I see them, I get this booming movie announcer voice in my head screaming "TUBES IN SPAAAAAAAACE".
And I would gladly pay full price for an updated X3.

[wellmadman]

And I would gladly pay full price for an updated X3.

As Would I =]

This is no joke, when I first got TC my computer was at the low end of the specurm =-/ and could only just run it, and man did it lag when I was making a big fab(at the time big fab for me was like 20)

Then I got a new computer, and it could run TC about 3-5 times over and the graphics are great, but I would LOVE to see a Updated version with newer graphics and all the trimmings, I petty sure that would not be to hard to do.

[Graaf]

- make boost allow the player to choose to go a LITTLE faster than traffic.

Now that you mention it, do NPC's also use a booster or is this purely a player capability. Because if the latter, it might as well be removed too.

[GCU Grey Area]

Now that you mention it, do NPC's also use a booster or is this purely a player capability. Because if the latter, it might as well be removed too.

NPCs use boosters. Capital ships (including L/XL freighters) use them to cross long distances, fighters use them for evasive flight in combat.