Why so little neutral space?

[TheDeliveryMan]

How many unclaimed, neutral, resource rich areas are there on earth?

I like that every sector has pro and cons, and that there is no single perfect player sector.

LOL there is no way you can make the same comparison.

The magnitude of space is unending. There would surely be neutral unclaimed area even if every galaxy in the universe was fully inhabited by advanced civilization. Literally out of zillions of trillions of civilizations, you would still easily find uninhabited space. Yes, thats how vast space really is

But we are talking about sectors that are connected to the gate network. Teladi are pretty fast in claiming such profit opportunities.

[LameFox]

That hasn't really been borne out in the game. In X3, before the gates shut down and re-aligned, there were already various resource rich unclaimed sectors. By the time of X4 some previously inhabited sectors have been affected by isolation, relocation within the network, and Xenon attacks leaving them empty or less populated when previously they were very active. They have ample opportunities within the lore to create unclaimed sectors.

[Mevelios]

Claiming a sector is mostly about painting it to your predefined color (green), so I must say I don't mind having such few targets. Silent Witness is a worthwhile investment for its wrecks and highway proximity, Nopileos' Fortune for its resources and position (disregarding a specific plot, but that only brings more activity so it's welcome IMO).

All you stand to gain is policing the area, which has no impact whatsoever in the remote Silent Witness sectors, and very little in the tiny area of Nopileos' ships are passing through. While I do enjoy messing a bit with it once in a while, is it really that big a deal? In the end, it's merely painting the area, really.

[LameFox]

To be clear my desire for unclaimed space is not really coming from needing it for anything. It's just nice to have. In a purely practical sense I don't need to claim any space at all, and if I did it's not actually difficult to take it from the AI. But this is a sandbox game with minimal difficulty and if I played it just according to what I need there'd be not much point in playing it at all.

[Mevelios]

I can't relate to X3, I haven't played it. Some mods do expand on the number of playable sectors (including neutral ones), but to stay on the subject of the original game, I'm pretty sure the sector ownership feature could be given a bit of love. As I was saying I don't mind having so little neutral space since ownership doesn't really bring anything worth of note (unless seizing a resource rich sector and forbidding transit within of said riches), but a few things could be brought to the table:

-Building administrative centers to contest ownership could periodically decrease relations with the owner faction.

-Ownership could change hands through another way than simply destroying opposing administrative centers (direct purchase for a fortune or for building a colossal station to be ceded).

-Piracy could be strengthened to mess with owners (no direct pirate ownership, but an increase in their activity or even staged station attacks).

-Station workforce could be impacted by stability of the ownership (an increasing pirate activity would progressively drive your workforce away, and contested sectors would reduce the influx of new workforce).

-TAXES. Gimme yer purse, harrr! Unpaying factions (player included) would have to face sanctions, from more relation penalties to targeted attacks regardless of the standing with the owner faction (to clear whatever property has failed to pay too often). Could provide interest in owning resourceless sectors or even tolerating SCA stations.

-Ownership could be harder to achieve, the first come first served principle quickly denies half of the initial neutral sectors - Getsu Fune, Frontier Edge, both iterations of Turquoise Sea, Saturn II. Same could be said of sectors freed of Xenon presence. I'm lacking ideas on that one, though it could be something like owning at least three stations equipped with administrative centers (double, no, triple the pain if wrestling with a competitor to own the location!) and a few stations comprising at least one production module (denying on purpose energy cells). Could circumvent the fact there's no real interest to build anything other than megastations (unless running into performance issues), since it heavily simplifies logistics, managers recruitment, and local defence.

[and0r]

How many unclaimed, neutral, resource rich areas are there on earth?

I like that every sector has pro and cons, and that there is no single perfect player sector.

LOL there is no way you can make the same comparison.

The magnitude of space is unending. There would surely be neutral unclaimed area even if every galaxy in the universe was fully inhabited by advanced civilization. Literally out of zillions of trillions of civilizations, you would still easily find uninhabited space. Yes, thats how vast space really is

But we are talking about sectors that are connected to the gate network. Teladi are pretty fast in claiming such profit opportunities.

yes please excuse me. i still havent even finished the tutorial missions yet...

[LameFox]

There's definitely room to expand on the concept of sector ownership, yeah. It's actually a relatively new thing, people were wanting it for ages in older games to be able to officially own sectors instead of just physically control them. Now we can, but it's not a lot different from physically controlling them. I'm not really sure if they have any particular plans for it at this point.

[Mevelios]

Ah, thanks for the information, wasn't aware it were that recent a thing - hence my feeling it's there for the sake of being there. Well, someday it might offer more!

[GCU Grey Area]

There's definitely room to expand on the concept of sector ownership, yeah. It's actually a relatively new thing, people were wanting it for ages in older games to be able to officially own sectors instead of just physically control them. Now we can, but it's not a lot different from physically controlling them. I'm not really sure if they have any particular plans for it at this point.

For me the important thing isn't that I can own a sector. Have played the game for over 7k hours & still haven't done that, except temporarily (couple of times have been in the process of building a defence platform with admin for a faction, then they've lost their last remaining platform so for a while I've ended up owning the sector until the station's finished & handed over to it's new owners).

Instead very much enjoy the fact that changes in sector control can occur between rival factions. One of the reasons X4's absorbed so much of my time over the past few years is that almost every game I've played has ended up with a strikingly different map, in terms of the relative power of different factions & how much territory they each control. Incidentally, one of the reasons I have absolutely no desire to play any of the old games is that I'd find a static unchanging map dreadfully boring now.

Suspect this may also be why there are comparatively few neutral sectors - without some sort of protection to prevent them being taken over by one of the factions they wouldn't stay neutral for long & if large swathes of territory did have that sort of protection they'd likely just get in the way of the various wars between the factions (e.g if Pious Mists were neutral & couldn't be captured by an NPC faction, it'd make a real mess of the Paranid civil war).

[LameFox]

Funny enough I actually avoid officially owning the sectors I build in if I can. I like them to be neutral, because SCA ships don't disguise themselves in neutral space, allowing me to easily clean them up... but that's mostly a function of the intended measures against them being unimpressive.

I do think blocking wars may have been part of the reason, but I suspect there's a relatively neat way around it, too. If they allowed skipping the sectors the AI won't claim (or won't claim first—they will take them if a player does) but not occupied sectors, I think it would still work okay. For instance, if ZYA and ARG could skip over Heretic's End and invade each other, but wouldn't skip over Tharka's Cascade or the chain of TEL sectors right of Silent Witness, it probably wouldn't start to make too much of a mess of their territory.

[ruger44]

Ok so you ckean out a sector of xneon. How do you stop them from taking the secror back ? You can not be there all the time

[Alan Phipps]

Claim it and build in it for yourself, patrol/police it, or just let the NPC factions claim and occupy it while you protect their expansion. X4 is a long-term planning strategy game more than a quick tactical 'win the battle and that's it' series of scenarios.

Mind you, you can quite easily hamstring any Xenon reoccupation just by hunting down their supply ships that enter the area.

[ruger44]

Savage spur was mentioned, been there lot of goodies to use, but it has matrix north of it. So that would need guarding

[ruger44]

The reach is a good one but then I would piss off the Argon and would have go thru their sectors to leave . I have found second contact flashpointvery goodtobuild in

[Starlight_Corporation]

Was kinda hoping Avarice DLC would have added some extra neutral sectors behind some inactive gates but doesn't seem to be. Did introduce a nice variant of pirate alley with the Windfall sectors. Their location is neat. Not sure if the Vig faction can be expelled/eliminated if people want, or if they got some indestructible stations for plots.

[Ormac]

Morning Star and Heretics End Looked interesting initially. Then there was a gate reconnection.

[Sound19]

Would be cool if there were more geopolitical tools, that allow you to turn things into a disputed/unowned alley. End game stuff.

[Treycore]

In general the universe is pretty small sometimes