Possible Alternative to ship modding

[Ethernet]

Hi,

I'm a big fan of hiring personal for specialized tasks. Either at the ship order menu or on stations.

What I personally really hate is tedious tasks like modding... Every... Single... Ship...

So my idea would be to have a main engineer on L/XL ships who is modding the stats passively depending on the stars of this guy. In addition to this there should a option at the info screen on how to focus in every aspect of modding.

In the new right cluck menu you can decide what focus your ship should have. For example: Anti Capital/Anti fighter/Transport/Smuggle etc. Etc.

Maybe it could also be possible to create "templates" of your own.

It should be clear that this mods need raw materials. The higher the specalusation the more. So every ship has the need of some materials on board.

Not a full fleshed out idea, but something I was thinking of.

[chew-ie]

Egosoft considers ship modifications as a way to customize your personal ship. It is not meant to mass modify your whole fleet.

Just adding that here as information to understand the reason of the current implementation.

[Ethernet]

OK, but then the system is broken anyway.

What's the point of ending up with hundreds of tier 1 mod parts when I should not use them... Or better to say, it's not intended to use them on many ships...

There are mods to turn them into Tier 2 and 3 but then again, what's the point of them anyway.

[Raptor34]

I'll rather have a surplus than them being hard to acquire tbh.

[Falcrack]

My issue with modding is the random outcomes. If I modify 5 different lasers with the same mod, they get all slightly different damage output, cooling rates, rate of fire, etc. It offends my sense of symmetry! I would rather there be a fixed, non-random outcome for each modification.

[Ethernet]

Exactly, that's also one of my problem with it. So re imagine this system in a immersive kind of way and get rid of this tedious reload roulette game...

Let's be honest, everyone is reloading multiple times with bad stats...

[Raptor34]

Or just don't do it? It's not like it's really necessary or anything. It isn't exactly a hard game.

[flywlyx]

My issue with modding is the random outcomes. If I modify 5 different lasers with the same mod, they get all slightly different damage output, cooling rates, rate of fire, etc. It offends my sense of symmetry! I would rather there be a fixed, non-random outcome for each modification.

Or, if they want players to grind for better spec, just use a natural logarithm curve, the benefits players get from the same modification are getting less and less.
RNG modification is so frustrating.

[GCU Grey Area]

Egosoft considers ship modifications as a way to customize your personal ship. It is not meant to mass modify your whole fleet.

Think it's intended for the player to mod as many of their ships as they want to/have the patience for. In most of my games the majority of my ships end up modded to one extent or another, e.g. generally mod all of my L freighters & miners with a Reaver/Polisher combination (even relatively modest rolls provide ~50% boost to travel speed).

My issue with modding is the random outcomes. If I modify 5 different lasers with the same mod, they get all slightly different damage output, cooling rates, rate of fire, etc. It offends my sense of symmetry! I would rather there be a fixed, non-random outcome for each modification.

Entirely the opposite for me. Indeed will often deliberately mod my weapons to provide substantially different outcomes, e.g. will often mod a destroyer to have one gun optimised for as much range as possible (for sniping turrets etc), while the other has only a modest boost to range but much higher damage output.

Let's be honest, everyone is reloading multiple times with bad stats...

Not everyone. Reloading takes too long, I just hit the reinstall button instead, as many times as necessary. Yes, this does sometimes mean that individual mods can end up costing several times more than the ship they're installed on, but still better than waiting for the entire game to reload.

[Themroc]

as we can´t jump with our personal ship , I have to mod my task force to have a unique ship for my intended purpose.
i am in the cockpit 95% of the time i play x and love dogfighting

most of my modded ship´s look like that..

https://ibb.co/mvnHLcf

that takes alot of time...
save , reload ,...again and again

I would like to have special component from very hard missions or kill´s (maybe in a row)
that give us the possibility to mod our ship´s without a negative value

[chew-ie]

Egosoft considers ship modifications as a way to customize your personal ship. It is not meant to mass modify your whole fleet.

Think it's intended for the player to mod as many of their ships as they want to/have the patience for. In most of my games the majority of my ships end up modded to one extent or another, e.g. generally mod all of my L freighters & miners with a Reaver/Polisher combination (even relatively modest rolls provide ~50% boost to travel speed).

That's not my point - I'm talking about Egosofts / Bernds statements regarding the modding of the ships. And he literaly said that modding is for your personal ship. (His words were along this line: "for your one favourite ship that you want to enhance") What the players made out of that feature is something completely different.

It doesn't matter though - both "methods" can coexist. I merely wanted the OP to understand the state of the current implementation. And once Egosoft has a clear design decision they very rarely change that direction. This is also helpful for the OP to evaluate wether feature requests in that regard are fruitful or not.

And just to be clear: I'm modding every ship I own.

[blackphoenixx]

Let's be honest, everyone is reloading multiple times with bad stats...

Not really, i just reroll until i get the values i want. It's not like there's any shortage of the parts even early game.
Once you get your own wharf/shipyard it doesn't cost any money and even a single looter set up at any gate to Xenon space will generally have you drowning in the common mod parts rerolling consumes (it doesn't consume the rare ones).
I wouldn't even bother using mods if i had to reload after every bad roll.

Before that point you should stick to only modding a few ships or learn to accept less-than-perfect rolls (or ideally both). Which the game is perfectly playable with.

[Eyeklops]

I did quite a bit of ship modding last night and think the biggest problem is the spread is too large on most of the modifiers, especially purples. I understand Egosoft wants some RNG but the -31.8 to 100% reload just feels frustrating and timewasting from a gameplay standpoint. I wish they would make it so either a mod helps reload, like 75 to 100% or it hurts it -25 to -50%. Not both on the same mod. Reload was just an example, there are other stats like this.

I think this feels the worst on purple mods. Purple weapon parts are super hard to obtain in any quantity, and so are High Energy Catalyst (HEC). Burning through a 1000 HEC isn't that difficult just setting up one ship. I was burning through a 1000 per Prometheus last night setting up the forward weapons and turrets. That was purple mods and "ok" stat rolls.

Things I'd like to see them change

• No more modifiers that have both negative & positive possible values
• Spread of values should be overall tighter based upon color. Green = current values, Blue = current max, but spread reduced by 50%, Purple = current max, but spread reduced by 75%.
• More purple mods, such as a beam length mod, pure cooling mod, pure damage, pure reload.
• Removal of modifiers that make no sense for the mod. "Weapon Mining" is the big offender. That stat is on a ton of damage mods for what reason? Who is using Assassin, Butcher, Exterminator, etc on their mining laser? Same goes for Excavator having damage, cooling, reload, and rotation speed (I guess the last one might help a bit, but really?). Do these exist just to make me waste mod parts? Feels that way.
• Some way to apply a single mod part to multiple weapons of the same type so reload and cooling stay syncronized.

Sadly, I don't think we'll see any movement for X4 on this as I'm not sure if they can rework the existing mods and still be savegame compatible. Maybe they could bring out a "black" series of mod parts with no spread at all that are much more focused for the intended role. That would be nice.

[Raptor34]

No more modifiers that have both negative & positive possible values

This one I agree with. It's hard to tell people not to min-max when the min part literally makes things worst.

[Ethernet]

So here comes the idea of the engineer from.

Get rid of the roulette,
Only benefitial numbers
BUT not so high numbers as current mods

As memtionend, the game is playable without modding the ships, so give the ships with an egineer on it a static not op buff. As proposed in my idea, the guy will be leveling so stats will grow over time.

Heck, give this engineer guy to npc ships and you will see even better battles. Underrated ship, but good captain and engineering = hell of a fight...

[Smart_Bomb]

Egosoft considers ship modifications as a way to customize your personal ship. It is not meant to mass modify your whole fleet.

Just adding that here as information to understand the reason of the current implementation.

Still, even modding personal ships is a bit of a pain. The UI needs love and more functionality.

[S!rAssassin]

If I modify 5 different lasers with the same mod, they get all slightly different damage output, cooling rates, rate of fire, etc.

Wish to modify whole group of guns/shields/turrets at same time with one type of mod with one output numbers of effects. Asymmetric stats of main guns of my Rattlesnake makes me cry
Just same mechanic as butch upgrade ships at Equipment Dock - one by one or all the same.