Good things that work in general:
- Surface elements
- In X3 everyone hated it that you can't destroy e.g. the weapons of the while boarding or the engines of a too strong enemy, now you can.
- It still would be nice to customize these more when build a new ship.
- Compressing multiple Production into one Station
- In X3 the one production only stations caused many issues, e.g. there wasn't a working way to supply all these stations with their own freighters.
- now where we have multiple productions in one station this system is possible once again without cluttering complex tubes or small supply ships everywhere.
- however it would be nice to have some specialization options in these precreated stations as some use only one choices e.g. Hightechfac: switch the chip module for a Y-quantum one.
- beta content The new Trade Deals menu
- it's a nice idea to make trading easier to access for new players, as it sorts tradeoffers by highest profit.
- however giving the actual system or sector at the option to restrict it to a singe system or sector would be a nice addition.
- - Trade:
- - AI:
- - Specialized Trading Ships:
- Ships specialized to e.g. one type of Cargo are completely useless for autotrade in the current game,
- because one non specialized Ship is more than enough to supply any station,
- but you can only assign a ship to one Station so if using specialized ships you would need 4 per station,
- so the only way to make specialized trading ship useful is to allow multi-assignments.
- - Mining Ships:(both gas and solids)
- You don't need them as any trading ship with the correct drones and cargo can mine any resource OOZ,
- so currently any mining ship is outclassed by the DV Hermod, extreme cheap, extreme Cargo size with bulk&liquid hybrid,
- so you either have to restrict mining drones only to mining ships or add special surface elements that must be present for mining.
- - trade execution:
- Trading is too slow, yes it should take some time, but not that much,
- there are some ways to improve this without loosing realism:
- Cargo URV's should be used in a totally different manner than now:
- - Quicktrade:
- If the Trade requires less than e.g. 5 Cargo URV's the trading partner with the wares
- starts 5 of them once they come closer than e.g. 5km
- the other partner starts 5 empty Cargo URV's and the URV's instantly switch the ownership
- if one of the partners doesn't have enough Cargo URV's the other partner will do this alone
- however this way the URV's have to return to their owner.
- - No need for Cargo URV's when trading directly:
- if both partners decide to dock at each other (by any cause), there isn't really a need for Cargo URV's, better expand:
- a cable for Energy cargo
- a corridor for Containers
- a pipeline for fluids
- a housed conveyor belt for bulk
- Stations in the same zone may trade directly with each other without using a ship via Cargo URV's.
- other uses for Cargo URV's keep the same e.g. collecting wares.
- consecutive Tradeorders with the same target shouldn't stack against the max Tradeorders limit, this would really help a lot when building stations.
- - Automated Inter System Trade:
- With beta content the new nice Warehouses there is some need for this at least for the player:
- The inter system trade should however function in a differently way than the normal manager trade,
- the mostly needed property is to make it more customizable than the manager trade,
- it should be something like CLS2 in X3 or Traderoutes in Anno.
- - Supply and DEMAND?
- - Shipyards
- Currently Shipyards are the only existing final ware consumer beside the DV Habitats
- This leads to some odd situations, e.g. you can only sell one hightech ware if all the other ones are produced, too.(else the shipyard wont produce anything)
- This system is neither dynamic nor realistic what we need is consume.(Fast Food, Clothes, furniture, Clocks, Phones, 3Dbeamers... something normal X inhabitants need)
- My idea is to add consuming cycle's to all stations that modify the production speed (like SETA but not the productivity) of a Station, and produce some credits.(some are profitable and some not)
- e.g. Life-support: Energy+Water+Food-> 1/4 of the wares average price in Cr.
- e.g. Luxury Goods Nividium+Cut crystals -> max price of the wares in Cr.
- - Weapon production:
- The current system to create Weapons, causes some issues:
- Weapons like Plasma beams aren't used at all while weapons like the small Ma guns are always out of stock.
- If you add a new Weapon type e.g. an Ion cannon you would have to change all existing weapon productions.
- The produced weapons doesn't represent all variations used on the ships and stations e.g. mk1-3 nor weapon mods
- That's why I would prefer a different system, Weapon components:
- Weapon factories should produce normed Weapon components instead these will be combined on demand at the shipyard into the actual weapon.
- these components could be: small medium and big turret mounts, ammunition supply(for missile launchers), energy focuser's, particle/mass accelerators ... (just ask your fantasy)
- this system would be more robust to: new weapons, weapon mods, weapons for small ships, combinations of big&item trading...
- - Shipyards
- - Settings and micro management:
- - mining range:
- with the up coming beta content warehouses, it might be usefull to allow restrictions to the mining range, too.
- As mineable wares can now be brought effectively for beta content warehouses, too.
- And even the base game offers some unique stations that sell these wares.
- - Ware management:
- I have some ideas for new and expanded ware management settings.(a helpful picture)
- First it would be nice to define storage borders for intermediate products when the manager should buy or sell them (picure 2. line)
- It would also be nice to have the dynamic price system, but still be able to define price borders for it (picture 1. line)
- between these the manager should select a price depending on the current storage.
- being able to select how much cargo should be used per ware, while displaying the cargo consumed by other wares of the same type(picture 3. line)
- - mining range:
- - Specialized Trading Ships:
- - Fight:
- - AI:
- - combat behaviour:
- one issue of combat AI is not to recognize the role of the ship it's controlling,
- we need a generalized interface how ships can tell their AI how it should react.
- I would use something like the following keyword system: artillery|broadside="directions"|antifighter|anticapital
- artillery tells the AI to hold position once the first weapon can fire at the target
- broadside tells the AI wish side should be turned to the primary target in close combat e.g. down for xenon capitals.
- antifighter|anticapital give target prioritisations
- all these should be stored as characteristics on the ship
- - fleet behaviour:
- if the group leader wishes to attack a target, it should tell it's escorts about it so that escorts with greater range than the leader can attack it first
- e.g. a fullmecron with balor escorts.
- if any ship of a group gets attacked by an enemy it should tell the leader about it so the hole group can react accordingly.
- if enemies get to close(e.g. 8km) to a fleet/group the fleet/group should react by directly attacking them, before they can start shooting
- - fleet refuel/resupply:
- not even refuelling works properly at the moment, and resupply doesn't work at all
- if a fleet leader gets a refuel order by any cause the hole fleet should refuel (1 as you can't give a refuel order to commanded ships) so the group stands together all the time
- it should be possible to assign a trading ship to multiple fleets that uses the quicktrade (as mentioned above) to refuel and resupply the fleet, and waits at a safe location if not needed.
- - combat behaviour:
- - balancing:
- - Stations
- NPC Stations are currently invincible especially OOZ and a hostile Station will shoot down any enemy OOZ nearly instantly.
- This is especially annoying if a small ship just enters the system and boost towards the highway the station would IZ never hit it, I recommend adding a OOZ reaction-time.
- Ships should damage station modules OOZ instead of trying to destroy the main hull (wish is only a derived value from the module parts)
- Stations should be completely destroyable and than be rebuild instead of being repaired by only one Scoty.
- Player owned stations should be able to use a engineer, too, however they should only repair surface elements and light damage (e.g. only the last 10%)
- - Spawn:
- Ships should be build if possible and not come from nowhere.
- Priate ships should evade stations or jumpbeacons, and instead try to block navigation routes e.g. parking a triturel in a highway intercept boosting ships.
- - Ships:
- OL could need a frigate.
- It could be nice to customize turret types and shield strength.
- Carriers should be Carriers.
- ships should start with a full set of personal if build in a shipyard.
- - Stations
- - AI:
- - Build:
- - buildorders:
- buildorders should be stackable like tradeorders so the architect buys all resources at once and completes this orders one after another.
- interface: build and equip are mutually exclusive so the can use the same button position. Use the free button for an undo last order.
- - blueprints:
- Blueprints should depend on the architect not on the CV. (this would be easier to understand, too)
- the player should be able to buy blueprints to have them present on all architects.
- a player owned shipyard would be nice, and somehow required to increase the overall demand of goods.
- - buildorders:
- - Think:
- - Minigame:
- better no minigame than the current one, many x players aren't good at reacting fast, especially those concentrating on the trade part, so why a reaction minigame in the smalltalk???
- make all essential minigame rewards buy or gain able by other matters, (tradeagents&skillimprovements)
- btw. why it the minigame the only way to skill up you NPC's better would be: LEARNING BY DOING
- - Having the last word for any action:
- this might work for new players that don't understand everything, but please add an option to make these NPC's more independent.
- If you have more than 20 stations you don't want to know that they have made some money.
- If you have more than 100 Ships you don't want to activate refuel on each, and you wont never ever give your captain's a free dinner....
- Please just add a big AI defaults menu to the game options: where you can en/disable any notification or piep your NPC's are doing or saying in general.
- - Interface:
- Being able to answer in dialogues without having to listen to the question, would be rally nice.
- if your are giving complex orders to your property an than a small pirate thinks of attacking you, you will have to close all menus which can take up to 15sec if a dialogue is involved, kill this cockroach and redo your work.
- I would instead add a toggle menu hotkey which hides all menus without closing them hit it again and they would be back.
- - Minigame:
- - AI: