Is it time to give it a try?

[BigBANGtheory]

Build:
"although the UI is in much need of love"

"it can become a management nightmare in late-game"

all this has happened before, and all of it will (hopefully not) happen again...
Six : Battlestar Galactica

[spankahontis]

...
Which lead to building fully self sustaining complexes that provided all the wares you wanted in a continuous loop.
Fun to build but immersion breaking to f**k, asteroids that never run out of resources, it was ridiculous and try building these complexes in areas with allot of micro-asteroids like Elaine's Fortune or Greater Pride and you get chaos with the placeholder.
...

I had built such complex in Elena's Fortune.

I can post screenshots:

Below you can see Products and some intermediate products of complex
http://i.imgur.com/9fiTKvr.jpg
As you see above complex has 1,160,000 Energy cells capacity and some of Solar Power Plants are idle, since it produce more, than necessary Energy Cells. I can use products any time to refuel my ships or to equip my Cobra with missiles (it is one of the SSC complexes)

Below is Sector view with complex. It is far from each gates and any Pirate (see screenshot) will not see it in his scanner.
http://i.imgur.com/icm3OCx.jpg

I had moved ALL Silicon Asteroids with yield 25+ and added to my complex.

I never build complexes near gates or factories.

Complex in Elena's Fortune had not been attacked even once, although Pirates are always enemies for me.

P.S,
Since almost every mission give me new capital ships, boarded by my own marines, then I use Mammoths to store weapons and shields of boarded ships. Sometimes I sell it in Equipment Dock (can be used HQ in Home of Light too) without any limits.
Some weapons (PPC) produced and produce my first SSC.
I have dozens of battle capital ships, but use them for my missions only.

Which proves my point, looking at your map, you built it outside the micro-asteroids which is around the central region, you try to place a station there and it will flicker all over the place, I tried to built a complex there near the East gate and it went everywhere.
It doesn't react well to objects in it's way.

The whole point is to build near the gates and take on the Pirates, not hide away.
Otherwise you might as well play the Pirate.

Also being able to build fully sustainable factories that can loop produce is possible and it's not immersive to have an everlasting factory.

I once built a factory that was self-sustaining near a mega complex factory that built nearly every missile and every gun you could make.

Also I could never pull off a Marine capture, wasted a fortune on marines
getting them trained and keeping shields below 10% was tedious.. Hell of allot more tedious than Rebirth so I would say they've improved boarding somewhat, still needs work.
So the only way to get guns was to build them myself which took far too long and making money on the Stock Market was a piece of piss.

[spankahontis]

Build:
You can still build complexes, but they are pre-determined, and usually focused to optimizing a single ware, or on producing 3-4 wares of a similar tier (for shipyard supply and the like). eg: You can build a construction shop, which starts by a plate foundry that builds reinforced metal plates (RMP, for short). You can then expand the station by building other modules from a station-specific list. In the construction shop's case, you can add up to 2 more foundry, 2 steel refinery which produce refine metal (required for RMP), and 2 chem refinery which produce chemical compounds (another required ware for RMP). In addition to that, you can expand the station with a few storage and defense modules. Once you've built everything on the list, that's it. The station is fully built and can't be expanded any more.
So the big difference is that complexes are pre-made, and usually focus on 1-3 types of wares. You chose how much you want to expand each station, but it's more limited than in X3 on that aspect. I like it, though. Station complexes are beautiful and much quicker to build, and you don't risk making a big mess by misplacing something.

Otherwise, building is pretty easy, game-play wise. You buy a construction vehicle (CV), equip it with drones, send it to a build location, chose a station and supply the build wares through trade ships. You don't have to hire those bulky mammoth ships to ferry your station across 3 sectors, ramming everything in it's path.
So yeah, it's different.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, you can only build at certain "build spots". There are usually 2 of those per zone, and you can also build between zones (thus creating your own zones), but you won't be able to build 10 stations in a tiny radius. Due to the size of the stations, the quality of the graphic and the presence of mass traffic by civilian ships, I'd say that's mainly for performance issues.
That being said, I did manage to build 5 stations in certain out-of-zone locations.



Trade:
I was never much of a trader in X3, so I can't really compare.
Manual trade in XR is pretty easy, although the UI is in much need of love. You get a trade menu in which every stations where you have a trade agent (or recently scouted for trade offers) will display their offers for buying and selling wares. You can then cycle through your ship and easily place trade orders.
Automated trading is a disaster. You assign trade ships to a station manager, and that's pretty much all you can do. You can set a price limit for whatever the manager will buy or sell, and you can restrict certain ware trades to your faction only. But that's pretty much the limit of what you can set without modding. You can't tell your manager to focus on supplying station X, Y and Z, you can't establish trade routes... you can't do much. Your unbound traders (those directly under your control) don't have any form of automated trade or trade routes either. You can queue up to 7 orders (with the right trading software), but you'll have to place each order manually, and do it again once the queue is done. While it's fine in early to mid-game, it can becomes a management nightmare in late-game.

I've always seen Rebirths Trade Mechanics as a lite-version of the Commodity MK I+II Software that you got with the Bonus pack.
But yeah, not as sophisticated as that mod pack.

[MrFiction]

Build:
You can still build complexes, but they are pre-determined, and usually focused to optimizing a single ware, or on producing 3-4 wares of a similar tier (for shipyard supply and the like). eg: You can build a construction shop, which starts by a plate foundry that builds reinforced metal plates (RMP, for short). You can then expand the station by building other modules from a station-specific list. In the construction shop's case, you can add up to 2 more foundry, 2 steel refinery which produce refine metal (required for RMP), and 2 chem refinery which produce chemical compounds (another required ware for RMP). In addition to that, you can expand the station with a few storage and defense modules. Once you've built everything on the list, that's it. The station is fully built and can't be expanded any more.
So the big difference is that complexes are pre-made, and usually focus on 1-3 types of wares. You chose how much you want to expand each station, but it's more limited than in X3 on that aspect. I like it, though. Station complexes are beautiful and much quicker to build, and you don't risk making a big mess by misplacing something.

Otherwise, building is pretty easy, game-play wise. You buy a construction vehicle (CV), equip it with drones, send it to a build location, chose a station and supply the build wares through trade ships. You don't have to hire those bulky mammoth ships to ferry your station across 3 sectors, ramming everything in it's path.
So yeah, it's different.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, you can only build at certain "build spots". There are usually 2 of those per zone, and you can also build between zones (thus creating your own zones), but you won't be able to build 10 stations in a tiny radius. Due to the size of the stations, the quality of the graphic and the presence of mass traffic by civilian ships, I'd say that's mainly for performance issues.
That being said, I did manage to build 5 stations in certain out-of-zone locations.



Trade:
I was never much of a trader in X3, so I can't really compare.
Manual trade in XR is pretty easy, although the UI is in much need of love. You get a trade menu in which every stations where you have a trade agent (or recently scouted for trade offers) will display their offers for buying and selling wares. You can then cycle through your ship and easily place trade orders.
Automated trading is a disaster. You assign trade ships to a station manager, and that's pretty much all you can do. You can set a price limit for whatever the manager will buy or sell, and you can restrict certain ware trades to your faction only. But that's pretty much the limit of what you can set without modding. You can't tell your manager to focus on supplying station X, Y and Z, you can't establish trade routes... you can't do much. Your unbound traders (those directly under your control) don't have any form of automated trade or trade routes either. You can queue up to 7 orders (with the right trading software), but you'll have to place each order manually, and do it again once the queue is done. While it's fine in early to mid-game, it can becomes a management nightmare in late-game.

Thanks, great info! I do have mixed feelings about this, it makes sense you can only build in predetermined spots in populated zones. But limiting the freedom of connecting dozens of stations is a big step down. Also the lack of MK3 or CLS traders will take some time for me to get used to.

[Tartaros_exe]

Thanks, great info! I do have mixed feelings about this, it makes sense you can only build in predetermined spots in populated zones. But limiting the freedom of connecting dozens of stations is a big step down. Also the lack of MK3 or CLS traders will take some time for me to get used to.

But don't forget, that the Mk 3 trader has been a mod at first and there are already some similar ones for X-R.

I use Yet Another Trader 2 and it works very well.
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=369263

I also recommend CWIR (you can conquer sectors and completly wipe out factions)
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=381043

Personally i got bored quicker from X3, but i never was that huge fan of the trade part (at most i had 8 Stations and i always cheated myself the resources for the Xenon-Hub Mission).

X-R is definitely worth a try.