Starting playing again, it's amazing. - Start Suggestions? (Now mods discussion).

[marcelteaching]

I'm going to fire this up after a long time - I am looking forward to the journey after a break of many years.

I was wondering if you had some suggestions on starting a new game - what mods in particular add to the enjoyment of the game / are must have's?

I'm not a particularly skilled player, but I recall enjoying a stockmarket mod that was kind of fun.

Oh - I have TP and AC - which one is the one I should be starting my new game with?

Also - How is the community here? Great to see it's still active.

[DrSuperEvil]

I like vanilla AP. You can go Terran Commander or Aldrin Adventurer for a bigger PHQ or Unholy Traitor (tough first half hour) for a Medusa Prototype. AP has the stockmarket as a default.

Alot of the community also uses steam or discord nowdays for chatting.

[RainerPrem]

I'm going to fire this up after a long time - I am looking forward to the journey after a break of many years.

I was wondering if you had some suggestions on starting a new game - what mods in particular add to the enjoyment of the game / are must have's?

I'm not a particularly skilled player, but I recall enjoying a stockmarket mod that was kind of fun.

Oh - I have TP and AC - which one is the one I should be starting my new game with?

Also - How is the community here? Great to see it's still active.

The both games are chronologically connected. If you play AP first, you'll miss some of the exciting discoveries in TC. OTOH AP has the better user. OTOOH TC leads you through more tutorial missions.

You see it's not easy to decide. You might play TC for a couple of hundred hours to learn the ropes and then switch to AP.

cu
Rainer

[Timsup2nothin]

You might play TC for a couple of hundred hours to learn the ropes and then switch to AP.

cu
Rainer

Or several years. That's a popular option.

[marcelteaching]

I was going to do the "install plots from TC into AP" option?

https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=324236

Any quality of life mods that are great for AP?

[SirNukes]

I was going to do the "install plots from TC into AP" option?

That's a handy way to marge games, though as a heads up there are some bugs. Mythrantar patched some of them; you can find a link to his patch late in that thread.


For QoL, different people have different tastes. My own short list would include:
1) Egosoft bonus pack, mainly for trade ship automation

2) Ship browser, which is more convenient than a wiki or the in game encyclopedia for comparing ship specs, and works well with other mods (maybe getting a little slow to load when adding a lot of new ships).

3) Some sort of gate ring modification that moves or removes the protruding pylons. The way they are set up in game, if you enter a system with a large capital ship waiting for permission to pass through a gate, it will be placed such that it crashes into a horizontal pylon and dies. A jumbo-size gate mod or ringless gate mod would work around this, though I prefer my own fixes available in my Customizer python tool (in sig) which keep the same size ring and only mess with the pylons.

4) Complex Cleaner for later in the game when you are placing a lot of factories. There is a bug in there with the vanilla game version, which HongoBLAST posted a fix for late in that thread.

5) Marine Repairs, mostly because it is just cool to have a use for staffing marines on a bunch of ships.

[TTD]

you can also adjust the starting scenario a bit...see the links below...hope they still work


hmmm my Xdownloads link seems dead.


anyone with a new link for that ?

[delray]

Start with Terrans, better campaign and better HQ at the end of it.

[marcelteaching]

Hmm,

Really appreciate you pointing out later bug fixes. Thank you.

I'm applying the patch from Mythrantar (https://tinyurl.com/y7baesyo) which was in his signature. Thanks for pointing that out - it would have been really disappointing to have the plot broken somewhere.

I'm slowly working through all the suggestions. [/b]

[wathman00]

I just came back to the game after about 5 years and it is still plenty fun. I recommend doing Tormented Teladi start to unlock Poisoned Paranid and then getting 25 mil in under 3 days to get an overtuned Hyperion. There is also an advanced Perseus included in the reward. The one I ended up with after a dozen reloads got up to 245 m/sec. I saw that the theoretical max is 250 but you could spend days re rolling the reward and not get it.

Just keep in mind that these start scenarios are not friendly for brand new players but are very doable if you are familiar with the game. The stock exchange in AP makes these starts pretty easy to do if you can survive the first hour.

[DrSuperEvil]

Within the first 8 hours your income from manipulating the stock market can be enough to complete the tormented teladi mission every 30 seconds.

Salvage Banshee Missiles and Remote Guided Warheads in the warzone before upgrading to a Discoverer and keep salvaging missiles until 500k before beginning manipulation of EBCs in Grand Exchange.

[Hemmingfish]

3) Some sort of gate ring modification that moves or removes the protruding pylons. The way they are set up in game, if you enter a system with a large capital ship waiting for permission to pass through a gate, it will be placed such that it crashes into a horizontal pylon and dies. A jumbo-size gate mod or ringless gate mod would work around this, though I prefer my own fixes available in my Customizer python tool (in sig) which keep the same size ring and only mess with the pylons

I like Xchange Guild Portals, same portals as vanilla but slightly more than twice as big. It's really hard to go back because it also means you don't have to thread needles when piloting capital ships, and greatly removes the risk of getting destroyed by NPC capital ships warping through your face.

Another essential QoL mod is Bounce, which makes AI ships a lot less suicidal in combat.


Edit: fixed up some broken tags

[Sinxar]

I'm going to fire this up after a long time - I am looking forward to the journey after a break of many years.

I was wondering if you had some suggestions on starting a new game - what mods in particular add to the enjoyment of the game / are must have's?

I'm not a particularly skilled player, but I recall enjoying a stockmarket mod that was kind of fun.

Oh - I have TP and AC - which one is the one I should be starting my new game with?

Also - How is the community here? Great to see it's still active.

Personally I always play vanilla TC or AP. I love TC to death but the QoL changes in AP makes me play that more often than not. For mods well, *shameless plug* X3:TC/X3:AP Vanilla Visual Enhancement With Complex Capital Docking No modified tag btw.

As for the community, us vets are still here with a slow trickle of newbies.

[marcelteaching]

Thanks for that suggestion!

I'd love it if someone could reupload the mod here : https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=300329 (XChange Guild Portals 1.0a) reason being that there are only dead links.

[Hemmingfish]

Oh yeah, I forgot to check that the links actually worked - I clicked through the first link but not the actual downloads and assumed it would work.

I've mirrored the rar version on my dropbox. Just download, extract and place the resulting "objects" folder into your base X3 Terran Conflict directory.