X4 done right EGOSOFT PLEASE READ

[Aven Valkyr]

OK Egosoft I know there is a lot of speculation on "X4" if there is going to be one, and a lot of suggestions flying around. But after playing hundreds of hours of X3 TC/AP and some of Rebirth, I can tell you with assurity the things that you should please for the love of god add to your games already.

I've browsed dozens upon dozens if not hundreds of posts on certain topics regarding your games. Just look at the mods out there that are available. Yes people mod the game to make it different, but a SOLID portion of the mods out there are present because your games are always either broken, bugged, or lacking.

After spending more hours looking at forum threads than I did actually playing the game, I offer to you these things in no particular order, just know that of the hundred other things suggested, these should be *TOP RATED* amongst them all:

Fleet Control:
It's always atrocious at best. Please do something to improve on fleet management. It should be possible to tell the fleet to do things which satisfy the players needs. It could be jumping to a new sector. Or escorting ships. Or defending a station. Either way, the player should have fleet options to control the fleet in much more sophisticated ways than "fly here and do stuff". And the AI should perform these tasks flawlessly. There should be no epic amounts of having to micro-manage around a buggy issue.

This comes in place with a new fleet system. Capital ships should have much more of a presence and interaction with the rest of the fleet. Take the carrier control system found in the game "Starshatter". It's an old game but provides an excellent example of what I'm talking about here. It has the ability to house fighter craft, and several of them. You can assign these craft into squadrons and have them make patrols around the carrier. You can set up a looping way point system for the carrier itself and the fighter squads will perform their patrol patterns around the carrier as it moves. You can assign frigates and other capital ships to escort the carriers. You can make several fleets, squads, wings etc. You can tell any ships to engage in a patrol pattern. You can set the waypoints in the sector overview map.

The bottom line is that the X series of games should have almost played out as a tactical space naval simulator, as well as the trading simulator. They should both be present to really flesh out X4. Make having a fleet an exciting thing. Give us a POLISHED interface. 3-d, rotating maps. Waypoint control. Patrol squads. Battlegroup stances (aggressive, cautious, passive).

Ship Piloting:
This is OK until you get into your first M7 (going to pre XR) and it's big and slow and the first person view of it is absurd. Going back to the starshatter concept, you had the ability to adjust a capital ships' pitch and yaw by using sliders that went around rings which were in align to a ships Z,X axis. The ship would turn to where the arrow had been set and then you had the option to increase its thrust. This provides an excellent 3-D view of the ship at all times to avoid silly things like collisions, and to see what your fleet is up to.

Starshatter also had the options while actively flying a frigate to enable and disable certain weapons. You had options during combat to select a ships' subsystem and blast it up. Another game which is close to this is Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. It should be easy to fly capitals and it should be rewarding. As of X3 AP it was downright frustrating. Capitals have always been a great thing about the X series, but flying them is commonly avoided.

Personnel Onboard:
It has been asked for MANY TIMES to add an actual personnel roster to each ship, changing how the ship reacts given the officers on board. This sounds very much like a Star Treck Online system. In that game you can hire officers to pilot your ship and they would yield different abilities depending on who you picked. For example having a weapons officer on board a frigate should increase weapons power and functionality. Reduced drain on the weapons battery, different weapon spread patterns, etc. The main reason for pilot controlled ships and not AI controlled ships is immersion. People want to actually *care* that there's 1200 of their men dying on that ship that's getting blown to space dust. It also would help them to train up officers and specialists to work on their capital ships.

A system similar to this is also found in Sins of a Solar Empire. When you upgrade your capitals the crew can unlock different abilities and their stats go up. What I'm suggesting is far more sophisticated than this but you get the idea. A suggestion for ship personnel is this:

Separate the personnel types into categories.

Piloting
Combat
Engineering
Security
Command

Each ship would have certain slots to fill personnel with. Even the smallest ships would have some slots. For example an M5+ would have an extra seat in it, so you could not only have a pilot but a combat specialist. The biggest ships would have slots available for all categories. However, depending on the race each category would have differences in how many slots are within those categories. For example an argon M7 would have 2 piloting slots, 2 combat slots, 4 engineering slots, 3 security slots and 1 command slot. Where as a teladi M7 would have 1 piloting, 2 combat, 3 engineering, 2 security and 3 command slots.

Examples of the categories and some ideas on personnel types (each sublisting is a single personnel with an ability that can either be used or provides a passive bonus to the ship. The "AI" controlled player ships would also use these abilities given the right situation):

- Piloting
-- Makes the ship have more velocity (passive)
-- Makes the ship turn faster (passive)
-- Has an ability that causes the ship to dodge more shots (ability)
-- Has more control over the piloting console, giving you more information about a target (passive)
-- Uses less fuel while jumping (passive)

- Combat
-- Does more damage with turrets (passive)
-- Does more damage with missiles (passive)
-- Increases weapon accuracy (passive)
-- Has the alpha strike ability, initiating a sustained volley of turret fire on target (ability)
-- Missile barrage ability, launches 3 - 5 volleys of missiles in a very rapid succession (ability)

- Engineering
-- Power to Shields/Engines/Weapons (ability)
-- Reduces battery drain during weapons fire (passive)
-- Initiates a powerful boost to the scanning array that provides an ultra long range, high resolution scan ping (ability)
-- Systems repair faster (passive)
-- Fast repair of the ship (ability)
-- Fire a nanite stream through the projection array that repairs other ships (ability, lasts infinitely)

- Security
-- Prevent incoming boarding parties (ability)
-- Increases ship internal defenses (passive)
-- Repel invaders (ability)
-- Boarding parties have higher chances of success (passive or ability)

- Command
-- Increases scan range and resolution
-- Cohersion boost, increases effectiveness of all other personnel and bosts their passive/active abilities by 15 - 20% (Ability)
-- Improves effectiveness (durability, maneuverability, damage) of squad members assigned to this vessel (passive)

Sectors, Systems & Travel:
You have tried the game with SETA and jumpgates. You have tried the game with highways. No hear this. No more seta, and less need of the highways. First, let me start this one off with the mapping system. It's terrible. A flat panel look at a system with a bunch of dots flying around. And that's in X3. In XR? Yeah hollow, empty, void, hard to understand, hardly ever use it. So my suggestion for the map is to look at what EVE online has done with their map. A 3D view. You can spin the galaxy any which way, zoom in, zoom out, look at connection points, plot routes, basically everything we would need to do in X4. Make the map a lot nicer. Make it easier to work with. Make it so that while in galaxy view, we kindof have an idea as to where our assets actually are by visually showing us. Not like some list "oh it's in this system". Allow us to interact with this map. Give us something NICE to look at. We happen to spend a lot of time looking at the map you know.

Now let me get to sectors. You have tried sectors 2 different ways (seta and highways). They both kinda worked but also kinda didn't. In X3 everything was clustered too close together and made me feel like a sector wasn't really very expansive. In XR they are waaaaay too spread apart. I get the idea behind highways, to travel to these areas, but in making a system modular like you have, you still have stations clustered all close together like. It didn't help with the problem that you've had from the initial get-go. A game you should look at is Starpoint Gemini 2. Now they had an awesome map, or playground. I'm not talking about the map itself here. I mean the area in which to do business. It's huge. The highway systems should be there to take us to other parts of it yes, but a pilot should be allowed to fly anywhere within the zone. And it should be populated with life and all sorts of happenings. "Defend the sector" would become obcelete since it would take literally an hour to fly from one part to another. But what I'm suggesting here is that the entire map for SPG 2 would be like one system within a sector. Then you would have multiple of these within a sector, each one displaying a different flavour, or part of the sector. Then the sectors should work up to the zones which are found in the galaxy. So system -> Sector -> Zone.

The last point to this one here is travel. Seta sucked. But it allowed AI to have better pathfinding while following you. Highways are cool, but leaves your fleet in the dust when you need them the most. What I propose here is a new way of travel. While highways and super highways will still be present, to take you around to different parts of the system, their usefulness would only be to get there quickly. Otherwise you can fly there with your fleet. For non-highway use, a drive that works much like the booster would be in place. It would activate and take time to wind up, then provide you with a sudden, high, constant push of speed. You can fly anywhere you like in this fashion. Highways would be much faster than they are now, in fact almost instant. But this drive, if you want lore, would be called a graviton wave generator. It basically creates a gravity anomaly in front of your ship which pulls you towards it, while generating a pushing wave behind you, allowing you flight which doesn't require physical thrusters.

So to recap this one here...
Give us a much better map to use. Make it nice, polished, sophisticated. With options.
Make the systems HUGE. Make it so the player wants to spend a lot of time in each system exploring, getting to know the locals. Trading. Fighting, etc.
Make travelling viable. Give us sub warp drives that we can use in conjunction with the highways. Still keep the booster for dogfights. Give us varying levels of methods of travel. Come on guys this is the year 3000 or something right? You would think they would have found this technology by now.

Repairing:
This is and always has been downright infuriating for most X players. In previous XR you had to spend minutes if not hours hitting your capitals with a repair lasers. Mods soon came out that made repairing better, but come on it was a bandaid on a dismembered limb. We need PROPER methods of repairing our ships. Why can we not build a ship repair array? Or have mobile support ships within the fleet that can repair us? Why not even have engineers or ship crew (an entire squad of engineers) to repair larger sihps? This is a massive issue and it's got to be dealt with. Thinkn of something here guys. ANYTHING really.

References to games:
- Starpoint Gemini 2 (travel, regions/zones)
- Nexus, the Jupiter Incident (ship control, weapons control, capitals)
- Eve (map system)
- Homeworld (Tactical overview, tactical control)
- Star Treck Online (officer abilities, ship personnel)
- Sins of a Solar Empire (ship abilities)
- Starshatter (capital ship control, carrier/fleet organization)

So if you read this egosoft devs, please. Think about it. Talk about it. Perhaps even do something about it. These are the MAIN issues that have plagued the X series of games. Every game addresses these issues, sometimes a little worse than others. XR is the pinnacle of failure to every one of these issues. However XR is at least the nicest X title to look at. So if you really are making an X4, make these topics the most discussed. We need you, as your fan playerbase, to please give us a game that is both a trade/empire building simulator, and a tactical space navy simulator. We want the best of both worlds, and we know you can deliver. It's just about finding your priorities and building the game around a system that delivers to the players' needs. Thanks

[Aven Valkyr]

A couple more things to add here.

Mission system epic arcs:
There should be ongoing missions when you get far enough into the game that allows you to work for a military. Could be the argon military or teladi, each race should have their own militaries to work for. You would need a fleet to take on these missions. Of course the standard missions would still be there but these new missions would be of a new calibre. You could be notified at a certain rank about a captain who wants to talk to you. So you fly out there to meet him and he offers a variety of missions. These missions pit your endgame content against a big target. A really big target. That's well defended. The stakes are high but so are the rewards. Failure of these missions could actually change the regions landscape. It could be possible for an invading force to capture a sector. So winning or loosing the missions could have a shift in political structure for the sector. But the rewards could be rare ships, items, personnel, etc.

Random mission arc npc's:
There should be NPC's floating around out there who give missions or mission arcs. These missions would be 1 - 5 missions long and could yield a rare gun type or ammo, or a rare ship or item. But they would be in many places. It would be nice to see the general space fairing population are willing to talk to you and helping flesh out the sector I am in. There should be a certain amount of lore. Perhaps you could get sent to check out an energy signature in some old ruin out in space somewhere, or help a pilot get his memory back, or whatever. More, fun things to explore and discover would be nice. And I don't mean just a few of these things.. I mean hundreds of them.

[BigBANGtheory]

Firstly its nice to see others not only recognising the value of proper Fleet Command (because there are many many players that feel that way), and that you've taken the time to write it down and express a PoV held by (everyone - 1%).

There have been a couple of hints over the years but Egosoft has never really acknowledged there to be a problem with either the X Trilogy or XR method of fleet command. This is why it keeps coming up time and again I believe...

The X Universe unique selling point that differentiates it from its competitors is the ability to build and expand within a deeply simulated sandbox it is not Spacesim only anymore. Egosoft need to embrace the strengths of the core product and vision it can't be all things to all people which I think they try to do but end up having to compromise on quality in too many places.

What will make the next product strong (X4-like by any other name), is Egosoft understanding its market and finding a healthy relationship with them.

I'll leave you with this to muse over...
"What is more important here, should X Universe look to deliver a SimCity in space experience or a Battlestar Galactica-like experience first and foremost (not mutally exclusive)?"...and if you have to think about that for too long you probably don't understand the player base.

[linolafett]

Thanks for the lengthy post. As usual some of us are reading the forums regularily.
I always try to ask for more asset control in the game, how much of my or your ideas can be put into a game is always difficult to tell. I do my best to present the requests in a nicely manner and try to think about how to make them easyly implementable.
Lots of other areas which are lacking have to be taken care of, too.

Lets see what happens in the future in regards of how to control your assets better.

[vrod]

I am very pleased about the possibility of a new X game.

I had played Terran Conflict (nearly exclusively) for an entire year.
Installed the balance mod for it, then played that for 9 months.
Installed AP and played for 6 months.
Installed AP balance mod and played for 4 months.

Totally skipped Rebirth. Main reason was not being able to change ships. Plenty enough other reasons.

Would love to see a new X game that continues (with updates) from the X3 series.
Don't need to have a plethora of ships either.
Would like to see random anomalies in the game and missions. (think old Star Trek...receive distress call, and find empty ship at the location, or giant roving space cloud that drains shields...lots of random stuff like that.)

Maybe rumor circulates that a certain mechanic can bump up your ships speed, weapons, shields...etc. That could be a nice mission in itself.

I loved the single player experience!!!

[jeroll3d]

hi guys!

Is very good see this interaction: players and DEV. X series have a story - a good story.

[mr.WHO]

I going into a bit of pesimist territory, but I start to think that Egosoft avoided this territory (proper Fleet command system) for so long with so many people complaining that I think it's no longer a technical issue but more like intentional.

Mods for X3 clearly show it's possible to have proper Fleet/Carrier management, but once you have this there is a hard problem - what to do with such force? In X3 you could burn down entire sectors, but GoD respawn stations. You could kill every ship in half of galaxy, but GoD will spawn the new one immediately.

In XR they even made stations indestructable and with crazy repair speed.
In entire XR you don't need fleet at all apart from attack on Xenon I (and there should be maximum of 2 of them in the entire universe).

The problem with X3 gameplay was that it took very long to go to the "endgame phase", but you had some limited grand objectives possible and limited fleet control. However achiving them using stock X3 GUI was a nightmare (equip every single destroyer and every single fighter in the fleet).

On the contary XR had "endgame progression" almost perfect, some good management simplification (faster and easier Capship equiping, no fighter customization), almost no fleet control and zero grand objectives except maybe making a totally self sufficient economy in DeVries.

[Patholos]

OP gets it, fleet management wise. Three thumbs up.

A bit off topic:
I'm more of an industrialist. Having an enourmous economic powerhous which dwarfs entire races industrial output, gives me deep satisfaction.

So in a future post, I want to express my humble viewpoint on the industrial side. Because in XR, it ain't half bad. It just stumbles in execution on regarding the players ability to influence flow of goods + a bit weird layout of the production schedule of different wares. I'll probably post it a bit later as reallife eats up much of my time these days.

Back on topic:
A decent fleet command is crucial in terms of being being an integral part of the much desired "endgame". Get fleet command up, and basically you've added a new dimension to the game.

At last, a small tirade:
A quick check on steamcharts on what's played of X3AP/TC and XR should be ample evidence. Listen to your customer/fan base, give the vast majority aka truckloads of $$$ what it wants.

[Aven Valkyr]

Thanks for the lengthy post. As usual some of us are reading the forums regularily.
I always try to ask for more asset control in the game, how much of my or your ideas can be put into a game is always difficult to tell. I do my best to present the requests in a nicely manner and try to think about how to make them easyly implementable.
Lots of other areas which are lacking have to be taken care of, too.

Lets see what happens in the future in regards of how to control your assets better.

Thanks for the reply! I'm happy to see you dev's are still keeping tabs on the forums It sounds like you are well under way for X4. There are a lot of good things in the X games that were done right. In X3 TC the trade system was amazing. The actual economy in those series was brilliant. You should take the economy of X3 and plug it into XR's graphics, you would have a solid foundation right there. Then with that in place, look at the fleet AI, travel, zones, and other things I mentioned.

I can understand it must be difficult. People hammered egosoft pretty hard over the release of XR. I must say though that you guys have done an awesome job bringing it up to the state it's at now (v3.53). However I'm sure there's much debate at Egosoft over what would be the next course of action. I appreciate you taking the time to submit our ideas to the board. Thank you

@ mr.WHO: Yes you are right. In order to make the fleet control worth anything, there would need to be some proper endgame content. We shouldn't be limited to taking the random mission type from a random station or ship, the same random missions over and over that don't really pay the bills that well. What we need are high end missions that pay very well. In fact even reward the player with ships, money, and awesome items and such. This could all be a part of a mission system that actually changes who owns which sectors, and therefore who is hostile to you and who isn't. This is kindof what I mean by my first reply to this thread. Endgame content needs to be worked into something much more dynamic.

[BigBANGtheory]

OP gets it, fleet management wise. Three thumbs up.

A bit off topic:
I'm more of an industrialist. Having an enourmous economic powerhous which dwarfs entire races industrial output, gives me deep satisfaction.

So in a future post, I want to express my humble viewpoint on the industrial side. Because in XR, it ain't half bad. It just stumbles in execution on regarding the players ability to influence flow of goods + a bit weird layout of the production schedule of different wares. I'll probably post it a bit later as reallife eats up much of my time these days.

Its a very valid point because the real strength behind X series and its vision has always been the depth of its simulation. There are a number of games where you can fairly effortlessly build a large fleet of ships and go do stuff, but very few that give you the full experience of building and supporting your own economy (as opposed to just extracting some simple resources) leading to your capacity to create and maintain a fleet of ships.

For as long as I can remember X series has always supported the player in their building and expansion, but heavily compromised the conclusion of that and the next phase the late game as I like to call it. You can't effectively manage the asset you've created for different reasons in X3 and XR, you cannot be the commander of the fleet you've built or aquired the game doesn't give the player the tools to do that, it robs the player of that experience and leaves them frustrated.

The fusion of industry and fleet management are very much linked, just as strategic gameplay is i.e. the purpose of fleet management to defend yourself or dominate others. The OP has quite rightly observed and experienced that having built some assets the follow on gameplay experience falls flat.

Where XR got its design completely wrong was trying to simplify fleet management by just giving greater control to the AI instead of (or in conjunction with) simplifying the method of control accessible by the player i.e. through a powerful and interactive UI. They tried to integrate a radial menu UI with the complex task of fleet management and I'm sorry but that was never going to work. Maybe it was the best that could be done at the time... ok well lets move on and do it right this time please.

I don't think there is an easy way around it, the UI has to evolve and do its job to act as the interface between the player and the virtual world, it should work for the player not be a barrier.

[blotunga]

Am I the only one around here who actually likes SETA? I think it's cool, especially in huge sectors like Aldrin in X3:TC/AP

[Slashman]

Am I the only one around here who actually likes SETA? I think it's cool, especially in huge sectors like Aldrin in X3:TC/AP

I never liked or disliked it. I just used it to speed up travel (which was its intended purpose). I don't think its loss is a huge problem. There just needs to be viable and engaging alternatives to it put in place.

[werewolves?]

My personal thoughts are that the map and gravidar in XR are pretty good. Agree with the sentiments on zone and sector design.

But good work to the OP, a well detailed contribution. And cheers to Lino for his response.

[gbjbaanb]

totally agree about SETA, it's not that its was a cheat - it was a gameplay addition to make the game less tedious. If people really dislike it then a replacement needs to be found - and highways are not it. A cruise-ddrive system (where you stop, shields and/or weapons go to 0 and then you get to blast off at triple speed) is probably the answer - less tedium, no 'cheating', and no effect on the rest of the universe. Might have to let NPC ships use it too though.... and in that case, why not just increase ship speed directly and have done with it.

As for the rest, I think I know why X3 was so popular - think less of it as a piloting sim, and more of a sim city type game with piloting on the side to give you something else to do while your empire is grinding along. When you look at X as a complex resource management game it makes a lot more sense.

Fleets: yup, can't argue with that though I'd like to see the race empires made substantially bigger - at the moment, you can pretty much become as big as any of them, this should be way more difficult. More likely that you can carve out your own mini empire and have to maintain good relations with the others. And why not promote a couple of pirate factions to mini empire status too. Then make a better distinction between core, border and empty sectors - and the policing that goes with them, so you have safe and risky areas to work with.

That might give you opportunities in the end - destroy a pirate faction, or defend from one, or like Litcube did - introduce a reason to have those fleets with the Xenon invasion.

I like the idea of better crew management, but don't screw it up by making it so mandatory like XR. You don't need a pilot for a M5 fighter! We should still be able to have autopilots, though maybe they'd be less effective than skilled pilots. Bigger ships might need crew to operate (eg gunnery plus general crewing for trade, maintenance and so on). But if you don't have crew, the AI should provide basic functionality so you don't need to micromanage every ship (and I suppose a pilot-less fighter is just a drone by another name!)


The UI needs to be thought of as a resource management type game too - radial menus and fancy pop up screens don't work there, we need boring spreadsheet style dialogs (sorry, but look at any other game like this, reports are de regueur for good reason). Forget immersive screens that don't work right, immersion is all in our heads anyway.

So my priorities are to make travel better, improve the economies with more complexity and loops of resource usage, add fleet management, and then work on the NPC interactions. That should do it really, unless you want to get rid of the stupid design ideas that have popped in (such as the stupidly big Aldrin space, or the stupidly oversized Terran ships).

[Nanook]

...
As for the rest, I think I know why X3 was so popular - think less of it as a piloting sim, and more of a sim city type game with piloting on the side to give you something else to do while your empire is grinding along. When you look at X as a complex resource management game it makes a lot more sense....

Actually, X3, and previous games, were so popular because of all of the above. X games give the player their choice on how to play and what to concentrate on doing. It's not mostly about resource management or piloting. Some players build an empire to support their combat game. Some players build fleets just to protect their empire building game.

I've played many a game where my emphasis was on flying and fighting. I've also played games where I built huge complexes and fleets to protect them. I've played games where I was a pirate and my primary income was from stealing things. I've even played games as a scavenger, picking up loot, buying, repairing and then selling used ships, capturing ships just for reselling, etc.

What makes these games so great is the breadth of things you can do, and the ability to concentrate on just one area for a whole game, if you wish.

[helgard]

Personnel Onboard:

No thank you.

[gbjbaanb]

...
As for the rest, I think I know why X3 was so popular - think less of it as a piloting sim, and more of a sim city type game with piloting on the side to give you something else to do while your empire is grinding along. When you look at X as a complex resource management game it makes a lot more sense....

Actually, X3, and previous games, were so popular because of all of the above. X games give the player their choice on how to play and what to concentrate on doing. It's not mostly about resource management or piloting. Some players build an empire to support their combat game. Some players build fleets just to protect their empire building game.

I've played many a game where my emphasis was on flying and fighting. I've also played games where I built huge complexes and fleets to protect them. I've played games where I was a pirate and my primary income was from stealing things. I've even played games as a scavenger, picking up loot, buying, repairing and then selling used ships, capturing ships just for reselling, etc.

What makes these games so great is the breadth of things you can do, and the ability to concentrate on just one area for a whole game, if you wish.

True, but I was trying to emphasise the aspect that makes X games different to the others, its USP if you will. If you just like shooting things you'll be playing Elite or similar, but if you want the more rounded experience then X3 was the only game in town. That XR isn't the successor we hoped says how much ES dropped the ball in this aspect, and forgot that a FPS shooter isn't a replacement, even if it still had a little bit of resource management stuff.

[Letzt]

You know I played x3 reunion x3tc and x3 ap , as a fighter pilot , piloting m5s m4s and m3s and I did because I could(until ap's missile spam , not adding decoys , flares , chaff , emps and minor direct countermeasures aside turrets , to m4s and m3s was almost a gamebreaker).

But hey on the side I managed my militaristic empire by taking on pirate and xenon sectors which was made more fun with pirate guild and yaki armada, leading a fleet of fighters from my own fighter and it was awesome.
Oh the glory days , don't be EGOtistic thinking all about yourself and how the game should be , because it was a game that you could play in many ways , you could be a trader you could be a capital ship captain you could be a fighter pilot with Split temperament like me , you could be anything you ever wanted.

Bring back what the series had till x3 ap(balance the damn missile spams bring countermeasures as described above) , build and expand upon it and maybe bring in limited planet interactions and for last be not least bring back the damn billboard(with little Suzie's adventures) from reunion with news and missions , I loved reading those , gave some immersion to the game.

That is all , thank you!

[Leafcutter]

An iteration on the last game will only make the series better.

As the OP has pointed out many things and more can be improved.

I am confident that whatever follows will be better.

Egosoft... the only developer that takes 1 step back to move 2 steps forward... and take the flack; lol; and I for one believe this to be a positive thing given the very complex nature of these games.

-LC-

[edit] Promote the storytelling individuals in Egosoft to sit at the big table

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

Welcome back, -LC-