NEWS: 2nd Twitch Live Stream on Sept 27th (20:00 CEST)

[Killjaeden]

for me it would be sufficient if the game is a bit more "dynamic" (a bit random guesses + some intelligent decisions made by the npcs), the best examples are "pirate guild 3" or "tortuga" plugins in X3, the "intelligence" behind those scripts were sufficient to make the whole game more interesting, and the player had to adapt to influences from those pirates ...

Egosofts goal is to make shipspawning and station building ressource based. And this alone makes everything muuch more difficult to balance and gives many things that where trivial/ unnecessary to worry about in the past a great importance.
Pirate Guild and Tortuga work even if they just follow some pre-set plan how to establish their power and how to grow it, because they can grow from nothing, their ship and station building is not strictly ressource based. Plus they have no coordinated resistance (other than the player).
Major races/factions are much different however. You could draw parallels to ancient Rome. Large economy and infrastructure - but this "established order" is constantly under threat from outside and inside. Keeping a large "empire" stable by an "AI controller" is much more difficult than an expansionist AI who is constantly an agressor (and rarely the victim) and never really has to worry about its ressources. Reaction/decision making time and time until the decision takes effect is much more critical when a lost power plant can mean that a large region of the economy loses their supplier and therefore can't produce stuff until a replacement has been built (which requires that enough ressources are available, plus ships plus time).

or compare lucikes trade scripts to the vanilla scripts ...what i'm trying to say is that it was even in X3 possible to improve the "intelligence" of the npc by a huge margin, even small changes can make a big difference

This is true, but consider this: Lucikes trader scripts are just a small piece in the puzzle to make better decisions. And they where mostly an improvement for player owned traders, because not every trader is using them. If all traders in the universe would have used his scripts there would also be problems (mostly for the player to establish himself...).

[Santi]

Sorry ,, but are we talking useless ships eternally circling stations or useless ships crossing the galaxy giving the appearance of trade/immersion..... ??

The ones eternally circling the stations. Using the same path you can find some station cargolifters as well, those are really swapping wares between stations if the useless ones pathing connect those stations.

[Sandalpocalypse]

in XR the mass traffic system is used for:

-the mass traffic itself, including police vessels
-construction drones, for repairing capital vessels and building stations
-cargo lifters, for ship-to-shore trade
-cargo lifters and ore collectors, for their docking and undocking routes on pickup orders (i think)
-cargo lifters for station-to-station trade, although this is rare.

so it is more complicated than just taking out the mass traffic. My read is that the developers generally are talking about the whole system and not just specifically the mass traffic itself.

[zanzal]

For me the concern about removal of JD has nothing to do with removal of the mechanic but the side effects of having to traverse the gate network in large ships esp. with fleets.. Through heavily traffic areas this can be slow even in Rebirth.. At times when there is a lot of traffic through a gate I've had a ship sit around and wait 20 minutes for its turn (occasionally even get blown up by a hostile cap ship while waiting). I think its probably a mistake, but if that's just how its going to be then I hope the team is focused on making sure that the AI, pathing, and queueing systems are up to the task of moving fleets from zone to zone.

IMO the easy solution is to allow Jumping between systems to a beacon one hop at a time. It solves problem of tactical gameplay since it does still take time to move fleets, but no bottlenecking or queuing.. Can also have logistical concerns.. Making refuel depots few and far between, making jump fuel more expensive, keeping the long cool down between jumps (logistical problems can be player gameplay opportunity.. must... build... refueling depots).. Also not every system may have a beacon so ships may only be able to hop around within small clusters. This is essentially how rebirth works, only it would work better with bypassing gates by jumping to the beacon within the next system.

On the flip side allowing full movement between areas without the need to jump is definitely a great improvement.

Anyway, I'd love to see how the gameplay evolves without Jumpdrives, but we've heard the "improved gameplay" song and dance before. Improved gameplay mechanics only matter if the gameplay you deliver isn't horribly broken by those mechanics. If you can't make excellent improvements to deal with AI pathing and queuing through gates then its going to suck and no improvement will be perceived by the player base.

[Sandalpocalypse]

well, an individual sector will be more important than in previous games, possibly even including XR, so the jumpgate choke point wont matter as much. in X3 it's the be all and end all, less so in XR, and I think even less so in X4. especially considering a heavy ship can dump out dozens of fighters or drones in seconds in x4.

if I was egosoft, I would resize the jumpgates so they can have outgoing and incoming lanes for capital vessels, rather than the 'panamax' style of XR.

[Blake00]

Watching now.. the station module building looks awesome. That's really cool that you can build living quarters for each race.


Edit: moved post from German to English topic. X2-Illuminatus

[Aven Valkyr]

All this debate about jump drives vs highways.

Egosoft, let me tell you something. The highways in XR were a total mess. You say you are the developers and so you know better than the people that spend all the time playing your games (probably more so than you do, given the untested state of XR on release, it's CLEAR you didn't play the game yourselves).

Here was my biggest, #1 probelm with XR. Getting around the universe. I couldn't stand it how my ship would enter a highway, telling my fleet to follow me, only to have them sit there like a bunch of morons, waiting for me to EXIT the highway, before their pathing told them to enter the highway.

With multiple fleets on the horizon, and the ability to directly fly any ship, you are GOING TO NEED a good system of travel, and an AI THAT IS COMPETENT.

Getting around in the X series is a delicate matter, and your AI pathfinding is utterly horrendous on so many levels.

If you are going to shove this highway system down our throats, then PLEASE make sure that the travel system is sufficient. If we get a distress call from 5 sectors away, I don't want to have to spend the next 15 hours screwing around with my fleet, trying to force them around the default AI pathing, pushing their slow asses into the highway system, and waiting for them to figure out what to do. The solution here is simple, jump drives.

So if you can manage, for once, to pull off an AI that actually is intelligent, and gives our automated ships the brains they need to travel around on their own without constant intervention from the player, then perhaps the exclusion of a JD is forgiveable. But I'm telling you without JD, the pathfinding of the AI must be TOP NOTCH, or you are going to have a LOT of problems with this game.

I bought XR plus one DLC, played about 20 hours of it, 3 of those hours were spent using the highway to go back to my f*in fleet that STILL sitting there waiting for me to leave the highway, and now they are under attack. No amount of "go here" could get them to enter the f*ing highway. So needless to say I have a shiny new-ish copy of XR and I would be happy to never see that game again. The highway system was a FAIL in my mind, and not because of the concepts of the highways, but because of the GARBAGE pathfinding of the AI. I literally shelved XR because getting assets around the game map is one of the most horribe and frustrating experiences I've ever encountered in an X title. This poorly implemented concept of the highway system literally broke XR for me, enough to make me stop playing and wonder why I was wasting my time with this game. So let me tell you, the highway system was NOT a raging success. Quite the opposite, it was a game breaking design flaw.

So if you are going to force us to use highways, then make sure you play test the system. Try sending fleets around, try getting them to follow you (while they are under attack). Get yourselves in an out of dangerous situations, and so make sure the travel system WORKS. Thanks

[UniTrader]

Sorry ,, but are we talking useless ships eternally circling stations or useless ships crossing the galaxy giving the appearance of trade/immersion..... ??

The ones eternally circling the stations. Using the same path you can find some station cargolifters as well, those are really swapping wares between stations if the useless ones pathing connect those stations.

none of them circle endlessly, they all have a Destination and use the shortest way on the MTN to get there... (i assume they use A* for this). usually not noticeable, but if you have a MTN like this:

Code: Select all

S > O > O
    ^   v
    O < O > L

S: Start Node
L: Landing Node
O: other nodes

the Ships in the Network will distribute like this:

Code: Select all

S#x+XxX+X
        #
        X#L

[Snafu_X3]

highway stuff

In X:R you cannot send capships (L and above) thru highways: that's what their jumpdrive is for (it'll target the nearest beacon & boost from there). Likewise you cannot send JD-equipped ships directly to gates, unlike previous X incarnations

If your complaint about the fleet handling mechanic/AI is to do with S/M ships then I sympathise, but unless you had /lots and lots/ of fighters/bombers available to you they wouldn't have helped much vs. most capships, except perhaps while OOS /This/ point I agree with, & from what I'm hearing it may have been addressed (altho I'm far from certain!)