Hey guys, can this possibly be any more tedious? Who greenlit this?

[mr.WHO]

1) Open the map.
2) R-Click on ship.
3) Select Information menu.
4) Open Personel hierarchy list, possibly some scrolling down involved.
5) Open Crew hierarchy list, possibly some scrolling down involved.
6) Open full crewlist hierarchy list, possibly some scrolling down involved.
7) Open marines hierarchy list, possibly some scrolling down involved.
8 ) Open recruit hierarchy list, possibly some scrolling down involved.
9) R-click on person.
10) Click call.
11) Select "work somewhere else"
12) R-click on ship.
13) Select "Select".
14) Go to the other side of the screen to "select workplace"
15) Click "assign to approve".

Realize you move one marine and you still have 50+ to go where you need to repeat steps 9 to 15 EVERY, SINGE, TIME!


For the love of god, how did we manage to make something far worse than X-Rebirth? How is it that crew movement was a chore ever since X-REBIRTH 1.0 and now we are at X4 2.50 and yet no one find this problematic?

Points from 4 to 11, 14 and 15 should be scrapped and moved to separate menu/window that support mass select and where you can fast move bulk of the crew to other ship or change their role.
Point 13 is completely redundant - why I need to R-click on the ship and select "select" which is only avaliable option? Shouldn't ship auto-select when I just left click on it?
Why I need additional step just to "unlock" the menu to the right side of the screen?

God forbid that you will have great idea to apply virtual seminars via points 1-12 with additional step where you have to open another hierarchy list level for person detailed skill list.

P.S. Why every time you assign new captain the existing one is executed? Is this Warhammer 40k?

Whoever made this system should be sentenced to reasigning the every single crew member of full Collossus.
Just once.
Actually Bernd should do it!
Maybe this will convince them to actually adress this in 3.0?

[Falcrack]

You seem to have a theme with the "crew transfer" issue. You must like boarding and using marines. Having never touched the mechanic myself due to lack of interest in stealing crappy second hand ships from NPCs, preferring to manufacture them myself, it never was an issue that bothered me. But, to each his own.

"P.S. Why every time you assign new captain the existing one is executed? Is this Warhammer 40k?"

This is addressed in 2.5

[mr.WHO]

It's not only boarding specific - this is a "Foundation" for the entire NPC crew managent and training.
Yes, the biggers chore is for boarding, but if you would like to move/manage your elite crew/captains this is a big chore too.

[Axeface]

They need to add Rebirths crew drones, pronto. They are little XS drones that just move people around, quickly and convieniently. Its one of hundreds of things X Rebirth 4.x does very well that needs to be ported to X4 (stop avoiding Rebirth like the plague egosoft... its a good game now).
And make it so if you are talking the the captain of a ship, you can say "Move somewhere else" OR "Move your crew somewhere else" (move everyone). And if you are talking to a marine "Move all your marines somewhere else". Make it so the crew drones can fit like 6 npcs, so multiple trips are required for a big crew (in Rebirth these drones dock and undock very quickly, even if your ship is moving, they are kind of like the little repair drones we see in X4).

Oh, I also think that all ships should come with a basic autopilot. So a crewless ship can do one thing, and one thing only.... move and dock where you tell it to. Cant fight, use turrets, nothing. But at least you can move it.

[mr.WHO]

Yup - I miss crew pod from X-Rebirth. It was more convinient.

Now it is a nightmare for S and M ships without landing pad (e.g. Minotaur, M freighters and M Miners) - you have to personally board and fly them to nearest landing pad.

[ajime]

Yeh, I Pretty much will be following on this. Hopefully its improved so i get some motivation to do some pirating and finally boot up the game then.

[Socratatus]

I hate the word `problematic`. It`s such a horrible modern buzz word. I just prefer the words `a problem.`

[Nort The Fragrent]

Consider this for a moment !
You are the Admiral of the fleet, and you are sending your best men off to die, wouldn't you want to be sure you picked the right ones for the task in hand. Take your time enjoy your war mongering.

I haven't even transferred a deep in list crew, I have no interest it so you get no sympathy from me.

And as some one else said, the ship you will get as a boarding reward is one that is cheep and off the shelf any way so why bother. It is a part of the game that completely bamboozles me as to why do it.

[lordmuck]

We have been screaming for this since 1.0 .

I have also been screaming for selecting a group of ships NOT A WING a mix of wings or single ships 30 or more.. and do the whole patrol command on EVERY SINGLE STUPID SHIP! or defend position on every stupid single ship tedious ? /wrists.
Before some smart arse says "Make them all into a wing" .. No..

from a programming perspective at the user end. Anything more than 3 clicks is absolutely crap.

[BattleXer]

Yup , totally agree with the OP.

This is one of the prime reasons I stopped playing shortly after 2.00 was released. It's just too tedious, and boarding for me is a big part of the game.
I cannot understand how anyone thought that navigating and assigning your crew this way was a good - or even acceptable idea...

Hope this will get some attention soon.

[graphicboy]

At some point someone will explain to me how all of this nonsense is better than purely software-based ships/fleets.

IMO, it needs to be an option. You want to screw with people on all your ships? Go crazy. I'm OK with Trading Software Mk3, or a dozen unnamed marines that got stuffed into cargo.

It didn't have to make "sense". It worked. Now I've got to deal with idiots that can't fly from A to B correctly.

[Damocles_]

A drag and drop UI would be the best for such assignments. (That collides with controller and joystick support)
But they have commited to a certain way the UI is implemented, that does not allow such a drag & drop.

A "move all personell" and "move 5 personell" order between two ships is still not hard to implement.

[Kadatherion]

This is the perfect example of what happens when nobody - nobody - plays the game in its entirety before it coming out. Devs usually test the game in limited, separated, chunks: "does this individual feature work as we planned? Yes? Good, then it's greenlit", but don't - often can't - play the full game from beginning to end as a player would, experiencing the whole progression and how separate elements can interact in a way that was overlooked at the drawing board. As such either broken/unbalanced features or even glaring obvious conceptual issues such as this one slip by unnoticed, because simply no one had the chance to experience what happens in game when you have to mass transfer crew. It's what in the past was done by the QA teams that don't really exist anymore today. That burden has fallen to the players themselves, either via early access models, or simply supposedly "full launches" that really are a beta at best.

Plus, Egosoft has always had quite the track record of seemingly balance things out with very few human controlled assets in mind. If the system is deemed to work well enough for when you have 5-6 ships to mess with then it's given the thumbs up, but often, as we well know, everything breaks apart when you find yourself forced to micromanage *hundreds* of ships. It's been like this forever: the UI, the order system, fleet management, trading, pretty much everything, ever since the first games. Even station complex building, that was mindbogglingly bad in X3 (remember how building the self sufficient chip complex you'd need to do the Hub plot would virtually make it impossible for you to ever again re-enter the sector you built it in after hours of unneccessarily convoluted work?), and was ever only fixed and optimized by mods. At least in this department X4 has gotten way better and smarter.

[Vandragorax]

This is the kind of state of functionality that is deemed "good enough" for a software release, and likely has several enhancements lying in a backlog somewhere to add things like "multiple item checkbox list selection" (which would allow moving multiple crew to the same destination at once with minimal work from devs and would be a great next step).

I agree with above that drag & drop is never likely to be used as it precludes support for controllers, joysticks etc. I think therein lies the crux of the X games often weird and annoying interface choices. The game doesn't really know whether it wants to be a cockpit flight/battle simulator, or a grand corporation building RTS. In essence it tries to be both, but there are so many compromises as a result (in order to cater for the other) that it ends up doing neither very well in a lot of situations.

It must be a very tricky balancing act but I feel that a clear separation between those two elements of the game would be very beneficial, then each could have their own UI design, interface choices, and control schemes which wouldn't get in the way of each other. The disabling of right-click in cockpit mode is another example of this, where the RTS elements interfere with the cockpit/simulator elements and it got messy with the only solution being to remove something that a lot of people used and found useful.

Disconnecting the two styles of gameplay (in terms of UI) really seems the only way forward in my eyes. Therefore when you'd want to manage your crew members, it shouldn't be done from within the same menus and using the same control scheme as we have for everything else ship related - but if there was some distinguishing difference between "RTS/Maintenance/Command" tasks, and "ship/combat/3d space" tasks, the two could open different UI's with different user interactions (UX). A lot of it could easily be component driven as well from a development perspective, but they'd need to come up with this distinction EARLY in the design process and have it in-mind when designing every UI element so it would not be trivial to now replace all of X4's UI with a new design - but it might be a job worth spending time on to get it right as it could be used as a basis going forward for future X games.

[gorgofdoom]

I just want to point out that the dev's are fixing these unnecessarily tedious tasks one at a time. IE, you no longer have to open the ware select menu for each ware you want a trader to handle. Now, there's a 'select all' button. I have faith in the dev-gods.

[Derp]

Hey guys, can this possibly be any more tedious?

You could have to play through a minigame every time you want something from someone.

You could only carry around five people at a time, while needing at least thee crew members just to get a ship going.

[zarrazee]

OP. 100% agree that some of the nested clicks are a bit excessive.

I haven't progressed to boarding yet, but find swapping 2 and 3 star captains follows a similar pattern & is a bit of a pain. Such that I try to make do with what crew I get to avoid all that micromanagement; I'll put 2 star captains in sectors with ore resource and a station that demands ore so I can allocate my 3-star where they're needed.

Perhaps Egosoft could implement some nice QoL features in Player Info/Empire/Number of Hired Personnel. E.g.

• Shift / Ctrl click personnel

• Right click brings up options like swap, board, recall, transfer etc

Of course the ships would have to be in the same location etc

[Lazerius]

Here's my thoughts on a real fix for it.

Right click on Ship in Menu > Manage Crew.

This opens a box on the screen. The left half of a the box has the name of the ship and below it lists the crew under their respective categories.

On the right side of the screen, there is a dropdown where you choose from a list of ships that are available to "Trade" with. Once one is selected, it shows the same crew selection portion for that ship as the ship in the left.

Between the two sides, there are 2 buttons:

<<
and
>>

with confirm/cancel buttons at bottom of screen.

Each crew member has a checkbox, a plus sign to drill down into their stats, their name, and their star level. You can check each crewmember individually, or you can select by Category "Pilot, Service Crew, and Marines." Selecting the category only checks all marines, so if you want to leave 10 there, you can go back and manually uncheck those 10.

So now, in practice, let's say I just boarded a ship with 50 marines and all survived. Now I want to want to leave the marine acting as pilot, and transfer the other 49 back to their original ship. The order of events would go.

1) Both Ships must be within 5k of each other (No more docking required to move between ships)
2) Right click on ship moving marines from and click "Manage Crew"
3) Select original ship marines came from in dropdown menu.
4) click the Checkbox next to the "Marines" category on left screen.
5) Click >> button. All marines now appear in Ship B's Marines List.
6) Click Confirm.

The ships move into 1k from each other and 49 marines teleport back to their starting ship. Done.

No need to go find a friendly station, or have a carrier nearby to be an inbetween, forcing the transfer twice. Add Teleportation tech as a software option like we had in X3 if you must for balance, but there's zero reason to meet and greet every single marine and tell them to return to the other ship.

An alternative for the dropdown to select the original ship is to select it from the map screen, and they both fly towards each other. If making multiple crew trades though, this would probably be more beneficial.

With this in, I would definitely start boarding ships again!

[Nort The Fragrent]

Kneel you players kneel, pay homage to the Developer gods. They are supreme.
Just like real gods, they laugh at the mea mortals struggling below. Toss them some bread crumbs, that will keep them happy.

I have no faith in gods, as there are no such things. Developers are as bad as I am, so to expect them to jump on every problem straight away is not going to happen. I shall wait, build my stations, pull in Billions in loot. ( 24 at the moment ) Fly around and dismantle the stations that are useless. Make notes of what works, and what is hopeless. Then when 3 comes out I shall start all over again, but not as a fresh start but after I have sold everything off, shut down all stations. And have just one ship left. I will then have all blue prints from the early game, my faction level will remain at 30 for the old factions.
I will be like an Arabian prince entering the West with Billions in my pocket, and lots to do. The X universe shall be my Oyster.

If you have read all that then you are as nuts as I am.

X4 Foundation. We are waiting for the building to start ES. Bring in the bricks and put the roof on.

[scav_n_ger]

The hierarchy menue itself is a huge problem.
At this point, i would be (more) glad to pay for a functional well desinged ui, than additional races and sectors.

The option to use the mouse-wheel to lock-in lines in the menues, would be be nice:
>Right click object opens menu (e.g. a ship)
>Use mouse wheel to scroll through the available Actions / Orders / Deployment options
>Middle mousebutton to confirm (simulate a click on) the selected option

The property and information panel on the left really needs some love.