Been away for a while... how is the whole X4 game doing these days?

[tatakau]

I'm looking on Steam right now, and it looks like there are two DLC: Split Vendetta, and Cradle of Humanity.

How are they? Do they have campaigns? If so, are they satisfying, voice acted, lengthy, etc?

How is the UI? Has it improved at all since the base release of X4?

What is your overall impression of the "completeness" of X4, as a game?

[tatakau]

Also... the store page for Cradle of Humanity mentions... terraforming? As a gameplay feature?? What? How would that even affect gameplay?

[kmunoz]

Also... the store page for Cradle of Humanity mentions... terraforming? As a gameplay feature?? What? How would that even affect gameplay?

It does not "affect gameplay" in the traditional sense. It's an endgame goal that doesn't impact the "map" in any way, but is a way to spend your money and time.

[kmunoz]

I'm looking on Steam right now, and it looks like there are two DLC: Split Vendetta, and Cradle of Humanity.

How are they? Do they have campaigns? If so, are they satisfying, voice acted, lengthy, etc?

How is the UI? Has it improved at all since the base release of X4?

What is your overall impression of the "completeness" of X4, as a game?

The Terran storylines are the richest in terms of voice acting and length. The Split ones are decent too. Both are significantly more story-rich than the player HQ and Hatikvah storylines from the base game.

As for the UI, the answer to this will depend on what you thought of the UI at initial release. If you're like me (which based on the question seems not to be the case), the UI is good and useful and easy to engage with. It is not significantly different from the UI at release, although some new features have been added. But if you didn't like the UI visually or interactively back at 1.0, you'll have the same impression now, and you will have the same impression in the future. It's not going to ever change so much that the things people disliked then or dislike now will disappear.

For me, X4 has been "complete" since 1.0. A lot of things have been added since then, and a lot of things have been fixed, but in terms of my experience of the game it is no more "complete" than it was back then. It was a fully playable game that I enjoyed at the time, and have continued to enjoy for 700 hours since then. I would reframe things thus: "what is your overall impression of how much as been added to X4, as a game?" And my answer to that question is: I am very satisfied.

[mr.WHO]

Also... the store page for Cradle of Humanity mentions... terraforming? As a gameplay feature?? What? How would that even affect gameplay?

It does not "affect gameplay" in the traditional sense. It's an endgame goal that doesn't impact the "map" in any way, but is a way to spend your money and time.

It does impact the map - The Terraforming projects for Antigone spawn additional Antigone battlegroups some time after terraforming is finished.
SCA terraforming vastly reduce piracy in galaxy.
Teladi one gives you Nividium market sink.

Some project are useless - I don't see any impact from Argon ones.

[Nort The Fragrent]

Surly ! The question is subjective !.
Depends on the player .
So i would recommend you play the game, and answer your question yourself.

[jlehtone]

How are they? Do they have campaigns? If so, are they satisfying, voice acted, lengthy, etc?

How is the UI? Has it improved at all since the base release of X4?

What is your overall impression of the "completeness" of X4, as a game?

A. I've done no "campaigns" so cannot comment. Apparently there are some.

B. I have not seen pre-3.10 either, but even within 3.10-4.0 span the UI has received additions. How much is enough ... is subjective.

C. There are plenty of features in the game that I have not used yet. Then again, I've used only 500+ hours ...
Either the game has (more than) enough or I'm a ****.

[kmunoz]

It does impact the map - The Terraforming projects for Antigone spawn additional Antigone battlegroups some time after terraforming is finished.
SCA terraforming vastly reduce piracy in galaxy.

That's a good point - I was thinking more in terms of "where can you go? can you land on planets?"

The factional impacts are important.

[Endealon]

The game continues without a proper UI. Managing the interface still requires endless menus and "clicks", even for the simplest tasks. The design remains as counterintuitive as ever.

The combat AI and fleet management is so bad that this single cause makes the game technically unplayable.

Clarification: I write this since update 4.0. I am not aware of the actual changes that have been made in 4.10, but what I have read so far does not look promising.

[Cdaragorn]

The game continues without a proper UI. Managing the interface still requires endless menus and "clicks", even for the simplest tasks. The design remains as counterintuitive as ever.

The combat AI and fleet management is so bad that this single cause makes the game technically unplayable.

Clarification: I write this since update 4.0. I am not aware of the actual changes that have been made in 4.10, but what I have read so far does not look promising.

As others have already pointed out this is highly subjective. I personally find the UI design very intuitive. The menus and "clicks" make sense for tasks managing my empire and where I need to go to do what I want seems to make sense at least to me and at least some others based on other posts here. There are also usually multiple ways to tell your ships to do what you want which contributes to making managing things easier. There are some things that take some learning to work out how to do but that is true of any complex task and not evidence of an "unintuitive" interface. It's a consequence of how much you can do in this game much more than of a poorly designed control scheme.

There are certainly areas that need improvement. Managing large numbers of assets can still be tedious right now.

As to AI and fleet management, the game is far from "technically unplayable". Yes there is work needed in this area but you are fully capable of engaging in fleet combat and winning battles. You'll take more losses than you would if we had better ways to control things like ship distance from target but that's not game breaking, it's just annoying.

Overall there is more work to do there have been a lot of improvements made and I am enjoying the game. I agree that the Terran missions are by far the funnest to play right now.

[Endealon]

As others have already pointed out this is highly subjective (...)

Yes, everything is "subjective". My opinion on the state of the game is necessarily subjective, but you will agree with me that your opinion necessarily is too. And if you visit Reddit or Steam, you will read thousands of other "subjective" opinions claiming to hate the current UI and speaking of this game's AI as the most badly done, unfinished and dumbest thing ever.


I guess it's your subjective opinion versus mine, but I'm not here to talk politics.

[Cdaragorn]

And it's exactly that kind of intentionally insulting and extreme position that discredits everything they have to say about it.

When you refuse to acknowledge the positives along with the negatives of something you're critiquing you are not worth engaging with. Yes the UI has problems and can be improved. The biggest problem I have with this feedback is that people are angry because the UI is complex. They blame the difficulty of working with it on the UI design when most of the fault is in the complexity of what it is trying to manage.

[Ezarkal]

I'm looking on Steam right now, and it looks like there are two DLC: Split Vendetta, and Cradle of Humanity.

How are they? Do they have campaigns? If so, are they satisfying, voice acted, lengthy, etc?

How is the UI? Has it improved at all since the base release of X4?

What is your overall impression of the "completeness" of X4, as a game?

-DLCs are pretty good additions, with each one bringing a whole new race and shipset into the game. The new split and paranid plot (paranid plot belongs to the base game I think, but it was introduced at the same time as the split DLC) are pretty nice and can allow you to influence the universe quite a bit. Also, while you can start them early-mid game, they will require end-game resources to complete, so they add to the length of the gameplay.
As for Terran plots, I only did 2 so far, which came out to be pretty good. I'm building up my empire before proceeding with the rest.
-DLC also add a lot of sectors to the universe, which grew by roughly 1.5x it's initial size, give or take a few sectors. It's also worth noting that new sectors don't have highways, if it means anything to you.

-UI is in the category of "you like or you don't". I rather like it and I think their current UI is a vast improvement when compared to the previous titles, but it does takes a bit of time to get used to.. They added a few neat new functions, such as mass crew transfer, repeatable orders and new assets filters (to mention only those), as well as a bunch of improvements. However, if you didn't like it and were expecting a massive overhaul, it didn't happen, so tough luck.

-I consider the game is pretty much completed ever since they mopped up most post-release game-breaking bugs a long while ago. Of course, I always enjoy new additions, especially where end-game is concerned.

-Haven't gotten to terraforming yet. I'm building up towards it. Shipyard comes first, though. I'm very happy to have these objectives to look up to, though. (Moar end-game stuff to do!)



-It may be worth mention that Xenons OOS combat is currently broken and they get crushed everywhere after their initial push into the "allied" sectors. I've been told the devs are working on the issue, and I personally hope to see a fix with the next patch. I've put my game on hold until then, since I'd like to keep them as an active enemy, and I don't want them to get crushed out of my game due to a bug.
Still they won't die too quickly either, so you have time to start a new game. The next patch will (hopefully) come and fix them at some point.

[dark7np]

I really like the Split station visuals. I'm planning to start a split game, or a game where I focus on their station parts at least at some point. Terraforming as well, there are some projects for turning resources into money, and some for training crew. But Terraforming is just an endgame activity with some benefits, there is no land on planets or so.

Crew assignment is cumbersome IMHO, but there is something in the works in the current beta. We'll see. UI is okay for me. There is room for improvement, but I get by mostly. I've posted some suggestions about manual trading if you want to follow up. That and crew assignment are my main UI concerns I'd say... Global defaults for resource prices might be nice, too. Ship and Fleet AI gets a lot of Flak... I'm not overly impressed by it, but I've not tried too much. I miss the Shift + T I think trading menu from X Rebirth.

Hatikvah and Paranid plot as far as I got it were interesting. Haven't started the Split plot or Terran.

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

Split plot summary. Grind.

The original game without any updates was easy peasy. You could make money hand over fist.
Then typical of some of the people here, they asked for it to be made harder. The nerf hammer was liberally applied.

So now it is indeed harder to make money.

People asked for the Khaak to be more involved in the game. So now they are a bloody nuisance.

Mining is harder, some would say not quite right yet.

There is a lot more content, and to be honest, I sometimes just stand on stations and watch the universe go by. It can bring on a warm fuzzy sensation, wait... that could be the drink.

I am enjoying the universe more with both expansions and all of the updates. The game can still make me want to spit out my dummy and throw my toys out of the pram.

One last thing, a Bumble Bee can find flowers collect nectar and inform other bees where the best flowers are. The AI in this game is very slowly getting better, but the bumble bee is still way ahead (it only has a very few neurons.)

[Dreez]

Apart from X3TC, i'd say that X4 is the best 4X game currently on the market.
Despite some if it's flaws, X Foundations is a very very good game, one that i keep coming back to,
and it alsl helps knowing that Egosoft is constantly working on improving their games.

If you're into openworld spacegames for singleplayer, you can't do better than X-foundations or X3TC.
(The reason why i don't like X3AP is because the enemy started using missile barrage)