Trouble understanding the Budgeted start in 4.20 - Workaround details.

[atsmith66]

Ok, so I was thinking about starting another X4 playthrough. My playthroughs usually last about 70-100 hours in total.

Thing is I am bored of the game-start. So I thought lets create a budgeted game. For context I have numerous saves with balances in excess of 250M and stations and fleets worth billions. I have also completed all the story lines. I have existing saves with completed Terran and HQ story lines. So, I go create a budgeted game and here's what I see:

• Money budget is limited to 300k so I can't add anything useful without setting the game to modified. My Game with 250M and stations and fleets worth billions is not a custom start, I have no mods, and that save is not modified.
• Any change to the story line status causes the game to be marked Modified so I can't add anything useful without setting the game to modified.
• Due to the previous point I can't start with a SETA without setting the game to modified. This is one of the main things that makes the early game boring to me. Waiting for all the parts for the SETA to drop when factories take hours to return their initial investment in real time means that really, I just decide not to start the new game in the first place.

Am I misunderstanding something or is the budgeted game broken in 4.20? I am a little confused.

Why I don't personally want to use Creative:
Why should I care that the game is modified? If not then why is there a Budgeted start in the first place? I think I sort of need the constraints of a limited game start, and love the idea of being able to expand those constraints through achievement. This means there is always some meaning to the game play. For me personally the "Modified" label makes it feel a bit like cheating so I don't want to start that game because it will rob me of the satisfaction of "I built that". If games two and beyond start further forward (like with a SETA) because I achieved that ability that's great. Creative starts remove that for me. Now it's not because I earned that early game boost.

So given the above rambling I shall ramble some more. I would like to know how the Budgeted starts work so I can take advantage of them. After a 1000+ hours of play I genuinely don't have another grind to the SETA left in me. Don't get we wrong this is not meant negatively. This is one of the best games I've played and I absolutely love it. There are just certain game loops that are now acting as barriers to my re-entry. I want to play the game but the first 6+ hours entry fee before the fun (at least what's fun for me) starts is now too boring thanks to many repetitions.

Of course if the budgeted start is just broken in 4.20 then I suppose the above is not very useful... Any advice or comments are welcome. Maybe I'm just being a dumb-$&%. If so please tell me.

Hope everyone has a great day!

[CBJ]

Have you actually loaded your older savegame recently? If not then the budgets won't have been updated to take account of what you have in that save.

[atsmith66]

Hi CBJ

Thanks for the reply. Yes I have loaded the saves previously. Here's a picture of my Load Games screen. Note the latest was saved using 4.20 on December 18.

Download image: https://www.dropbox.com/s/h20mrltbdd812 ... p.jpg?dl=0.

You can download and look at the latest save game too if that's helpful: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ps5kfebslzf7x ... ml.gz?dl=0.

As a sanity check I quickly reloaded that save game, saved it again into a different save slot, quit the game, and then started a new budgeted start. The cash budget is still 300k and all story missions are still marked as Modifying.

It's worth noting that I don't have any mods installed and the Extension screen shows only Cradle of Humanity and Split Vendatta.

Now I'm curious and digging. So there's a userdata.xml file dated 03 December that looks like this:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
  <unlock_x4gamestart_trade>1</unlock_x4gamestart_trade>
  <unlock_x4gamestart_scientist>1</unlock_x4gamestart_scientist>
  <story_hq_boso>1</story_hq_boso>
  <story_research_teleportation_range_02>1</story_research_teleportation_range_02>
  <story_research_teleportation_range_01>1</story_research_teleportation_range_01>
  <story_research_teleportation>1</story_research_teleportation>
  <story_research_teleportation_range_03>1</story_research_teleportation_range_03>
  <story_hq_dal>1</story_hq_dal>
</root>

There is also a usedata_signed.xml dated all the way back to 16 October that's binary and all bytes are NULL (zero).

No idea whether that's useful

[Mirrdae]

Hello! Replying to this because this helped me solve a similar issue.

A couple weeks ago my machine bluescreened (unrelated to X4 but happened while playing at the time) and after that, Budgeted mode refused to track any of my "achievements" as far as increasing starting limits.

Couldn't figure out why. Game wasn't modified, didn't say it was, etc. No start of any kind let me increase the Budgeted start limits.

Previous poster, atsmith66, mentioned the userdata_signed.xml file, so I did a little digging myself. Mine, too, was filled will NULLs and the uidata.xml log reported errors reading the config file. The timestamp on the file was permanently 2022-02-20, even though the userdata.xml file was later.

Obviously the corruption was the problem. Cloud sync was complicating it; I couldn't just delete userdata_signed.xml because cloud sync would restore it on launch, and X4 does not, apparently, regenerate this file if it is corrupted, leaving Budgeted mode "broken."

Deleting userdata_signed.xml while the game was running and exiting out convinced GoG Galaxy that "deleted" was the proper state of the file to sync, and I was then able to launch X4 again, load a save file and voilà, userdata_signed.xml was generated properly and Budgeted start was calculating properly again.

Note: Just to be thorough, I also deleted userdata.xml. I do not know if this was also necessary -- cardinal sin of troubleshooting, changing more than one thing at a time.

[Stigski]

Hey! I was having the same problem; figured I wasn't understanding how the custom start budget is calculated, because those values never changed for me despite my progress.

Just did as Mirrdae said - deleted userdata_signed.xml whilst the game was running, exited out, booted it back up, loaded the save with the most progress, then went to the budgeted custom game start, and all the values had changed to reflect my progress. So it worked! For the record, I didn't delete userdata.xml. Just userdata_signed.xml.

Figured posting this may be useful for anyone looking for answers to the same problem.

[dtpsprt]

People (used to) care if the game is modified or not due to the Exceptional shipmod parts and cool paintjobs they would get from Ventures. One needed to play a "vanilla" game to take part.

So far the ventures are disabled (since V4.00) so it's a moot point. They may/will come back at some undefined point in the future. Playing for 70-100 hours into a game means that any game you start now you'll "end" it before anything happens in that field.

P.S. I personally believe that havenig either Steam or GOG cloud in X4 is a very bad idea in general. X4 can be individually be excempt from Cloud at least in Steam.