Feedback through the medium of a wall of text

[pittlebelge]

Hey, I wanted to make this post to give a bit of feedback after my latest playthrough and highlight some of the issues I've encountered. I will probably echo some classic themes of the forums. Before doing so, I should point out that this has been by far my longest playthrough in the X series and it has been entirely on 4.20 vanilla. While I'll do some criticism, I want to make it clear that I spent hundreds of hours having fun.

There are little things that have been annoying here and there, but the big offenders have been the ease with which the Xenon got herded back to a corner of the map only to be farmed for crafting components, and the fleet management system and it's limitations.

So, for the Xenon, while in the early game they do present a real threat and obstacle, as soon as investing about 15 million in a defense platform is within my ability, they became completely harmless. I was able to keep them contained and clean their sectors at my leisure without encountering any significant resistance. By the endgame, they also basically stopped building new capital ship and only sent fleets of P, M and N to try to break out.

I'd love if the Xenon reacted to their current strategic situation or to the player rank in some meaningful way. Maybe prioritizing fleets and raiding groups that favor more capital ships (multiple I's), maybe shortening the build time or resource cost of their ship or hacking my defense station in some way to get past a blockade. Adding a couple of ships to their roster would also be welcome.

At the end of the day, I felt like I was managing a Xenon preserve. The early game tension that they provided was gone long before I even built my (relatively) fancy self sustaining shipyard.

Alright, so the other thing that felt limiting was the fleet management, and there I realize that any solution would require a massive amount of work. I also know that what I want my fleets to do is probably not what every other player wants. That being said, here are the things I wish I could do.

I'd like to be able to save a fleet template and use that template to either replenish a fleet that suffered losses or outright build a new fleet from scratch. The first one is to remove the tedium of using carrier in combat operations. It's just a hassle to order back every variant of fighter lost after an engagement. The other reason I'd like to have fleet templates is to be able to build my miners with their escort at the same time and have them come out all set up and ready to go. For a couple of M miners, it's no big deal, but by the late game, when I build more than 50 miners to feed a station, it makes L miners the only option to avoid having to go through the chore of replacing the ships lost to Kha'ak attacks. The same idea could even extend to the mining fleet of a station. I'll often go hours without noticing that all the gas miners of a small station have been lost. Being able to just right click on the station and click on "replenish fleet" would be a life saver.

When it comes to ordering my fleets around, I must first recognize the great simplicity of the system we have now. the fact that everything fleet related is accessible in just a few clicks is a great feature. Now, the first somewhat realistic thing I'd love to see is for my fleets to keep in formation when not in combat, even when using their travel drive. It just feels so great when all the ships are aligned and ready to go, looking like a proper fleet, no other game can do this like the X series does. Unfortunately, as soon as they start to go in travel mode, they just become an incoherent mess. Let them all sync up their drives to the slowest ship of the fleet and keep formation all the way.

The other somewhat realistic thing I'd like to see would be for ships on a carrier to divide themselves when picking their target when they are on an intercept or defend order. As it is now, they all track the same target unless they get damaged and start to defend themselves. The strategic view of the battle on the map reminds me of some old Benny Hill gag but with a big green blob chasing a small red arrow. If my ships could decide that the first 4 interceptor go for the first target in their list, then the next 4 interceptor for the second and so forth prioritizing the enemy that is closest to the carrier, it would make those large fleet engagement feel so much better.

One last thing that I think is realistic. It would be awesome if we could use numerical shortcuts to make and select groups of ships (something like Ctrl+1 to create the group and Alt+1 to select it afterwards). I think it would greatly facilitate the strategic side of large engagement. As it is now, scrolling down the fleet screen when hundred or more ships are on the list becomes frustrating.

Now, for the unrealistic complications I'd like to have in place to order the fleets more effectively. I'd like to be able to customize the general orders like "attack", "defend", "intercept" on a fleet by fleet basis. Basically, I'd like to be able to customize those orders as if they were the companion scripts of Baldur's gates. I'd like some ships to always stay in formations, others to actively retreat in front of enemy capital ships and yet others to focus on attacking those capital ships. I want some ships to retreat when damaged and others to fight to the end. More importantly, I want to experiment, to spend dozen and dozen of hours finding the best fleet composition and the best way to have them wage war.

That exploration of the game, of the builds, fleet compositions and the tactics to use is one of the major drive of the X series for me. There aren't many games that allow such a level of depth and I'm sure that there are other players out there who enjoy it too.

That being said, I look forward for Tides of Avarice and I hope we'll get even more expansions afterwards.

TLDR: Xenon too weak in the end game, fleet management needs more love