A small rant...is it really neccessary to keep all the one by one mouse actions ?

[WoodyAut]

Hi,

In X3 there has been a nice mod from Lucike to place a pilot in every empty seat of an ship....will be there anything liek this in vanilla game of X4 ?
I am really tired when boarding a carrier, which had a few ships landed, to transfer a pilot one by one to the empty ships.....sometimes i am really asking myself if the deciders of Egosoft are a bit sadistic to their customers regarding some decisions about the UI, where lots of logcial mass transfers are not possible or intentonially blocked/not working at all.
For example imitating - You can a ship order imitate any action, but the associated ships are not doing anything, except mining...without any notice, so the users are forced to do any action mouseclick by mouseclick....and again....and again....and again..... (and right now i did not find anything else working for this behaviour except mining)
In case you integrate a new feature it would be nice if it would be really working in the way the wording looks like...but not exclude everything else except something special....

Sorry for ranting....but the necessary count of mouseclicks made me mad....

Best regards
WoodyAut

[oddible]

The controls are very internally consistent and represent a very clear methodology. That said, in many cases it is pretty low usability to users. For instance, why make me click twice to get into the pilot's chair? Once to get the captain to get up, then once to sit down. Why make me click so so so many times in those tiny menus to drop satellites OOS? Just give me a hotkey!?!? It is something we as players do a LOT so why not hotkey that up? Or dropping mines? Why even put mines in the game with such a terrible carpal tunnel inducing pain in the butt. So yes, I love the how straightforward and understandable the controls are and once you get it - they're pretty easy to follow. I don't love that it is like 2-3 steps to do every single repeated action.

That said... individuallly placing captains in fighters? Seriously? Fighters are piloted by chaff not elites. The elites are reserved for capitals and important trader / miners right? Or are you using some mod that trains the folks super fast so now you've created a new problem for yourself that the designers never intended? Talk to your mod maker

[blackphoenixx]

That said... individuallly placing captains in fighters? Seriously? Fighters are piloted by chaff not elites. The elites are reserved for capitals and important trader / miners right? Or are you using some mod that trains the folks super fast so now you've created a new problem for yourself that the designers never intended? Talk to your mod maker

Terraforming pilot academy. 100 scrubs turned into 4-star pilots in 80 minutes. I wouidn't call that "never intended".

Not that i use them for fighters, but the reason for that is definintely the amount of clicking needed, not a lack of skilled pilots.

[geldonyetich]

I agree. Quality of life could be a lot better in many places in the interface.

• Lets say I want to move a lot of wares from one station to another, more than one ship can hold. It would be great if I could select all the ships, trade with their total available capacity, and then the game would automatically allocate the wares being moved between them with the least number of ships. Sure. you could probably make more profit this way, but so what? You would be capped by the current buy order.
• It would be really nice if I could rename all my ships once when doing batch refit/build operations on them. A few patches ago, batch refit/build did not even exist. For that matter, batch repairs seen to be unavailable if any of the selected ships in the batch are already repaired.
• It would be super cool if ships on orders like attack or defend would withdraw and go back for repairs when needed like they do on intercept. Many fighters have died needlessly. I can do it manually, but should I have to?
• There's an "attack to disable" and "allow boost" things to select under the attack order behavior. A nice option to have. It's annoyingly hard to get at when I have 20 combatants I want to change it on.
• I would like repeat orders to have the option to transfer wares, and not just buy/sell wares, because that way I could access reserved amounts.
• I would like the mimic orders behavior to copy repeat orders on the leader so I only need to set repeat orders once.
• The ability to set multiple buy and sell orders on the same ware on stations, each with different trade restrictions. That way I would have more control over when I would trade my own goods, be able to prioritize which faction gets them, at what stock level, etc.

And so on.

And they're all so obvious that I would be surprised if Egosoft has not been aware of them for years.

While I do respect Egosoft and all that they do, I think the quality of life improvements of features like these are worth more than whatever reasons they went with to decide not to do them. Except, perhaps, if that reason is it was simply impossible.

[af_2017]

For example imitating - You can a ship order imitate any action, but the associated ships are not doing anything, except mining...

Your problem is that you've built expectations before checking the feature first.
So far I've used "Mimic" behavior for auto trading/fill shortages.

While I do respect Egosoft and all that they do, I think the quality of life improvements of features like these are worth more than whatever reasons they went with to decide not to do them. Except, perhaps, if that reason is it was simply impossible.

I guess the problem here is that you are playing the game differently (and thus not intended way).

The only improvement I can think about is "Lets say I want to move a lot of wares".
So the feature should look like:
- a "manager" which is not bound to station
- user can assign ships to the manager
- user can set "some orders" to the manager which will follow using assigned ships
the orders for example could be:
1. move set of wares from station to station
2. fill shortages for specific station (which could be any station including npc owned station)
3. fill shortages for specific station's build storage (which could be any station including npc owned station)

[geldonyetich]

While I do respect Egosoft and all that they do, I think the quality of life improvements of features like these are worth more than whatever reasons they went with to decide not to do them. Except, perhaps, if that reason is it was simply impossible.

I guess the problem here is that you are playing the game differently (and thus not intended way).

The only improvement I can think about is "Lets say I want to move a lot of wares".
So the feature should look like:
- a "manager" which is not bound to station
- user can assign ships to the manager
- user can set "some orders" to the manager which will follow using assigned ships
the orders for example could be:
1. move set of wares from station to station
2. fill shortages for specific station (which could be any station including npc owned station)
3. fill shortages for specific station's build storage (which could be any station including npc owned station)

That's true, that solution does work. I even got supply depots that do this already. Yet, there are still times I want to address something manually. Perhaps desire lines are usually indicative of something other than playing the game wrong? And many of those bullet points I mentioned don't have a solution like this.

[HammerHead91]

I saved a click with this one weird trick!

We all know not to mine ice, right? So, when setting up an autominer, you give the order and then move the mouse pointer to the top of the screen (which is all the way up there for some ... reason?) and click Ore, Nividium, Silicon.

But wait! You don't have to do all that. When you get the selection box at the top of the screen (which is all the way up there for some ... reason?) you can click the select all button and then unselect ice!

Once click saved!

I deserve my time in SETA.

[Diroc]

Sorry for ranting....but the necessary count of mouseclicks made me mad....

There are definitely many areas where the user interface could be improved.

Thankfully, I'm only gaming so I don't really have anything better to do besides clicking the mouse.

Less steps that might improve QoL are always welcome though.
Avoiding repetitive strain injuries is always a plus.

[XIII8]

Youre absolutely correct. Some of the best QoL-improvements, even with older X-games, was always the ability to gives orders to lots of ships at once. Lots of space for X4 to improve in that regard.

[camshaft97]

Have you noticed the recent resupply improvement ? I don't remember which update, maybe 5.10, You can now do the following :
-Hold down shift, select multiple homogenous ships(say 8 for example), either with map or selector-thingy on the left (nothing new yet...)
-Right click the Warf(or shipyard), and select Upgrade/Repair (still the same as previous versions...)
(Nothing new so far, but next...)
-Instead of selecting 1 ship, you can select the "8x Eclipse".

You just selected 8 ships at once, and when I move the slider for say, missiles, You'll see something like 176 (22*8) missiles in the basket.

just sayin,

[Axeface]

It would be really nice if the click seat > npc gets up > wait (dont click and mess it up, wasting time trying to get back out the chat menu) > click seat was condensed into a single click.
I feel like by making the chair spin and the npc get up animation into a single anim, and moving the player view to the side a little as it moves into position, you could make this all into one click.

Also, it would be a big QoL change to release controls the instant a player says 'goodbye' (or anything similar) rather than making us wait for the npc to reply.

[Prophet1]

Is there a way to get all fighters in a fleet to go to an aux and repair instead of clicking on each one individually?