1.3 war doesn't last long and it's gone cold again?

[jasonbarron]

Two main problems overlap in X4:

• 1. There's no war and so no resource sink of military hardware (and its related production chain). It's a legitimate choice for a player to pursue a "pacific" route of development. However, all around you, war takes place nonetheless: Khaak, Xenon incursions or invasions, Factions' hostilities and so on. And with it ships and stations must be rebuilt, supply chains replaced. Then it's your choice if you wish to join the onslaught or just get profitsss by meeting the war market demads.
  2. There's no civilian economy either. You see: the war machine is an economy booster since humans got down from the trees but in "normal" times civilian economy works and consumes resources daily to sustain populations and civilian productions and services. So there should be a constant demand and resource sink to reflect this. Food, water, energy cells, base minerals etc. should be always be consumed and in demand even if subject to some fluctuations in case of severe events (see above: war economy).

Great point about the civilian economy. When you look at the super small stations in the game, obviously they are intended to be expanded upon whether there's a war going or not, and that's simply not happening.

[pref]

those don't want war doesnt' understand the basic of X4
If no battleship get destroy >>>> Faction Shipyard & Wharf don't produce any ship >>>> These stations' storage reach MAX (important) >>>> These stations will stop put up BUY orders >>>> WHAT EVER YOU PRODUCE OR MINE WILL GOT NO PLACE TO

I'm not into a full peaceful universe, but that's beyond the point. Some people will like that anyway.
Eco collapsing without war is a design issue, not the "basic of X4".

If it was up to me i'd make the AI mimic the player style: for an all peaceful player wars should drop to a minimum, and for one that starts fights repeatedly there should be significantly more conflicts.
Either way consumption should keep alive production, and wars should provide a significant increase in income if played well.

[Hector0x]

I have to say, the whole gameworld is way more dynamic than i expected.

But that mustn't be a good thing. I don't see Egosoft aquiring an economic/military equilibrium that is adequate for a vanilla experience, even with years of patching. It's either total chaos (which should be left to mods), or passive (like now).
The universe just isn't big enough to prevent factions from collapsing completely if the whole economic force would be utilized for war. If one faction gets the upper hand and damages the enemies economy, it's over for them in the long run. The winner would blob and destabilize everything. I bet that is the reason why they are extra careful to not unleash too much Mayhem. For this to work, you'd need a system where a faction could loose one or two systems and then gets rescued by a coalition of many other factions that beat the aggressor back down to its original size.


With the current universe structue Egosoft should instead reintroduce an artificial resource sink, much like they had in X3 or XR.

For example:
1. despawn wares in shipyards overtime
2. despawn ships or add a superior passive enemy, like a super powerful xenon sector that doesn't attack by itself. There AI ships can go to die.

I know this would be disappointing, but i don't see another way.

[Kadatherion]

I'm not into a full peaceful universe, but that's beyond the point. Some people will like that anyway.
Eco collapsing without war is a design issue, not the "basic of X4".

In a sense, it's both. It is a design issue - because it doesn't work and I'm already betting it will never work so well as to be enough to keep everything functional - but it's also the basic objective Ego had with X4. "Everything is simulated, nothing gets created or consumed magically" was pretty much their marketing pitch. Sounded great. Much like world peace, however, it is as awesome as it is impossible to achieve.

[palm911]

WELL , i guess i will declare war to the teladi, just to claim the sectors cluster where my PHQ sits. lol . (i blame egosoft for the dead of dont know how many lizards.)

[ApoxNM]

I'm not into a full peaceful universe, but that's beyond the point. Some people will like that anyway.
Eco collapsing without war is a design issue, not the "basic of X4".

In a sense, it's both. It is a design issue - because it doesn't work and I'm already betting it will never work so well as to be enough to keep everything functional - but it's also the basic objective Ego had with X4. "Everything is simulated, nothing gets created or consumed magically" was pretty much their marketing pitch. Sounded great. Much like world peace, however, it is as awesome as it is impossible to achieve.

I don't think that's true. As posted above, there needs to be a solid civilian economy. Goods and ware which are consumed by stations. The more stations get build, the more goods consumed, the more good creating stations are needed, which in turn consume even more of these goods.

This would add a parallel economy to the war economy and one could build on that, instead of basing the economy mostly on war and ship production.

[pref]

"Everything is simulated, nothing gets created or consumed magically" was pretty much their marketing pitch. Sounded great.

For me that sounds weird and also impossible. Folks need food, tech stuff and everything to go on with life, and these should provide a huge sink. Even military consumption should be significant just much lower compared to war times.
With the current detail level of the simulation it would mean "magical consumption", but honestly i couldn't care less. This is just a popular wish not thought through well.
The depth of the simulation does not allow for no magic sinks. And there is no need to go deeper in that sense, it would mean simulating properties of the population that are irrelevant for this game.

Maybe one could go as far as relating magical consumption to station count of the faction, but still it would be a sink outside of X4 eco.

[Iosevus]

I'm starting to think it's the Xenon economy that is busted, but I'm not sure how they work.
They have the power distribution units floating around, but no factory stations. So I can only assume they collect power by chilling in space... I've yet to see one deliver to a station though (Do they even need to deliver?). I'm currently making use of the odd bug where you can teleport to an enemy station and am observing (Call me a Xenon Biologist) what I can of them. I'm about 100 hours in on this game and the only Xenon activity is a swarm of them on a kha'ak station that is invincible, but I think those Xenon are the ones that have been there from the start cause the other far sectors are empty.

[thanos]

Regarding the Xenon:

I used the cheat mod from Nexus that allows you to tamper with station inventories. I jumped to a Xenon shipyard and emptied its inventory. It was full, like all other shipyards/wharfs in my game. I did the same to a Xenon wharf, then put down some satellites, and left.

Sure enough, after a couple of minutes, those Xenon S ships that you see wandering around "looking for trade" started showing up on my satellites. They were resupplying the shipyard/wharf. This activity is still ongoing and I suspect it will continue until the stations are full of resources again.

I originally did this to see if I can push them to build some more ships. It unfortunately didn't happen. I did the same to the Argon/Hop shipyards. I did get tons of traders to trade with them but still no ships built.

So again, I think the problem, at least with my save, is that shipyards just don't build ships for NPC factions. Either no orders are being placed for some reason, or they are but are not being executed. The end result though is a lack of (military) ships.

[Kadatherion]

I'm not into a full peaceful universe, but that's beyond the point. Some people will like that anyway.
Eco collapsing without war is a design issue, not the "basic of X4".

In a sense, it's both. It is a design issue - because it doesn't work and I'm already betting it will never work so well as to be enough to keep everything functional - but it's also the basic objective Ego had with X4. "Everything is simulated, nothing gets created or consumed magically" was pretty much their marketing pitch. Sounded great. Much like world peace, however, it is as awesome as it is impossible to achieve.

I don't think that's true. As posted above, there needs to be a solid civilian economy. Goods and ware which are consumed by stations. The more stations get build, the more goods consumed, the more good creating stations are needed, which in turn consume even more of these goods.

This would add a parallel economy to the war economy and one could build on that, instead of basing the economy mostly on war and ship production.

That's exactly what I said. But it is a fact Egosoft thought they could simulate everything with no need of automatic resource sinks. Turns out they couldn't. And, as stated, I'm betting they won't be able to even after the whole war mechanics begins to work as intended (heck, to work *at all*), because it just is way too ambitious for the size of the economy represented here.

"Everything is simulated, nothing gets created or consumed magically" was pretty much their marketing pitch. Sounded great.

For me that sounds weird and also impossible. Folks need food, tech stuff and everything to go on with life, and these should provide a huge sink. Even military consumption should be significant just much lower compared to war times.
With the current detail level of the simulation it would mean "magical consumption", but honestly i couldn't care less. This is just a popular wish not thought through well.
The depth of the simulation does not allow for no magic sinks. And there is no need to go deeper in that sense, it would mean simulating properties of the population that are irrelevant for this game.

Maybe one could go as far as relating magical consumption to station count of the faction, but still it would be a sink outside of X4 eco.

Absolutely. There are many ways to implement resource sinks that while being automated still don't feel too "magical". Slow food and civ wares autoconsumption on certain stations at the end of the manifacture cycle has been done in the past and wouldn't feel unrealistic at all. These and other wares could also be deleted by events (let's call them "random" events, but they wouldn't necessarily be random: the very stagnation could be the trigger to tell the code to delete a massive amount of a certain ware from a system, and explain it through an event/open "mission": there's been a plague in sector X, space vermin infestations have destroyed food stockpiles in sector Y, and so on). Such events would work as "safeties" for the economy, when saturation is detected, and create shortages that would offer gameplay opportunities to the player, that way the very "cheat" you are using to keep your simulation from dying becomes a feature that INCREASES immersion.

TBH, they had an ambitious idea, and apparently went full charge ahead without thinking it through nor really thoroughly testing if the result actually worked as they thought it would.

[Noodle (N&T)]

i started a new game with 1.3 and there was a lot of war action at the start, but after about 20 hours (plus using SETA) the pirates a non existent, the xenon are pretty much nowhere to be seen, the wars between the factions just aren't happening and all the warfs and shipyards are full up on resources and not building any more ships as they aren't losing any to need to replace them, which in turn has crashed/frozen the economy.

hope they fix this soon and if they don't manage to fix it anytime soon then i hope a talented modder is able to find a way to make it all work as it should.

(I have mapped all the factions sectors and a few xenon sectors. I have filled the whole universe with advanced satellites)

[Hector0x]

there needs to be a solid civilian economy. Goods and ware which are consumed by stations. The more stations get build, the more goods consumed, the more good creating stations are needed, which in turn consume even more of these goods.

Then you have either
- eternal growth, which will melt your computer at some point.
or
- stations that consume as much resource value as they produce themselves. If the same rules apply for the player, why would someone build such a station?

Additionally they can't just redesign the whole economy at this point. How are they supposed to introduce a station based civilian resource sink for weapons, shield and hull parts?

[pref]

I have to say, the whole gameworld is way more dynamic than i expected.

But that mustn't be a good thing. I don't see Egosoft aquiring an economic/military equilibrium that is adequate for a vanilla experience, even with years of patching.

Why it isn't so difficult. There need to be certain sinks for all kinds of wares, and fix the bug that results in no ships being built (if it exists even, i can't say for sure).
Perhaps relate chance for offensive behaviour of the factions to fight rank or player kill count.
It will work out if/because the system is dynamic enough.

[Kadatherion]

there needs to be a solid civilian economy. Goods and ware which are consumed by stations. The more stations get build, the more goods consumed, the more good creating stations are needed, which in turn consume even more of these goods.

Then you have either
- eternal growth, which will melt your computer at some point.
or
- stations that consume as much resource value as they produce themselves. If the same rules apply for the player, why would someone build such a station?

Additionally they can't just redesign the whole economy at this point. How are they supposed to introduce a station based civilian resource sink for weapons, shield and hull parts?

Like they did in all their previous games?

But yes, of course you'd have to limit the potential growth, putting in a quota comparable to the one already enforced on ships by the jobs file. Anybody notices how we are getting closer and closer to our old GOD system? It's not by chance, it's common sense: realism in a limited game environment has - pun intended - its limits.

As for weapons, shield and hull parts, once the war mechanics get ironed out, the actual simulation could work well enough at least for them to only need a few pushes here and there behind the curtains if for any reason it still stalls for longer than reasonable. If the code recognizes more than X% of those wares is stagnating filling up the universe for longer than Y hours, then launch event Z (a massive Kha'ak invasion, maybe? Something that still doesn't feel *too* out of place if it works by spawning instead than by being natively simulated, and that still is more immersive and useful for gameplay than simple autoconsumption. Think of Stellaris and its mid/late game "crises").

[ApoxNM]

there needs to be a solid civilian economy. Goods and ware which are consumed by stations. The more stations get build, the more goods consumed, the more good creating stations are needed, which in turn consume even more of these goods.

Then you have either
- eternal growth, which will melt your computer at some point.
or
- stations that consume as much resource value as they produce themselves. If the same rules apply for the player, why would someone build such a station?

Additionally they can't just redesign the whole economy at this point. How are they supposed to introduce a station based civilian resource sink for weapons, shield and hull parts?

Like they did in all their previous games?

But yes, of course you'd have to limit the potential growth, putting in a quota comparable to the one already enforced on ships by the jobs file. Anybody notices how we are getting closer and closer to our old GOD system? It's not by chance, it's common sense: realism in a limited game environment has - pun intended - its limits.

As for weapons, shield and hull parts, once the war mechanics get ironed out, the actual simulation could work well enough at least for them to only need a few pushes here and there behind the curtains if for any reason it still stalls for longer than reasonable. If the code recognizes more than X% of those wares is stagnating filling up the universe for longer than Y hours, then launch event Z (a massive Kha'ak invasion, maybe? Something that still doesn't feel *too* out of place if it works by spawning instead than by being natively simulated, and that still is more immersive and useful for gameplay than simple autoconsumption. Think of Stellaris and its mid/late game "crises").

Yea. kind of what I was thinkig about. Event triggers.

[Hector0x]

Why it isn't so difficult. There need to be certain sinks for all kinds of wares, and fix the bug that results in no ships being built (if it exists even, i can't say for sure).
Perhaps relate chance for offensive behaviour of the factions to fight rank or player kill count.
It will work out if/because the system is dynamic enough.

Let's hope so. But i'm not worried about the economy.

- right now they don't build ships
- if they actually used all those resources to build fleets and attack each other on full force, then one side will always be slightly stronger
- in a fully dynamic gameworld (with war declarations and stuff) the strongest faction will take over everything. And i don't want that in the vanilla game.

[ApoxNM]

Why it isn't so difficult. There need to be certain sinks for all kinds of wares, and fix the bug that results in no ships being built (if it exists even, i can't say for sure).
Perhaps relate chance for offensive behaviour of the factions to fight rank or player kill count.
It will work out if/because the system is dynamic enough.

Let's hope so. But i'm not worried about the economy.

- right now they don't build ships
- if they actually used all those resources to build fleets and attack each other on full force, then one side will always be slightly stronger
- in a fully dynamic gameworld (with war declarations and stuff) the strongest faction will take over everything. And i don't want that in the vanilla game.

But constant small skirmishes would suffice.

[pref]

- in a fully dynamic gameworld (with war declarations and stuff) the strongest faction will take over everything. And i don't want that in the vanilla game.

Shouldn't be too hard to limit AI to not start an offensive below a certain enemy asset level.
I'd even bet on that such limits are already built in the game.

[Kadatherion]

Let's hope so. But i'm not worried about the economy.

- right now they don't build ships
- if they actually used all those resources to build fleets and attack each other on full force, then one side will always be slightly stronger
- in a fully dynamic gameworld (with war declarations and stuff) the strongest faction will take over everything. And i don't want that in the vanilla game.

We talked about that in a couple older threads in the past few days. Yes, it's going to be an issue, because you can't prevent snowballing in a fully simulated environment. Some thought of diplomatic mechanics like you would have in games such as Total War, that try to prevent steamrolling by applying diplomatic maluses tied to "empire power", meaning that when a faction grows too strong, then the others ally against it. But the map, the number of factions, ships, pretty much the environment here is too small to really apply such a thing, which still would need so much difficult finetuning that it's going to be almost impossible.

It could work, though, in a bit simplier way if you had more space in the universe: by creating a few more "buffer" sectors between factions, and a very strong static defense at the entry point into core sectors, you could tone the war all the way up and still have much of it contained in specific areas with no risk of the whole universe being steamrolled by anyone. It's an old trick in the book of 4X games: chokepoints. IMO, it would work pretty nicely from all perspectives: want to have a peaceful playthrough? Stay out of the war zones. Want to see the fireworks? Go there. Ships are going to be destroyed at a nice pace but even if a faction beats everyone in contended space once it tries to get into the enemy core sectors, static defenses tear through them. At this point all its war machine is nullified in a very short time, and why it tries to rebuild everything from scratch, the other factions can get the advantage back and push through the contended sectors once again. And so on and so on.

It still would be a bit of a compromise: those OP static defenses would feel a bit fake and you would never really fear for the safety of a specific faction, no one risks annihilation, but that's pretty much the point: if the system can bring factions to annihilation, then the economy will break, so it must not be allowed to happen. Unless, of course, the player wants to in the very late game, by attacking himself those defenses with a force no npc empire (limited by the jobs file) could ever build up. It would even be a nice "end game objective" for the war inclined players.

[warjager]

So much thing can be done to this kind of ''Realism'' economy. Some people here put the finger on it, and it NEED to be done, for this kind of real ''supply/demand''.

Like some sed in a couple of post back ... and some idea of my own:

- Constant drain on consumable good, to simulate day to day economy. (like food, water, spacefuel and such, etc...)
- Random event that can put a strain on station ware to help trade. (ware stolen, epidemic, etc...)
- Trash the real economy for the khaak and xenon and make them spawn instead, and bring back the hyperdrive so they can spawn (warp!) in some random sector, to put some spice in the world, and use it to control the strongest normal faction.This way, you put strain on faction who become too powerfull! (After all, they are invader from other world/machine that self replicate...so this is 100% lore friendly!)
- And for the pirate faction.... why not used already constructed trader/military ship that ''change'' allegiance randomly to pass into the pirate faction? after all, what is a pirate, other than an average joe who want fortune/fame/action in his live? (btw... why is that a ''pirate faction" have good standing with all faction/player ??? just dont get it! weird game concept lol). This could help faction to built more ship, cause they loose some workforce, to the hand of the pirate faction.
- I dont even know if its already the case (never, to this date, saw it), but why not include a modular damage system? Shield could be broken down, weapon, thruster, etc.. so that you/npc have to buy back part that are broken down, again helping economy get going. Same thing with hull repair that can consume ware on station that make repair on npc ship. I know that alot of work, but all this add up to the economy system in place.

With all this included in the economy system, im pretty sure there will be no more stall ever in supply/demand like we have now in the late game.

just my 2cent!