Are There Really No Hyperdrives

[SacremPyrobolum]

I've been told that X4 doesn't have hyperdrives and that there are no plans to add them. If so this is very disappointing. Hyperdrives are what made slow, clumsy capital ships viable and there was nothing like jumping into a Xenon sector with your carrier group from your base and launching out scores of fighters.

Are there really no plans for hyperdrives?

[BlackRain]

I've been told that X4 doesn't have hyperdrives and that there are no plans to add them. If so this is very disappointing. Hyperdrives are what made slow, clumsy capital ships viable and there was nothing like jumping into a Xenon sector with your carrier group from your base and launching out scores of fighters.

Are there really no plans for hyperdrives?

Are you talking about the jump drive? If so, then there is no jump drive and no plan at this time to add it. Capital ships have a travel drive but I doubt you mean that

[SacremPyrobolum]

I've been told that X4 doesn't have hyperdrives and that there are no plans to add them. If so this is very disappointing. Hyperdrives are what made slow, clumsy capital ships viable and there was nothing like jumping into a Xenon sector with your carrier group from your base and launching out scores of fighters.

Are there really no plans for hyperdrives?

Are you talking about the jump drive? If so, then there is no jump drive and no plan at this time to add it. Capital ships have a travel drive but I doubt you mean that

Did they ever give a reason as to why not? It was a good late-game form of travel that gave the player a sense of how far they came from the days of having to set a destination, enable autopilot and then go AFK and hope they don't crash into the side of a gate.

[RWolf]

I've been told that X4 doesn't have hyperdrives and that there are no plans to add them. If so this is very disappointing. Hyperdrives are what made slow, clumsy capital ships viable and there was nothing like jumping into a Xenon sector with your carrier group from your base and launching out scores of fighters.

Are there really no plans for hyperdrives?

Not to mention it gave purpose to having energy cells and solar power stations. Its nice when commodities also had purpose other than being sold for profits.

[Alci]

Did they ever give a reason as to why not?

strategy. With jump drives you completely bypass the borders, unit deployment and the whole strategic value of the game. Now (unlike all the prev games) war is real (once fully fixed ) and defending your sectors is better done if the enemy can't just appear anywhere with any force at disposal.

The same goes for your force. You may actually need station defenses instead of just one fleet jumping wherever the attack occurs.

Personally I consider it a good thing. The universe is not that large to begin with, real logistic is still not a thing (try to travel from one side of universe to the other), but it's large enough (and capitals being forbid from highway) to make you think twice of default fleet deployment.

[SacremPyrobolum]

Did they ever give a reason as to why not?

strategy. With jump drives you completely bypass the borders, unit deployment and the whole strategic value of the game. Now (unlike all the prev games) war is real (once fully fixed ) and defending your sectors is better done if the enemy can't just appear anywhere with any force at disposal.

The same goes for your force. You may actually need station defenses instead of just one fleet jumping wherever the attack occurs.

Personally I consider it a good thing. The universe is not that large to begin with, real logistic is still not a thing (try to travel from one side of universe to the other), but it's large enough (and capitals being forbid from highway) to make you think twice of default fleet deployment.

Frankly I'm more worried about the AI slamming my expensive capital ship into a station while its going mach 5 in travel mode than anything else. The hyperdrive was a good way to avoid having to use the auto-pillock on AI ships.

[mamastoast]

I actually think I prefer the game without jump drives... But then again I'd also prefer the teleportation feature not to be there. Any kind of jumping around that ignores the gate system kinda feels like it takes away from the universe in a way...

I would like to see huge capital ships that wouldnt fit through gates though, and they'd certainly need some kind of jump tech.

[ZombiePotatoSalad]

Did they ever give a reason as to why not?

strategy. With jump drives you completely bypass the borders, unit deployment and the whole strategic value of the game. Now (unlike all the prev games) war is real (once fully fixed ) and defending your sectors is better done if the enemy can't just appear anywhere with any force at disposal.

The same goes for your force. You may actually need station defenses instead of just one fleet jumping wherever the attack occurs.

Personally I consider it a good thing. The universe is not that large to begin with, real logistic is still not a thing (try to travel from one side of universe to the other), but it's large enough (and capitals being forbid from highway) to make you think twice of default fleet deployment.

Frankly I'm more worried about the AI slamming my expensive capital ship into a station while its going mach 5 in travel mode than anything else. The hyperdrive was a good way to avoid having to use the auto-pillock on AI ships.

The AI has hax. They can pass through entire stations without taking damage.

[Alci]

Frankly I'm more worried about the AI slamming my expensive capital ship into a station while its going mach 5 in travel mode than anything else.

autopilots works best if you don't look. The only issue is the real autopilot because you are at helm. Once NPC pilot takes over they are ok. None of my ships had any problem on auto (they bumping a bit into inside docks when I'm already there, but no harm done and they eventually find a way). Only the one I'm driving. I don't use autopilot at all because of that. Even your co-pilot is ok for any non combat situations.

[SacremPyrobolum]

strategy. With jump drives you completely bypass the borders, unit deployment and the whole strategic value of the game. Now (unlike all the prev games) war is real (once fully fixed ) and defending your sectors is better done if the enemy can't just appear anywhere with any force at disposal.

The same goes for your force. You may actually need station defenses instead of just one fleet jumping wherever the attack occurs.

Personally I consider it a good thing. The universe is not that large to begin with, real logistic is still not a thing (try to travel from one side of universe to the other), but it's large enough (and capitals being forbid from highway) to make you think twice of default fleet deployment.

Frankly I'm more worried about the AI slamming my expensive capital ship into a station while its going mach 5 in travel mode than anything else. The hyperdrive was a good way to avoid having to use the auto-pillock on AI ships.

The AI has hax. They can pass through entire stations without taking damage.

...I'm not sure I like that solution.

Do they at least only do it when they are outside of the player's view?

[Requiemfang]

Did they ever give a reason as to why not?

strategy. With jump drives you completely bypass the borders, unit deployment and the whole strategic value of the game. Now (unlike all the prev games) war is real (once fully fixed ) and defending your sectors is better done if the enemy can't just appear anywhere with any force at disposal.

The same goes for your force. You may actually need station defenses instead of just one fleet jumping wherever the attack occurs.

Personally I consider it a good thing. The universe is not that large to begin with, real logistic is still not a thing (try to travel from one side of universe to the other), but it's large enough (and capitals being forbid from highway) to make you think twice of default fleet deployment.

Also the game took a performance hit when ships jumped in sector all of a sudden. I remember a war mod in X3TC that had fleets jump into a sector it cause the game to have hiccups and freezes constantly due to how taxed the cpu was in calculating all of that.

[ZombiePotatoSalad]

Don't forget: what's good for the goose should be good for the gander.

If the player gets a jumpdrive, then the AI should too. And can you wholeheartedly tell me that you're content with an M ship just jumping away while you're trying to wear it down to cap it, making you have to chase it down? Are you content with the Xenon teleporting their I with 3 K escorts on top of your fledgling Solar Power Plant?

I know I'm not.

[nerdtron]

Did they ever give a reason as to why not?

From the Q&A (see here).

Owen: One of the reasons why we went with transporters and not having the jump drive was that we want the player to be a bit more tactical with the placement of units across the map. Not having to just say ok I have a fleet of capital ships I can fill them with energy and go anywhere instantly. Well, we also don't want that for the NPCs, because that takes away from the strategic value of things like a gate. You try and stop them making an advance and if they can just jump behind you, then it's very tricky to control. It really does add thinking. Where do I put things, am I missing any areas that they can get in. I'm enjoying looking forward to really trying to figure out how to stop the AI and expand myself and things like that, and see what the NPCs do with each other. (See also this post by CBJ about the reasons behind the removal of the jumpdrive and the introduction of Teleportation.)

From the thread linked to above.

In a game like this, the universe needs to feel "big" otherwise it doesn't feel much like a space game. However, while sitting looking at the universe pass by can be really enjoyable for a while, most players don't actually want to do this indefinitely; they want to get to the action reasonably quickly. Now of course these two fundamental goals are actually contradictory, and they are not the only contradiction. Players want the game to be tactical, with variation in the universe, importance placed on where resources are gathered, and where stations are built and where fleets are stationed, yet they don't want to spend precious gaming time travelling between different parts of their empire. They want there to be dangers, yet they also don't like it being too hard to get to their trading ships quickly to protect them. The list goes on.

Both SETA and jumpdrives are solutions to some of these problems, but both of them are "blunt instruments". We didn't initially implement them in XR because we wanted to see if we could find better, more subtle, ways to achieve the same results. Highways and engine boosters were the main tools for this, but there were mixed reactions to the highways (not helped by some design issues in early versions which made them less enjoyable to use than they should have been). Boosters proved more widely popular, with the possible exceptions of our chosen "cost" for use, namely the shields, but came with the downside that the player would tend to spend more time in empty space, not seeing any other traffic.

However, neither of these solutions addressed one key player scenario, namely the situation where the player really does just want to allow more time to pass, for example to allow production or station-building to complete. We had hoped that players would be too busy doing other things to be too bothered about not being able to accelerate time, but it turned out that that wasn't the case. With no better alternative solutions to that particular problem in sight (and with the functionality to accelerate time already available in the game for development purposes) we decided to restore SETA. That remains the situation with SETA as we work towards X4, and I will leave discussion of SETA at that.

Jumpdrives were popular, but they pretty much completely destroyed both the feeling of size, and the tactical, territory-controlling element of the game. Sure, there are ways to mitigate some of their effect (jump target limitations, range limitations, fuel cost) but none of them remove the fundamental problem that you cannot place an obstacle in the way of an invading fleet in an interesting way. Note that adding another gameplay mechanism to prevent jumpdrives being used doesn't really count as interesting for these purposes; it just stops the jumpdrive from being useful, making it redundant. So, thinking again about which features of a jumpdrive we wanted in the game, and which we didn't, we realised that there were two separate scenarios. One was getting a ship or fleet from A to B, and the other was getting the player from A to B so that they could be "in on the action".

For the first scenario highways have a place, allowing ships in densely-populated areas to move quickly. This not only makes sense logically, in the same way that roads and motorways make sense in busy areas, but it also helps with the perception of how busy such an area is since a player travelling along through the area will see more ships. In less populated ares, ships would still be able to use boost drives, and the player not seeing so many of them would help create the corresponding more empty atmosphere.

That leaves the player case. In particular it leaves the case of the player being frustrated to see their ships being attacked on the far side of the universe, but having no means to get there and apply their skills to try and save the situation. Allowing them to jump in at will with a fleet is too overpowered and takes away any real danger, but allowing them to be there in person and maybe try and fly the ship to safety, or perhaps man a hero escort ship and fend off the enemy single-handed, makes for good, exciting gameplay. That's where teleportation comes in, and I'm sure you can work out numerous other possibilities it brings up.

One final thing for those saying that jumpdrives "can't" be removed because it "doesn't make sense" from a lore perspective: I'm afraid that argument is back to front. The lore needs to be made to fit the gameplay, not the other way around.

Now, I'm sure you will read through this and say "yes, but...." and come up with some counter-argument that you feel supports your view that jumpdrives should stay, and of course you are entitled to your opinion. However, please don't try to claim that we didn't think through the decision, nor that we just "threw away" something that you liked without considering it properly. We have thought about it very carefully, and who knows? Maybe the fact that we came to a different conclusion to the one you would perhaps have come, might even mean that it wasn't us who missed something important.

[ZombiePotatoSalad]

Frankly I'm more worried about the AI slamming my expensive capital ship into a station while its going mach 5 in travel mode than anything else. The hyperdrive was a good way to avoid having to use the auto-pillock on AI ships.

The AI has hax. They can pass through entire stations without taking damage.

...I'm not sure I like that solution.

Do they at least only do it when they are outside of the player's view?

Nope. I was riding with my AI piloting. I told them to dock at a wharf. They proceeded to go THROUGH the station it was attached to.

[SacremPyrobolum]

Did they ever give a reason as to why not?

From the Q&A (see here).

Owen: One of the reasons why we went with transporters and not having the jump drive was that we want the player to be a bit more tactical with the placement of units across the map. Not having to just say ok I have a fleet of capital ships I can fill them with energy and go anywhere instantly. Well, we also don't want that for the NPCs, because that takes away from the strategic value of things like a gate. You try and stop them making an advance and if they can just jump behind you, then it's very tricky to control. It really does add thinking. Where do I put things, am I missing any areas that they can get in. I'm enjoying looking forward to really trying to figure out how to stop the AI and expand myself and things like that, and see what the NPCs do with each other. (See also this post by CBJ about the reasons behind the removal of the jumpdrive and the introduction of Teleportation.)

From the thread linked to above.

In a game like this, the universe needs to feel "big" otherwise it doesn't feel much like a space game. However, while sitting looking at the universe pass by can be really enjoyable for a while, most players don't actually want to do this indefinitely; they want to get to the action reasonably quickly. Now of course these two fundamental goals are actually contradictory, and they are not the only contradiction. Players want the game to be tactical, with variation in the universe, importance placed on where resources are gathered, and where stations are built and where fleets are stationed, yet they don't want to spend precious gaming time travelling between different parts of their empire. They want there to be dangers, yet they also don't like it being too hard to get to their trading ships quickly to protect them. The list goes on.

Both SETA and jumpdrives are solutions to some of these problems, but both of them are "blunt instruments". We didn't initially implement them in XR because we wanted to see if we could find better, more subtle, ways to achieve the same results. Highways and engine boosters were the main tools for this, but there were mixed reactions to the highways (not helped by some design issues in early versions which made them less enjoyable to use than they should have been). Boosters proved more widely popular, with the possible exceptions of our chosen "cost" for use, namely the shields, but came with the downside that the player would tend to spend more time in empty space, not seeing any other traffic.

However, neither of these solutions addressed one key player scenario, namely the situation where the player really does just want to allow more time to pass, for example to allow production or station-building to complete. We had hoped that players would be too busy doing other things to be too bothered about not being able to accelerate time, but it turned out that that wasn't the case. With no better alternative solutions to that particular problem in sight (and with the functionality to accelerate time already available in the game for development purposes) we decided to restore SETA. That remains the situation with SETA as we work towards X4, and I will leave discussion of SETA at that.

Jumpdrives were popular, but they pretty much completely destroyed both the feeling of size, and the tactical, territory-controlling element of the game. Sure, there are ways to mitigate some of their effect (jump target limitations, range limitations, fuel cost) but none of them remove the fundamental problem that you cannot place an obstacle in the way of an invading fleet in an interesting way. Note that adding another gameplay mechanism to prevent jumpdrives being used doesn't really count as interesting for these purposes; it just stops the jumpdrive from being useful, making it redundant. So, thinking again about which features of a jumpdrive we wanted in the game, and which we didn't, we realised that there were two separate scenarios. One was getting a ship or fleet from A to B, and the other was getting the player from A to B so that they could be "in on the action".

For the first scenario highways have a place, allowing ships in densely-populated areas to move quickly. This not only makes sense logically, in the same way that roads and motorways make sense in busy areas, but it also helps with the perception of how busy such an area is since a player travelling along through the area will see more ships. In less populated ares, ships would still be able to use boost drives, and the player not seeing so many of them would help create the corresponding more empty atmosphere.

That leaves the player case. In particular it leaves the case of the player being frustrated to see their ships being attacked on the far side of the universe, but having no means to get there and apply their skills to try and save the situation. Allowing them to jump in at will with a fleet is too overpowered and takes away any real danger, but allowing them to be there in person and maybe try and fly the ship to safety, or perhaps man a hero escort ship and fend off the enemy single-handed, makes for good, exciting gameplay. That's where teleportation comes in, and I'm sure you can work out numerous other possibilities it brings up.

One final thing for those saying that jumpdrives "can't" be removed because it "doesn't make sense" from a lore perspective: I'm afraid that argument is back to front. The lore needs to be made to fit the gameplay, not the other way around.

Now, I'm sure you will read through this and say "yes, but...." and come up with some counter-argument that you feel supports your view that jumpdrives should stay, and of course you are entitled to your opinion. However, please don't try to claim that we didn't think through the decision, nor that we just "threw away" something that you liked without considering it properly. We have thought about it very carefully, and who knows? Maybe the fact that we came to a different conclusion to the one you would perhaps have come, might even mean that it wasn't us who missed something important.

Thank you, I was looking for something like this.

I still hate how teleportation (my least favorite of all sci-fi technologies) is in the game and jump-drives aren't.

[RWolf]

If they want the universe to feel big, and remove the jumpdrive logic... space highways should not exist either. All they do is make the universe feel smaller. IF you are fleeing being attacked, they are a get out of jail free card. They basically serve no strategic purpose.

[Phoynix]

Its 700 years since the first jump drive... they could have invented new tech that jams jump drives from jumping into core systems unless you have a Jump code(given by the race in question) that lets you bypass it.
Stations and the like could also have been protected by a jump jammer that means you couldnt jump in/out near them so that races/player had time to defend against a invasion of non core systems.

This way the races could wage war by jumping in to secondary systems and attempt to push through, further the game spawns hostile ships on you anyways which is effectively as if they are using a jump drive... except with no logic behind it because jump drives don't exist.

Did they ever give a reason as to why not?

strategy. With jump drives you completely bypass the borders, unit deployment and the whole strategic value of the game. Now (unlike all the prev games) war is real (once fully fixed ) and defending your sectors is better done if the enemy can't just appear anywhere with any force at disposal.

The same goes for your force. You may actually need station defenses instead of just one fleet jumping wherever the attack occurs.

Personally I consider it a good thing. The universe is not that large to begin with, real logistic is still not a thing (try to travel from one side of universe to the other), but it's large enough (and capitals being forbid from highway) to make you think twice of default fleet deployment.

[Solflame]

To be fair, the ships aren't quite as gung-ho to throw themselves through ever since they did a pass on collision detection and avoidance in 1.30. It still occasionally happens but is much rarer.

I'll be honest, I kinda like being on the same footing as the NPCs. Teleportation ends up just being a way of letting you personally get to a different theatre of operations while preventing you from taking a single fleet anywhere you want instantly. It doesn't even work for any of your NPCs or cargo: just your own personal character.

Right now I know I need at least two fleets: One to hold the PHQ, and one to hold the HOP front. I've started investing in stations in the Republic, and the damn heretic three-eyes are already pushing a recon force through, and I haven't even gotten the war patch 1.32 yet! I don't even wanna know what kind of stuff they're gonna start hurling this direction once that comes out. I'll probably want a small personal task force for my own usage as well.

Phoynix, just gonna quote the last part of CBJs statement:

Now, I'm sure you will read through this and say "yes, but...." and come up with some counter-argument that you feel supports your view that jumpdrives should stay, and of course you are entitled to your opinion. However, please don't try to claim that we didn't think through the decision, nor that we just "threw away" something that you liked without considering it properly. We have thought about it very carefully, and who knows? Maybe the fact that we came to a different conclusion to the one you would perhaps have come, might even mean that it wasn't us who missed something important.

[Phoynix]

Maybe they are right, and it wasn't them that missed something important...
Its not like they released a broken and buggy game with major core functionality broken from day one that they didn't even know about yet players found out almost instantly...

That would really be funny AF if they did that while making such statements about maybe its not them that missed something...
Good thing that didn't happen

To be fair, the ships aren't quite as gung-ho to throw themselves through ever since they did a pass on collision detection and avoidance in 1.30. It still occasionally happens but is much rarer.

I'll be honest, I kinda like being on the same footing as the NPCs. Teleportation ends up just being a way of letting you personally get to a different theatre of operations while preventing you from taking a single fleet anywhere you want instantly. It doesn't even work for any of your NPCs or cargo: just your own personal character.

Right now I know I need at least two fleets: One to hold the PHQ, and one to hold the HOP front. I've started investing in stations in the Republic, and the damn heretic three-eyes are already pushing a recon force through, and I haven't even gotten the war patch 1.32 yet! I don't even wanna know what kind of stuff they're gonna start hurling this direction once that comes out. I'll probably want a small personal task force for my own usage as well.

Phoynix, just gonna quote the last part of CBJs statement:

Now, I'm sure you will read through this and say "yes, but...." and come up with some counter-argument that you feel supports your view that jumpdrives should stay, and of course you are entitled to your opinion. However, please don't try to claim that we didn't think through the decision, nor that we just "threw away" something that you liked without considering it properly. We have thought about it very carefully, and who knows? Maybe the fact that we came to a different conclusion to the one you would perhaps have come, might even mean that it wasn't us who missed something important.

[KextV8]

...I'm not sure I like that solution.

Do they at least only do it when they are outside of the player's view?

Yes. This only happens when the player is out of sector. It's there to save processing power for calculating things that the player can actually see. Allows npc's to travel without using much more demanding pathfinding algorithms .