My experience so far

[tianlongprc]

Let me start by saying that I was a huge X3 fan, minus the occasional loosing ships because they jumped through a gate and collided with another ship. I skipped Rebirth and glad I did. With that said I took a leap of faith with X4 and pre-purchased the collectors edition. 5 months in and I have to say I am disappointed. I didn't play when it first came out even though I owned it because I didn't have the time and I was reading on the forums about all the bugs and issues that the game had. So I waited and now that I had a small vacation and the time decided, wow it has been patched a lot it should be close to playing now. Well I was wrong. I am in my current save for about 6 hours and I still cannot buy a second ship because the 5 wharf's that I have found all lack engine parts and or other materials that are needed to make the ship. I tried in my starter ship to move some engine parts only to discover that I can only fit like 5 in my little ship and the best dock is lacking over 300+ engine parts. So that is great, I thought to myself that sucks but maybe I should save money and build my own station to create the needed parts. But however to my dismay, I am now stuck in a NPC's ship and cannot get out. At first I laughed but then realized that I paid for a game that is pretty broken. Maybe give it another shot in 5 months and play games that actually work in the mean time?

https://i.ibb.co/SfwWThb/X4-Foundations.png


{Images posted directly to the forums should not be greater than 640x480 or 100kb, oversize image now linked - Terre}

[Shuulo]

Seems you re just very unlucky with that bug on screenshot, never had it, playing from release.
2.2 is not the best, but 2.5 is, more or less, the game that it should be on release. 2.5 will release this week i guess, so try again after that.
Note that even if shipyard shows that it lacks some materials, just make an order, it will be built soon when it will get up in queue for construction, as those materials are always booked for future constructions, shipyard info panel is just not that clear. Anyway, 2.5 is much better with this.

[RainerPrem]

Let me start by saying that I was a huge X3 fan, minus the occasional loosing ships because they jumped through a gate and collided with another ship. I skipped Rebirth and glad I did. With that said I took a leap of faith with X4 and pre-purchased the collectors edition. 5 months in and I have to say I am disappointed. I didn't play when it first came out even though I owned it because I didn't have the time and I was reading on the forums about all the bugs and issues that the game had. So I waited and now that I had a small vacation and the time decided, wow it has been patched a lot it should be close to playing now. Well I was wrong. I am in my current save for about 6 hours and I still cannot buy a second ship because the 5 wharf's that I have found all lack engine parts and or other materials that are needed to make the ship. I tried in my starter ship to move some engine parts only to discover that I can only fit like 5 in my little ship and the best dock is lacking over 300+ engine parts. So that is great, I thought to myself that sucks but maybe I should save money and build my own station to create the needed parts. But however to my dismay, I am now stuck in a NPC's ship and cannot get out. At first I laughed but then realized that I paid for a game that is pretty broken. Maybe give it another shot in 5 months and play games that actually work in the mean time?

Hi,

I suggest to use your time exploring the universe and collecting money and reputation by doing missions. There are also a number of abandoned S and M ships you can find in the universe for free.

PS: Did you look in Argon Prime? They have the best supply infrastructure, and the shipyard very seldom runs dry.

cu
Rainer

[tianlongprc]

Let me start by saying that I was a huge X3 fan, minus the occasional loosing ships because they jumped through a gate and collided with another ship. I skipped Rebirth and glad I did. With that said I took a leap of faith with X4 and pre-purchased the collectors edition. 5 months in and I have to say I am disappointed. I didn't play when it first came out even though I owned it because I didn't have the time and I was reading on the forums about all the bugs and issues that the game had. So I waited and now that I had a small vacation and the time decided, wow it has been patched a lot it should be close to playing now. Well I was wrong. I am in my current save for about 6 hours and I still cannot buy a second ship because the 5 wharf's that I have found all lack engine parts and or other materials that are needed to make the ship. I tried in my starter ship to move some engine parts only to discover that I can only fit like 5 in my little ship and the best dock is lacking over 300+ engine parts. So that is great, I thought to myself that sucks but maybe I should save money and build my own station to create the needed parts. But however to my dismay, I am now stuck in a NPC's ship and cannot get out. At first I laughed but then realized that I paid for a game that is pretty broken. Maybe give it another shot in 5 months and play games that actually work in the mean time?

Hi,

I suggest to use your time exploring the universe and collecting money and reputation by doing missions. There are also a number of abandoned S and M ships you can find in the universe for free.

PS: Did you look in Argon Prime? They have the best supply infrastructure, and the shipyard very seldom runs dry.

cu
Rainer

Yeah I am usually in Argon prime area, When I started playing sometimes the autopilot turns off and it did it while I was on the super highway, I found out that you can continue to fly around on it, so I went to the main systems connected to it and so I can remotely access any all the different ship yards. I just wanted to buy a mining ship and try that out. Thinking, maybe I could try a new game and see if that helps. Or I can try to look around for abandoned ships, however the last two times I just went searching around in my first two games I got killed once by xenon and the second time I found a big battle and when I was trying to scavenge loot I got killed by a missile that hit the target killing me in the process even though the ship had already been destroyed, lmao. I think maybe if I want to continue to play, I should just remember to save every 10-15 mins. Being stuck in the ship lost me an hour of game play.

[Nifhtyeq]

Let me start by saying that I was a huge X3 fan, minus the occasional loosing ships because they jumped through a gate and collided with another ship. I skipped Rebirth and glad I did. With that said I took a leap of faith with X4 and pre-purchased the collectors edition. 5 months in and I have to say I am disappointed. I didn't play when it first came out even though I owned it because I didn't have the time and I was reading on the forums about all the bugs and issues that the game had. So I waited and now that I had a small vacation and the time decided, wow it has been patched a lot it should be close to playing now. Well I was wrong. I am in my current save for about 6 hours and I still cannot buy a second ship because the 5 wharf's that I have found all lack engine parts and or other materials that are needed to make the ship. I tried in my starter ship to move some engine parts only to discover that I can only fit like 5 in my little ship and the best dock is lacking over 300+ engine parts. So that is great, I thought to myself that sucks but maybe I should save money and build my own station to create the needed parts. But however to my dismay, I am now stuck in a NPC's ship and cannot get out. At first I laughed but then realized that I paid for a game that is pretty broken. Maybe give it another shot in 5 months and play games that actually work in the mean time?

https://i.ibb.co/SfwWThb/X4-Foundations.png


{Images posted directly to the forums should not be greater than 640x480 or 100kb, oversize image now linked - Terre}

Reload back in is always my suggestion for being stuck. The game world is at war so it's hard to get parts so I suggest lowering your preset then upgrading later at equipment dock.

[RainerPrem]

Being stuck in the ship lost me an hour of game play.

Perhaps you should try to remember hitting the F5-Key each time you pass a gate or a superhighway...

[Tomonor]

You have a series of misfortune in your game, OP. I'm playing on a 1.5 save, odd things do happen here and there (jumping to other systems without crossing gates for example), but these bugs are minor for me.

As for the economy, it really is random. There are a number of pre-defined stations upon gamestart, but most of them are randomly generated. You seem to have stumbled upon a universe that's lacking in a certain department for reasons. The problem is, you will need to find out what's holding back the economy from producing your ships.

[Falcrack]

Yet another player annoyed because they can't get the ship they want early game. Egosoft could get around these complaints by having prebuilt ships from ship traders or something similar which the early players could just buy outright instead of waiting for construction materials for the shipyard to make it.

As for being stuck inside an NPC ship, prioritize researching teleportation, so that if you do get stuck, you can teleport yourself off whenever you want to if need be.

[Faustov]

I find the missing parts condition normal. When I encountered this, I delivered the missing parts myself, then with time, built relevant factories near the wharfs to beat the competition.

Still, way too many bugs come from the lack of attention to detail and give the game an overall feel of "buggy", which IMHO results in such posts.

[burger1]

Maybe after the initial war state ends the shipyards get most of their resources. I have had to deliver a part or two to get a ship built. Once you get used to the trade window and it's filters it's not hard it just takes a bit of time. Later in the game it's mostly peaceful and trading becomes more predictable/routine. I have never been blown up by a secondary explosion. I use npcs rather than autopilot if that makes a difference. Getting killed by small enemy ships is normal if you fly a fighter. I would just dock and alt tab out and let the game play for several hours? Alt tabed out the game uses much less cpu and gpu resources.

[Paul McParland]

I have restarted the game 3 times so far, and will most likely restart again when 2.50 comes out. My experience is this, when you first start a game there are very few NPC ships flying around, and gaps in each races supply chain. Initially I think the game builds a massive amount of ships to fill these gaps. I noticed from roughly 8-18 hours into a new game the number of NPC ships, and station, increase greatly and the shipyards are usually low on certain resources. At around the 20-25 hour mark most shipyards/wharfs seem to recover and don't have as much of an issue with supplies.

This is just what I have noticed in the games I have played

[Derp]

Yet another player annoyed because they can't get the ship they want early game. Egosoft could get around these complaints by having prebuilt ships from ship traders or something similar which the early players could just buy outright instead of waiting for construction materials for the shipyard to make it.

There is an entire wharf and shipyard with no in-game function other than to build ships for the player.

But I'll agree the shipyards should spawn fully stocked, if they don't already.

[ETA] Possibly a better solution: when a player buys a ship from anywhere, any missing resources are taken from the ALI shipyard/wharf if possible.

[Nifhtyeq]

Yet another player annoyed because they can't get the ship they want early game. Egosoft could get around these complaints by having prebuilt ships from ship traders or something similar which the early players could just buy outright instead of waiting for construction materials for the shipyard to make it.

There is an entire wharf and shipyard with no in-game function other than to build ships for the player.

But I'll agree the shipyards should spawn fully stocked, if they don't already.

[ETA] Possibly a better solution: when a player buys a ship from anywhere, any missing resources are taken from the ALI shipyard/wharf if possible.

But then what's the point if it's supposed to be a dynamic economy. If stations spawn fully stocked. I think the best option is to have supplies have a better tradition from wartime to peacetime economies. So if they're is a ceasefire called for two warring factions the war stop for a while. Then they pick up again depending on player as well as NPC interactions. That way ships still get built even during peacetime and with less of a demand their is less of a impotus on military ships so production dies down and more players can have more and nicer ships. Also I would keep current system for warfare only.

[surferx]

Being stuck in the ship lost me an hour of game play.

Perhaps you should try to remember hitting the F5-Key each time you pass a gate or a superhighway...

Or don't turn off auto-save.

[Hero77]

While I was suprised of how relativly well the game released and how it has progressed from 1.0 to 2.2, I still have to agree that for the most part the fundamental systems are still broken. Especially the economy "system" is far from functional. The idea of the X games has always been that its a simulated universe on your computer that "plays itself" and that it does not rely on player activity. Right now, if you start a new game in 2.2 and do not engage in trading the economy comes to a halt within the first 20 hours of the game. Admittedly this is a difficult problem to solve because its very hard to debug, especially with the XML scripting. By now I tried most if not all of the mods available that try to solve this issue aswell and while some kind of make the game more playable they are also not able to solve the underlying issues effectivly. Additionally, many other scripts, including some of the generic mission types, behaviours (e.g. explore-command), basic features (personal mining) also have problems.

I think egosoft had a great comeback with this game after rebirth and I am sure the guys working on the game are very talented in what they do, however I am not sure how they can get this game to a stable state. In my oppinion there are just too many issues for the small team size working on the game. I gave this game a positive review on steam and I played about 200 ingame hours now, restarting the game from scratch many times trying different combinations of mods and also the releases.

So, on the one hand side there is a huge number of issues with the current content in the game and then on the other side the content itself is still (for what the game wants to achieve) pretty short. Again, I think egosoft does a fine job, I just think they are too small of a studio to acomplish the game they are aiming for. Right now,, its a game for people that either enjoy restarting from scratch many times over, or people who love tinkering and working around the many issues.

[Kadatherion]

The whole engine parts (and, in general, economy stalling up) issue was probably one of the longest threads in these forums: this to say, dear OP, no, you're not "unlucky", you've encountered one of the fundamental issues with the game that most have encountered and that isn't yet fully addressed.

Initially the game had this problem of shipyards running dry with engine parts. This was caused by several different bugs and reasons. They made it a bit better, fixing some of them. In the meanwhile, though, they also fixed (to an extent) the AI wars (that didn't happen at launch and basically were pretty much not in the game AT ALL). This kickstarted the whole real resource sink of the economy and BAM, the engine parts/smart chips et cetera issue came back with a vengeance. Fixing and most of all long term balancing that wide, conceptual issue, is still being done now, so yeah, you might want to wait quite some more. Of course, there's quite a bit of RNG behind it, which means you can encounter the issue sooner than someone else, or with a different resource, or in a magnitude that's game breaking when to someone else stays longer in the correct "a hole just big enough to encourage the player to fill it", but overall the issue is still there, waiting to creep up on you. You're not unlucky to have ecountered it, those who didn't (yet, or did less often) are lucky.

Granted, it's getting MUCH better than it was, but if you want to experience a stable, seamless, long term playthrough without having to worry about this - and several other annoyances - then the game is admittedly still a bit too unreliable for that. My suggestion: wait for 3.0 and the Split DLC at least. Just because I doubt they'd go for the DLC before being finally quite confident the foundations are finally stable enough to throw a whole new race, its economy and war machine, at them.

[Nifhtyeq]

While I was suprised of how relativly well the game released and how it has progressed from 1.0 to 2.2, I still have to agree that for the most part the fundamental systems are still broken. Especially the economy "system" is far from functional. The idea of the X games has always been that its a simulated universe on your computer that "plays itself" and that it does not rely on player activity. Right now, if you start a new game in 2.2 and do not engage in trading the economy comes to a halt within the first 20 hours of the game. Admittedly this is a difficult problem to solve because its very hard to debug, especially with the XML scripting. By now I tried most if not all of the mods available that try to solve this issue aswell and while some kind of make the game more playable they are also not able to solve the underlying issues effectivly. Additionally, many other scripts, including some of the generic mission types, behaviours (e.g. explore-command), basic features (personal mining) also have problems.

I think egosoft had a great comeback with this game after rebirth and I am sure the guys working on the game are very talented in what they do, however I am not sure how they can get this game to a stable state. In my oppinion there are just too many issues for the small team size working on the game. I gave this game a positive review on steam and I played about 200 ingame hours now, restarting the game from scratch many times trying different combinations of mods and also the releases.

So, on the one hand side there is a huge number of issues with the current content in the game and then on the other side the content itself is still (for what the game wants to achieve) pretty short. Again, I think egosoft does a fine job, I just think they are too small of a studio to acomplish the game they are aiming for. Right now,, its a game for people that either enjoy restarting from scratch many times over, or people who love tinkering and working around the many issues.

I completely disagree they were able to turn rebirth around they made X3 into a great game and honestly what they needed to do is create a really good foundational base game. Then allow players to work off of that. And honestly that's what they are doing with all updates post 2.2. In fact start playing 2.5 right now and take it for spin see the changes and differences they have added. I think post 3.0 and post dlc X4 with ego and modders creating content will allow x4 to thrive. Like it's predescesors before it.

[surferx]

While I was suprised of how relativly well the game released and how it has progressed from 1.0 to 2.2, I still have to agree that for the most part the fundamental systems are still broken.

Fair enough, although I would not use the term "broken." That implies game breaking. Fact- the game is completely playable-not perfect- but playable. Not being to obtain a certain specific ship instantly is no reason to be forced to discontinue play. Being unable to buy a frigate or freighter from a Paranid wharf does not prevent me from going to Argon or Teladi sectors for a similar ship. If I can't have the ship I wanted right now I don't turn off the game and fume and rant on forums that I can't play. In fact limitations running out of goods is an opportunity to trade those goods and profit. This, for me, makes the game more immersive by reflecting a real economy which is at anytime subject to shortages. Those who can't play now, I'm afraid will always find some reason to complain even after 3.0 and later.

[Hero77]

While I was suprised of how relativly well the game released and how it has progressed from 1.0 to 2.2, I still have to agree that for the most part the fundamental systems are still broken.

Fair enough, although I would not use the term "broken." That implies game breaking. Fact- the game is completely playable-not perfect- but playable. Not being to obtain a certain specific ship instantly is no reason to be forced to discontinue play. Being unable to buy a frigate or freighter from a Paranid wharf does not prevent me from going to Argon or Teladi sectors for a similar ship. If I can't have the ship I wanted right now I don't turn off the game and fume and rant on forums that I can't play. In fact limitations running out of goods is an opportunity to trade those goods and profit. This, for me, makes the game more immersive by reflecting a real economy which is at anytime subject to shortages. Those who can't play now, I'm afraid will always find some reason to complain even after 3.0 and later.

If a system does not behave as intended, its broken- otherwise its functional. IMO, the X4 economy (and many others systems) do not behave as intended, aka they are broken. However, as you said - having a game with many broken systems, does not mean the game is in itself unplayable. its just (for many) not alot of fun.

[photomankc]

The whole engine parts (and, in general, economy stalling up) issue was probably one of the longest threads in these forums: this to say, dear OP, no, you're not "unlucky", you've encountered one of the fundamental issues with the game that most have encountered and that isn't yet fully addressed.

Initially the game had this problem of shipyards running dry with engine parts. This was caused by several different bugs and reasons. They made it a bit better, fixing some of them. In the meanwhile, though, they also fixed (to an extent) the AI wars (that didn't happen at launch and basically were pretty much not in the game AT ALL). This kickstarted the whole real resource sink of the economy and BAM, the engine parts/smart chips et cetera issue came back with a vengeance. Fixing and most of all long term balancing that wide, conceptual issue, is still being done now, so yeah, you might want to wait quite some more. Of course, there's quite a bit of RNG behind it, which means you can encounter the issue sooner than someone else, or with a different resource, or in a magnitude that's game breaking when to someone else stays longer in the correct "a hole just big enough to encourage the player to fill it", but overall the issue is still there, waiting to creep up on you. You're not unlucky to have ecountered it, those who didn't (yet, or did less often) are lucky.

Granted, it's getting MUCH better than it was, but if you want to experience a stable, seamless, long term playthrough without having to worry about this - and several other annoyances - then the game is admittedly still a bit too unreliable for that. My suggestion: wait for 3.0 and the Split DLC at least. Just because I doubt they'd go for the DLC before being finally quite confident the foundations are finally stable enough to throw a whole new race, its economy and war machine, at them.

Yep. I was here too and gotten myself into a real predicament because the only ship I had left was an Ides with crappy beam turrets. I'd sold my starter ship and started to build new ones but BAM. They were out of resources in a BIG way and I didn't notice it until too late. I had to fly around for hours in that Ides moving ship parts. Good news was it made me some decent money. Bad news was it was not what I wanted to be doing.

Fast-forward another 150hrs. I've been at war with the HOP for a long time. Flipped two sectors over to GOP and ANT and finally decided to let up on them and repair relations. Well they are rebuilding their merchant and military fleets and guess what happened? They've run almost everyone out of smart chips, and hull parts. I'm presently busy building a factory to supply those parts in now the empty ANT sector of True Sight.

At first the shortages ticked me off but I think I now see that as a natural response to the sudden demands for products. This time I am in a position to capitalize on it where in the early game I was just shut out of progress on the PHQ missions and exploration (An Ides is a terrible ship to go exploring in). I just wish they would make a few simple ships available to purchase without the JIT production issues. At least one could finish the PHQ quest or do meaningful exploring or trading with a few scouts or S courier/mining ships to choose from that didn't need to be built and were there for the player to buy not the AI.