New X4 player questions

[Toastysoul]

Having some trouble understanding many things about X4. Bear in mind, I've played X games long enough that I bought my original boxed copy of X3: Reunion 1.0 from EB games BEFORE they became Gamestop, but as I'm playing this it feels like someone took a hole punch to X4 and now it's just --- missing things.

When I'm trying to setup a trader, pilots will often spawn with less than the 3 stars required for any kind of automated trading. I gathered from extensive searching that in a prior build (>1.5?) the option used to be there to make a sector/galaxy trader. There doesn't seem to be any option for sector/galaxy traders any more. Like, really? It was considered an 'exploit' because you could do it with low star pilots so the answer was just to scrap the entire system? Automated trading was a huge part of the game in X3.

I understand that post 1.5 you can setup autotrading via behaviors but have to select wares manually however, it still requires a pilot with 3 stars. BUT there also doesn't seem to be any way to get the pilots to level up? I'm not opposed to setting up a bunch of 'manual' autotraders but there doesn't seem to be any vanilla mechanism to get them to increase in level. This is really kind of irritating. All searches around this issue return posts on here, reddit, and steam dated back to Christmas, with real no answers. How am I supposed to level up my pilots without starting them all in drills first?

I assume there are mods to fix this, but those also block you from using ventures? Ego scraps a major income stream/economy lubricator then adds a feature at the same time that you can't participate in if you use a mod to fix it? WTAF?

Explorers don't seem to be doing much of anything except idling -- and that ALSO requires a 3 star pilot. What's the point in having a pilot star rating gating things if you need 3 stars to do anything other than basic commands? Exploring should absolutely only be a 1 star requirement for aimlessly screwing around a sector the way they do.

The only automated pilot function that seems to be available and working correctly is mining.

I have missions to get captains for ships and a station manager. Any particular place I can recruit qualified candidates or am I just supposed to promote Joe the Conduit Scrubber to run my new $100m station?

How can I stop drones from deploying and attacking everything in sight? There seems to be absolutely zero drone aggression control. It's really obnoxious to have to park for 10 minutes while they all wait for each one to fly to the ship and dock. Shouldn't they all at least be following the ship until it's their turn to dock?

Where are the satellite network deployment options?

How do I get the map objects to show crates?

Why can't traders carry ore/silicon/nividium?

Where's the story? If the one Boron was it -- that's pretty seriously disappointing.

[Nifhtyeq]

Miners carry ore and only ores that's why not traders. Look up x4 leveling mods there are a few out you can also remove the skill requirement on traders. You can level up in vanilla it just takes a while. Also there are offline modded ventures so if you still want rewards your fine. Drones are designed to defend your ship. The idea is that they do attack any enemy in site. They can also cover your retreat. Also they are what version of the game are you playing because in 2.5b3 they follow my ship until they can dock. Crates you have to scan for in order for them to show up. I know ego teased at doing a dlc with a new story at some point as well. Hmm Ill check my game to double check that explorer point. Also I think they did mention crew leveling as something thats gonna be patched.

[Slashman]

Egosoft has said numerous times leading up the launch of X4 that there would be no story campaign. In several videos and it is not advertised anywhere on the game page so why are you surprised that there is no story?

[Falcrack]

When I'm trying to setup a trader, pilots will often spawn with less than the 3 stars required for any kind of automated trading. I gathered from extensive searching that in a prior build (>1.5?) the option used to be there to make a sector/galaxy trader. There doesn't seem to be any option for sector/galaxy traders any more. Like, really? It was considered an 'exploit' because you could do it with low star pilots so the answer was just to scrap the entire system? Automated trading was a huge part of the game in X3.

I understand that post 1.5 you can setup autotrading via behaviors but have to select wares manually however, it still requires a pilot with 3 stars. BUT there also doesn't seem to be any way to get the pilots to level up? I'm not opposed to setting up a bunch of 'manual' autotraders but there doesn't seem to be any vanilla mechanism to get them to increase in level. This is really kind of irritating. All searches around this issue return posts on here, reddit, and steam dated back to Christmas, with real no answers. How am I supposed to level up my pilots without starting them all in drills first?

You can use "Distribute wares". It is like a poor man's autotrader. It will only trade in a single sector, but you can designate as many wares as you want, and it will buy the wares and attempt to sell them in the sector. I don't think distribute wares looks at profitability of the trade before it starts, so be aware of that. But it will keep going, and may eventually get the pilot to level up. Maybe.

[Nort The Fragrent]

To get a 3 star pilot for your trading ship, go and buy some cheep small fighter ships. Full spec, then remove all options so it costs you less. Dump/fire your useless 2 star trading pilot, and replace it with one of the fighter pilots (3 star+) Sell off the below star fighters, and keep any 3+ for other ships!!

[burger1]

Autotrader requires 3 stars but for each additional star they get 1 extra sector range. So 3 sectors range for 3, 4 for 4 and 5 for 5 (5 star pilots are very uncommon).

Most of the ai stuff works. With autotrade you should select the rights areas, the right wares and not over saturate trades in an area. To get more big money trade deals you may need to manually trade between far away sectors. Explore kind of sucks I just set the course manually. Mining ships can go into loops.

For captains just buy/sell ships don't even bother trying to train them. For managers they level up either very quickly (shipyard managers since they buy tons of stuff) or at an ok rate.

To stop drones from deploying whenever an enemy is around set your turrets to defend. I think drone behavior is controlled by turret settings. If you attack a target you can go to the order queue and click on the * to configure the attack which has a choice for drones/no drones.

Different ships carry different wares types like liquid, container and solid.

The Boron story was it.

[fcth]

How am I supposed to level up my pilots without starting them all in drills first?

They do level up doing other tasks, but it's very slow, and not worth the effort babysitting them IMO. The easiest thing to do is buy a bunch of scouts/couriers with minimum equipment and transfer the good pilots, then sell them. I've also heard people say you can find pilots for hire on the bridges of NPC capital ships, though I haven't had good luck with that. If you did actually want to train them, assign the ship to a factory, as the manager can order them to do tasks you can't, and eventually they'll level up without a ton of work on your end.

Explorers don't seem to be doing much of anything except idling -- and that ALSO requires a 3 star pilot. What's the point in having a pilot star rating gating things if you need 3 stars to do anything other than basic commands? Exploring should absolutely only be a 1 star requirement for aimlessly screwing around a sector the way they do.

Yeah explorers suck as far as I can tell. You'll have better luck exploring by going through the unstable wormholes and then finding out where you end up.

I have missions to get captains for ships and a station manager. Any particular place I can recruit qualified candidates or am I just supposed to promote Joe the Conduit Scrubber to run my new $100m station?

Joe the Conduit Scrubber seems to do a fine job with stations, and will level up quickly if running an expensive complex.

How do I get the map objects to show crates?

Check your filters, for me they just show when zoomed in enough.

Why can't traders carry ore/silicon/nividium?

Those are solids, not containers so you need a different type of freighter (a miner). Miners can be set to autotrade, though the only place to buy would be trading stations, so it's much better to set them to mine. Same deal with liquids vs. containers.

Where's the story? If the one Boron was it -- that's pretty seriously disappointing.

That's all. The game is a sandbox, much more akin to Xtension than any of the other X games.

[Kadatherion]

I've also heard people say you can find pilots for hire on the bridges of NPC capital ships, though I haven't had good luck with that.

That was actually an unintended glitch that happened in the very first game versions right after launch. It's long since been patched out.

[Toastysoul]

Miners carry ore and only ores that's why not traders. Look up x4 leveling mods there are a few out you can also remove the skill requirement on traders. You can level up in vanilla it just takes a while. Also there are offline modded ventures so if you still want rewards your fine. Drones are designed to defend your ship. The idea is that they do attack any enemy in site. They can also cover your retreat. Also they are what version of the game are you playing because in 2.5b3 they follow my ship until they can dock. Crates you have to scan for in order for them to show up. I know ego teased at doing a dlc with a new story at some point as well. Hmm Ill check my game to double check that explorer point. Also I think they did mention crew leveling as something thats gonna be patched.

OK, but why have a distinction between different types of solid cargo? I can understand liquid vs solid, but solid vs container? Just makes little sense, an over complication.

I'm playing 2.21 the latest stable version. Ship captains are not really leveling. Exploring (right-click explore) does no actual leveling of ship captains, and is stupidly slow to boot. Who wrote that explorer logic?

I don't have the time to sit there an order a bunch of traders to make an endless list of manual trades for skills levels. That doesn't even make sense. Why are my manual orders providing experience to traders? There X3 system of hiring a pilot for sector trades, then after gaining xp doing that bumping up to galaxy trading with the option to take training courses was much more ideal. There just seems to be lack of coherency when it comes to dealing with ship crews and experience in X4.

There's a whole mid-game just seems missing for me.

[Skeeter]

Egosoft has said numerous times leading up the launch of X4 that there would be no story campaign. In several videos and it is not advertised anywhere on the game page so why are you surprised that there is no story?

He did say there was no one man army campaign like previous games but he implied that the game had mini storys per game start which changed perspective in response to things based on character starts and share 1 important plot mission the boron one. Tho ive yet to see anything myself. He also implied later that they want more story in x4 overtime as they couldnt do it due to time and budget initially for x4 so im hoping the story comes in the dlc and its not just a asset pack of faction stuff only but we will see.

[Imperial Good]

OK, but why have a distinction between different types of solid cargo? I can understand liquid vs solid, but solid vs container? Just makes little sense, an over complication.

Solid is bulk material stored in a hold while container is wares inside containers stacked in an organized way.

This mimics real life where bulk carrying ships such as those used to move iron ore or coal from Australia to China are specially designed to do so and cannot be used to move containers from China to Australia on the return journey. Like wise a container ship is specially designed for stacked containers such as those used to move various products from China but they cannot be used to move iron ore or coal during the return trip from a destination like Australia.

The design of the holds is very different for each purpose. With the case of moving bulk wares it is important the hold is extremely durable as the bulk material is literally poured into it, often from quite some height, and must be shaped for efficient unloading by heavy machinery. With the case of moving containers the hold has to have regularly spaced with mounting and chaining structures to be used to keep containers securely in place, and must be very flat to allow for optimum packing and loading/unloading.

This same concept exists in X4. With "Solid" storage being used to move around or store bulk material such as obtained from mining asteroids and needs structures such as hatches to load/unload the material efficiently by pouring or pumping. While "Container" storage is used to hold processed and packaged wares and needs structures to facilitate the traversal and movement of the wares carefully and precisely by robots.

Exploring (right-click explore) does no actual leveling of ship captains

That is correct. Exploring cannot by itself level up captains or crew. It can do so indirectly if the ship happens to stumble across and enemy which attacks it and it kills the attacker but that applies to all combat equally.

Why are my manual orders providing experience to traders?

Because they gain experience for buying/selling wares, independent of where the order comes from. They gain more experience if they are buying below half the minimum to average sale price and selling at above half the maximum to average sale price. They gain considerably less experience, even losing morale, if they are buying above half the maximum to average sale price and are selling below half the minimum to average sale price. The fraction of the hold transferred multiplies the experience gain.

Technically the fastest way to level doing this would be to repeatedly buy and sell wares to a trading station which has both offers open. This would allow the most full hold transfers at around average price per unit time. If this makes economic sense is another question...

Until then you can build your own stations and let them work as station subordinates. Station subordinates are auto traders with the restriction that all trades must feature the station at one side as either a buyer or seller (note that this might not always be the case currently due to a bug being fixed for 2.50). The range they operate is inherited from the skill level of the station manager. Station managers level considerably faster than captains, especially if you refrain from building excessive storage capacity and limit pricing such that it makes no bad purchases or sales (same logic as with trade ships except from station perspective).

[RodentofDoom]

To get a 3 star pilot for your trading ship, go and buy some cheep small fighter ships. Full spec, then remove all options so it costs you less. Dump/fire your useless 2 star trading pilot, and replace it with one of the fighter pilots (3 star+) Sell off the below star fighters, and keep any 3+ for other ships!!

You can just buy them with minimum engines and software .. you don't need to equip & then un-equip shields, weapons etc etc ..
The game will still randomly generate pilots with 1* to 4*'s in piloting & morale


Managers are easy to find .. just 'hire' a random bod on any platform. fly to your station, dock and then comm them through the ship information interface
Whilst the piloting skill doesn't appear to change much, the Management skill maxes out at 5*'s fairly quickly (around 4-8hrs for an actively trading/producing station)

[Gregorovitch]

How am I supposed to level up my pilots without starting them all in drills first?

The easiest legit way is to start off building a reasonable sized fleet of auto-miners. They don't need stars to mine but they do level up. If you get a trader with <3 stars you can almost always find a miner pilot with 3+ and swap them over. Effectively this replaces the "flight school" training ring system set up with CLS we all used in X3.

You can also cheese 3*+ pilots by buying cheap fighters until you get one, swapping them to your trader and selling back the fighters (as I think someone has already mentioned).

If you get a trader with 2* you can also set them up as a Distribute Wares trader. Some wares, such as food and medical supplies, are bought in small quantities by most all stations. Distribute Wares traders will buy a hold full of the ware assigned to them then do a milk round selling off 50 here, 150 there. Distribute Wares traders are actually very good to use 'cos although they don't make earth shattering profits they do make much more than auto-traders do dealing in mundane wares (because they go straight from one customer to the next which auto-traders don't, they buy what they need for one deal at a time, then go back and buy some more for another deal). Think of them as free money + pilot training. They do level up doing it. Auto-traders are probably best used for a restricted set of high value wares and strategically, set up specifically to get vital components to shipyards etc.

TL;DR: for a cheese free as intended game if you get a 2* trader pilot set them up as Distribute Wares and wait out a level up, make sure you got at least 15-20 auto-miners in operation ASAP which will provide your pool for where you really do need have to have 3*+ pilots wall-to-wall, station traders. By the time you are building stations your miner pilots will almost certainly be ready to transfer.

Explorers don't seem to be doing much of anything except idling -- and that ALSO requires a 3 star pilot. What's the point in having a pilot star rating gating things if you need 3 stars to do anything other than basic commands? Exploring should absolutely only be a 1 star requirement for aimlessly screwing around a sector the way they do.

Explore is totally borked at the moment. The best way to use scouts to map sectors it is demonstrated in this video, Start at 2m52s if the time stamp doesn't work:

https://youtu.be/Fs6DMbt-a_M?t=172

This is orders of magnitude faster than explore for mapping sectors. It's also pretty easy and quick to set up once you get the hang of it. It works because Fly To uses Travel Drive but Explore doesn't.

I have missions to get captains for ships and a station manager. Any particular place I can recruit qualified candidates or am I just supposed to promote Joe the Conduit Scrubber to run my new $100m station?

To get Station Managers look to your best pilots, they level up management skill fast - the very skill required for station managers. I am not certain but I think they may only do this if they actually have a crew to manage, possibly the bigger their crew the faster they level up management but I'm not sure. Experienced service crew will level up engineering if you need one of those. TL:DR - don't skimp on crew for your ships when you buy them.

Where are the satellite network deployment options?

The best way I've found to sat up a sector is to use my scouts: fill 'em with a load of sats and chain sat drop commands (accessed from right click speed menu on the map) on all the required stations. My basic MO for opening up sectors is to make sure my scout is loaded with sats, set up a mapping circuit as I described above, then when they finish that set up a sat drop chain on all the stati0ons they've found. It's a 30 second job but it works a treat. BTW you can't send a scout through a gate you haven't been through yet unless you use the Explore command. Since I don't want my scouts getting owned by a wall of Xenon Q's the moment they arrive, I always jump the gates myself before sending the scout through to do the mapping/sat dropping.

[Nifhtyeq]

Miners carry ore and only ores that's why not traders. Look up x4 leveling mods there are a few out you can also remove the skill requirement on traders. You can level up in vanilla it just takes a while. Also there are offline modded ventures so if you still want rewards your fine. Drones are designed to defend your ship. The idea is that they do attack any enemy in site. They can also cover your retreat. Also they are what version of the game are you playing because in 2.5b3 they follow my ship until they can dock. Crates you have to scan for in order for them to show up. I know ego teased at doing a dlc with a new story at some point as well. Hmm Ill check my game to double check that explorer point. Also I think they did mention crew leveling as something thats gonna be patched.

OK, but why have a distinction between different types of solid cargo? I can understand liquid vs solid, but solid vs container? Just makes little sense, an over complication.

I'm playing 2.21 the latest stable version. Ship captains are not really leveling. Exploring (right-click explore) does no actual leveling of ship captains, and is stupidly slow to boot. Who wrote that explorer logic?

I don't have the time to sit there an order a bunch of traders to make an endless list of manual trades for skills levels. That doesn't even make sense. Why are my manual orders providing experience to traders? There X3 system of hiring a pilot for sector trades, then after gaining xp doing that bumping up to galaxy trading with the option to take training courses was much more ideal. There just seems to be lack of coherency when it comes to dealing with ship crews and experience in X4.

There's a whole mid-game just seems missing for me.

Firstly carrying ore is a little different than carrying engine parts. Also you could go to a wharf or equipment docks and when you go in for repair or upgrade. You can purchase new crew and they will be high level. Infact people buy cheap transports with high level captains.

[graphicboy]

Normally I'd break down your post into separate replies, but you're already an X'er.
- I think they wanted us to use the seminars to train pilots, rather than them gaining stars on their own. Yeah, not happening. Why they blocked abilities before fixing leveling up... Dumb.
- Ventures have no place in this game.
- Mods are IMO the only way to play this game as it currently stands. WAY too much unfinished, irritating, or missing functionality. I've even taken to writing my own because there simply aren't solutions for some problems.
- You definitely want to be OOS, or you'll find out the mining script / feature is also extremely problematic. In fact, I'd say be OOS for most game play.
- Recruiting is r*******. Yes, Joe is your guy. I don't know what was wrong with the X3 "software/AI" model.
- Drones actually deploying seems to be recent. You want them to be smart? Hah.

Seems your other points/questions were answered early on.

[Toastysoul]

Egosoft has said numerous times leading up the launch of X4 that there would be no story campaign. In several videos and it is not advertised anywhere on the game page so why are you surprised that there is no story?

Because I didn't follow any Egosoft news after the absolute disaster that was X:Rebirth? Maybe people that stayed glued to these forums don't understand the damage that game did to the brand. I came to this as a player from X3 & X2, you know the games with stories?

X:BTF - Story
X2 - Story
X3 - Story
X:R - Story
X4 - No Story

Forum user: Why would you expect a story?

You can use "Distribute wares". It is like a poor man's autotrader. It will only trade in a single sector, but you can designate as many wares as you want, and it will buy the wares and attempt to sell them in the sector. I don't think distribute wares looks at profitability of the trade before it starts, so be aware of that. But it will keep going, and may eventually get the pilot to level up. Maybe.

Thanks for explaining that distinction. I'll give it a try.

To get a 3 star pilot for your trading ship, go and buy some cheep small fighter ships. Full spec, then remove all options so it costs you less. Dump/fire your useless 2 star trading pilot, and replace it with one of the fighter pilots (3 star+) Sell off the below star fighters, and keep any 3+ for other ships!!

Seems like that's what I'll have to do. Pretty stupid workaround. They should have just left the other system in place until a proper fix for it was created. Honestly don't understand the thought process of the person(s) managing/directing this game.

Autotrader requires 3 stars but for each additional star they get 1 extra sector range. So 3 sectors range for 3, 4 for 4 and 5 for 5 (5 star pilots are very uncommon).

Most of the ai stuff works. With autotrade you should select the rights areas, the right wares and not over saturate trades in an area. To get more big money trade deals you may need to manually trade between far away sectors. Explore kind of sucks I just set the course manually. Mining ships can go into loops.

For captains just buy/sell ships don't even bother trying to train them. For managers they level up either very quickly (shipyard managers since they buy tons of stuff) or at an ok rate.

To stop drones from deploying whenever an enemy is around set your turrets to defend. I think drone behavior is controlled by turret settings. If you attack a target you can go to the order queue and click on the * to configure the attack which has a choice for drones/no drones.

Different ships carry different wares types like liquid, container and solid.

The Boron story was it.

Thanks for explaining that. If only they had some way of letting the player know that's how the autotrader works through in game actions...

The drones will deploy anytime my ship is hit, even if I'm just trying to zip past a furball and causes the loss of the drones, my engagement, and generally a waste of my time. Another incomplete feature.

Re: The Boron Story -- What a disappointment.

Firstly carrying ore is a little different than carrying engine parts.

Is it? Why? What's the in-universe reason for this? Other games made no distinction between wares and resources. How does it enrich game play forcing miners to also be traders or limiting basic resources from trading ships? All it really does is slow mining down or force more ships to get built.




@Gregorovitch & graphicboy Thanks for useful workarounds and explanations. Just a pain in the backside the state the game is in. I suppose I'll just skip the venture BS and achievements and use mods to fix the rest.

[Falcrack]

Managers are easy to find .. just 'hire' a random bod on any platform. fly to your station, dock and then comm them through the ship information interface
Whilst the piloting skill doesn't appear to change much, the Management skill maxes out at 5*'s fairly quickly (around 4-8hrs for an actively trading/producing station)

The rate the managers level up in management skill "should" be the rate at which your trade ship pilots level up. Don't know what egosft was thinking, or why they continue to be obstinate and refuse to change their leveling system when so many players feel it is so totally worthless to try to level up captains that the main response to folks trying get get good pilots is "buy cheap present ship until you get lucky to get good captains". I'm sorry, but this sounds like ludicrous nonsense to me.

[Nort The Fragrent]

First things fist with managers, !
Get them from one of your other station’s that way they don’t take I hire fee.
Any one will do, so long as you pick one with a nice voice, as that is what you will hear over the comms when docking..
Give the station as much loot as you can, that boosts the morale, and get’s the station pumping Skill levels up quite quick after that.

I assign one of my dock personal to my pegasus as captain, then jump in the seat. Zoom off to your new station, Hop out of your seat, then when she ( yes she! Sexy voice ) sits down, you talk to her and reassign her to station manger. She is so delighted to not be engineering, she gives me her number!!

[Kadatherion]

The rate the managers level up in management skill "should" be the rate at which your trade ship pilots level up. Don't know what egosft was thinking, or why they continue to be obstinate and refuse to change their leveling system when so many players feel it is so totally worthless to try to level up captains that the main response to folks trying get get good pilots is "buy cheap present ship until you get lucky to get good captains". I'm sorry, but this sounds like ludicrous nonsense to me.

It definitely is. Not to mention they have the training seminars as placeholders in game since day 1, they simply aren't enabled yet. While they would still be a sub-optimal solution given you have to manage hundreds of crewmen and pilots, it would be half a day work tops to make them work (and of course there already are very simple mods that do just that). The borked leveling system is one of those mindbogglingly obvious things - and there's quite a lot of them in X4, unfortunately - that really screams "don't you guys play your own game?". And I can't find an answer, any plausible answer, that isn't "no, they really don't".

[Nifhtyeq]

The rate the managers level up in management skill "should" be the rate at which your trade ship pilots level up. Don't know what egosft was thinking, or why they continue to be obstinate and refuse to change their leveling system when so many players feel it is so totally worthless to try to level up captains that the main response to folks trying get get good pilots is "buy cheap present ship until you get lucky to get good captains". I'm sorry, but this sounds like ludicrous nonsense to me.

It definitely is. Not to mention they have the training seminars as placeholders in game since day 1, they simply aren't enabled yet. While they would still be a sub-optimal solution given you have to manage hundreds of crewmen and pilots, it would be half a day work tops to make them work (and of course there already are very simple mods that do just that). The borked leveling system is one of those mindbogglingly obvious things - and there's quite a lot of them in X4, unfortunately - that really screams "don't you guys play your own game?". And I can't find an answer, any plausible answer, that isn't "no, they really don't".

I mean technically do because they play bugged games. But I honestly believe it's one of those things where they might not have people to spare.