Going through some negative feedback while planning the next 4.0 update

[Max Bain]

- Sector automine was too easy because the script saw much more than the player. You could make profit from any resource field which was in the same system even if you had not found it yet. This will change of course. At the same time 4.0 introduces loops, which makes some of the advantages that higher level mining scripts bring a bit obsolete as long as you do just a bit of manual control: i.e you can simply set up a loop to mine any area you found and sell manually to the best place then let that loop run for a longer time. What we did here is drastically reduce the replenishment of resources in some cases. NPCs will have to be more dynamic and search for good regions.

- Shipyards: We did consider for a while, to require players to have special contracts with factions in order to sell ships to a war faction and actively retaliate in case you would sell to two factions at once, but decided against it. Income per ship will still be reduced dramatically with the final version of 4.0.

-Bernd

That are very good news!
Just one idea that comes into my mind: Why can AI's only buy at the player shipyards? Why not let them buy ships from allies as well and make a random check each time a ship will be bought. At 100% sell price the check is equal for each allied or neutral and if you increase the price the chance goes down and if you lower the price the chances go up. So the price slider would have an effect. You would lose or gain orders for your ship construction.


The changes in mining you mentioned are also very nice. It felt like cheating when your ships instantly knew where to mine best.
I dont know how or if you will improve the following behaviour: ships tend to mine all at the same spot. So if you have a very dense mining spot, all your 100 miners would rush for that spot even if it has only enough resources for maybe 2 or 3 miners. they should spread out more equally or check if the spot is "overmined".

[EGO_Aut]

Allround thrusters need more "love" the given parameters are useless.(also add travel and allround Mk4 pls)

The same with a lot of ships, Quasar, Theseus, Scouts,... need a place ingame.

AI fight parameters IS are too different to OOS. L's clumping together IS is so annoying.

FAF Rattlesnakes destroyed ANT wharfes in the first few hours of my new game (beta 4.0) without resistance.

......and a lot more, but its still my favorite game

[Max Bain]

- Shipyards: We did consider for a while, to require players to have special contracts with factions in order to sell ships to a war faction and actively retaliate in case you would sell to two factions at once, but decided against it. Income per ship will still be reduced dramatically with the final version of 4.0.

Would it be possible to tell us what "dramatically" approximately means in numbers? Are we talking about a 5-10% reduction or more like 50%?

Very likely more than 50%

More than 50% is necessary. I once made deep analysis of the economy and the margins are sometimes 800% or higher. So 50% reduction would mean that a ship would still give your 4 times the money back when you buy the resources for average price. That is a no brainer.
I made a mod I use in private, which tries to fix the issue and does it quite successful in my opinion (I have tested it for many hours so far, and the AI works pretty well with it). So far it is hidden for private usage, but you can have a look at it. Its well documented what it does to fix the problem. Maybe some points you can copy and/or change.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2097645858

[capitalduty]

Hi Bernd, first of all I want to thank you for X4 and all X games, those are my favorites, especially this X4.

I also want to wish you and your team the best for 2021. Keep up the good work!

I would like to apply to you for many high level fighting oriented players who love your game. Are you planning to increase the fighting challenge at the endgame for people who have giant fleets and don't have enough of a challenge?

I'd really love to see some faction job file changes late in the game to really increase the challenge. The player has a gigantic empire with many fleets and no real enemies to fight ... Factions do not build enough destroyers / carriers to pose a challenge. , only one or two shipyard left for main factions. Myself with 5 and 5 docks ... I can outbuild and outfight anything.

It will be very interesting for the surviving factions from endgame to react and adapt to the player's military strength ... something similar to the old fight range in X3 Albion Prelude / Terran Conflict.

Also could something could be done about enemy factions using correctly carriers? they dont store and deploy fighters effectly.

As always I would love to give you more feedback on ideas to improve lategame in fight sense!!

Thanks again for your time

[mr.WHO]

4.0 among many things also cranks up the "Khaak threat" again

While I'm happy to shoot purple triangles instead of toasters, X4 Khaak have huge design flaw comparing to X4 Xenons - you have no impact on them due to invulnerable station and mass auto spawn.
Xenons have somewhat rudimantary economy and building patterns which player can exploit (I created rather big Xenon outbreak in my game by sabotaging factions that border with Xenons).
It would be hard to make something like that with X4 Khaak unless there are some more ships for them in the work.

I'd love to see Khaak economy, but instead having 3 incomplete hostile factions (Xenons, Khaak, Pirates), I'd prefere 1 completed (and by completed I mean full range of ships and working economy).
Xenons seems to be closest to complete out of 3.



BTW regarding the general ballance, the is one more thing that is a bit painful in late game:
- factions military jobs are too weak and not enough variety


Example - Carriers:
Some factions don't field them at all and factions that do field them do not use their full power (assign 15 fighters instead of 60).
This makes my 10 carrier fleet more powerful than ALL of the galaxy combined - this made me rather unsatisfied with late game as galaxy conquest would be like stealing candy from the kid.

It would be good if you could crank up the military jobs significantly, like factions flielding multiple carriers and having more variety in military groups they deploy (in my galaxy I mostly see Destoyer spam with ocasional Supply Ship).
The variety of military squads should also be increased as now you can see they use only a few very same templates to create military fleets.
It would be nice to see one faction use swarm of frigates, other use a lot of gunboats, other a fighter dominant etc.

I know that bigger fleets would put more strain on the economy, so this would possibly need some kind of safety check, so that factino would not build several carriers when their economy is broke.

[Lord Crc]

I mentioned it elsewhere but, as much as I complain here, I do enjoy the game a lot!

As you say one of the strengths of X4 is the variety of ways you can play it, hence one persons feature is another persons problem.

For me the biggest issue is the out-of-sector vs in-sector combat discrepancy. I understand it is very difficult to make it even, but right now it's so different it is usually game-changing if you're in-sector or not. Like the difference between losing 10 destroyers and crushing the station without losses.

Secondly the the difficulty scaling is kinda inverted. Like in my current game I got a shipyard and I just queued up 20 L destroyers. They'll take a wee bit to build but once I get them they can plow through most things. If 10 of them gets destroyed, meh, I'll queue up 10 more. The key issue is that there's no upkeep. If you can build a ship, there's no reason not to. Two ships are better than one, and fifty are better than two.

Perhaps this could be combined with improving captain ratings. If a captain and crew with more stars demanded a star-dependent salary, then that could perhaps balance things a bit.

On another level, I'm really hoping there's a bit more to explore in the new DLCs. I've really enjoyed the puzzles I've found, but I'm happy with smaller things. Anything that'll make me go "huh, cool". I mean you have some really nice and diverse sectors, so it feels like a bit of a shame that there's usually not that many reasons to stick around besides looks.

In any case, happy new year to you and the team!

[oddible]

Awesome news, and thanks for all the amazing work. I've committed so many hours of my existence to your creation!

Regarding the NVidia Shields / Hull issue. How long will this need to go on expecting NVidia to fix it before you guys just use a different method to display them that doesn't leverage the broken video feature? Is there a possibility of a fix that involves just coding it in a different way that avoids the problem NVidia created? What if NVidia decide they won't fix it because the number of people using it are very few for instance?

Love hearing the rationale behind the mining decision. That was my first question from your original post as well. Curiously, the lack of raw materials is a major constraint to faction economies. If it is less profitable for the player to mine, thus supplying these raw materials, will we hear even more complaints about hull part shortages?

With trading and traders being such a core part of the game, are there plans to improve the trading AI, to either speed up the cycle it takes for station traders to update their wares so they're sitting idle less, or to improve their ability to factor ship size into their purchases so we have less Incarcatuas with 1 energy cell being transported?

Thanks again!

[Toombstone]

Hello Sir and thank you for the great game. Here are my thoughts

1. I think vanilla factions need some overhaul on their ships compared to the Split and very soon the Terrans. Especially the Carriers, come think about it only the carriers. I agree with the above posters that faction turrets need more diversity in general but not too much.
2. Xenon in all my games are dangerous the first 20ish hours after that 2 defence disks are so powerfull that can wipe out anything that comes trough the gate as it comes. One fix is forbid us to buy plots in a 20km radius around a gate that way we cant insta kill the big xenon ships while they are coming trough (a potential xploit if this gets implemented is buying a small plot and then expanding it so it should be taken into consideration)
3. Xenons need more diversity as stated above.
4. More pirate activity .. force us to guard all our traders and miners (a couple of months ago when i assign fighters to a station the manager used to send them with traders so far in 4.0 b4 that dosent seem to happen 5 star manager btw)
5. instead of nerfing the income from wharfs and shipyards enemy factions should be able to build bigger fleets and be more aggressive. Make them target your infrastructure with higher priority or just make them stop sending army a few at a time.
6. PLEASE increase the storage space on AUX ships and increase it ALOT, they are still useless.
7. Taus and Shards and Blast Mortars are way way too powerful against K's and I's not as powerful when 3.0 hit but still too powerful (a fighter should be able to hurt XL and L ships only with torpedos and penetrating weapons) for torpedo bombers to work tho see 6 and give us an option that we can specify what we can auto resupply in the global orders menu. Not just low med high and then they go and get whatever they want to based on some preset ... give us control so we can have fun with boom boom missiles and torps.
8. Just remove the super highways they make L traders and miners pointless im very interested to see if someone is using them at all ...
9. Plans for Fab bays should need some other requirement other than just rep and should be more expensive
10. I still think that auto trade should require 2 stars not 3. Seminars for 2 star pilots are scares even if you do all the missions and as soon as you get to station building you are assigning traders to managers and i personally never use auto trade in any game. Getting to basic stations and mining profits are high enough just to avoid that part of the game.
11. Considering it is better to not have wing leaders and just assign all fighters to alpha beta etc it would be lovely if i click on for example Alpha and just select all fighters ... or right click it and say Remove all orders in both the equipment menu and in the Property owned tab.

I see a trending topic that factions need to be more reactive and that you should not be able to be a friend with everyone and i disagree. With the option to declare war we can choose to use only ARG and ANT or only HOP ships and equipement and be at war with everyone else or we can choose to be the guy who is friends with everyone and be the economy powerhouse which can decide who wins and who loses by influencing economics.

Im sure i will think of more stuff but thank you for asking for feedback and i hope i was constructive.

Best regards from Bulgaria, Grozdan

[MegaJohnny]

Thanks for making this thread, I'm always glad to hear what Egosoft make of the noise coming from the forums

My concerns about longstanding AI piloting bugs are less about fleet maneuvers and more about small (but jarring) things that can happen with just one ship. All these things I've noticed on an M-ship in 4.00 beta 4:

• Ships usually "tumble" and rotate strangely after exiting a local highway in the middle (on one occasion it never stopped rotating, and I had to interrupt the pilot to get them to fly normally)
• Ships sometimes stop dead instantly after coming to the end of a local highway, and have to build speed back up for the next part of the journey
• Asteroid avoidance sometimes bothersome - sometimes pilots will travel-mode crash into an asteroid and start the avoidance maneuver far too late, sometimes they perform an avoidance maneuver even though the asteroid isn't close to blocking their path
• On the "fly to position" command, ships will stop travel mode when they reach the correct logical zone, even if they're still 80km away from the target position
• M-ships fly a little strangely when lining themselves up to enter an S/M Maintenance Bay (obviously it's much better than 3.30 where they sometimes failed to dock at all, but the overall "approach" behaviour seemed smoother before 3.00)
• Occasionally, when a ship comes into high attention, it vibrates rapidly between two positions

I do love the game to death and overall the look and feel is a huge improvement over X3 and XR that you can be proud of. It's just small things like the above that can make the game a little frustrating to play.

I would love to report some saves that reproduce these issues, but almost none of them happen deterministically and I appreciate if these aren't the top priority, as they don't really prevent ships from progressing.

[jlehtone]

The support you are showing is second to none and it is a pure joy to see how X4 is improved upon with every update. I wish you a good 2021 as well.

+1

[Revan Tair]

Hello Bernd, hey X-people,

cool that you wrote something to the general complains about the game.
I have no doubt that X4 will become a good game like X4TC, AP or XR (XR was always good, fight me ).

My current main gripe with the game is following:

I want less cluttering in my property list, with the addition of repeat orders as behaviour we are getting there (mining fleets and trader fleets), what would be a good addition would be: a dummy fleet wing, where you can set behaviours and orders yourself. Would be like:
assign role for: dummy wing -> set behaviour repeat order -> patrol 3x, dock and wait; or something along those lines.

edit: this also goes for stations. I want to be able to give stations dummy ships that follow my exact order. And while we are at it, I want stations be able to be subordinates of other stations just for the sake of them disappearing from my sector list/ property list. If I want to see stuff again, I collapse like currently with fleets/stations


Other things:

Also we need a shortcut for renaming and a way to mass name our ships (in the yard/wharf, yea I know it's in, but if I want to have Trader 001 to Trader 0XX I can't because it's not recognizing it) and in the list, I propose the use of either [ ] or { } to add number sequence.

And once again I ask you for your support, we need a CEO Room. Where we can use SETA, use a (better) map, have Info Graphs about our general empire, stations, ships etc etc. I want more informations!

Another thing that drives me crazy (and I am alone in that regard it seems): I want to have a indication where the manager's window is when I built my first dock, so I can actually look out and have a nice view. (Yes I rebuilt docks if they don't face the right direction )

I hope we will see some sort of module with terraforming that allows us to actually send ressources to the planet (could be a L trader or a TL-esque ship (remember the TL Orca from X2 cutscene, where you land on the planet to get Mi Ton?)). We would also need more production modules for that, like luxus goods, consumer goods (food and medicine is already there). I think 3 tiers of diffrent stuff is enough and luxus goods should be very very expensive.


I should stop writing, or this will never end

greetings Revan Tair

[aidebob]

You all have made an awesome game! Please keep up the great work

[mr.WHO]

As someone mention Logistic ships need bigger cargo hold as they are barelly able to resupply dozen heavy torpedo bombers or a missile destroyer or two.

In addition the traders assigned to logistic ships should dock/follow to them if idle (currently traders assigned that do nothing will stay in space in place where they got assigned to the leader - this makes them vunlerable and often force them to cross entire galaxy when they finally get the trade order - actually this behavior - dock if iddle - would be also good for traders assigned to stations).

I'd also like if we could assign trader to carriers as well since they are also resupply ships for fighters.

[exogenesis]

Would it be possible to tell us what "dramatically" approximately means in numbers? Are we talking about a 5-10% reduction or more like 50%?

Very likely more than 50%

More than 50% is necessary. I once made deep analysis of the economy and the margins are sometimes 800% or higher. So 50% reduction would mean that a ship would still give your 4 times the money back when you buy the resources for average price. That is a no brainer.
I made a mod I use in private, which tries to fix the issue and does it quite successful in my opinion (I have tested it for many hours so far, and the AI works pretty well with it). So far it is hidden for private usage, but you can have a look at it. Its well documented what it does to fix the problem. Maybe some points you can copy and/or change.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2097645858

Much more than 50% reduction if you want to remove the 'instant win' effect of player shipyards/wharfs.
I'd say a 95% reduction, if the current 'everybody preferentialy buys ships from player' theme is kept.

Realistically the difference could better be made by NPC not buying the current level of ships from player,
but keep profits per ship as it is.
That is assuming NPC shipyards can build to most of their own demand/need level (whatever that is controlled by),
this speaks to having a supporting NPC ship-tech-wares economy,
or the player must/can add that support - else no NPC ships are ever built at NPC shipyards.

In the last 1600 game-hours my shipyards built over 200,000 ships for the NPCs,
even at just '100% sale price' this gave about 300 billion credits.
There is no other part of the game anymore - there's no point, apart from a 'keeping the peace' sort of thing.
(unless I start a new game, but keeping that for the new DLC )

[mr.WHO]

3.0 added "interceptor" assignment, but it's only avaliable on ships.
I'd love to see "interceptor" asignment for stations as my defense stations are cable of taking down capships, but when I assign fighters via "defense assignemnt" to take out other fighters they die fighting capships, instead of chasing other fighters.

I also fail to understand why you created "interceptor" asignment, but didn't add "bomber" assignment

[Bernd]

I mentioned it elsewhere but, as much as I complain here, I do enjoy the game a lot!

As you say one of the strengths of X4 is the variety of ways you can play it, hence one persons feature is another persons problem.

For me the biggest issue is the out-of-sector vs in-sector combat discrepancy. I understand it is very difficult to make it even, but right now it's so different it is usually game-changing if you're in-sector or not. Like the difference between losing 10 destroyers and crushing the station without losses.

Secondly the the difficulty scaling is kinda inverted. Like in my current game I got a shipyard and I just queued up 20 L destroyers. They'll take a wee bit to build but once I get them they can plow through most things. If 10 of them gets destroyed, meh, I'll queue up 10 more. The key issue is that there's no upkeep. If you can build a ship, there's no reason not to. Two ships are better than one, and fifty are better than two.

Perhaps this could be combined with improving captain ratings. If a captain and crew with more stars demanded a star-dependent salary, then that could perhaps balance things a bit.

On another level, I'm really hoping there's a bit more to explore in the new DLCs. I've really enjoyed the puzzles I've found, but I'm happy with smaller things. Anything that'll make me go "huh, cool". I mean you have some really nice and diverse sectors, so it feels like a bit of a shame that there's usually not that many reasons to stick around besides looks.

In any case, happy new year to you and the team!

Thanks for the feedback.

I do not believe that excessive upkeep is a great solution to this problem as it also complicates the game further and will eventually feel like a chore. However I agree to your general point of adding more counter balance for late game. It is OTOH of course a never ending struggle for us, there will always be a point where you saturate the end game and we can not focus our attention entirely on an area of the game that only a relatively small fraction of players ever reach.

Right now we are still focussing a lot of attention on missions and plot. Not just for the expansion but also improved missions in the base game.

For 5.0 and future DLCs however there is a chance we can get more attention to this issue.

[Bernd]

Very likely more than 50%

More than 50% is necessary. I once made deep analysis of the economy and the margins are sometimes 800% or higher. So 50% reduction would mean that a ship would still give your 4 times the money back when you buy the resources for average price. That is a no brainer.
I made a mod I use in private, which tries to fix the issue and does it quite successful in my opinion (I have tested it for many hours so far, and the AI works pretty well with it). So far it is hidden for private usage, but you can have a look at it. Its well documented what it does to fix the problem. Maybe some points you can copy and/or change.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2097645858

Much more than 50% reduction if you want to remove the 'instant win' effect of player shipyards/wharfs.
I'd say a 95% reduction, if the current 'everybody preferentialy buys ships from player' theme is kept.

Realistically the difference could better be made by NPC not buying the current level of ships from player,
but keep profits per ship as it is.
That is assuming NPC shipyards can build to most of their own demand/need level (whatever that is controlled by),
this speaks to having a supporting NPC ship-tech-wares economy,
or the player must/can add that support - else no NPC ships are ever built at NPC shipyards.

In the last 1600 game-hours my shipyards built over 200,000 ships for the NPCs,
even at just '100% sale price' this gave about 300 billion credits.
There is no other part of the game anymore - there's no point, apart from a 'keeping the peace' sort of thing.
(unless I start a new game, but keeping that for the new DLC )

How likely are you to start a new game?
We are making many changes to make the path towards your own shipyard longer and more interesting but if you continue with that save, then it is hard to "fix" without drastic agressions against player stations.

[Falcrack]

More than 50% is necessary. I once made deep analysis of the economy and the margins are sometimes 800% or higher. So 50% reduction would mean that a ship would still give your 4 times the money back when you buy the resources for average price. That is a no brainer.
I made a mod I use in private, which tries to fix the issue and does it quite successful in my opinion (I have tested it for many hours so far, and the AI works pretty well with it). So far it is hidden for private usage, but you can have a look at it. Its well documented what it does to fix the problem. Maybe some points you can copy and/or change.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2097645858

Much more than 50% reduction if you want to remove the 'instant win' effect of player shipyards/wharfs.
I'd say a 95% reduction, if the current 'everybody preferentialy buys ships from player' theme is kept.

Realistically the difference could better be made by NPC not buying the current level of ships from player,
but keep profits per ship as it is.
That is assuming NPC shipyards can build to most of their own demand/need level (whatever that is controlled by),
this speaks to having a supporting NPC ship-tech-wares economy,
or the player must/can add that support - else no NPC ships are ever built at NPC shipyards.

In the last 1600 game-hours my shipyards built over 200,000 ships for the NPCs,
even at just '100% sale price' this gave about 300 billion credits.
There is no other part of the game anymore - there's no point, apart from a 'keeping the peace' sort of thing.
(unless I start a new game, but keeping that for the new DLC )

How likely are you to start a new game?
We are making many changes to make the path towards your own shipyard longer and more interesting but if you continue with that save, then it is hard to "fix" without drastic agressions against player stations.

The more drastic the change, the more likely I will start a new game.

But starting a new game when the game changes can be nice! For those who do not want to live with the changes right away, would you allow players the option to roll back to previous versions?

[Lord Crc]

I do not believe that excessive upkeep is a great solution to this problem as it also complicates the game further and will eventually feel like a chore. However I agree to your general point of adding more counter balance for late game.

Yes I realize it's a delicate balance. I just didn't want to only be complaining

It is OTOH of course a never ending struggle for us, there will always be a point where you saturate the end game and we can not focus our attention entirely on an area of the game that only a relatively small fraction of players ever reach.

I can fully appreciate this.

I really enjoy the dynamics of the economy, a highlight of X4 that I missed so much in X3, so I know you are limited by what kind of additional dynamics you can add around that without ruining it.

I'm currently doing the Split start and fighting back the Xenon and rebuilding the ZYA economy which was almost destroyed has been a very nice achievement. Back in X3 I recall a point where I thought "but what's the point, the AI isn't affected by my trades", so seeing the effects on the economy by doing trades and building stations is just great.

Right now we are still focussing a lot of attention on missions and plot. Not just for the expansion but also improved missions in the base game.

That sounds great! I was actually thinking the other day that I really missed the story-rich mission line in X:R. I had a really good time playing the Paranid and Split civil war missions in X4, and it left me wanting more. I realize those take a lot of effort, especially with the voice-overs and everything, but "medium sized" text-only mission lines "with a purpose" would be a very welcome thing.

edit: What you said about upcoming mining changes sound really nice. Perhaps you're already planning it, but I was dreaming of central resource fields (ie close to stations and ships, typically middle area of sectors) to be relatively safe due to sector patrols, and hence well used and low yield. To get the really juicy yield you'd have to move much further out in the sector, where the chance of being harassed by dangerous ships increases significantly. This would lead to risk/reward, where you can play it safe, or add a few fighters as protection to your miner. Or if you don't have the money, protect it yourself...

Anyway, thanks again for your time!

[Panos]

Thank you @Bernd and Happy New Year you too