Going through some negative feedback while planning the next 4.0 update

[mr.WHO]

You may have noted that we have been working on a custom gamestart mode. The code for that is in the game already and this is what one mod is basically unlocking. We have not made it available as a general feature yet, because it is ... well unfinished. Right now it is not a priority to work on, but we will surely improve on this and release it at some point.

I think custom game start might actually convince me to start a fresh game and I'm a person who played entire X-Rebirth from 1.0 save and my current X4 game is also from 1.0

I hope it will offer a lot of customizations like account size, unlocked blueprints, relation with factions or even rrelations between factions (e.g having Teladi at war with someone).


Personally for 5.0, I'd love to adress NPC uniforms to include dress code (e.g. ship captain use this uniform), faction colors and faction emblem. I think currently only player space suit do this

Edit: Especially with Terran DLC, it will be more and more hard to distinguish human faction NPC without proper uniforms.

[Gregorovitch]

Rather than reducing sale cost per ship, the profit per ship should be reduced. This way there is much more money to be made with normal stations supplying ship building wares rather than only with the shipyard. Currently the entire supply chain is top loaded with most (90%+) of profit being made selling ships to the NPCs. This has the other side effect of once a player buys a shipyard or warf then making ships becomes dirt cheap due to them bypassing this markup and the materials are cheap.

By lowering this markup of actually making the ships, the shipyard/warf becomes an optional ultimate goal for players late game. Most of the game they could get by making and trading intermediates as that would be where most of the profit is made. The player also never gets access to cheap ships since they will either have to pay a lot more to buy in the wares, or lose out on a lot more not selling these wares or the ship to a NPC. This would encourage a much more natural flow of progression of their economy going from individual miners/traders and trade stations to stations supplying intermediates to finally shipyards/wharves using their intermediates.

It is also important that getting money is not a grind, especially early game. although getting a warf in 8 hours is a tad fast, I would not want to see that time extended past 36-48 hours if the player knows what they are doing. As it is many new people have saves that are 6-7 days in and still cannot afford ship building.

So....according to this plan setting up a hull parts factory in, say, Argon Prime is going to make a bomb compared to what it does now?

[dtpsprt]

You may have noted that we have been working on a custom gamestart mode. The code for that is in the game already and this is what one mod is basically unlocking. We have not made it available as a general feature yet, because it is ... well unfinished. Right now it is not a priority to work on, but we will surely improve on this and release it at some point.

I've noticed and it's a great idea. I'm actually using the mod that unlocks it and don't think of "going back" (until it is official from Egosoft). Still the problem remains that characters for Argons (and I suppose Terrans) are awful, not to mention the female "dress code". That is a huge put down. Please do something about it. It's a shame for the players to be ashamed to view their character in the instances they appear...

[Buzz2005]

I've noticed and it's a great idea. I'm actually using the mod that unlocks it and don't think of "going back" (until it is official from Egosoft). Still the problem remains that characters for Argons (and I suppose Terrans) are awful, not to mention the female "dress code". That is a huge put down. Please do something about it. It's a shame for the players to be ashamed to view their character in the instances they appear...

what mod?

[Imperial Good]

So....according to this plan setting up a hull parts factory in, say, Argon Prime is going to make a bomb compared to what it does now?

Well not a bomb, but I would personally like it to make significantly more. Currently a large hull parts facility may be able to make at most 10M or so an hour, while the same facility supplying hull parts for your own ship building will make you a lot more in ship hulls sold. Currently I very much find myself rushing shipyard/warf and then building from the top down to supply it. This other approach would encourage people to build from the bottom up and eventually get to shipyard, making more profit along the way. Overall a more natural progression, a rags to riches approach.

[Revan Tair]

So....according to this plan setting up a hull parts factory in, say, Argon Prime is going to make a bomb compared to what it does now?

Well not a bomb, but I would personally like it to make significantly more. Currently a large hull parts facility may be able to make at most 10M or so an hour, while the same facility supplying hull parts for your own ship building will make you a lot more in ship hulls sold. Currently I very much find myself rushing shipyard/warf and then building from the top down to supply it. This other approach would encourage people to build from the bottom up and eventually get to shipyard, making more profit along the way. Overall a more natural progression, a rags to riches approach.

Tbh, I only play this way. Since it's boring to rush Moneymaker asap. Also I liketo be independent U don't start from the sixth base and go backward to the first one

[Gregorovitch]

So....according to this plan setting up a hull parts factory in, say, Argon Prime is going to make a bomb compared to what it does now?

Well not a bomb, but I would personally like it to make significantly more. Currently a large hull parts facility may be able to make at most 10M or so an hour, while the same facility supplying hull parts for your own ship building will make you a lot more in ship hulls sold. Currently I very much find myself rushing shipyard/warf and then building from the top down to supply it. This other approach would encourage people to build from the bottom up and eventually get to shipyard, making more profit along the way. Overall a more natural progression, a rags to riches approach.

I very much like the sound of this. I think it's the right direction. You may have noticed I didn't much like the idea of the player ships going much cheaper than the faction ships which kinda the message I got from Bernd's posts.

My take on this is very much the same as yours I think. Currently if you build a warf you can just open for business and buy in the parts and immediately make a packet from the get go. Given how much investment is involved in getting all the BP's etc to make a warf work then if you have also got to actually make all or most of the parts yourself to make any sort of decent ROI out of ships that's going to take a lot of time and money to put in place. It would be more of a strategic decision and/or a later game convenience than a business one.

I still think the idea that Bernd said you've rejected (issues with factions getting shirty about who you are selling ships to etc) is good too, I would be disappointed if you did not put additional political shenanigans around shipyards into the mix. I mean if Amazon suddenly started selling combat jet fighters people would start to ask questions one would think.

[Panos]

Hi guys,
and 5.0 already in the plans of course).

With 5.0 are you going to consider a character creation? Not something fancy just as we pick a start eg Young Gun, to be able to select gender (no race) and a pre-selected avatar which do not need to be many. Just 2 per gender per race.

There are mods doing more than that tbh but prefering to keep game vanilla for the remaining achievements

You may have noted that we have been working on a custom gamestart mode. The code for that is in the game already and this is what one mod is basically unlocking. We have not made it available as a general feature yet, because it is ... well unfinished. Right now it is not a priority to work on, but we will surely improve on this and release it at some point.

Thank you

[sh1pman]

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.

As a veteran Rimworld player, I fully support the idea of drastic aggressions against player property. The more you have, the harder they should hit. Massive pirate raids targeted at player’s stations specifically, khaak station popping up right in front of the HQ, random disasters like solar flares disabling productions in entire sectors, jump gate glitches linking your home sector to some Matrix#123... Endgame should feel like “holy #$%!@&, I survived!”, not “ok, got a shipyard, guess I won the game”. But maybe it should be in a form of a difficulty setting for players like me

[Raevyan]

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.

As a veteran Rimworld player, I fully support the idea of drastic aggressions against player property. The more you have, the harder they should hit. Massive pirate raids targeted at player’s stations specifically, khaak station popping up right in front of the HQ, random disasters like solar flares disabling productions in entire sectors, jump gate glitches linking your home sector to some Matrix#123... Endgame should feel like “holy #$%!@&, I survived!”, not “ok, got a shipyard, guess I won the game”. But maybe it should be in a form of a difficulty setting for players like me

That’s not going to happen because the performance gets already quite bad. But the big issue still remains if you go the usual X4 route which is: if something doesn’t work quite well, just throw more ships at the problem. They need to improve the ai by a big margin. If AI would be smarter, battles become harder without throwing more assets at something.

I honestly don’t see big ai improvements happening. Bernd literally mentions AI problems and the first thing he is talking about is the autopilot that fails... if that’s what they think is a big issue... sure it’s annoying but I could live with a bad autopilot if combat ai, faction ai and trader ai would actually be smarter. Fighters that are assigned as subordinates to traders still do not fly in formation. Now having khaak and xenon randomly spawn out of thin air to harass miners makes this issue even more worse.

Those smarter Behaviours should also not be locked behind a 5 star pilot that has a fraction of percentage chance to level up and is virtually not possible to acquire by normal means.

[GCU Grey Area]

Rather than reducing sale cost per ship, the profit per ship should be reduced. This way there is much more money to be made with normal stations supplying ship building wares...

Absolutely dreadful idea from my perspective. Really don't want to get that rich that fast. Excessive amounts of money really does spoil the game for me. Much prefer the current level of the profitability of stations. Shipyards being excessively profitable is a problem, really not convinced the solution to that is to give all the other stations the same problem.

[DaMuncha]

Like I've said before, you realy need to have addon patches seperate from bug fix patches. I cant wait 6 months for you to release a bug fix for a problem I've had for a year (3.0). I waited 6 months for the station FPS bug to be fixed, and then had to wait another 3 months for the missing constructor fix to be released in the next addon patch (3.3), and then to find out the next big bug fix isnt coming till (4.0) with the new DLC which we dont even have a release date yet, and of course that will come with its own bugs which wonrt get fixed for another 6 months. I've only played the game for a few days in the last 2 years because the game breaking bug fixes dont get released. I dont expect the game will be in a playable state for another 6 months after the DLC finally comes out.

[Slashman]

Like I've said before, you realy need to have addon patches seperate from bug fix patches. I cant wait 6 months for you to release a bug fix for a problem I've had for a year (3.0). I waited 6 months for the station FPS bug to be fixed, and then had to wait another 3 months for the missing constructor fix to be released in the next addon patch (3.3), and then to find out the next big bug fix isnt coming till (4.0) with the new DLC which we dont even have a release date yet, and of course that will come with its own bugs which wonrt get fixed for another 6 months. I've only played the game for a few days in the last 2 years because the game breaking bug fixes dont get released. I dont expect the game will be in a playable state for another 6 months.

So the game is literally unplayable right now is what you're saying? I wonder what all the people actually playing it are doing.

[DaMuncha]

Like I've said before, you realy need to have addon patches seperate from bug fix patches. I cant wait 6 months for you to release a bug fix for a problem I've had for a year (3.0). I waited 6 months for the station FPS bug to be fixed, and then had to wait another 3 months for the missing constructor fix to be released in the next addon patch (3.3), and then to find out the next big bug fix isnt coming till (4.0) with the new DLC which we dont even have a release date yet, and of course that will come with its own bugs which wonrt get fixed for another 6 months. I've only played the game for a few days in the last 2 years because the game breaking bug fixes dont get released. I dont expect the game will be in a playable state for another 6 months.

So the game is literally unplayable right now is what you're saying? I wonder what all the people actually playing it are doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2DTsS7cmMw

I havent played since 3.3 came out which broke my save for the 3rd time. And I'm not playing again till the new DLC comes out, and gets fixed.

Every time one of these big patches comes out (2.0, 3.0, 4.0) I have to start a new game, only to find egosoft have fixed one bug to replace it with 3 more bigger bugs, which then dont get fixed till the next big feature patch is finally released.

[Slashman]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2DTsS7cmMw

I havent played since 3.3 came out which broke my save for the 3rd time. And I'm not playing again till the new DLC comes out, and gets fixed.

Every time one of these big patches comes out (2.0, 3.0, 4.0) I have to start a new game, only to find egosoft have fixed one bug to replace it with 3 more bigger bugs, which then dont get fixed till the next big feature patch is finally released.

I thought they were people playing with saves since 1.0 that still could play them. What happened in your game that it got so messed up that you can no longer play?

[Imperial Good]

I still think the idea that Bernd said you've rejected (issues with factions getting shirty about who you are selling ships to etc) is good too, I would be disappointed if you did not put additional political shenanigans around shipyards into the mix. I mean if Amazon suddenly started selling combat jet fighters people would start to ask questions one would think.

In my opinion the issue with such a concept is it makes about as much sense as what is happening currently. In real life third party weapon manufacturers happily sell to both parties of a war without having their factories blown up. It is pretty much war profiteering, and as dishonourable or evil as it sounds it is real and does happen. You are offering to build ships for whoever pays you, why should people be mad at you when they are welcome to order ships as well?

If such a penalty was implemented it would need to occur only if you are noticeably acting in a lopsided way. For example you are purposely building ships for the enemy of the a faction that you have restricted ship building for. Even then it would make sense if you could pay a reparation, war contribution or other kind of fee instead of suffering a reputation hit.

Like I've said before, you realy need to have addon patches seperate from bug fix patches.

I suspect this is not really possible due to the coupling between the two. For example a bug fix might touch code that has been modified in preparation for an addon. As the addon is not complete, that file and the bug fix it contains cannot be released until the addon is finished. Sure effort could be made to separate the two, but in the end this requires effort, which would eat time away from other activities such as making addon content or fixing other bugs.

Every time one of these big patches comes out (2.0, 3.0, 4.0) I have to start a new game, only to find egosoft have fixed one bug to replace it with 3 more bigger bugs, which then dont get fixed till the next big feature patch is finally released.

As far as I am aware 1.0 saves still just work. Chances are there will be some clutter or state in them that will not be present in a new save but still they will load and play just fine for the most part. I kept a 1.0 save going all the way up until split vendetta was released and it worked just fine.

[DaMuncha]

1.0 saves will "work" except in 2.0 Ego fixed the mass stations spawning all over every sector which killed FPS, 3.0 fixed the supply/demand which was killing FPS (5 frames per second in stations before that patch) but it also introduced another bug that stopped constructor ships from arriving at a new station, this bug was unfixable for a current save and once it was fixed in the 3.3 patch the only way around it was to start the game yet again. I took a break from anything to do with X4 for a while then I saw the DLC was announced with more bug fixes mid last year. Well just like the first DLC, its January already with no release in sight. I've also bought a new PC since 3.3 came out but had no saves to back up anyway.

Because of the time investment required to play the game and start a new empire, I dont think its wise starting a new save before the DLC comes out knowing that it will most likely break the save again.

So while 1.0 saves can "technically" still work, you wouldnt want to play it seeing as how much the game has changed over the last 2 years. So yes, the game is unplayable for me.

[Roeleveld]

All the best wishes for 2021 to everyone.

I saw some interesting things here, including that starting with the shipyard is the better option when it comes to getting rich quick. Guess I can start over as I was slowly building up the supply chain from the bottom up. (Which I also consider more logical)

As for mining, please don't make them less profitable. But I do agree with them sticking to known sources. I don't mind placing resource probes all over the place, but some indication as to their range would be nice.
I also don't get any result in certain sectors, like "Noplieus Fortune II", this is filled with rocks, with scanners I find several ORE and SLC rocks, but placing a resource probe in the middle of some of these doesn't give any return.

[Gregorovitch]

I still think the idea that Bernd said you've rejected (issues with factions getting shirty about who you are selling ships to etc) is good too, I would be disappointed if you did not put additional political shenanigans around shipyards into the mix. I mean if Amazon suddenly started selling combat jet fighters people would start to ask questions one would think.

In my opinion the issue with such a concept is it makes about as much sense as what is happening currently. In real life third party weapon manufacturers happily sell to both parties of a war without having their factories blown up. It is pretty much war profiteering, and as dishonourable or evil as it sounds it is real and does happen. You are offering to build ships for whoever pays you, why should people be mad at you when they are welcome to order ships as well?

Hmm. TBH are don't think there are any weapons manufacturers in existence that are not sponsored (and controlled via export licenses, manufacturing licenses etc) by the state they manufacture in. They don't sell to anybody, only those their government says they can sell to and most deals are struck between governments themselves. Black/grey market weapons dealers exist, for sure, but not manufacturers.

[xant]

Hmm. TBH are don't think there are any weapons manufacturers in existence that are not sponsored (and controlled via export licenses, manufacturing licenses etc) by the state they manufacture in. They don't sell to anybody, only those their government says they can sell to and most deals are struck between governments themselves. Black/grey market weapons dealers exist, for sure, but not manufacturers.

Then again, those manufacturers usually don't have an economy and military rivalling or even surpassing that of the government. In X4 the power dynamic is entirely different, you're closer to being a superpower than anything else.