Going through some negative feedback while planning the next 4.0 update

[MSterling]

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.

Better than nerfing ship prices, which would be fiat changes, just stop having factions buy ships from you. Shipyards are not money makers, they are ways to avoid having to pay exorbitant prices for ships from a faction shipyard and to supply what you need, not what you can sell. IMO a bit harsh... but it makes more sense than cutting what you are allowed to sell ships at.

For community minded players, getting missions to rebuild a lost faction (due to xenon or faction antics) would be a further goal, it would also let you recover blueprints you want and missed out on.
E.g. first you will be asked to build a wharf for them in some sector, possibly unowned, possibly in a friendly faction sector.
Then you'll be asked to take over one of their original sectors. BIG WAR!
Then you'll be asked to build them a warf and shipyard in that sector and given the plans to build their admin center there, creating the lost faction in the game again.

[MSterling]

Currently I very much find myself rushing shipyard/warf

That is the problem, and it is self made. You're shoving your hand in boiling water and complaining about the pain. When credits don't make sense if you get them via shipbuilding, why are you rushing to make them?

[MSterling]

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...

If ships don't move to the right place, how will their AI make any difference? If they can't pilot to a defensive formation, how do they survive?
AI Autopilot is the BEDROCK of sorting out battles. Real Flight Sims solve it by having a couple of dozen at most (and usually only a handful) and the biggest obstacle they have is the ground, which they keep away from. Space games don't have that option. If there is a battle, it is likely to be defending a station or carrier fleet, and that is an obstacle to pathing that you can't obviate by being 20 km away from...
Autopilot is what EVERY SINGLE NPC SHIP has to fly by. They don't get a choice. And if the AI ship can't fly to the battle, in what sense can it fight?

[MSterling]

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?

It is also the first character trait of the Teladi. Yet lorewise they get on with everyone BECAUSE they are reliable merchants who will sell you stuff.

MAYBE an option is that only smaller ships, as required by faction to grow, would be bought from you, military ships only by order (so if there is a building for defending borders by the HOP, they will ask for ships from your shipyard to be delivered and pay for them.
So if you want your shipyard to profit, you need to grow the entire cake, not offer free cake. If you want to profit off the big ships, you need to let the war continue and not remove customers by taking them out, but you don't get any control of how quickly you will profit from that route. You have to accept the ebb and flow of conflict. Stations become your baseline profit generators.

[mr.WHO]

Surely you can get those ships to be safe if you give them the default action of "dock at ship".

I tried this and it basically make them hardcoded to stay docked and ignore averything, including trade assignment.

[GCU Grey Area]

Better than nerfing ship prices, which would be fiat changes, just stop having factions buy ships from you.

Don't like this idea either. I want to be able to support factions I'm allied with by building ships for them. I'd simply like the option to sell those ships at cost (or give them away for nothing if I've built a self-sufficient shipyard), rather than ruining other aspects of the game (e.g. Trade) by being given absurd amounts of money in the process.

[snwboardn21]

I think the shipyard thing would be solved if relation dynamics were a little more volatile.

Right now the player controls when they want to get involved in conflict, if there was a dynamic way for 2, 3 factions even more to declare war on you and subsequently raid you with 10 capital ships and 40 or so fighters for whatever reason maybe it would make the player need to spend those extra credits. The problem to me isn't lengthening out the time it takes to get to endgame but making endgame and the journey there more interesting.

Even something as simple as if you build a station in a sector you immediately inherit all the enemies of that controlling sectors relations. Yeah it is pretty easy when you are friends with the entire galaxy to make credits hand over fist but go into -30 with everyone except a couple of factions and have fun replacing all your traders any time they leave the highway. Not to mention your potential client list drops by at least half.

[Accuracy]

The main issues of X4 are Balancing and AI.
AI got quite a few improvements, but combat AI still sucks.
Combat AI should at least get rules for keeping certain distances.
Turrets need a Command to fire at missiles&S/M Ships. (Firing you mainguns at them should be a thing to)
Economic AI if you remove the miners ability to find resource fields please add a prospector command to find them and place probes.

The Balancing on the other Hand still sucks at the same level as 1.0:
Combat ships are only Balanced by amount and placement of hardpoints, that why a Rattlesnake kills fleets while a phoenix dies by flies.
There need to be a cause to leave some hardpoints empty or use lower lever equipment, X3 used energy consumption here and I recommend a reintroduction.
I want the missile defence Mosquito back those flares are useless.
Civil ships are only feasible in smaller sizes, with the repeat orders behaviour L freight ships lost their last cause of existence (to manually supply build plots) the need much more cargo space to be at least a bit competitive to smaller ships.
If you compare the values of M to L cargo ships you will notice all M ships have more space than hull points while all L have much less space than hull, their storage should be multiplied by 4, especially if you consider the price-difference. And station Container S/M storage modules need much more storage too, there is no cause to build them given how cheap an L storage is. Station Container: S 25k M 100k L 1M Liquid/Bulk: S 100k M 500k L 1M

I think all storage containers should be multiplied by 3 or 4.
There is a mod that does this and it almost completely fixes the economical problems.
From my personal analysis, the largest issue with L ship trading is the AI inefficiecny. What the AI does is it spends a lot more time outside fast travel mode than in travel mode. Whenever it needs to make small adjustments it exits the fast travel mode. The pathing for L ships should be parabolic.
Therefore the cargo per hour delivered per M ship ratio is better than cargo per hour delivered on L ships.

[Imperial Good]

That is the problem, and it is self made. You're shoving your hand in boiling water and complaining about the pain. When credits don't make sense if you get them via shipbuilding, why are you rushing to make them?

This falls into the category of player skill and experience playing the game. Why take 10 hours to do what can be done in 1 hour?

Many players, like myself, like a challenge as it gives a sense of accomplishment. A challenge is not a grind (not earn money so slowly it takes hundreds of hours to get anywhere). Although making a lot of money should not be very hard, it should still require a little more effort than currently. Until people like myself reported it, there was a massive exploit where you could get over 1 billion credits and a shipyard/warf ordered in under 2 hours from start without flying a ship for more than 30 seconds to the nearest station. In the current live version you could probably get it done in 6-8 hours and may require some flying. I personally would not mind seeing that raised a little to 12-18 hours, as that might open up new opportunities to try and optimize. Especially if the way it is raised is by making mechanics a little more complex or difficult.

MAYBE an option is that only smaller ships, as required by faction to grow, would be bought from you, military ships only by order (so if there is a building for defending borders by the HOP, they will ask for ships from your shipyard to be delivered and pay for them.
So if you want your shipyard to profit, you need to grow the entire cake, not offer free cake. If you want to profit off the big ships, you need to let the war continue and not remove customers by taking them out, but you don't get any control of how quickly you will profit from that route. You have to accept the ebb and flow of conflict. Stations become your baseline profit generators.

The issue is that you can set your sell price to 150% and the AI think nothing of buying ships just to have them die the instant they undock because their enemy is HOP and just ordered a Destroyer which ARG and TEL stuff is incapable of competing against. If your sell price is too high the AI should not buy from you, and specifically the player should be driven down towards 50% sell price to get AI orders rather than 150% which they can set currently. This alone is a huge reduction in profit (most of it). Additionally if you are selling to factions that are at war with each other they should embargo specific warfs/shipyards of yours if it is not safe for their ships to undock which will further limit the amount of money you can make by not having AIs re-order ships you just made but were destroyed and requiring you build more than 1 shipyard/warf.

Personally I suggested that when an AI faction order a ship from the player that they order it to their own, safe, space. The ship is built and in player control until it reaches there and if it gets destoyed along the way the player gets no payment (and order is cancelled, could be re-issued soon after). This would let them buy from a single shipyard/warf at the same time as their enemies without degenerate losses since the ships will always arrive safely for deployment.

[Roeleveld]

Personally I suggested that when an AI faction order a ship from the player that they order it to their own, safe, space. The ship is built and in player control until it reaches there and if it gets destoyed along the way the player gets no payment (and order is cancelled, could be re-issued soon after). This would let them buy from a single shipyard/warf at the same time as their enemies without degenerate losses since the ships will always arrive safely for deployment.

This is also how cars are made and supplied.
I like this idea: Ships must be delivered to a faction-owned shipyard/warf before payment arrives.

[dtpsprt]

Personally I suggested that when an AI faction order a ship from the player that they order it to their own, safe, space. The ship is built and in player control until it reaches there and if it gets destoyed along the way the player gets no payment (and order is cancelled, could be re-issued soon after). This would let them buy from a single shipyard/warf at the same time as their enemies without degenerate losses since the ships will always arrive safely for deployment.

More "map work"? and for what? more (unnecessary) credits? Even the Teladi would grow sick of this... I'd rather have the factions ordering one or two Wharfs/Shipyards fully stocked to the player and have their own shipbuilding restored, also stop selling ships to the player the moment the player's Wharf or Shipyard is up and running accordingly... That would pose a challenge...

[Roeleveld]

Personally I suggested that when an AI faction order a ship from the player that they order it to their own, safe, space. The ship is built and in player control until it reaches there and if it gets destoyed along the way the player gets no payment (and order is cancelled, could be re-issued soon after). This would let them buy from a single shipyard/warf at the same time as their enemies without degenerate losses since the ships will always arrive safely for deployment.

More "map work"? and for what? more (unnecessary) credits? Even the Teladi would grow sick of this... I'd rather have the factions ordering one or two Wharfs/Shipyards fully stocked to the player and have their own shipbuilding restored, also stop selling ships to the player the moment the player's Wharf or Shipyard is up and running accordingly... That would pose a challenge...

Not necessarily shipped "manually", but with a minimal crew to a base belonging to the ordering faction and done automatically.
And with pirates and other factions trying to destroy these ships in transit, payment becomes unreliable unless you invest in more patrols.

[Gregorovitch]

Personally I suggested that when an AI faction order a ship from the player that they order it to their own, safe, space. The ship is built and in player control until it reaches there and if it gets destoyed along the way the player gets no payment (and order is cancelled, could be re-issued soon after). This would let them buy from a single shipyard/warf at the same time as their enemies without degenerate losses since the ships will always arrive safely for deployment.

More "map work"? and for what? more (unnecessary) credits? Even the Teladi would grow sick of this... I'd rather have the factions ordering one or two Wharfs/Shipyards fully stocked to the player and have their own shipbuilding restored, also stop selling ships to the player the moment the player's Wharf or Shipyard is up and running accordingly... That would pose a challenge...

Not necessarily shipped "manually", but with a minimal crew to a base belonging to the ordering faction and done automatically.
And with pirates and other factions trying to destroy these ships in transit, payment becomes unreliable unless you invest in more patrols.

This is intereseting and all - but has anyone considered that you don't necessarily control when ships get ordered and built? So if you got to jump to it every five minutes to babysit new ships to the customer's base, how are you going to feel about that if you're in the middle of a invading a Xenon sector or trying to save the ARG from the HOP?

[Roeleveld]

More "map work"? and for what? more (unnecessary) credits? Even the Teladi would grow sick of this... I'd rather have the factions ordering one or two Wharfs/Shipyards fully stocked to the player and have their own shipbuilding restored, also stop selling ships to the player the moment the player's Wharf or Shipyard is up and running accordingly... That would pose a challenge...

Not necessarily shipped "manually", but with a minimal crew to a base belonging to the ordering faction and done automatically.
And with pirates and other factions trying to destroy these ships in transit, payment becomes unreliable unless you invest in more patrols.

This is intereseting and all - but has anyone considered that you don't necessarily control when ships get ordered and built? So if you got to jump to it every five minutes to babysit new ships to the customer's base, how are you going to feel about that if you're in the middle of a invading a Xenon sector or trying to save the ARG from the HOP?

I actually mean, as part of the production, the shipyard needs to ship the ordered ships. Eg, this is organised by the manager (AI), not the player.
But, the ships can end up being destroyed in transit, especially as there is only a single pilot, which means the turrets are near-useless.

Just had an extra idea, getting turret-crew to actually make the turrets more efficient. (or less efficient without crew)

[dtpsprt]

I actually mean, as part of the production, the shipyard needs to ship the ordered ships. Eg, this is organised by the manager (AI), not the player.
But, the ships can end up being destroyed in transit, especially as there is only a single pilot, which means the turrets are near-useless.

Just had an extra idea, getting turret-crew to actually make the turrets more efficient. (or less efficient without crew)

Ahhhh... more work for the devs and for what? Let them fix stuff first (pathfinding would be a good start), reinvent the wheel (like making ships in a fleet use the slowest ship's traveldrive speed to stay in formation and follow the same path regardless if they can travel in highway or not "Fleet" logic must supercede everything else), close the gap between IS and OOS behaviour (I do want to participate in those battles without endangering my extremely hard earned 3+* captains), get some plotlines that are not entirely money dependent and leave you feeling they are just to prolong the time you spend in the game... then they can start on putting finishing touches (start at the start by reviewing the loadscreen "tips" that belong to X Rebirth and have no relevance in X4 like the guns getting damaged with reduced performance, continue with the Boron saying "Hello there" after he has spoken to you etc.)

Tall order I know, necessary nevertheless...

[Waltz9]

I'm not really complaining. I love this game.
I do make a whole lot of reports but only because I want to see the game improve rather then sit back and cry about it.

But lately I turned my game back from 4.0 beta to 3.3 because I believe the entire station system is completely broken right now.
If you build a station the universe will only supply one thing of its requirements. After a long time your miners stop working.
If you have habitats but do not want other races to supply its requirements your traders will just sit back being confused what to do.
Its a pain to deal with all this in its current state so I rather wait the next updates.

But rolling back to 3.3 also gave me other insights about how the game was and how it is now and I must admit I already miss a lot of the 4.0 features it has.
This proves your are doing a great job.

Only one thing I would love Egosoft to focus on really is something for players to do in a late game because the game starts exciting but ends up being boring as hell because there is just no challenge anymore.
Anyway. keep doing what you are doing. I can't wait for 4.0 to release. For me its one of the major updates I been waiting on.

[Mr.Killer]

Hi guys,

I was just using the relaxed days to collect some problems and negative feedback about the current state of X4 and thought I collect some answers I gave here in order for you all to know what is about to happen at egosoft in the next few months:

- Some people critizise us for working on DLCs when there are still bugs: We are always spending the majority of our time working on updates of the core game. The DLC is always about new assets like more ships, weapons and new systems and in some cases missions (while there are also lots of missions that go into the free update), but that is only one part of the team. There is always a larger fraction constantly working on improving the core game in the form of the next big updates (4.0 soon-ish and 5.0 already in the plans of course).

- Unfortunately I read a lot about NVidia driver related issues. Already since early november there are a number of issues that are a bit out of our hands. The most obvious one is that UI elements like the hull and shield bar might flicker or completely disappear, but also at least two driver related crashes (one limited to 30xx cards where actually the game just ends abruptly with a device lost). We are doing what we can to get support from NVidia to fix this ASAP. Please be patient if you suffer from any of these issues.

- Economy complaints: Some people complained about the economy producing either not enough with the symptom being that ultimately shipyards can not produce, or too much with the symptom being that you as a player can not make decent money with trading with NPCs. While we are always working on improving the high levels of the NPC economy (e.g decissions about what stations to build) and the next 4.0 beta will bring some big changes especially to the lower part of the economy (mining wil be less profitable), the described behaviour of "waves" which are very long (hours) is intentional. There is a long latency between NPCs detecting either over-demand or over-supply and them building stations in response. This is intentionally an opportunity for players.

- Compaints about AI: These are of course not new and we always work on improving AI. Just this statement or complaints like this are not quite fair though: First of all there are multiple very different layers of AI and inherently different problems related to them. Hence there are different solutions:

There is currently a number of problems with the autopilot of the playership. This is ultimately a threading issue related to how we try to make use of multiple cores. Sometimes the game does not finish certain calculations in time but the ship already calculated its course through the new sector. This is being worked on with high priority.

The above is not related to NPCs AI behaviours. That again is a system of multiple layers. That of near station path calculations and the actual AI script that implements "tactics" and commands if you will. Think of that last bit as the highest level. On that high level we are constantly making improvements and the current beta version of 4.0 for example has a whole new tactical command system to allow more coordinated battles with entire fleets. What this does is actually sending commands from the leader of a larger squad down to multiple levels depending on what type of group assignment you have made. Feedback on this and everything else beta 4.0 is bringing is very welcome.



Ok... enough rambling for now.

Thank you all for you patience and have a great 2021!

-Bernd

I see I am not the only one who wants to talk to you, but I keep it simple, the next thing is just an idea, I hope you like some part or all of it, it makes my game a lot more exiting...

Turn the tables EGOSOFT, start with being a part of an empire instead of making your own so our (player) actions does not affect everything instantly.

Make a wish, become a trader, be a trader, not a fighter, ask for fighter support to make trades in rural territory or be that fighter, kick enemy ass when that is not your enemy, but the enemy of the freighter that asks you to guard him!!!!

Not everything the same, I can wake up any X4 player in the world and ask him "What faction holds dominion over sector Grand Exchange???" and they know the answer to that, because I find my stations I need to find in my dreams.
It would really be a shock to the community if all sectors are different, by name, station locations and leading faction! That would shit their pants, knowing that they could start out in their tiny ship surrounded by enemy sectors.....

[Graaf]

... rambling ...

As the successor of a game that was not designed to be an X-game, which is merely set in the X-universe and doesn't deserve to hold the X in the title, Foundation also doesn't succeed in being an improvement to X3.
Overall the game is boring. So-called improvements are mostly superficial. Several design choices are even unnecessary and form the restriction of why Foundation is less than half the game it could and will be.

[snwboardn21]

But lately I turned my game back from 4.0 beta to 3.3 because I believe the entire station system is completely broken right now.
If you build a station the universe will only supply one thing of its requirements. After a long time your miners stop working.
If you have habitats but do not want other races to supply its requirements your traders will just sit back being confused what to do.
Its a pain to deal with all this in its current state so I rather wait the next updates.

I have been playing beta 4 for a while and I have never had that issue. I usually just drop the price I am willing to pay for wares to the minimum price, the only time my miners stop is if my storage fills up. Are you using any mods?

[Artean]

... rambling ...

As the successor of a game that was not designed to be an X-game, which is merely set in the X-universe and doesn't deserve to hold the X in the title, Foundation also doesn't succeed in being an improvement to X3.
Overall the game is boring. So-called improvements are mostly superficial. Several design choices are even unnecessary and form the restriction of why Foundation is less than half the game it could and will be.

Eh, no. Superficial? Far from it. X4 is a clear and very obvious improvement to the static X3 universe. Each to their own, I guess.