Going through some negative feedback while planning the next 4.0 update

[Marco Nero]

It's always a nice thing when Bernd write on forum happy 2021 to you and to all Egosoft team too!

My honest opinion is: X4 is full of new awesome features, for example the map, the construction system, the dynamic economy (even if it seems to need more work). Onestly i do not mention features like scanning stations, hacking and so on, couse i feel the mini game in general is very boring.

Personally i would enjoy this game more, if we will have more sectors, more ships, more softwares, more weapons, better weapon sounds/effects, a better Capital Ships IA a dynamic diplomacy, a single very nice and long plot, instead of various and mediocre, B - R - NS!,Betty saying the name of the faction when you select and object and ofc big fixes, but i'm sure, as you always did, this fixes will come with time.

My favourite game is still X3, even X4 is a lot better in other things, i think we really need a goal to proceed the game, it ends pretty quickly also becouse the universe is very small: the sectors are extra large, yes, but are empty sectors, the number of sectors is very small, so this does not help, i would like to see also more immersion in general, and a return of real Battleships.

[dtpsprt]

To both of you: You answer your own question there. The obvious thing to do is to split the one in all UI. It will function better, be less of a learning curve for the noobs (getting aquainted with one thing at a time without things to loose themselves in) and also minimising it's size so hat it can grab the focus of the player on the task at hand.

How about, instead of this, you get a station to sit at at the bigger ships, one where it presents a GUI that allows some special use. Sit at the managers' seat at a station and you get one that presents only those bits that deal with stations and trading. Sit at the tactical officers' seat on a destroyer and you get ship-wing interface for combat. Sit at the same seat on a Auxilliary and you get one that shows what is needed to resupply and reform a fleet (including info on what ships were lost so you can order them up and pre-order them to join in when complete).
And so on and so forth.
Because you may need to do the current workload in any position, including standing on the dock of a bay (watching the tides drift away), the current UI remains.
But this allows a safe static process of the UI progression, never losing anything, but adding a new UI and a reason to sit on a big ship (you have multiple stations to choose from, no need to let a bridge only have tactical operations, it can have a management console too, for your use. And developing new UIs will not have the insane task of having to keep multiple, possibly incompatible, design goals in mind, it can narrow down the focus to produce a better UI for one specific role, at the cost of being no good at anything else.
The difference between a GUI and a command UI is that the former makes what has been programmed for easy to do, but makes what wasn't programmed in impossible. The command line gives you access to everything, but help with nothing.

It can be done, of course and it is in the same "vain" as my proposal but I, personally, hate stations and station walking. I prefer to fly my ship (me not an NPC) and have a small "side" screen that will give me only the information I currently need without hiding what's happening around me.

[Kpla Keltak]

@ Kpla Keltak: It might be worth taking the time to read Bernd's opening post of this thread which is presumably what you are replying to.

I had read his post when it was first posted but didn't reply due my comments which i know wont be welcomed.
against my better judgement i decided to post today.

clearly...the state of X4 does not concur with the statements below..

- 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).

[dtpsprt]

Fleet combat? This is just one sector. Fleet deployment? What Fleet deployment when the Fleet will not stay together just because some of it's ships can follow the Highway and some can not (and that not even taking into account what happens when they have different traveldrive speeds (and Egosoft made certain via algorithm that even the same ship model with the same engine will have small differences in their statistics simply because two parts cannot be identical)?

This is why game design for X series is so hard. A lot of people with opinions who haven't played a lot of another type of game.

Play more wargames. Heavy war simulation wargames.

There is VASTLY more than "just one sector" to fleet combat.

Flanks exist. Supply lines exist. Retreat and reinforcement are things that exist in real wargame simulators. STOP is a thing in real war simulations. Simultaneous Time On Point. You come to that single sector through every available gate, ensuring there are no reserves nearby, you time it so that the track from there to the estimated locus of action of the opposition are equal no matter what route your forces too. Seeing attacks from only the front portion, you lure the enemy to attack with their superior force, leaving their rear ignored. Every gun is pointed on way.
Then your other forces come in from behind, to fire on the undefended rear and the weak rear portions of the emeny hardware.
They turn some around to present a threat to slow your rear assault, but now your flanking forces arrive and in turning, the enemy presents firing solutions on the backsides of the ships trying to turn, slow as they are because they have to turn around and present to the aft forces, meaning a change of velocity, passing through zero.
If you arrange your timing correct, and set up the lines right, you can win in a one-on-one fight at a two to one disadvantage, or win with normal superiority of forces (a third more and up) with minimal losses.
Having denuded the enemy, they need to flee. Your tactics then denote whether you will give them an out so they do not try to fight their way out or whether you exterminate all threat. If they leave, and you guessed their retreat lines, you can follow them back to their source and remove that as a source too.

Of course a lot of this isn't possible in this game YET, but some is. The rest require a more complex decision matrix for AI, and all of it require better autopilot pathing and threat decisions. If you are fleeing, you don't want to flee through the engagement zone of a destroyers' batteries.

Combat = fighting and this is done in the end sector (therefore one). The rest is Fleet transition/route. And I wouldn't put a "yet" because I don't see Egosoft ready to change course and get the game more combat oriented. I believe it is up to the mods (if they are up to the task) to do such a thing but for them to be actually useful Egosoft has to "finalise" it's changes so the moders know where they go from there and most importantly how...

[dtpsprt]

Did rather like the trade interface in XR (quite possibly my favourite aspect of that game). Was very useful being able to see ALL the trades available for each ware, not just the best one available on the visible map area. However not sure that approach would work as well with a map the size of X4's. Would have to be an awfully big spreadsheet to fit them all in. Not sure what you mean by "autotraders issue". Rarely used them in X3 & simply don't use them at all in X4. The ease at which manually operated freighters can be used en masse in X4 has made them entirely redundant for me.

X Rebirth had just one line per commodity with a button to expand when there were more than one offers so it's not so big, unless you want to expand on more than one item at a time. Even then it's totally manageable.

Have successfully waged war on a considerably larger scale than just a single sector (e.g.https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8r9pf5qbo7ve ... 1.jpg?dl=0). Had no issues with deploying my forces across what must have been around 1/4 of the map. Would have been awful trying to do that with X3's map, which can't even show the relative position of ships across just 2 adjacent sectors, let alone a big chunk of the universe map. As for fleet cohesion, recommend investing in carriers. Mostly my fleets looked like this while in transit: https://www.dropbox.com/s/llur76vqnbiu2 ... 1.jpg?dl=0.

The use of carriers and landing the smaller (and able to use the highway system) ships on them, the Auxiliaries and Destroyers solves one part of the problem only. What about the needless headache that comes from different traveldrive speeds? A challenge yes but not a "productive" one in my opinion. I prefer to feel proud of doing something that I dreamed and organised than working around the game's deficiencies (no glory in fighting faulty machines).

[GCU Grey Area]

What about the needless headache that comes from different traveldrive speeds?

Headache? Not in my experience. Moved a considerable number of ships around the map during my war with HOP & while the carriers were indeed slightly slower than my destroyers in travel mode, in practice the difference wasn't all that significant. If I was in-sector they stayed close together despite that (see 2nd screenshot in my previous post). OOS the destroyers sometimes flew a bit ahead, but never so far ahead that it caused me any problems. That war with HOP lasted for weeks, not one headache from different traveldrive speeds, needless or otherwise. If anything I'd find it beneficial for the destroyers to arrive at their destination slightly ahead of the carriers & auxiliaries, so they can clear out hostiles before the less well-armed ships arrive. Often use Point Guard as my default formation for my fleets for precisely that reason.

[Imperial Good]

clearly...the state of X4 does not concur with the statements below..

- 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).

I think you are underestimating how much effort it takes to improve the core game. Even fairly small changes may require a lot of man hours due to the iteration and testing required to get satisfactory results. Additionally some core changes might be entirely under the hood so have no directly visible impact to the player even though it helps to improve their experience in the background so it is hard to judge just how much work is getting put into the core game. There are also core game aspects which are still works in progress so may not be visible to the public but have consumed developer time, for example player character customization.

[Kpla Keltak]

clearly...the state of X4 does not concur with the statements below..

- 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).

I think you are underestimating how much effort it takes to improve the core game. Even fairly small changes may require a lot of man hours due to the iteration and testing required to get satisfactory results. Additionally some core changes might be entirely under the hood so have no directly visible impact to the player even though it helps to improve their experience in the background so it is hard to judge just how much work is getting put into the core game. There are also core game aspects which are still works in progress so may not be visible to the public but have consumed developer time, for example player character customization.

You are entirely correct. I don't appreciate or understand how much work is involved to put things right. But...why split your resources wasting time on Ventures and terraforming? surely the game would be so much better if all effort was placed into resolving as many of the known issues as possible, adding to and refining what's already in the game. I've played this type of game since the original Elite, this game has so much potential its off the scale. its such a shame that 2 years after release things are as they are.

[Imperial Good]

But...why split your resources wasting time on Ventures and terraforming?

People are differentially skilled. Someone employed to do artwork, such as used heavily by DLC due to all the new assets, might not be that skilled when it comes to AI or graphic related coding. Even within coding people are differentially skilled with some people being better at designing and optimizing graphic pipelines while others are better at AI. As such it is usually not efficient or even possible to throw everyone available on the same problem to get it done as fast as possible. This is especially the case with smaller developer teams where there are fewer people in them to begin with.

[MSterling]

I, personally, hate stations and station walking.

So?

For one, not just your game. For a second point, you ain't walking much. Nor are you using the UI while piloting. So your complaints really don't do anything other than say "No, I don't want THAT solution, I want something else", but you go ahead and design your own UI.

Additionally, read the entire post, not cherry pick, or if you want to show you did read it all, explain why you thought a destroyer was a station.

[MSterling]

Combat = fighting

Fleet != Fighting.

[MSterling]

wasting time on Ventures and terraforming?

This presumes it is a waste of time. If it isn't a waste of time, then there is no need to answer why waste time on a thing that isn't a waste of time.

Many want a pewpew experience. Stuff on the station management is all proclaimed to be "Spreadsheets in SPAAAACE!". If the UI doesn't allow an action, it is called a waste, if it has options that the person doesn't want, it is a cluttered mess and a waste of time to add more clutter.

Personally? Not really up for ventures. It isn't a part of the game I care about, partly because offline almost all the time. Not online, can't get hacked or spammed, and if I'm playing a game, I ain't looking at what my firewall is doing or what background tasks are doing. HOWEVER, lots of people DO like being online, and the benefits of ventures grant them quicker access to crafting materials they want to use. A waste of time depends on who decides what goes into the game. I don't. Neither do you. We can have input, and if we discuss enough, we might meld ideas and get a better one. And others may add their thoughts, improving the idea again.

The problem with a forum is this doesn't really allow for this sort of iteration ideas workshopping, nor are most posters actually worried enough to put effort into it that might lead to their ideas being surpassed and discarded. Fire and forget. Make demands. And NEVER surrender your position. Giving up silently is fine, though, so it isn't Galaxy Quest quite.

[Graaf]

Even if this was an X-game, what is the purpose of Terraforming? It will take years, if not decades to terraform a planet. So what's the point?

[Imperial Good]

Even if this was an X-game, what is the purpose of Terraforming? It will take years, if not decades to terraform a planet. So what's the point?

It is set in the future. Thanks to the ludicrous resources at the disposal of the player it takes quite a lot shorter than that. Not like the player character needs to worry about how long it takes given that they are mechanically immortal and cannot die due to age.

[Kpla Keltak]

wasting time on Ventures and terraforming?

This presumes it is a waste of time. If it isn't a waste of time, then there is no need to answer why waste time on a thing that isn't a waste of time.

Many want a pewpew experience. Stuff on the station management is all proclaimed to be "Spreadsheets in SPAAAACE!". If the UI doesn't allow an action, it is called a waste, if it has options that the person doesn't want, it is a cluttered mess and a waste of time to add more clutter.

Personally? Not really up for ventures. It isn't a part of the game I care about, partly because offline almost all the time. Not online, can't get hacked or spammed, and if I'm playing a game, I ain't looking at what my firewall is doing or what background tasks are doing. HOWEVER, lots of people DO like being online, and the benefits of ventures grant them quicker access to crafting materials they want to use. A waste of time depends on who decides what goes into the game. I don't. Neither do you. We can have input, and if we discuss enough, we might meld ideas and get a better one. And others may add their thoughts, improving the idea again.

The problem with a forum is this doesn't really allow for this sort of iteration ideas workshopping, nor are most posters actually worried enough to put effort into it that might lead to their ideas being surpassed and discarded. Fire and forget. Make demands. And NEVER surrender your position. Giving up silently is fine, though, so it isn't Galaxy Quest quite.

Using valuable resources and time on add on items when the core product is severely lacking is bad management and time wasting.

Why Ice a cake when the cake tastes like crap!

I genuinely believe that if Egosoft had focused on the core game and putting things right we would definitely have a much better game today...right now!
I also think they would of sold a lot more copies without having to slash prices etc.
Its all well and good adding eye candy and bullet points to attract new buyers, but if the product is bad they wont like it.

Just my opinion

[Lord Dakier]

I genuinely believe that if Egosoft had focused on the core game and putting things right we would definitely have a much better game today...right now!

Hopefully after the release of SV and soon CoH, which I support, we will have a small period of say six months to improve core game mechanics, rebalancing and new features to cut out the tedium of the game. Hopefully this thread is the start of that process.

[Killjaeden]

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

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.

"Feel like a chore"... why do you think that? I'm actually really curious. "Search your feelings". Have you played other games with upkeep ? To me, playing other games with upkeep for units (e.g. total war series) and buildings (e.g. Stellaris) it never feels like a chore to see that you only make very little money due to your disproportionaly large army - compared to your economic power.

The important pre-requisite is, that it needs to be easy to see in your account balance how much you lose because of upkeep. Without that, yes it could be considered a chore - because you dont know where to look. Very beneficial are also methods to identify where to look to reduce your upkeep (so maybe a sector list and the cumulative upkeep inside them). And also display upkeep per ship when you buy/build them.

It results in much more interesting gameplay, because you actually have to balance your economics and your military. In X4 (and all predecessors), once you have an economic setup, you can make thousands of ships and never worry about your economy again. There is no need to ever improve your economy - unless you want to build more ships even faster. And in essence, that means you can dominate the entire universe with only a small amount of stations. Anything beyond that is superfluous. In X4 you can slowly build up a big "doomstack" of ships and bulldoze everything with it. In other games you need the economy to be able to do that. That means you need more production, and more resource gathering. That also usually means that getting access to those resources becomes important, and you have to fight for it. Although in X you can gather resources everywhere that is not hostile**, so that does not directly apply here.
You also dont ever need to optimise your economy, because there is simply no cost to it once it exists. In other games that is a huge part of the game - optimising your economy. Of course it could be decided from gameplay perspective that just ships (or even just combat ships) have maintenance, not stations. But imo stations and traders should have them too, because all those things would expand the THINK part of the game significantly.

Another benefit is, that it adds a whole other level to consider when choosing your ships of your fleet - giving possibility to use ships that are low upkeep but not that great in stats. This makes it much more interesting to ponder over what to use.

And as always... a modifier for amount of upkeep would be a prime candidate for a difficulty selection menu. Since it only affects the player and his progress toward "Overwhelming power".

____________________________________________________________

**Btw: If you introduce diplomacy - mining rights (the right to mine minerals in that factions sector) could be something interesting to explore... As form of punishment that does not directly equal "ok now we shoot you". Maybe even more: Mining rights, Docking rights, Right of passage (through gates/highways etc). It could even be expanded on "per sector" but that could get complicated - unless it is easily presented in the UI. Might also involve costs if you want to reaquire them (provided you lost them previously).

[xant]

The problem with upkeep is that it always makes you dependent on generating profit, something you can't do on your own. Selling inventory items to traders on your station is the only way to make credits on your own without any faction. So having credit-based upkeep would make it necessary for us to somehow make credits on our own or to use something else for upkeep, something we can produce and distribute (like food and medical supplies). Otherwise it would cut down hard on our sandbox experience.

[Killjaeden]

The problem with upkeep is that it always makes you dependent on generating profit, something you can't do on your own. Selling inventory items to traders on your station is the only way to make credits on your own without any faction. So having credit-based upkeep would make it necessary for us to somehow make credits on our own or to use something else for upkeep, something we can produce and distribute (like food and medical supplies). Otherwise it would cut down hard on our sandbox experience.

Upkeep doesnt have to be monetary based. After all, what the ships need for maintenance are replacement parts that can be manufactured. Means, to maintain the ships you only need the wares that you also need to build them in the first place.
If upkeep is needed to tie to people then people want money only so they can buy things they need or want. You can cut out the money, if instead of money, you provide them directly with the things they need (food, ...) and want (e.g. common or luxury items of life - whatever you consider common or luxury in lore of X).
I dont see a problem in that regard...

The chore would only be caused if you want to apply in-depth logistics to the upkeep.
As in "ship must be sent to shipyard, be serviced there for X hours". Yes then it could be a chore - if its not automated in that the ship would not visit it automatically itself, and return once done.
But this level is not necessary to gain the benefits from upkeep mechanics. Small ships can be maintained automatically any time they dock at other ship, or a station. After all, the only reason you need to bring your Car to a Workshop IRL is because you dont have either the knowledge, or the tools to lift the car sufficiently to access it. In space, you dont need no car jacks. Just need the repair knowledge and the handy tools to unscrew the thing you want to replace. If we assume the pilot is a trained mechanic, you only need replacement parts to complete it -> money or resources.

And large captal ships could maintain themselves. Most of stuff would have to be maintained in the interior, therefore no visual representation required. External bits could be done with help of space walking engineers (Drones are utterly boring... i want to see people in action).

Alternatively you could say that instead of "everyone maintains themself" you could have dedicated ships flying around the universe to provide on site maintenance - they bring the resources (which they can buy or take from somewhere).

[GCU Grey Area]

The problem with upkeep is that it always makes you dependent on generating profit, something you can't do on your own. Selling inventory items to traders on your station is the only way to make credits on your own without any faction. So having credit-based upkeep would make it necessary for us to somehow make credits on our own or to use something else for upkeep, something we can produce and distribute (like food and medical supplies). Otherwise it would cut down hard on our sandbox experience.

Very curious about this. Can't work out how you're playing the game (as it is right now) without interacting with NPC factions, if that cuts down on your sandbox experience. How do you even get started in such a game? OK - you've got your starter ship (that's free), but what do you do next if you can't get credits from the NPC factions? Truly baffled.


By the way, I agree with Killjaeden on this. Would very much like upkeep to be part of the game & would not see it as a chore. Don't mind if that costs credits (since that now seems to be a relevant factor), though would also be fine if it's other stuff. Played a fair bit of the new Crusader Kings last year & really it's the upkeep on your army which is one of the things which drives the game forward - need to conquer new territory to obtain the the resources (e.g. more tax from vassals) needed to build a bigger army to conquer new territory...