The game needs to stop giving you things and actually let you earn something

[BrasatoAlBarolo]

I`ve had to buy every ship (spending all my money) except for 3, 2 which bailed after I shot at it and one found, the only freebie so far in many hours (near 2 weeks) of play.

But then again I try to avoid Let`s Plays or people who tell me how to find stuff and just search the universe by myself.

I have found four miners, two frigates and two bombers. A little too many abandoned ships, imho.

I have restared three times. I played quite some time already and have not found a single ship. I keep reading abouti t, but I never found one.

I just long range scan every once in a while during my trips.
You have abandoned ships when in the map you see a cluster of "?", representing the mines around the ship. You need to blow them all before claiming the freebie.

[ApoxNM]

I have found four miners, two frigates and two bombers. A little too many abandoned ships, imho.

I have restared three times. I played quite some time already and have not found a single ship. I keep reading abouti t, but I never found one.

I just long range scan every once in a while during my trips.
You have abandoned ships when in the map you see a cluster of "?", representing the mines around the ship. You need to blow them all before claiming the freebie.

I just found mines, tried to shoot them, blew myself up.... moved on... no more shooting at random mines...hmmm

[quadrapod]

I`ve had to buy every ship (spending all my money) except for 3, 2 which bailed after I shot at it and one found, the only freebie so far in many hours (near 2 weeks) of play.

But then again I try to avoid Let`s Plays or people who tell me how to find stuff and just search the universe by myself.

I have found four miners, two frigates and two bombers. A little too many abandoned ships, imho.

I have restared three times. I played quite some time already and have not found a single ship. I keep reading abouti t, but I never found one.

I've found 4 M class ships in just 15 hours of play. PHQ spoiler:

Spoiler

Show

One of those spawns every single playthrough during the mission to protect the transports as part of freeing the PHQ boron. Though it's not always the exact same ship, it will always be an equipped M class military ship from one of the races.

I never actually got the experience of buying my first M class ship after being in a fighter, because the game was just too willing to shove one at me. If I wasn't convinced by that it gave me a second one within the hour just sitting in the middle of a mining sector. Being given something like that with no effort pretty much immediately destroys any sense of accomplishment which might have been obtained from the progression. I still loved the sense of scale but the achievement was meaningless and worse felt almost like it voided any actual progress I might have put toward the goal of buying a better ship. Mission payouts are too high but even then the amount of money the game just throws at you with random windfalls completely invalidates even that source of income. I didn't learn of crystal mining really until well after I'd gotten established in my first playthough, and I never did it much other than to test it out in subsequent playthroughs, but even then it just feels like the icing on the cake of constant excessive player rewards.

[BrasatoAlBarolo]

I have restared three times. I played quite some time already and have not found a single ship. I keep reading abouti t, but I never found one.

I just long range scan every once in a while during my trips.
You have abandoned ships when in the map you see a cluster of "?", representing the mines around the ship. You need to blow them all before claiming the freebie.

I just found mines, tried to shoot them, blew myself up.... moved on... no more shooting at random mines...hmmm

Shoot from 2km away and you will be safe.

[Barnardstar]

I really hope that ES has plans for this to change more towards X3's hard work.

What we really miss are those ranks for combat and trading... i don't know why ES didn't put that into X4, because it's of a huge importance
to making the player work towards something other then "more ships more stations".

Some missions required certain ranks and standing with factions to start - plot missions ..

This. This game needs some kind of rank or renown to build up before you get higher paying/more important missions.

[Arghan]

Fully agree with the op. I only have a few hours a week to play, so I haven't put a ton of time into the game, but already I've got a couple of frigates, a whole fleet of miners and universe traders, and a station. The main point is, I'm not super trying. I just fly around the galaxy, mapping systems and looking for missions to repair satellites and shoot mines. I'm already an Argon 'Hero of the federation', which is nice an all but... Really guys? You don't have any war heroes or philanthropists to honour? Just me, the space welder?

I remember in x3, the first time I scraped together the cash to buy a Centaur. It was awesome and a real achievement. It took a lot of thinking and planning. By the point where I was looking at buying capital ships, I had a huge trade fleet and a manufacturing empire with stations in every race's territory, which again... effort.

I think the main thing to fix this is to rebalance the payout from missions completely, they pay too much and require no effort. Repairing a station regularly nets me $150k, shooting mines can be up to $200k. This is a ton of money in this game and all I have to do is follow the waypoint, press the button, done. Manual trading can make a similar amount in the same time, but it takes planning and thinking. Combat makes less, 5k(?) for killing a fighter, and there's risk and costs involved. Trade missions would be well balanced in terms of effort to reward, but I always ignore them in favour of fixing a satellite since it pays more and I don't have to find the resources.

I also think ship prices should be upped. In x3 a Nova was 4x the price of a Buster, a centaur was 5x the price of a Nova, etc. The result was you spent more time on each 'level', planning how to upgrade your money engine to be able to afford the next upgrade. In this game, I had enough for a Cerberus (Centaur analogue) in a few hours of just messing about. Maybe x3 was a bit extreme, but x4 has gone too far the other way.

The game feels like it will be awesome someday, but at the moment it needs more challenge.

Yeah... You just posted all reasons why I've stopped playing Elite. Grind was killing me.

Now, 150k is tone of money?! Holy crap man, i need upwards from 10kk for a single station i'm building... And this is while using my traders to bring resources on cheapest price possible. And this is only one station of a dozen of so I'm planning and I'm yet to finalize design - i'm still adding stuff i forgot....
Not to mention proper fleet i want... Not sure why you think 200k is much. For me this is small change, helpful when i run out of money before mining and trading cash in and in need of satellite refill, but not in any way significant. Truth be told i'm doing most of them to kill time while waiting for real income.

On the other hand this do help to speed up boring grind in the beginning. It allowed me to quicker get my starting number of miners running.

Combat and risk?! Common, this combat "idiots" behind sticks are no risk at all. The only reason i may want to ever upgrade beyond 1 gun is time investment in killing stuff.... Only swarms of enemies may pose a problem. They can't keep fire on you, can't rotate properly to being turrets on you, not to mention laughable damage from them and constant boosting killing their shields faster then I can do it.
Devs should actually look on some good pvp flying styles from elite and see how those pilots should behave. At least some of them.... Cause right they are sheep ready to slaughter in any number.
Okey, if you send your own AI then there may be some problems... But you only need to send enough of them and they should still get the job done.

[Socratatus]

I just found mines, tried to shoot them, blew myself up.... moved on... no more shooting at random mines...hmmm

You give up way too easy, m8. Just backoff and get some distance then shoot.

[ApoxNM]

Well, I don't know how you guys play, but I pirate almost every single ship I get, I do some missions for standings and when I need to equip a ships, somtimes some chrystal mining.

But I really haven't gottten that far. I finally conquered my first M ship, with the help of one wing man and now got a quad of 4 heavy fighters and my Frigate.
Hat to reply it several times because I couldn't win the battle (xenon intruded and another damn pirate).

I also use loads of mods.


Get mods, lots of them, makes the game way more palyable!

[ApoxNM]

I just found mines, tried to shoot them, blew myself up.... moved on... no more shooting at random mines...hmmm

You give up way too easy, m8. Just backoff and get some distance then shoot.

Well, I didn't know for what, I didn't see a ship, so I tought, Meh.

[shealladh]

I have restared three times. I played quite some time already and have not found a single ship. I keep reading abouti t, but I never found one.

I just long range scan every once in a while during my trips.
You have abandoned ships when in the map you see a cluster of "?", representing the mines around the ship. You need to blow them all before claiming the freebie.

I just found mines, tried to shoot them, blew myself up.... moved on... no more shooting at random mines...hmmm

I got a glitch where you could see the yellow texture when close enough that it was a mine. Could shoot till Clint Eastwood becomes President to no end.

They should have missions that escalate or contribute to the wars between factions by allowing you to blockade things. Or ruins your reputation because some out back trader found some of your mines, labelling you a "threat" to that faction.

[Arze]

Suuure~ Make things grindier~

I have no idea why people willingly choose the worse option and then demand that it be implemented for everyone. If you want misery then take or make a mod that gives it to you but do me a favor and don't pretentiously act as if I was playing the game wrong, or that the way you play is the "correct" way. Cause it isn't.

I also have no clue where the weird X3 nostalgia come from? You could get a solar station and a mine in 4 hours in that game and then just print money for free in SETA in this one you actually have to earn your SETA first.

That's how I did everything in it and it was easy money. The universe was smaller missions completed faster, and the moment you got your first trading ship you were set for the rest of the game. The longest it took me to get up to speed was when I restricted myself to buying and selling energy cells for a run until I got my Mercury. It was not hard, it was time consuming but it was just as much fire and forget as it is in this game. In fact we had better control so it was even easier than this game. Starting up SETA for hours just to get something done is not gameplay. It never was. That's why the game had no audience. That's why I loathed every moment I had to spend not in SETA in every iteration of the game before. The ships move slowly making it an absolute slog. For no reason whatsoever too! It was literally made that way to waste time. That's not gameplay. If you want to do that there are thousands upon thousands of mobile games out there doing just that.

Even better, stations needed, stored and used resources at much larger quantities so there was always something you could make a bunch of money on, not always on large profits but you could always make a profit. Unlike in X4 where stations buy hundreds of energy cells at a time max at any give time and they push buy prices into the dirt and make their produce expensive. X4 economy is harder, not by much but it is harder thanks to the control that was taken away and the weird way stations buy and store stuff.

I am not going to abandon the game soon cause there is nothing to do. I will abandon it cause there is nothing that WORKS. Just like how I abandoned X Rebirth as well, I liked it despite the universal hate, I liked the design I liked how it was drones loading my trading ship, but it was Broken beyond belief and did not worth my time. There are many games out at any given time. I do not have to put up with half finished crap. Nostalgia does not carry a trash product.

[Wou]

I do agree.
If a game is about going zero to hero, rags to riches, the zero/rags part needs to be there too.
And then I do a very early mission, escorting some freighter for a Boron, and I get not 1, not 2, but 4 ships just waiting there for me for pickup.

[Barnardstar]

Suuure~ Make things grindier~

I have no idea why people willingly choose the worse option and then demand that it be implemented for everyone. If you want misery then take or make a mod that gives it to you but do me a favor and don't pretentiously act as if I was playing the game wrong, or that the way you play is the "correct" way. Cause it isn't.

I also have no clue where the weird X3 nostalgia come from? You could get a solar station and a mine in 4 hours in that game and then just print money for free in SETA in this one you actually have to earn your SETA first.

That's how I did everything in it and it was easy money. The universe was smaller missions completed faster, and the moment you got your first trading ship you were set for the rest of the game. The longest it took me to get up to speed was when I restricted myself to buying and selling energy cells for a run until I got my Mercury. It was not hard, it was time consuming but it was just as much fire and forget as it is in this game. In fact we had better control so it was even easier than this game. Starting up SETA for hours just to get something done is not gameplay. It never was. That's why the game had no audience. That's why I loathed every moment I had to spend not in SETA in every iteration of the game before. The ships move slowly making it an absolute slog. For no reason whatsoever too! It was literally made that way to waste time. That's not gameplay. If you want to do that there are thousands upon thousands of mobile games out there doing just that.

Even better, stations needed, stored and used resources at much larger quantities so there was always something you could make a bunch of money on, not always on large profits but you could always make a profit. Unlike in X4 where stations buy hundreds of energy cells at a time max at any give time and they push buy prices into the dirt and make their produce expensive. X4 economy is harder, not by much but it is harder thanks to the control that was taken away and the weird way stations buy and store stuff.

I am not going to abandon the game soon cause there is nothing to do. I will abandon it cause there is nothing that WORKS. Just like how I abandoned X Rebirth as well, I liked it despite the universal hate, I liked the design I liked how it was drones loading my trading ship, but it was Broken beyond belief and did not worth my time. There are many games out at any given time. I do not have to put up with half finished crap. Nostalgia does not carry a trash product.

Not grindier, just a longer build up time and more sense of progression. Getting a capital ship should feel like an achievement, and at the moment it doesn't. It's also not just about speed, it's about how you make money and progress. In X3 there were ways to make quick cash once you knew about them (space fuel run in Herron's Nebula, for example), but they still required you to figure things out and plan your moves. There are too many ways to make money in X4, that don't take any planning or effort. Also the gameplay involved in things lie shooting a group of mines isn't interesting, zero skill is involved. I do think some of the issue is that at the moment there ISN'T a lot that's working as intended. Piracy looks like it could be awesome, as does sector takeovers, but there are too many problems with combat at the moment to make them interesting.

I do like the game so far. I can see the potential, but it definitely needs some tweaking.

[radcapricorn]

Suuure~ Make things grindier~

I have no idea why people willingly choose the worse option and then demand that it be implemented for everyone. If you want misery then take or make a mod that gives it to you but do me a favor and don't pretentiously act as if I was playing the game wrong, or that the way you play is the "correct" way. Cause it isn't.

Uh-huh, let's see...

I also have no clue where the weird X3 nostalgia come from? You could get a solar station and a mine in 4 hours in that game and then just print money for free in SETA in this one you actually have to earn your SETA first.

That's how I did everything in it and it was easy money... Starting up SETA for hours just to get something done is not gameplay...

Pfff... yes, you are absolutely right, sitting in SETA for hours is not gameplay. And if for you it was the only way, then you did do it wrong. How about you try actually playing X3, and then compare apples to apples?
Yes, you could get a few trade ships rather easily. You could even get a corvette rather easily. And then what? How about a fully equipped missile frigate, and supply to keep it equipped? It's not about how long it takes to get to that, it's about what you need to do to get to that. In X4, you don't need to do all that much to buy or capture a freaking destroyer.

[Arghan]

Not grindier, just a longer build up time and more sense of progression. Getting a capital ship should feel like an achievement, and at the moment it doesn't. It's also not just about speed, it's about how you make money and progress. In X3 there were ways to make quick cash once you knew about them (space fuel run in Herron's Nebula, for example), but they still required you to figure things out and plan your moves. There are too many ways to make money in X4, that don't take any planning or effort. Also the gameplay involved in things lie shooting a group of mines isn't interesting, zero skill is involved. I do think some of the issue is that at the moment there ISN'T a lot that's working as intended. Piracy looks like it could be awesome, as does sector takeovers, but there are too many problems with combat at the moment to make them interesting.

I do like the game so far. I can see the potential, but it definitely needs some tweaking.

Thats actually equals to making game grindier. You want players to take longer to get to meat and bone of this game by doing menial boring stuff. Already crafting is useless. Now make mission less profitable and every sane person will only mine crystals. Than you make crystals less profitable.
Thanks to this attitude there is and will be less diversification of how to start the game and it will not add any fun.
Thats exactly what Elite was doing for last 2 or so years for exactly the same reason, to make big stuff "count".

How exactly would it look like?!

After 10 hours of grind, hey, I can finally buy a miner?! Than another 9 hours and one more? Than 7 hours and I have 3? Than 4 hours to get fourth?!
Or just force player to prioritize SETA, get 1 miner by pirating it, AFK (super intresting gameplay by the way) for 24 hours and get the same exact stuff we can get in multiple ways now?

Yeh, lets make SETA mandatory. Great idea. It will be so much more hardcore true X gameplay that only veteran seta x3 players will be able to handle it. No, wait, they will go back to X3 cause more features.

Sorry, but I don't see any way this request plays well for the game.

Edit:
Just realised something. SETA AFK is actually microtransactions hidden in the game for your electricity provider benefit Egosoft you really should get some money from those dolars they made from your SETA AFK in x3 Or do you actually already get some?!

[ScandyNav]

Right now the game gives you so many large and easy rewards that it never really feels like you've built anything, and the things you have done just feel insignificant. Wealth in X4 comes predominately from a few lucky windfalls and means of constant wealth generation are so easily accessible that they feel meaningless. In x3 getting a universe trader set up was significant, it represented a real investment and those deposits it gave with each successful trade felt meaningful for it.

I don't know what X3 are you referring to, but in X3:AP just for following quest markers on main quest, you get bunch of ships, up to M7 if recall correct, for free and millions of credits.

[Barnardstar]

Thats actually equals to making game grindier. You want players to take longer to get to meat and bone of this game by doing menial boring stuff. Already crafting is useless. Now make mission less profitable and every sane person will only mine crystals. Than you make crystals less profitable.
Thanks to this attitude there is and will be less diversification of how to start the game and it will not add any fun.
Thats exactly what Elite was doing for last 2 or so years for exactly the same reason, to make big stuff "count".

How exactly would it look like?!

After 10 hours of grind, hey, I can finally buy a miner?! Than another 9 hours and one more? Than 7 hours and I have 3? Than 4 hours to get fourth?!
Or just force player to prioritize SETA, get 1 miner by pirating it, AFK (super intresting gameplay by the way) for 24 hours and get the same exact stuff we can get in multiple ways now?

Yeh, lets make SETA mandatory. Great idea. It will be so much more hardcore true X gameplay that only veteran seta x3 players will be able to handle it. No, wait, they will go back to X3 cause more features.

Sorry, but I don't see any way this request plays well for the game.

Edit:
Just realised something. SETA AFK is actually microtransactions hidden in the game for your electricity provider benefit Egosoft you really should get some money from those dolars they made from your SETA AFK in x3 Or do you actually already get some?!

To your first point. I don't mean just nerf the money from missions, I mean rebalance them so menial tasks pay menial money and things that take skill/risk/planning make real money.

To your second point. Huh?

[Arghan]

To your first point. I don't mean just nerf the money from missions, I mean rebalance them so menial tasks pay menial money and things that take skill/risk/planning make real money.

Yeah, but first thing that require planning imho is either administrating bigger mining fleet so to not crash single station goods value and/or optimize how much travel they need to do. Or building self sufficient big station. And those things are first thing that make real money in X4. As I already wrote, imho 10kk+ is minimal amount which count as real money, at pennies level to be exact;).

As for risk - not sure what is possible and bear risk right now. Either task would be impossible (for example kill xenon station without fleet), force you to alienate a faction (not fun), force player against swarm of enemies (imho the only one which actually is possible) or there is nothing I know in game now that poses risk.
Skill? I have no idea what in this game right now need skill beside fighting swarms of enemies at once and using X4 interfaces. And last one I somehow doubt is intentional.

[BrasatoAlBarolo]

To your first point. I don't mean just nerf the money from missions, I mean rebalance them so menial tasks pay menial money and things that take skill/risk/planning make real money.

Yeah, but first thing that require planning imho is either administrating bigger mining fleet so to not crash single station goods value and/or optimize how much travel they need to do. Or building self sufficient big station. And those things are first thing that make real money in X4. As I already wrote, imho 10kk+ is minimal amount which count as real money, at pennies level to be exact;).

As for risk - not sure what is possible and bear risk right now. Either task would be impossible (for example kill xenon station without fleet), force you to alienate a faction (not fun), force player against swarm of enemies (imho the only one which actually is possible) or there is nothing I know in game now that poses risk.
Skill? I have no idea what in this game right now need skill beside fighting swarms of enemies at once and using X4 interfaces. And last one I somehow doubt is intentional.

Fighting is actually hard because primary weapon fire (mouse right click for me) opens the info panel of your target, making hitting your enemy harder.

[Kalantris]

I wholeheartedly agree some things are too easy (on my third save). I struggled really hard on my first one mainly because it's my first "X" title and I had a lot of problems to actually get things going.

I do have house rules on my third playthrough, which are:
- No base building missions unless I actually want a base in this system now.
- No crystal mining outside Xenon sectors. It's actually quite fun mining and fighting Xenon sending waves after waves of fighters and frigates to kill you.

It's much more challenging that way.