Is it too easy to make money?

[Phoynix]

Getting started in X3 was easy... go find pirates and get a Nova to bail, from there you had to work but it was a great start.

X4
Capital ships discounting if they have missile turrets are simply not a threat even to the starting fighter, and you can capture them with a single marine.
You can make 20-50 million in an hour of play time by finding a heavy fighter or nemisis m class to bail so you can take down caps far faster.

It needs to be harder to Earn Rep, Capital ships and cargo transports need to stop having all the crew eject from just getting bombarded... hell marines should be always the last to quit so you actually have to make an effort... Maybe give all ships "internal" security turrets so you need a decent set of marines to start off and have them take more losses.
Ships need to sell for less(while taking into account cargo which they current do not seem too)

S and M ships do seem ridiculously cheap. A big fighter in X3 could easily cost 2 million compared to a scout costing like 60k, and moving from a scout to a shiny Nova was a hill to climb in itself. But now the price and performance difference between different S fight ships is really tiny.

But maybe this is all part of the economy? Ships can't be too expensive if the NPCs have to pay the materials for them now. It could make the economy fragile (I guess, I'm not an economist).

[radcapricorn]

Getting started in X3 was easy... go find pirates and get a Nova to bail, from there you had to work but it was a great start.

Be interesting to do that in a start with no guns.

[Phoynix]

Just go to where pirates are Elenas fortune is a good spot and wait for security/pirates to fight and for some guns to drop it should happen rather quickly

Getting started in X3 was easy... go find pirates and get a Nova to bail, from there you had to work but it was a great start.

Be interesting to do that in a start with no guns.

[Teleth]

It needs to be harder to Earn Rep, Capital ships and cargo transports need to stop having all the crew eject from just getting bombarded... hell marines should be always the last to quit so you actually have to make an effort... Maybe give all ships "internal" security turrets so you need a decent set of marines to start off and have them take more losses.
Ships need to sell for less(while taking into account cargo which they current do not seem too)

I was never a fan of ship bailing in X3, if nothing else they should bail while activating a self-destruct or sabotage sequence (ideally you'd break the lock on the hull door and futz around inside to prevent it). I can understand small ships bailing, but not larger vessels that are part of military structure. It would be nice to have turrets in ships and definitely some marine resistance.

I don't think you can sell ships for less given the simulated economy, but perhaps 'stolen' ships could be marked down in value somehow; with different tiers of faction licenses for selling 're-purposed' vehicles closer to their original value in late-game.

[CaptainX4]

Getting started in X3 was easy... go find pirates and get a Nova to bail, from there you had to work but it was a great start.

Be interesting to do that in a start with no guns.

it would be interesting even for a buzzard with 2 lasers. the nova had turret soo. I always went for a paranid transport ship to bail, it was fairly easy. but now in x4 you dont need that, your starting ship can do anything you will ever need. add that for doing a single mission and you can buy a heavy fighter, do 2 missions and you have a heavy fighter with mk2 turrets... nothing stands in your way...

The only thing I can see that probably qualifies as "too easy" for money making in the early game is crystal farming, that stuff is ridiculously overpriced compared to the ease with which it is found and farmed. The missions being over priced seems laughable to me, though.

really? getting the price of a fitted fighter for every satelite repair is not too much? or getting the price of 1-2 corvettes for building a 3 module station that you dont even have to do anything with? as soon as you have 1.2 million you can literally farm millions in seconds

I love how you make the leap from a few 150,000 average courier missions to building a station as if there was no gap in between. Yes, I think the value and ease of the crystal farming has way more to do with easy money in the early game. Make of that what you will.

because there isnt, thats exactly the point. repair 6-8 satellites or clear mines and there you go, you have the money to build stations. and thats not the big problem, the problem is that then building those cheapass bases pay you even more...

[caiman1776]

A sense of achievement, overcoming a challenge has long been removed from gaming, it started in X games with Albion Prelude.... One only has to see the youtubes of "How to make a billion without playing the game" have proliferated..... Regretfully it appears to be what the market wants...

Except for Kenshi, brutal as ever

This, 100% man. The X universe at least still has some going on, but gaming in general has declined a bunch. It might just be me, but it seems like devs are associating "grind" with "difficulty." Time gating content instead of putting it behind monumental and profoundly difficult challenges is awful. In X4, the content is hardly even time-gated! If you put 6 hours into crystal farming in your starter ship, you can go buy a Nemesis, provided you have the measly 10 rep, and then you can overpower any ship in the game due the the veg AI. There also isn't a good reason to use a lot of the other ships, even if you really like the meager aesthetics going on with a lot of them.

It's not hard to beat Ks and Is, but why do it in the first place? You only run the risk of losing supporting craft/money, or definitely the time spent holding the trigger down while mindlessly floating around with the ship. And, I don't believe we should have to artificially add difficulty to our games by giving the AI a handicap. Their turrets are garbage, and you can strafe three of them to death before losing half your shield. Then the carrier is neutered and is waiting basically to die. Now, if these ships were crazy hard to beat and the rewards actually meant something, we might be onto something!

I think what I am into is something like billion credit carriers that actually do cool stuff like having jump drives, refit capability, and super impressive scale and aesthetics that you can jump into a Xenon sector and fight to get to that weird crystal station they have, where you have to do a crazy boarding operation to be able to steal plans for a ship design that they are going to be rolling out that would be able to cloak or something, or just the tech itself.

It would be cool to go on a super long and difficult mission string where you had to rediscover ship schematics that were lost during the gate switch, that take insane resources to build in line with the lore, so it presents a real choice factor or something along those lines.

Those are probably dumb ideas, but that's the kind of stuff I like because if gives you a reason to use existing mechanics and content. Right now, I just fly around in a Pulsar waiting for a big conflict or problem or adventure to show up that is worth a lot of effort for some reason.

X4 has great bones, and I hope the devs crank up the authenticity a bit (a lot) to match. I am on board for the process, even though I am getting a little frustrated with the "months post launch, it will be a fun game" dynamic that seems to be the norm these days. I will say, at least these guys seem interested in fixing their game and listening to their community, kudos for that.