WHAT IS THE NEXT BIG THING? ...and WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE ,or not like IN IT

[perkint]

Multi player of any form has been (repeatedly) ruled out for X3 and explanations for that given in full.

Doesn't mean it won't be in TNBT tho

Personally I would like some form of coop in a hosted universe, but not sure as it'll be there. Ok they could have added multi player to TNBT from the start much more easily than retrospectively into X3 but it would still be development time taking away from other things. And the majority of the customer base has repeatedly shown more interest in single player than anything else (check any of the many polls if you want proof). And Egosoft (as has already been mentioned in this thread) are very good at listening to their customer base

Tim

[efernal]

Surely it reinforces it? You appear to be saying the same thing as me, namely, weapons do too much damage and shields don't block enough of it!

That's about right. Some weapons are just too powerful for what they do. Or for what ships can equip them. And a unified shield system just doesn't make any sense in any military when the enemy is using the same thing either. Should every military on Earth have f-16 fighter jets? No that's why there are Migs. Or Ak-47s for everyone? No Some military's Use the m-16 or some other form of assault rifle. That's why I pointed out there should be different shield types with different recharge rates. It makes no sense that the different races shouldn't figure out to build different types of shields. And yes shields are weak and rather useless in some cases.

Also if there should be a killer weapon that cuts down the shields like a hot knife through butter (looking at you PBG's), They out to be a rare weapon. Thus enabling only the leader of a group have 1 or 2. No matter how big the group is.

What i meant by throwing out the argument is that it is not entirely just because there is one ship that uses a shield killer but whole groups of 3 or more ships that will engage you with over 1/2 of them using the same weapon. If you want to solo you almost always loose the fight due to this fact. Not everyone wants to sling missiles from a distance or use some ungodly giant ship with flacks. Some of us like to get down and dirty and no longer can do just that due to some annoying game imbalances and a lack of options to customize the ship more to better suit the players needs. The only thing a player can customize is what ship they fly and what guns to use.

[StarSword]

One more thing: the ability to use a tractor beam on an enemy ship would be awesome. It would make spacewalk boarding operations way simpler if you could hold the other guy in place for your marines (who only have a top speed of 28 m/s).

[stickocide]

I come back to X3TC every now and then, but I always find it really disappointing. The idea of the game is great, and would I'm sure be very popular, if it wasn't for it's many terrible flaws. But these haven't been addressed. I really really hope that the next thing Egosoft makes improves these - as it stands they have a very dedicated fanbase which can look past all the crap and find fun in the game, but I feel most players are very turned off by all the things it does wrong instead of enjoying the stuff it does right. Those that buy out of interest will probably become frustrated and ditch the series after one game, so sales are probably poor. If Egosoft manage to make a new space game that fixed some of these problems, I can't see why it wouldn't take off in a more mainstream way, and attract a large fanbase and lots of MONEY.

Virtually the only way to be successful in this game and get the big exciting ships requires micromanagement. A lot of it. Even the automated universe traders have to be bought, outfitted and trained in particular places. You have to spend loads of time actually getting good ships, outfitting them, etc etc, even if you have piles of cash. Then they get blown up very quickly in combat, and you have to start again. There is no way to automate this effectively, and that there haven't been any attempts to make effective and simple ways to do so is a disaster. Stations have to be set up through complicated menus which are hard to navigate, and aren't very flexible.

Organising the ships you buy is also very poorly done. The ships have terrible pathfinding and general AI, often crashing, firing into the wrong place, not bringing main guns to face the enemy, etc. If you try and field a carrier with a fighter fleet, even with mods to improve things, you have to constantly buy in fighters as they die all the time. They often die without once shooting at the enemy due to poor flight path AI and wing AI. They also crash into their carriers and die that way quite a lot too. You can't automate purchasing and outfitting these effectively, which is shameful, and makes carriers, which are quite powerful, a complete waste of effort when one could use destroyers and not worry about losing all the stuff they've invested so much time in.

The other races in the world regenerate ships all the time. This is not done as accurately as one would hope - no cost for parts, no race banks, no convincing market, but at least it happens. If players could have a menu where they arrange to have, say, a fleet wing of 20 fighters which are automatically bought in, outfitted, and shipped to where they need to be, that'd be great. Perhaps it should be possible to hire a fleet director, who buys in and trains ST/UTs, and deploys them where they make most profit. Maybe you could order your hired director to ensure you always have a battlegroup of so many ships of a certain type that work as a wing, which you can give general orders to. If these could find their way, together, as a group, fly effectively as a group, and be replaced by new ships bought by the 'fleet director' as lost in combat, the game would be infinitely more fun for those not fond of micromanagement. If you had tons of money, you could specify that you want at least one frigate patrolling every sector you have stations in. As these are destroyed they would be automatically repurchased. You could, say, always have a battlegroup flying around xenon sectors clearing up anything they encounter. Or a flight wing of 50 UTs that are bought in and automatically trained as they die. This sort of automation should perhaps cost a lot of money, but be viable ingame. It would make it so much more enjoyable for more mainstream gamers.

Even if there could be a system of AI which would take care of ship acquisition, organising them with the current HUD would be very hard. As it stands, it is really pretty bad. It is confusing, hard to navigate, restrictively text based, and in general terrible to use. You can only open one window at a time. You cannot resize things. You cannot click and drag a selection box. All of these things are really obvious ideas, and haven't been implemented. This means organising any large number of ships is a disaster, even with lots of mods to make it simpler.

If there was a macro-management system to buy and order ships about, with perhaps a massive tactical universe-wide map that allows you to easily control the different aspects of your entire fleet, wherever they are, the game would be drastically better. If there was more automation and more effective control through a better HUD with a universe overview (and perhaps a FULLY mobile camera to more effectively see what's going on and better enjoy those actionpacked moments), the other small problems could be overlooked, and the game would be so much more fun that what it is now.

That said, there are small things that would be easier to fix in a new game. The system of communication with other pilots would be better if the pictures of other pilots weren't so terrible. Their speech is very poorly done, and it might be better if the game was text-based for less important speech, and only given audio for important or plot-related lines. Without worrying about accompanying audio for all of the lines, they could be varied more and there could be more options for conversation with other pilots. At the moment the speech is lifeless and forced, and very predictable.

The game also takes itself very seriously, and looks ridiculous as a result of this. Alien races have stupid dialogue which would make you laugh if the game wasn't so serious. Think elcor in mass effect - ridiculous, but funny and fairly believable. Here it's poorly done, and wrenches you out of the game and back into reality due to how unbelievable and poorly done they are. The text and lore is largely great, and the sector descriptions add to this, but the pilot pictures and their speech just makes you want laugh at the game. If it was willing to make jokes about itself more often, it would be ok, but that it's so serious all the time, yet has such stupidly childish dialogue and more makes it just seem low quality.

That said, the game is fun in many ways. The sectors are beautiful, and the way that new mods have improved this beauty is amazing. The ships are great looking, and well designed. The fighting, in sector, is alright if you ignore the poor capital ship AI and aiming and the fighter problems. Fighting as a single M3-M6 is great fun. OOS is pretty crazy and unpredictable, and could really use being looked into. The trading element and market are in general well done - clearly it can't be 100% accurate due to CPU constraints, but if races had to actually buy all of the stuff they put on their new ships, interacting with the market would be much more fun. As it stands it feels too much like a boring spreadsheet-based job, not quite a game.

Automation and ease of use really should be key in a game like this, and if the next game manages to do these the user base could expand drastically and the developers could expand a bit with the extra money they'd get. They have good ideas, but the implementation is poor for anyone other than a hardcore micromanagement specialist, meaning it's just not fun enough for mainstream gamers, and will never expand out from it's tiny community, which is a real shame. I want it to be good so much, but it just isn't in its current state.

[Observe]

I think TNBT should have a very high learning-curve. This so it isn't "dumbed down" too much. After all, X has traditionally been a long-running game, with some playing many months without restart. What does spending a month or so learning the UI matter?

[TWYQ]

3D universe and better back-story.

By 3D universe I primarily mean universe map and gates (N E S W in space ???). Why not try something like a molecule model that can be rotated and zoomed in and out as it expands with players discoveries. It would also be more realistic if different sectors of the same solar system are connected by some sort of an in system connections ( similar to orbital accelerators in X3TC - taking in to account that planets/moons/asteroids are moving and that all space stations are also moving) while connections to other systems would be jump points/wormholes/gates. That would create a different map levels - sector/system/universe.

Back-story of the game could include a start where some races are already connected while others are isolated. Depending on chosen race player starts in an isolated or connected part of the universe. Ownership of sectors and systems should change through conquest, politics, purchase and discovery (previously unknown) - with and without players influence. Player should have an option to get a job - in a large corporation or for government as a cargo ship pilot, explorer, construction contractor (see my previous post on modular station design - connecting new modules to an existing one should be an delicate job that requires a skill), police or military. In that way on start he should be just a pilot starting his career. If he chooses to go on his own he should have more freedom of choice but more difficult living/earning, while as an employee he should have more security in moneymaking but less choice in type of jobs he takes.

P.S. Definitely against game dependent on internet, and against turning it in an RTS - I like RTSs but in space sim I don't like to worry about wingmen and task forces but enjoy myself in exploring the universe and fighting.

[Argon tactican Justin]

An Auto-Profesional instead of the Auto-Pillock.

On one side you have half the people that play this game complaining about auto-pillock. On the other side you have me worrying that my computer is slowly becoming something like the Xenon because the autopilot can capital ships through a dense asteroid field without hitting anything, even coming within less than a kilometer of an asteroid and almost orbiting it for several seconds.

As for what I think would make interesting additions or changes to a new X-series game if one is being made:
1. Changing the ship classifications of some ships to make the sizes of destroyers more accurate compared to carriers. In World War 2, destroyers were (and still are) much smaller than carriers but larger than most other ships. They were able to attack other ships to defend the carriers. Battleships, however, were slow ships about the size of carriers that had more guns (and firepower) than any other ship, but were too slow and large to be anything other than target practice for ships, subs, and aircraft. They ended up being replaced by cruisers, which were about as large and fast as destroyers, but many people have the idea that they mainly carry and launch missles to engage other ships and aircraft as well, so some people end up calling them missle cruisers. Destroyers and cruisers were also slightly faster than some other ships, but carriers could be about as fast as destroyers if memory serves. When I think about it, the M7s are about the right size compared to M1s to be called destroyers (M7Ms would therefore be missle cruisers if what I said is compared to the other ship classes), leaving M2s to be considered battleships. If you've used something like Cycrow's cheat collection package to spawn the Valhalla into X3TC, you'll agree that it's too big to be considered a destroyer

2. Perhaps the self- awareness of the Xenon reaches a point where they finally begin talking to the Commonwealth and Terrans instead of trying to kill everything that moves. This wouldn't suprise me because the Xenon and ATF once stopped attacking each other and joined forces to kill me during part of the Terran plot

3. The source of the Kha'ak is discovered and their attacks become more destructive than ever. Operation Final Fury would continue, becoming more powerful as they approach their ultimate goal of destroying the Kha'ak once and for all. This would be extremely interesting for me because the Kha'ak are probably the only race I fear besides the Split.

4. Angered by the Terran's continued development of jumpgate technology and Terran/Commonwealth tampering with what must be a minor hub for the jumpgate network, the Ancients reveal themselves to eliminate what they view as a threat to their power and superiority in the universe, leaving the Commonwealth, Terrans, and (assuming that everything on this list would be part of a new X-series game for the purposes of this discussion) the Xenon to join forces against a far more advanced foe. They would have to fight through at least one larger hub sector (the one that was most likely used to reconfigure the Jumpgates at Alpha Centari to isolate Earth from the rest of the universe), possibily part of another jumpgate network considering that there are at least two such networks mentioned in X3TC- including the one containing the Commonwealth, and eventually manage to capture one of the hubs and some of the Ancients' technology that is reverse engineered to fight back. With this idea, the larger hub may simply act like the hub in X3TC with more gate pairs, or it may be able to reconfigure jumpgate connections, activate, and deactivate jumpgates as well as insert itself between two connected sectors, which might cause problems because people could use it to turn the entire universe into a giant maze, link sectors controlled by races they don't like to Kha'ak sectors, or even deactivate jumpgates to isolate entire races. With the Ancients appearing to destroy everyone, it would be interesting for a similar reason as #3 on this list

[Nanook]

...
1. Changing the ship classifications of some ships to make the sizes of destroyers more accurate compared to carriers. In World War 2, destroyers were (and still are) much smaller than carriers but larger than most other ships. They were able to attack other ships to defend the carriers. Battleships, however, were slow ships about the size of carriers that had more guns (and firepower) than any other ship, but were too slow and large to be anything other than target practice for ships, subs, and aircraft. They ended up being replaced by cruisers, which were about as large and fast as destroyers, but many people have the idea that they mainly carry and launch missles to engage other ships and aircraft as well, so some people end up calling them missle cruisers. Destroyers and cruisers were also slightly faster than some other ships, but carriers could be about as fast as destroyers if memory serves. When I think about it, the M7s are about the right size compared to M1s to be called destroyers (M7Ms would therefore be missle cruisers if what I said is compared to the other ship classes), leaving M2s to be considered battleships. If you've used something like Cycrow's cheat collection package to spawn the Valhalla into X3TC, you'll agree that it's too big to be considered a destroyer ...

You're confusing WWII designations with space warships. Think Star Wars Star Destroyer, not little tin cans of the oceans. Really, it's all just a different nomenclature, and there's no reason it has to follow 'wet navy' conventions.

IMO, wet navy 'destroyers' are really misnamed anyway. They don't destroy so much as protect. So technically, maybe they should be called 'protectors'.

[StarSword]

You're confusing WWII designations with space warships. Think Star Wars Star Destroyer, not little tin cans of the oceans. Really, it's all just a different nomenclature, and there's no reason it has to follow 'wet navy' conventions.

IMO, wet navy 'destroyers' are really misnamed anyway. They don't destroy so much as protect. So technically, maybe they should be called 'protectors'.

Actually, the Imperial Navy in Star Wars was an anomaly even within its own universe. In the Expanded Universe, at least, the rest of the militaries used more standard classifications. Example: the Rebel Alliance (and later, New Republic) answer to the Imperial Star Destroyer was the Mon Calamari MC80 Star Cruiser. (They also countered them with daredevil fighter pilots using a tactic known colloquially as "Trench Run Disease," but that's beside the point.)

Plenty of other sci-fi universes use conventional classes, including (but not limited to) David Weber's Honorverse (where the closest match to the M2 is called a dreadnought, and has an even bigger sibling called a superdreadnought), John Scalzi's Old Man's War, and yours truly's United Galactic Federation universe (heavy cruiser, battlecruiser, command ship, dreadnought, everything but destroyer; that's a smaller, faster capital ship akin to an M7).

And wet-navy destroyers were originally built as a counter to torpedo boats (a late 19th-early 20th century design, functionally equivalent to X3TC's M8 class). In fact, they were originally called "torpedo boat destroyers." But over time their roles shifted as technology and tactics evolved. The name was too long anyway.

[jlehtone]

IMO, wet navy 'destroyers' are really misnamed anyway. They don't destroy so much as protect. So technically, maybe they should be called 'protectors'.

Yes, looking at their original name explains a lot.


Auto-pillock is on both sides. Both in your ships (on your wing) and in the foes on your tail. The fights alone have been awfully easy, but on the other hand taking friends into the fray has been fruitless too. Not to mention that the auto-pillock does not strafe, jump, avoid the sector where you are, or beat you with a Docking Computer.

Whether or not that has been "balanced", one surely can build balance around some other point too.

[StarSword]

In case you guys are wondering, I studied naval tactics at Trafalgar, Jutland, and Midway for my senior thesis in high school. I also looked at the War of the Spanish Armada, but what I saw there was less tactics and more Spanish incompetence and bad weather.

Personally I would like some form of coop in a hosted universe, but not sure as it'll be there. Ok they could have added multi player to TNBT from the start much more easily than retrospectively into X3 but it would still be development time taking away from other things. And the majority of the customer base has repeatedly shown more interest in single player than anything else (check any of the many polls if you want proof).

Personally I would like some form of coop in a hosted universe, but not sure as it'll be there. Ok they could have added multi player to TNBT from the start much more easily than retrospectively into X3 but it would still be development time taking away from other things. And the majority of the customer base has repeatedly shown more interest in single player than anything else (check any of the many polls if you want proof).

As far as multiplayer is concerned, I have one word: "Meh."

The obsession these days with putting every damn thing on the Internet (I'm talking about cloud computing here, not Facebook) is really stupid in my opinion. Sure, it means you don't have to store things on your computer, but it also means your data is less secure and you can't access it if your Internet goes down.

I live out in the backwoods of a rural county in North Carolina, and fragging Embarq and Time Warner Cable are too fragging cheap to put in DSL (even though we have five households in the space of a square mile or so, who would gladly share in the installation cost, and we have told the cable companies so repeatedly). We're stuck with HughesNet satellite internet, and have a download limit of about 150 MB a day (or our connection speed gets cut to around 3KB/s for around twelve hours). Plus it's slower than would be required to download X3TC from Steam anytime this century: connection speed averages around 120KB/s. (And our neighbors down the road don't even get that fast; they're stuck with dial-up, last I checked.

Getting back to topic, my opinion on multiplayer is, it's only good if you've got good Internet. (I can't even reliably play Wizard 101 at home.) And keep releasing the games on DVD, too: GameStop is more convenient for those without good Internet.

[stickocide]

The idea of the Xenon forming a higher intelligence and working as something more interesting other than the crazy genocidal AI that it is sounds excellent. They are one of the more interesting races, but serve very little purpose in the game other than being an antagonist. And they're not very good antagonists, with no voice and a dull plot. I found ME's Geth - a confused legion of AIs struggling to define themselves and their purpose in the universe - one of the most interesting races on there. Some sort of loose alliance with the Xenon would be a truly awesome thing to see, too, against a more interesting and developed new super-antagonist.

All we need is a good voiceover, like Sovereign from ME1. Yes, the X series isn't renowned for its excellent voice-overs, but I can hope...

[DeLoreanLover]

I WANT X4: [Insert awesome name here]!!!!!!!!!!!!

X4: Improved Auto-Pilot

[Retiredman]

I WANT X4: [Insert awesome name here]!!!!!!!!!!!!

X4: The Next Big Thing Before X4:The Newer Next Big Thing.

[Lord Kellmar]

My wishlist :
- Full 64bits. No more 32bits to limit
- Multicore support
- A girl named Suzie who wander from station to station
- A more logical cargo system : No more S/M/L/XL. Why an 1-XL uses the same amount of space than a 1-S, but is still bigger ? Plus why do installed components (weapons, missiles, shields) do use cargo space ? (I'm thinking of a system more like in the Escape Velocity games)

[Snafu_X3]

- A more logical cargo system : No more S/M/L/XL. Why an 1-XL uses the same amount of space than a 1-S, but is still bigger ? Plus why do installed components (weapons, missiles, shields) do use cargo space ?

Think of the S-XL definitions as being a combination of both volume & mass. One standardised cargo unit of an item may take more volume/mass than a different item.

WRT weapons/shields etc, how else do you think the ship will fit them? Armaments/protection systems would logically be situated inside the hull, to protect them from damage in combat (hence you only start losing them once you start taking hull damage, usually after shields have been shot to bits). If you put something inside the hull, it takes up space that could be used for cargo..

[Argon tactican Justin]

The idea of the Xenon forming a higher intelligence and working as something more interesting other than the crazy genocidal AI that it is sounds excellent. They are one of the more interesting races, but serve very little purpose in the game other than being an antagonist. And they're not very good antagonists, with no voice and a dull plot. I found ME's Geth - a confused legion of AIs struggling to define themselves and their purpose in the universe - one of the most interesting races on there. Some sort of loose alliance with the Xenon would be a truly awesome thing to see, too, against a more interesting and developed new super-antagonist.

Which is why I suggested the Kha'ak become more dangerous as their source is discovered (summary of #3 on the list) and the idea of the Ancients coming to destroy all knowledge of jumpgate construction (#4) with the Xenon, now communicating with the other races, joining the fight to stop them from wiping out humanity and the Commonwealth races.

Stickocide is the only one that actually responded to any part of my list of ideas besides the idea of calling M2s battleships instead of destroyers, but nobody's mentioned the last two on the list so far...

As for the list, I have three more ideas (numbering will continue from the end of the list on my last post so I can keep track of when I came up with each idea):

5. Allow TLs, M7s, M1s, and M2s (in the case of ships such as the Valhalla) to trade with stations using homebased ships. These ships would be able to enter a specific area near a station when recieving the dock at command (or something similar), buy/sell goods to the station, and have the ships homebased to it fly back and forth, delivering resources to the station and picking up goods bought by the ship based on their cargo capacity, allowing large amounts of goods to be bought and sold at a station for a single price, but taking a long amount of time based on how many ships are transferring goods, their max speed, cargo capacity, and the quantity of goods bought or sold. The player could also decide to buy or sell multiple types of goods and then order the transports to begin the transfer when they're done selecting goods. Perhaps these larger ships could send their transports out to several stations in the sector at the same time, allowing a UT on a TL to trade with multiple stations to earn smaller amounts of money while traveling to make more profitable trades.

6. Allow the player to build shipyards, which can build ships like the HQ but aren't as valuable if lost.
6. Allow equipment docks, shipyards, and the HQ to be connected to a complex. Equipment docks and the HQ would provide additional storage space to the complex, while shipyards and the HQ would use the resources produced by the complex to build ships and would work together to produce multiple ships simultaneously and more quickly. All three would serve as additional hubs, providing additional docking space and allowing capital ships to dock with the complex. If an equipment dock, shipyard, or the HQ are one of the first two stations in a complex, perhaps it would serve as the hub instead of building a new station for that purpose. Finally, if a complex contains at least one equipment dock, shipyard, or the HQ and the primary complex hub is destroyed, one of those stations would become the primary hub instead of the entire complex being destroyed

[Tonto]

A real economy. Every ship built, every gun installed comes out of the buildings you trade with.

I'd love to see in a long time of peace the buildings get filled up and stop with maybe certain supplies (computer parts etc.) being shipped to the planet and so those keep running. Then once an invasion happens and losses are taken it all starts running again as the demand kicks in.

You could also then have a start where your race is weak and plagued by enemies/pirates with the military barely holding them off due to lack of parts/economy. Then every factory you build or NPC factory you supply actually effects the race as the military get more ships and push back etc.

Could have economic news with losses, shortages, sector security and new ships.... Gives more of a purpose for buildling stuff other than just money.

[GreasyBaz]

Is it a cover based first person shooter? Using the unreal engine? With space marines with huge shoulder pads?

Boron space marines.

[StarSword]

Could have economic news with losses, shortages, sector security and new ships.... Gives more of a purpose for buildling stuff other than just money.

Seconded. The Escape Velocity series has that, and those games are way less advanced than X3.