[Feedback] Crews, Wings, and Empire Building

[Avius Caelestis]

Hi all. Excited to see X getting back to it's roots, I gave XR a chance and pretty much walked away afterwards. It didn't have what X was to me in it. X4 has a lot of holes currently that'll likely take some time to fix, but it definitely seems to be the right path again. I have a few things I'd like to call attention to though, and I'll try not to beat a dead horse with regards to crews, training, and current combat AI because that horse corpse is already looking pretty mutilated.

• Crew Training. This has been noted before, the issues with speed and what the manuals / directives are for and what they might do in the future. I'd like to ask / suggest a different tack to better fit in with the concept of Empire Building. And that concept is...
• Barracks.
  1. As mentioned previously, we need personnel transfer ships. The current way to move crew around is, quite frankly, abysmal. Also, am I really to believe that a fighter has 4-5 people on it? It's clearly a one person ship, no, just no. No. Make me a shuttle like ship, or a pirate raider S class ship, that clearly can hold that many people - it wouldn't be difficult or require much modification, there are some larger courier ship models that could easily fit the mould for such without needing new designs. And for shuttles, we should have at least one M class ship that can ferry say 100 ish people. Assuming no real cargo capacity on board, that should easily be doable with the current M class ship sizes. Hell, the Teladi would probably just retrofit some container pods to have seats and call it a MAC flight (for a clearly marginal fee).
  2. Give us someplace to put crew that isn't a ship. IE, Barracks. We clearly have the ability to build bases, and that's a core tenant of X gameplay. I want to be able to build some defence platforms. And these platforms should have launch structures for ready teams, as well as training facilities for my hired hands. This station module would need to be different than the current setup for "station crew" since that's done by habitation module, which is why I'm placing this in feedback rather than mod requests. I don't necessarily believe it needs a separate model or anything though.
  3. I should be able to train crew not yet assigned to a ship. IE, in the barracks. This should require usable items (like directives) and should have a cap on it (you can train them up to 2 or 3 stars max) which each star next requiring more time to complete.
• Speaking of ready teams. What are wings? No, seriously, the only way I can figure out how to make them is by assigning ships to protect one another. However, one must be careful because if you create a "loop" of protect commands the game crashes. Like every time. I can kind of see why that would happen, but it is a bit annoying. There should be more thought in wing design, and if there is already (ie something other than just assigning wing ships to defend the primary... like how do you create a convoy wing with more than one primary to defend? Hence those protect loops...) I'd love to be illuminated about how it works.
  1. On the topic of wings, I see no way to assign ships to one another permanently. How do you create fighter and carrier groups? We can assign ships to a station, but that's for mining and trading. Defence seems to not work the same way, instead setting up protect / guard routines with a patrol parameter? I definitely don't see a way to create Q-ships. The L class cargo vessels have 1 or 2 S bays, making them perfect as Q ships for those who wish to play pirate or for the war monger to provide a superior surprise defence. I specifically would like to see a way to create groups / teams that are permanently assigned to one another and have the ability for them to either fly CAP or to dock with their assigned base until needed (ie, when attacked). No, defence drones don't count. They are lol bad at doing anything right now with the limited numbers ships can carry. It's far more appealing to have additional cargo / build / repair drones and use actual fighters with crews for ship protection.
  2. And further extrapolating the point above with crew training, I'd love to see a way for managing station defence teams. We should have the ability to assign a primary and backup team for CAP, where the crews rotate based on time so that every pilot gets training time while providing for immersion and realism and cycling of the NPCs seen on one of your stations. I could see creating wings that had, say, a veteran pilot for the lead fighter with two or more apprentices / etc as wingmates for training and backup (simultaneously giving you fodder and increasing the likelihood of experienced crews to survive desperate fights).
• Ship default behaviour needs a drop-down setting with player created profiles. Currently, it is set by individual ship and global. There is no option to create a preset and assign it via dropdown to a class / type of ship. It's a huge QoL improvement to not have to micromanage each individual ship, especially once you start getting to the point of owning a few dozen ships. Currently, I have more trade ships than attack ones, so my global settings are set up for how I expect a trade ship to behave and just individually setting each "war" ship. However, I see the potential for having a setup for my warships, a setup for my small mining ships operating singly or in pairs, a setup for my large mining ships that probably have fighter escort / backup, a setup for my exploration ships (that should definitely be interacting with derelicts, for example, when most other ships shouldn't waste the time or inventory) etc etc.
• Player interaction with the galaxy as a whole. There is a section in the statistics screen that talks about your merchant and fighting ranks. I'd like to see this have more impact on gameplay. A player that is a multi-system trading empire, or a heavily armed mercenary force, should be noticed by the factions in-game. Some should find you antagonistic, and others should want to assist you (perhaps aided by your reputation with them). The game already talks about how you're being noticed (ie for the faction / rep missions) but this is just to grant you access to more missions. It doesn't have an impact on the galaxy. In regards to the war missions (ie. the holy empire civil war) I want to see system territories changing hands. Show me those borders changing. And provide a means for players to claim space in a similar way, where you "own" a system or sector and get your border colour around it and can set the terms of legal vs illegal goods, and the choices you make in doing so will also affect your reputation with the surrounding factions.
• Why do I need to be >+20 reputation before getting any hab modules for my space ports? This seems to be a really high margin for entry. Yes, I know I can get them by
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  doing the PHQ missions, unlocking the research items, and EMP bombing some stations
  but I shouldn't think it unreasonable that we get access to say, the small versions of hab modules? Or we're limited on the actual crew we can have initially? Either way, I think this could use a relook.

I'll leave NPC appearance and player characterisation to modding, since I think that's where it'll really shine (I personally would like to be able to choose what my player avatar looks like, and how my NPC appearance is for certain roles, but I know that's not everyone's deal since some people would like a more random, Firefly-esque crew appearance).