Around 100hrs in - Guess it's "Welcome to the party pal" - Fleets Uggghhhh

[photomankc]

Well I guess that the honeymoon period is over and now a few things are clear to me.

1.) The economy side of things is reasonably good. I can trade pretty well, the trade ships make decent money just on the legal stuff and I'm making money with a couple of stations. Not close to a billionaire yet, but enough that buying a few fighters is not a major concern. However pilot leveling is completely broken in my game. I've never seen one level up at all on piloting only morale. That sucks. I have to play dice by buying 4 or so ships at a time and stuffing the decent pilots into a freighter to warehouse them and I've never seen a 5 star pilot, ever. Egosoft - Fix this. Mining and Auto-trading for multiple 10s of hours should be worth upgrading a pilot. Managers and Crew do level up at least but crew seem to only get better if I get damaged, not just in fighting. Again, this should be fixed dang-it. But overall the trade side is workable and runs pretty smoothly.

2.) Fleet action is a nightmarish box of broken glass labeled as rock-candy. I struggle to find much that works right AT ALL.

• Attack this station - 10 minutes later, ships still sitting close to where they were without orders. Repeat, sometimes they will sometimes not who the hell knows? You can be positive that the station will not ever actually be destroyed though, that much I can be sure of

• Wing leader: Attack this ship - This means the wing leader alone should fly 5km past the ship stop, turn around and cruise towards it without travel or boost and follow it into it's home territory to be destroyed. Once engaged in hostile territory it will remain there no matter what as it queues it's own orders over the top of yours (HTF does that make sense?)

• Wing leader and shift select the wing members - This indicates the UI should select some random list of other ships as well and launch them into combat. Great - I'm glad my transports could join the battle against the K today. That's the spirit! The highlighting makes zero sense, as does the sector object list in a crowded fight with wings and docked fighters

• Docking and drones - Mother of GOD, just don't bother. They are an unmanageable crowd of worthlessness. Primarily they make it impossible to tell what my fighters are really doing. Please give them their own icon

• Capitol ship wings - This is apparently secret code for annoy me to the point of cussing like a drunk sailor. "Awaiting orders" every 30 seconds in rotation for everyone following the leader. This starts whenever they desire and ends only when I remove them from the wing. Great

• Destroyers won't destroy - Order them to attack a station and they will take an hour or two to get what they can done. Why? Because my captains are r*******. They stay at range for the main battery and 'pew, pew, pew' away at the station. I have to teleport on to the ship take the helm and get into range for all the turrets and then we can get things done. Eventually the turrets will all stop, leaving obvious modules in place and a station at 0% hull. "Awaiting Orders" is the reply from everyone asked to finish it off

• Some ships seem to have different rules. I watch as my ships score hits OOS strip the shields, do hull damage, and the transport then rockets away on travel drive and my ships then plod along and follow it wherever it wants to go. For me if one single pulse laser hits it's max deceleration into the windshield and time-out. My boost is also very dependent on shields, no shields, no bueno. I guess some have different rules

FFFFFFFFFF%$%^#%$#^%$#^#%^%%$#^%##^%#%^$#^%%$#^$#^% - My HOTAS almost met it's end yesterday trying to extract my 3 corvette/frigates from a second suicide mission into HOP territory. 35 pause/command cancellations later I finally got them to get out.

I sold off the majority of my warships. I'll keep a few destroyers around to take on solo fights, and a frigate/corvette or two, but a mixed fleet is like herding cats. It's just not worth the aggravation right now. Please put the work into fixing this stuff. Without the fleet action it's a workable space flight shooter and space trucking company simulator and it's fun in that regard but a whole dimension is missing that's the most fun to me really.

I'm hoping for good stuff to come because on the whole I'm hooked.

[Kadatherion]

Don't expect too much: X games never really were able to make fleets bigger than a handful of ships really... well, manageable. Sure, in this department X4 is currently a clustef***, in an obviously worse state than its predecessors in their final stage of development are, but those too aren't much better in that regard. It's not a coincidence the main overhaul mod that still keeps X3 relevant is focused first and foremost on that: fleet management (and automation, especially). Granted, X4 has commands and mechanics that X3 never had or could have: they are just totally, completely, utterly broken and nonsensical right now so... that's an improvement, I guess?

[photomankc]

I'm not really griping so much as commiserating with the others. I knew the score and that things were not good right now but man that attack on the HOP defense stations this weekend was more borked than I expected. X3 was never fantastic. Fighter wings were a bit of a nightmare sometimes and enough hassle that I rarely deployed fighters because loosing a few 5 million credit eclipse fighters because they decided to all split up was never too exciting, nor was outfitting them all again. At least they could do some decent stuff like limit themselves to other fighters or capitols. Then you didn't have an eclipse just kamikaze run a frigate or a frigate chase a discoverer down (well you could limit that).

Queued orders are a great benefit on the trade side where they are not in a moment to moment dynamic environment and trade reservations mean that the resource is claimed when I queue the order - well done. On the combat side, if I tell a ship to attack this thing, it's very likely that I want it to do that right now. Not in 30 minutes when it finishes up pounding on this station and flying back to a fly-here command. If I say get out of this sector and fly here the last thing I want it to do is stop and fight it out with everything that lands a hit. This is tricky AI area but I would rather it follow MY current order to a fault. That means flying to this point and evading and escaping, not stopping turning and engaging.

[Kumba42]

Wing leader: Attack this ship - This means the wing leader alone should fly 5km past the ship stop, turn around and cruise towards it without travel or boost and follow it into it's home territory to be destroyed. Once engaged in hostile territory it will remain there no matter what as it queues it's own orders over the top of yours (HTF does that make sense?)

I've noticed this myself. It seems what is happening is the ships are flying to the last-known coordinates of the target, then tracing out where it went and then trying to chase it down. I label this as a bug with the overall pathfinding logic in the game, much like how ships travel to the station icon on the map before heading to the docks. It's like the logic requires a "rally point" as a way of concluding a step in the pathfinding before it moves on to the next step.

Wing leader and shift select the wing members - This indicates the UI should select some random list of other ships as well and launch them into combat. Great - I'm glad my transports could join the battle against the K today. That's the spirit! The highlighting makes zero sense, as does the sector object list in a crowded fight with wings and docked fighters

Bug in the map's selection logic. It doesn't happen all the time, but when drag+selecting ships, if the selection reverts back to the *previous* ship you had selected a second or two later, then close and reopen the map and you'll gain a few minutes of respite. The GUI logic has a number of bugs, which I suspect are closely related, as you see similar selection-releated quirks when navigating around the list of ships element on the left-side of the screen and using shift+click or ctrl+click to select ships. The longer you keep the map open and how often you go around selecting objects seems to be a factor, hence why closing and reopening the map seems to reset some kind of state-tracking logic.

Destroyers won't destroy - Order them to attack a station and they will take an hour or two to get what they can done. Why? Because my captains are r*******. They stay at range for the main battery and 'pew, pew, pew' away at the station. I have to teleport on to the ship take the helm and get into range for all the turrets and then we can get things done. Eventually the turrets will all stop, leaving obvious modules in place and a station at 0% hull. "Awaiting Orders" is the reply from everyone asked to finish it off

Order ships to "fly to" the target first, then attack. That'll cause them to use their travel drive to get close. Apparently the attack command from far enough out will make them rely solely on the normal engine speed. If attacking another ship, your earlier point comes into play where they might try to fly to the last-known point of the target, which if they travel slow enough, just results in a goose-chase all over the map.

[Mileron]

Order ships to "fly to" the target first, then attack. That'll cause them to use their travel drive to get close. Apparently the attack command from far enough out will make them rely solely on the normal engine speed. If attacking another ship, your earlier point comes into play where they might try to fly to the last-known point of the target, which if they travel slow enough, just results in a goose-chase all over the map.

I italicized the part to which I'm directly replying.

That's not entirely accurate.

Having just cleared both Silent Witness 12 of Kha'ak, and Matrix 79B of Xenon, if you command "Attack" from far enough away, they will in fact use travel drive to get there, but they'll slow to non-travel speeds long before arriving; in some cases over 100km.

This is bad in the above scenarios because your M ships get there first, and get splattered.

So your suggestion of "Fly To" is still a good one, except for the fact that ships don't correctly defend themselves when attacked first. AI Pilots take too long to react. You'll have to micromanage their attack upon arrival.

[Kadatherion]

Wing leader: Attack this ship - This means the wing leader alone should fly 5km past the ship stop, turn around and cruise towards it without travel or boost and follow it into it's home territory to be destroyed. Once engaged in hostile territory it will remain there no matter what as it queues it's own orders over the top of yours (HTF does that make sense?)

I've noticed this myself. It seems what is happening is the ships are flying to the last-known coordinates of the target, then tracing out where it went and then trying to chase it down. I label this as a bug with the overall pathfinding logic in the game, much like how ships travel to the station icon on the map before heading to the docks. It's like the logic requires a "rally point" as a way of concluding a step in the pathfinding before it moves on to the next step.

Troubling thing is, it's most likely not a bug. It's definitely intended (although clearly a shortsighted choice), given how every kind of follow command works like that. Ask an AI ship to follow you: it will fly to where you were when you issued the order; you moved in the meanwhile? It will then start a new go to order to the point you are at right now... you move once again? Guess what?

The most likely scenario seems to be they coded the basic follow/go to--->object command like this because it saves A LOT of computing power compared to how it worked in previous titles, where the script updated in (almost) real time, so the AI ship would correct its course towards its followed object WHILE the command was still running. Basically, it now tries to do with two checks and sort of "static" coordinates (and, obviously, fails miserably) what previously did with a monitor that made thousands of checks in the same amount of time. Problem is, regardless of how blatantly stupid the new system is, the game was built upon it: and there might be no easy way to revert that. All the CPU cycles they freed this way have been "invested" somewhere else, so going back to an old - but more CPU intensive - system might not be something they can afford anymore (as the game already is way too CPU hungry). There's hundreds, thousands of AI ships flying around, running commands that most likely make abundant use of this new follow script counting on the fact it's very lightweight: make it work better but not so lightweight anymore? The game will begin to struggle even on the beefiest CPUs. They'd probably need, as such, to rework many other AI scripts to use the follow behaviour more sparingly (or at the very least separating tasks between those that would absolutely need a real time updating follow behaviour and those that could still sort of work with the old one)... it quickly becomes a major rewrite.

All this while we know the universe is going to expand with the race DLCs, with new sectors and their hundreds of AI ships going to be added on top of this scenario (and we also know how the game NEEDS to be much bigger than it is now). I'm very worried there might be no coming back from that oversight, it might basically be too late.

[graphicboy]

Yes, welcome to the party. I posted a number of these (and more) in the beta forum, along with a few other folks.

Think of it like a meta game, where you're actually doing pro bono QA on the game you paid for. Join the dark side.

Oh, and for some of the other annoying stuff ... "there's a mod for that".

[Olfrygt]

Don't expect too much: X games never really were able to make fleets bigger than a handful of ships really... well, manageable. Sure, in this department X4 is currently a clustef***, in an obviously worse state than its predecessors in their final stage of development are, but those too aren't much better in that regard. It's not a coincidence the main overhaul mod that still keeps X3 relevant is focused first and foremost on that: fleet management (and automation, especially). Granted, X4 has commands and mechanics that X3 never had or could have: they are just totally, completely, utterly broken and nonsensical right now so... that's an improvement, I guess?

Well, but in X4 the ships are much cheaper then they where in X3. And it's still an 2018 game and we even got a map. Homeworld has better fleet controls and it came out in 1999...y its an RTS and X4 not but we are now 20yeras older aswell.

[phrozen1]

Troubling thing is, it's most likely not a bug. It's definitely intended ...

I thought about that too and really hope there is an more easy fix for that problem. But i guess you are right and the ai's strange behaviour is more of a root-problem than we want it to be

[Kadatherion]

Troubling thing is, it's most likely not a bug. It's definitely intended ...

I thought about that too and really hope there is an more easy fix for that problem. But i guess you are right and the ai's strange behaviour is more of a root-problem than we want it to be

If I had to guess, I'd say the likely best realistic scenario is a rewrite for pretty much only the player owned assets. Meaning player owned ships would use a separate new set of follow related tasks (so all the attack, escort, patrol etc commands), while the "real" AI keeps the old, borky but pretty much weightless one.

It would definitely not be ideal, but it's the best "illusionist trick" I could think of: while the issue would still be there for 99% of the ships flying around the universe, them not being yours would massively limit your chances of noticing it (unless you were actively and knowingly looking for it); so, even though the player would be given some sort of "unfair" advantage over the AI, it would hardly be noticeable in normal gameplay (or relevant: after all, it wouldn't be much different than the player owned Universal Traders running much smarter trading and traveling scripts than the background AI traders, like we had in X3) . This could still become troublesome for the game performance if a player were to build and order around hundreds of ships, but that's the kind of issue X games always have on many different angles: have too many traders around, you take a hit, build a station complex too big, you take a hit, now even the very map is badly optimized and a few too many satellites and queued orders shown on it and you take a (major and mostly unjustified, but still) hit. That would still be relatively acceptable because statistics have always shown how only a small fraction of X players really get to build huge fleets (be it right or wrong, there's a reason X4, just like its predecessors, still has been built thinking on the micro more than on the macro scale of things).

It would be a compromise, but at least I think it would be realistically feasible. I sure don't see Egosoft ever being able to do a bigger rewrite of the mechanics than something such as this (and even this would be more than what they have ever done in the past), when after 4 months they are still struggling with issues 1000 times easier to rebalance like, I don't know, pilot skill training pace, to name one of the lot. Or how their "solution" for things like the autopilot smashing into walls is disabling collision detection during autopilot and forget about that. Not to mention, they still have to make what basically was the selling point of X4 over the older Xs, the dynamic wars and economy, actually work at all.

The state of the game is honestly atrocious and it's gonna need a LONG time before becoming acceptable: we swallow it because, all being said, there's no real alternative, no other game in the genre really tackles the space sandbox the same way X tries to. Except maybe a few 2d or "minecraftey" indie games, everything else with a certain level of polish is steered more towards the simplier and more linear Freelancer approach. The only "real" competitor to X (at least the way we play it), although apparently in a completely different genre, is Mount & Blade; which, ironically but understandably, suffers from pretty much the same shortcomings: the scope of the game is so vast each of its components tends to be a bit too simplistic or unpolished at times, and the second half of the game, where you go from a few units (like ships) to managing your kingdom (like here with fleets and production complexes), is sorely lacking basic management tools to really handle the macro side of things.

[photomankc]

Don't expect too much: X games never really were able to make fleets bigger than a handful of ships really... well, manageable. Sure, in this department X4 is currently a clustef***, in an obviously worse state than its predecessors in their final stage of development are, but those too aren't much better in that regard. It's not a coincidence the main overhaul mod that still keeps X3 relevant is focused first and foremost on that: fleet management (and automation, especially). Granted, X4 has commands and mechanics that X3 never had or could have: they are just totally, completely, utterly broken and nonsensical right now so... that's an improvement, I guess?

Well, but in X4 the ships are much cheaper then they where in X3. And it's still an 2018 game and we even got a map. Homeworld has better fleet controls and it came out in 1999...y its an RTS and X4 not but we are now 20yeras older aswell.

That's what kills me, I mean it's not like the knowledge isn't out there on how to develop a decent set of fleet controls. Homeworld got a lot right and makes a pretty good example to follow. This game is not Homeworld and I'm glad but managing a fleet is missing so much even micro-managing it is really damn hard. Just some really basic stuff is missing.

- Launch and attack all enemy (even better would be launch and attack all S/M -within- 10km). Then my fighter compliment can actually do it's job and defend me from the drone wave.
- Flee, retreat, whatever - Fly to this point as fast as possible and do not deviate to engage -or- Stop fighting and dock here NOW for fighters! (Edit: Sounds like maybe Withdraw from combat serves 2nd part of this, I need to try that out)
- Attack all X in range - Attack S, M, L/XL, Stations etc. Again, bonus points if I can specify a 'leash' distance.

That last one would be a big help in keeping fighters and frigates from wandering into the station fight and being burned up like ants at first. The second is desperately needed to stop the whole, "Wait, that Xenon I shot me in my Gorgon ass again, let me at 'em" thing. The first would be an enormous help in making the fighters do their job and protect the capitol assets not charging off after everything that crosses their path.

I hope you guys are wrong on the "attack" behavior and some reasonable fix is possible, but I also acknowledge that seems to explain why M/N's are drawn to stations like moths to a bug zapper. I'm betting they do the same thing with freighters they want to attack and get stuck chasing them all the way to the dock because for some reason fighters in X universe are slow-pokes.

As I said though... I'm hooked pretty hard. Finally was able to get the rep needed with God Realm and bought myself an Odysseus and damn if I was not floored standing on my bridge watching it pummel a HOP engine parts factory to rubble. Standing on the dock and watching the fighters/frigate launch as the plasmas all pounded away with the ensuing fireworks overhead on a 65" 4K TV was one of the coolest game experiences I've had. It's got moments of utter brilliance. The Matrix has me.

[graphicboy]

"Attack this" - should be done now and result in nothing else until "this" is dead.
"Attack here" - should mean what it's currently doing.

"Fly to this" / "Fly to here" - should be done now and result in nothing else until "this" or "here" is reached.