My list of future features/fixes

[taztaz502]

I apologise in advance for the huge wall of text i was just thinking about what x4 was lacking to make it feel like a living breathing universe and most of it is already their just needs some improvements.

Improve the range of capital ship turrets

Improved Capital Ship combat behaviour (With the increased range of weapons make capital ships fly in relatively straight lines unless trying to evade the enemy)

Improve fleet behaviour/Ai (The player can assign roles to individual fleet member's e.g. set fighters to only launch and attack fighters then dock, set frigates and destroyers to remain in formation with carriers, have fighter wings fly in formation around your fleet as escorts)

Improve fleet/wing Formations (Ships in fleets/wings will fly in correct formations you set them and will remain in those formations this includes ai fleets no longer will the Ai send in ships 1 at a time)

Add a ton more small fighters to fulfil a variety of roles e.g. Police ships should be different to navy fighters etc (Think about freelancer, you have liberty navy ships then you have the liberty security police ships which were weaker.)

Flesh out the pirate faction (Give them their own ships,stations etc and make them more active in the universe. e.g. disrupting trade lanes and hijacking freighters. With the new map colours i've already noticed behemoth plunderers looting stations which is really cool)

Add a civilian faction (Ships,stations etc but belong to no faction. If you attack them in owned space you would take a reputation hit but less of what you would if you attacked a ship belonging to that faction, if you attack them in unowned space you receive no reputation hit. Although would be nice if you added some sort of pirate rank so if you did it often other factions would scan you more or simply ask you to leave their territories without just resorting straight to violence)

Improve station control (Allow players to designate specific tasks to station subordinates e.g. the ability to command mining ships to only mine certain resources rather than having them decide on their own, same with trade ships set them specific cargo for each ship.)

Add a lot more neutral sectors and spread out the bubble more so it doesn't seem like every edge of the galaxy is occupied.

Slow down in sector travel (Sectors seem small due to the size, cut down fast travel speed by at least half but improve ai so they navigate better)

Change weapons significantly and add a power reactor component to ships which powers the weapons. (We need weapons that focus shields, hull, crew and power from ships to make combat more interesting and improve features like boarding)

Change missiles to actually have different uses and longer range. (Smart missiles should completely ignore chaff and need to rely on point defence to take them out, missiles in general should do a lot more damage or maybe make them ignore shields and give us counter missiles)

Change torpedo (Torpedoes should do huge damage to hull and destroy any components in the vicinity of the explosion, they should be pretty slow and easy to deal with if fired from far away and should only really be used in close strafing runs to the station/capital ship Ai should focus any bomber class ships approaching their capitals/stations)

Rename destroyers to frigates, add some bigger destroyers twice the size of the current, twice the guns and a lot of range.

Rename Frigates to drone carriers (Specialised in cargo retrieval and repairing/restocking capital ships)

Add more corvettes for each faction (More ships like nemesis)

Add more "Consumer Goods" Type wares, e.g. food stuff, medical supplies but things like perishable foods, entertainment products etc

Improve station/fleet workforce (All work force now require food/medical supplies even on ships, Workforce happiness will effect performance, if happiness falls below a certain degree they will leave to keep basic needs you must supply at least food/medical supplies to boost happiness beyond that you must also supply other consumer goods like i listed above.

Playing into that system drugs would also increase happiness whilst adding some detrimental effects (Maybe chance for factories/ship components to break down for X amount of time due to errors of the high work force meaning they're beneficial to a certain degree until someone messes up, which gives us a reason to make things like spacefuel/spaceweed illegal in our own sectors and police it)

Add transportation rating to stations and new ships personnel transporters. (Adding these ships to stations would improve happiness and transport workforce around stations etc)

Balance quantities, weight and consumption of goods and perishables giving us more use for different types trade ships. (E.g. Fast ship for perishables, huge freighters for industrial wares, medium freighters for food and med supplies, small haulers for smuggling etc etc)

Personnel Uniforms (Give us the ability to give employees certain uniforms/space suits for more immersion)

Empire diplomacy (Unlocked by claiming your own sector and building a very expensive capital building which is also added to every other faction, This would allow diplomacy options with other factions to negotiate things like war, peace, border controls and trade tariffs.)

As well as consumer goods as upkeep it would be cool if we had to pay employees a wage too, obviously this would have to be balanced to still make stations profitable, but also mean they're not just money printing machines if you build a station in a bad sector it might be better to close it and stop paying your staff, at the moment you can just leave it to print more money.

[bitsbytes]

Improvement of carriers highly appreciated because it could be much fun to play with them.

I was first very impressed of all the details, staying there in the carriers hangar, etc .. this is much of an enjoyment, also watching ships starting and docking, etc.

BUT .. 1st of all: everything that you do with the carriers in the game lasts simply too long.

Handling needs to become easier, more predictable and more reliable, that they follow your instructions.

The captains / AI needs to be more smart to protect the ships. Call them back early enough if they are damaged.
Or make it configurable by a threshold value of how many % in shields or armor a ship qualifies for coming back or getting even hull repair.

I want to sit there and more enjoy the spectacle instead of sitting there and seeing that the carrier and the whole fleet only follows very reluctantly your commands
which finally can very easily cause completely unnecessary ship loss, because commands are not really followed or take too much time, like recalling ships,
giving the command to leave sector etc.

Even if you stop all tasks of the carrier and want the carrier to leave the system. It takes everything too long until the ship moves. etc.
It seems sometimes to wair for the ships to return, but sometimes also not.

Then all the ships sometimes use travel speed, sometimes not.
Then I mounted ship extensions to the Nemesis. Now its quick and also boosts like hell.
But now it boosts for so long, that the ships shields are down and the ship needs to crawl back to the target, which meanwhile could restore its shields.
This sucks so much.

After a week working with Carriers in this game ... Too many efforts, too low fun factor. Much of wasted time. Ship loss (M, S).

[taztaz502]

Improvement of carriers highly appreciated because it could be much fun to play with them.

I was first very impressed of all the details, staying there in the carriers hangar, etc .. this is much of an enjoyment, also watching ships starting and docking, etc.

BUT .. 1st of all: everything that you do with the carriers in the game lasts simply too long.

Handling needs to become easier, more predictable and more reliable, that they follow your instructions.

The captains / AI needs to be more smart to protect the ships. Call them back early enough if they are damaged.
Or make it configurable by a threshold value of how many % in shields or armor a ship qualifies for coming back or getting even hull repair.

I want to sit there and more enjoy the spectacle instead of sitting there and seeing that the carrier and the whole fleet only follows very reluctantly your commands
which finally can very easily cause completely unnecessary ship loss, because commands are not really followed or take too much time, like recalling ships,
giving the command to leave sector etc.

Even if you stop all tasks of the carrier and want the carrier to leave the system. It takes everything too long until the ship moves. etc.
It seems sometimes to wair for the ships to return, but sometimes also not.

Then all the ships sometimes use travel speed, sometimes not.
Then I mounted ship extensions to the Nemesis. Now its quick and also boosts like hell.
But now it boosts for so long, that the ships shields are down and the ship needs to crawl back to the target, which meanwhile could restore its shields.
This sucks so much.

After a week working with Carriers in this game ... Too many efforts, too low fun factor. Much of wasted time. Ship loss (M, S).

I agree they need a lot of work and i honestly think egosoft will pull through and sort it out just going to take time, the game has already came along so far already and it is called foundations after all, i hope egosoft plan to put many more years into development and updating current features as well as adding new ones.

I really want to see something along the lines of freelancer AI, fleets and battles in general in that game felt just so good in fact freelancer was so good the devs should really study that game and try incorporate the same feel into x4.

Also i think they fixed the boost issue in the beta 3.0 patch, they now only boost to escape combat i think.

[bitsbytes]

You are right this is a great game and I hope its being fine tuned into the right direction.

What sometimes also nerves, that travel mode with some ships is being interrupted very often when travelling longer distances within a system.

And in a fleet setup it is nerving, if you have ships of different speeds, that
- some of the ships do not enter travel mode quick enough to stay in formation or
- that the whole fleet does not enter travel mode when its appears applicable depending on the speed of the slowest ship (carrier, slow M/S ships).