[Feature Request] Ship reverse engineering

[vvvvvvvv]

Would be great if there was a way to extract blueprints from captured ships. There are mods that implement that ( https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 1687245083 ), but would be great if there was some official way to do it.

Right now the only way to proceed towards empire building is to butter up one of the factions then buy their blueprints. Shipyard blueprints cannot be hacked, and ship blueprints cannot be stolen, so the only possible way to play as completely unaligned power is to keep stealing ships. Which again makes you dependent on other factions.

In x3 it was possible to reverse engineer ships, and that gave a reason to bother with ship capturing. Would be nice to have this here.

[Sutopia]

It would be great if the game implements IRL reverse engineering consequences: lack of understanding of the engineering logics causing objectively worse performance and hilarious designs. Just go look up how Tu-4 was developed.

A few ideas here:
- A roll and level system similar to crew leveling, baseline is every spec degraded in a way (doubled mass and drag, reduced weapon heat sink, increased turret reload, reduced burst clip size etc). Each time you study it there is a chance you make a breakthrough to reduce the penalty a bit at the cost of the material cost of the object you’re studying. If you’re studying a gun, it costs weapon components and advanced electronics for example. Of course, the more stars the weapon got, the less chance you get the next breakthrough in exponential difficulty. To reduce frustration probably only need 5 breakthroughs to reach 5 stars (penalty removed, star also removed as they’re now identical to vanilla). For price evaluation, degraded equipment or hull will suffer corresponding price penalty (1 star = 20% price, 2 star = 40% price, etc) for selling or fleet assembly purposes.

Bonus ideas: Faction selling ship to player may get defects since they should prioritize their own needs with higher quality equipments. Depending on standing you get quality of 3 star (sub 10), 4 star (10~19) or pristine equipment when buying from NPC shipyard/wharf. You will not be able to study an equipment past the ranking of the original object. NPC’s own ships are always using pristine equipment so you have three options: capture one, buy one at +20 or above or pay up the blueprint cost.


Imo boarding and reverse engineering are both unrealistic bad tropes. I’m glad the game didn’t release with one off reverse engineering gaining full blueprints kind of nonsense. Boarding is still bad and boring tho.

[LameFox]

Agreed. Never really understood why they moved away from this. There's an entirely different playstyle essentially locked away behind this lost feature, especially because we cannot even strip captured ships of their equipment to reuse it, and with S or M ships a bunch of it falls off (and why that was only implemented for those is itself a mystery to me). Consequently, if you *do* play a capture focused game, having someone to sell you blueprints or refit your ships for you is still mandatory. And why? I can't imagine it's for balance reasons. It's not like selling minerals to everyone until they love you and spending the profits on blueprints is hard to do. You barely even need to be awake, and I mean that entirely literally, you can set it up and sleep through most of the process.

In x3 it was possible to reverse engineer ships, and that gave a reason to bother with ship capturing.

Indeed, especially with Xenon ships. With some of these being flyable again, and especially with the researchable timelines ships, it seems a better time than ever to start letting us use capture to acquire blueprints.

[vvvvvvvv]

It would be great if the game implements IRL reverse engineering consequences: lack of understanding of the engineering logics causing objectively worse performance and hilarious designs.

I don't think so. Look at this from gameplay perspective, not from "correctness" perspective. What does this mechanic try to achieve? Which part of it is supposed to be fun?

The primary effect, as far as I can tell, is that player will not use reverse engineering. Because effectively this is negative gacha which punishes the player by producing an inferior copy.

Regardgin real world examples, this is 800 years in the future, all factions have access to programmable matter. Things would be quite different compared to earth history where such tools did not exist.

--edit--

I'll elaborate a bit. Reverse engineering I was looking for is the type used in X3. This one requires special facility, takes time (more for larger ships) and destroys ship in the process. So the player already paid a price at multiple points. If after all of that the player gets "funny crippled ship", that'll be a point where player likely will consider quitting the game. Especially if that was one of the kind ship or something difficult to capture the player wanted to make more of.

[Sutopia]

It would be great if the game implements IRL reverse engineering consequences: lack of understanding of the engineering logics causing objectively worse performance and hilarious designs.

I don't think so. Look at this from gameplay perspective, not from "correctness" perspective. What does this mechanic try to achieve? Which part of it is supposed to be fun?

The primary effect, as far as I can tell, is that player will not use reverse engineering. Because effectively this is negative gacha which punishes the player by producing an inferior copy.

Regardgin real world examples, this is 800 years in the future, all factions have access to programmable matter. Things would be quite different compared to earth history where such tools did not exist.

--edit--

I'll elaborate a bit. Reverse engineering I was looking for is the type used in X3. This one requires special facility, takes time (more for larger ships) and destroys ship in the process. So the player already paid a price at multiple points. If after all of that the player gets "funny crippled ship", that'll be a point where player likely will consider quitting the game. Especially if that was one of the kind ship or something difficult to capture the player wanted to make more of.

It basically makes the game worse as it de-uniquify ships. Current game is already too easy acquiring ship blueprints by paying and all the ships were completely “unlocked” allowing you to use any meta weapon mixes, except for borons.

It should serve as an alternative way, not an easier way. You cannot buy blueprints from a hostile faction, thus you *need* to pirate it. You’re ignoring the opportunity cost of befriending a faction understandably as current faction rep is too easy to gain, except for QUE and FAF but they have nothing to offer anyways.

—Edit—
Lemme rephrase it, claiming it cost something doesn’t justify allowing a complete copy as it’s still not an engaging mechanism that justify to exist as it’s either gonna be objectively cheaper that noone ever go buy a blueprint again or objectively worse that noone uses the feature anyways. I think a cheap way to make a worse pirated copy can be a fair tradeoff.

[Nanook]

...
Lemme rephrase it, claiming it cost something doesn’t justify allowing a complete copy as it’s still not an engaging mechanism that justify to exist as it’s either gonna be objectively cheaper that noone ever go buy a blueprint again or objectively worse that noone uses the feature anyways. I think a cheap way to make a worse pirated copy can be a fair tradeoff.

I think if you had played X3 very much before X4, you'd have a different opinion. Most of us found reverse engineering a very "engaging mechanism". I, for one, would not engage in reverse engineering if the copies came out worse than the original. It would make more sense for me to just buy/steal those ships. One of a kind ships can be excluded from RE, or you could just do so in your personal game.

[Sutopia]

...
Lemme rephrase it, claiming it cost something doesn’t justify allowing a complete copy as it’s still not an engaging mechanism that justify to exist as it’s either gonna be objectively cheaper that noone ever go buy a blueprint again or objectively worse that noone uses the feature anyways. I think a cheap way to make a worse pirated copy can be a fair tradeoff.

I think if you had played X3 very much before X4, you'd have a different opinion. Most of us found reverse engineering a very "engaging mechanism". I, for one, would not engage in reverse engineering if the copies came out worse than the original. It would make more sense for me to just buy/steal those ships. One of a kind ships can be excluded from RE, or you could just do so in your personal game.

You are preoccupied with assumptions that everything should follow old game mechanisms which it doesn’t and needent.
- if the result is the same people will take the path with least resistance
- excluding unique ships needs justification which I doubt the game can other than “cuz it’s that way accept it duh”.

A worse ship for player isn’t a new idea either. Starsector pirates literally use worsened copies of main faction ships, with a few that got modified in awkward ways that some are considered better than their base counterpart due to their specializations. Eve online also made it very clear that player ships are inferior copies of empire ships.

[vvvvvvvv]

It basically makes the game worse as it de-uniquify ships. Current game is already too easy acquiring ship blueprints

Rather than "Too easy" it is "too boring". You just amass money and buy everything. Done it several times, it isn't a whole lot of fun. There isn't really any ship that feels "unique and special" right now either.

Lemme rephrase it, claiming it cost something doesn’t justify allowing a complete copy as it’s still not an engaging mechanism that justify to exist as

I believe I mentioned that reverse engineering needed to be done via a special facility. So you first obtain facility, then you cap the ship, then you bring, then you wait, then you get your prize.

Compare it to just walking up to faction rep and throwing money at him/her. It does not feel as an achievement. Capture is much more engaging.

You are preoccupied with assumptions that everything ...

The path with least resistance is buying the ships. Reverse engineering in x3 was a lot of fun. More fun than system with just buying blueprints.

A worse ship for player isn’t a new idea either.

It is an unfun idea. That's the issue. Another issue is that "inferior copy" would ideally need a visual model, meaning an artist would need to create a broken variant for every ship in x4. There are also already pirate variants in the game, and they're done properly. Meaning they're worth using, and don't exist to insult the player. Moreya, Kuraokami, Prometheus, Barbarossa.

Mechanics need a purpose. The purpose of reverse engineering mechanic is to provide an alternative playstyle. The purpose of crippling reverse engineered ships, as far as I can tell, is to deter the player from using said mechanic. As random roll does not make result more valuable, it only makes player waste more time to make more rolls.

The thing is, If after going through the hassle of building a base, setting up the shipyard, capping the ship, and waiting for rev engineering to finish, the game gives me an "inferior copy", the game goes to the trash bin. I have life to life, instead of jumping through some completely arbitrary hoops. The purpose of a game is for player to have fun. The purpose isn't to act as an artificial suffering simulator. Even soulslikes provide payoffs.

Anyway, I see no benefit from your idea. I have nothing else to add.

[Sutopia]

Anyway, I see no benefit from your idea. I have nothing else to add.

This is exactly how I felt about the whole thread. No you I guess. I am unable to see the purpose of creating an inferior convoluted way of doing the same thing, you’re unable to see the purpose of creating an inferior result as a mechanism, they are the same thing.

I don’t really understand how you are able to imply it would cost more effort to reverse engineer if the result is meant to be worse. You’re on the same boat as the previous guy who are unable to adapt to scaling designs. As PHQ is already a thing it can cost as much as just docking the damned ship at PHQ to qualify as research target. it doesn’t need to take forever, every other research is like 10 minutes or so; Time isn’t even a precious resource most of the time as you’re not required to stare at Boso Ta in her lab while it’s ongoing. I can’t see why it *needs* to be an expensive act.

As I said, it’s a bad trope in itself for people living in previous era when designs were mechanical and thus copyable. Any technology 21 century onward are already nigh impossible to create perfect copies, mostly due to being able to see the final product is not equivalent to getting the process to create such product. Just look at how China is still struggling to make their two digit nanometer chips when the top tech is doing one digit nanometer. Oh and people are still not able to recreate coca cola within reasonable cost, you can probably synthesize the drink with lab settings mixing all the compounds but it’s nowhere as efficient as how the company prints them making billions.

Does the game need to be realistic? No. But does a mechanism using a tried and failed trope seem any more engaging? For me hardly so. I grew up in an environment where reverse engineering is being seen as a relic of the past, not the cutting edge future, hence it never feels right to appear in a sci fi setting but leans more to a medieval fantasy setting.

And btw, the open universe playable Xperimental is already an inferior replica. Food for thought.

[Nanook]

...

You are preoccupied with assumptions that everything should follow old game mechanisms which it doesn’t and needent.

Don't even presume to know what I'm "preoccupied with". It's insulting. I'm just making a case for having something that was in a previous game.

A worse ship for player isn’t a new idea either. Starsector pirates literally use worsened copies of main faction ships, with a few that got modified in awkward ways that some are considered better than their base counterpart due to their specializations. Eve online also made it very clear that player ships are inferior copies of empire ships.

Who gives a rip how another game did something. This isn't Starsector, it's the X Universe, and should follow the lore of the previous games.

But does a mechanism using a tried and failed trope seem any more engaging?

What "failed trope" are you referrng to? The reverse engineering mechanism in X3 was highly successful and almost every player used and enjoyed it. Your arguments lack merit.

[Techedge]

I would really like a reverse engineering like that in X3 as per OP.

@ Sutopia, don't take it personal, I'm addressing you since it's you who is suggesting a reverse engineering that I don't like...

You are preoccupied with assumptions that everything should follow old game mechanisms which it doesn’t and needent.
- if the result is the same people will take the path with least resistance
- excluding unique ships needs justification which I doubt the game can other than “cuz it’s that way accept it duh”.

A worse ship for player isn’t a new idea either. Starsector pirates literally use worsened copies of main faction ships, with a few that got modified in awkward ways that some are considered better than their base counterpart due to their specializations. Eve online also made it very clear that player ships are inferior copies of empire ships.

So you are suggesting that following old (but same X-Universe and lore) games is wrong and is not needed, but then you are taking ideas from other (different universe) games to justify your assumption. Not very logic and, more important, not convincing at all!

Just look at how China is still struggling to make their two digit nanometer chips when the top tech is doing one digit nanometer. Oh and people are still not able to recreate coca cola within reasonable cost, you can probably synthesize the drink with lab settings mixing all the compounds but it’s nowhere as efficient as how the company prints them making billions.

Do you really think that in 2024 we can't replicate coca-cola recipe or one digit nanometer architecture? Or is it just that you cannot fully replicate other brands products because of patents and that means the need to study and achieve their own recipe or architecture (plus, real life should not be taken so much into account since... it is a game!)? Again, not convincing at all!

[vvvvvvvv]

I am unable to see the purpose

Unlocking ships through reverse engineering is more fun. That's the purpose. It worked very well in X3, where you had a lot of ships you couldn't buy blueprints for.

Just look at how China is

X4 is set in far future (800 years, I believe). Our technology to them is what medieval or earlier tech is to us. They can build an aircraft carrier in 20 minutes. That tiny station connector Argon stations use is 400 meters from end to end. They build it in one minute. So it doesn't matter what China struggles with - it is a different world compared to ours.

[Sutopia]

a lot of ships you couldn't buy blueprints for.

Hey you’re up to something. I don’t think I need to explain a lot when there is a significant difference between it being the only way vs a new inferior way.

The X4 is the exact change following the course of history. Instead of low efficiency mock engineering (as I like to call it), social engineering is way more effective. Gaining rep to buy blueprints is an act of social engineering.

Tech being superior is the reason why things are getting harder/impossibler to study, not easier. I think you didn’t get the message so I’m rephrasing it, coca cola is already being 100% analyzed of its content, we have sufficient tech to do that, there is no mystery. HOW the company can make it that cheap IS the problem that any analysis is not capable of doing. Unless the setting has time travel or the ability to reverse state of the matter chronologically, it is a low credibility concept.

Coca cola is not patented because by filing a patent they need to disclose the production method that noone is able to figure out. Why bother. Boso cannot figure out how to make protectyons.

[vvvvvvvv]

The X4 is the exact change following the course of history. Instead of low efficiency mock engineering (as I like to call it), social

Nothing in the game suggests that such change took place.

Boso cannot figure out how to make protectyons.

Protectyon was made by a far superior technology that's why Boso Ta can't make sense of it.

Boso Ta, however, reverse engineers Timelines ships you get and produces blueprints for them. He can also reverse engineer Xenon gun data. He also produces ship mod recipes. All of them.

Ships are different from Protectyon. ALL ships you encounter in the game are made at technology level similar to yours, including Xenon. They all use same approach and any wharf/shipyard can construct any ship. Even though terrans use different type of programmable matter (computronics instead of claytronics), it does not matter for the ship builder in the slightest.

I'll remind you that entire factory blueprint can be stolen by a bloke in a spacesuit with an EMP in seconds, with plans for ALL machinery within. That's the future for you. That's why comparisons about "misunderstanding" do not apply. You're dealing with near star trek level civilization.

[RubyRezal]

Did all the factions install DRM on their ship computers between X3 and X4 to prevent blueprint piracy? /sarcasim

Seriously though. If Boso Ta can reverse engineer the Erlking from just its power core, Xenon equipment from a data shard, and all of the non-Xenon Timelines unlockable ships, surely he's capable of reverse engineering regular ships for us.

[Raptor34]

Did all the factions install DRM on their ship computers between X3 and X4 to prevent blueprint piracy? /sarcasim

Seriously though. If Boso Ta can reverse engineer the Erlking from just its power core, Xenon equipment from a data shard, and all of the non-Xenon Timelines unlockable ships, surely he's capable of reverse engineering regular ships for us.

Yeah, consequence of your X3 HQ REing everything. Note there wasn't RE before that.

[gorgofdoom]

+1 for reverse engineering, however we come to terms on it's function.

I don't really like the idea of having sub-par ships. How would we track the better one's from the worse? If the idea is to make it 'more difficult' to achieve than the legal means then any debuff to ships should happen on the economic side.

Perhaps we can make them cost more to make, progressively less, as we can apply more research, instead of weaker. Imagine that the funky ships do get built-- unbuilt, and tried again. this could be much like recycling 3d printer waste for modern creators; unless knowing a specific method that makes it work reliably you will have unreliable results and the waste that comes from recycling.

On how we can acquire blueprints: what about a point based system where donating capturing ships is worth 100x, recycling a wreck is worth 1x, and the whole project needs "x" total points to unlock, but allows progressively cheaper production as you get more points, beryond, up to a maximum?

A mission to take in a disgruntled / defecting engineer could be real neat, adding yet another path to gain.

[h2o.Ava]

this mod allows such:

https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/72

(sets the save to modified tho)

[RubyRezal]

this mod allows such:

https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/72

(sets the save to modified tho)

I am sure many people are aware of the mod, but if we don't want our save flagged as modified this does not help. Just in a general sense, I'm kind of annoyed learning this used to be a feature in prior games but it's not in X4 for whatever reason.

Addendum: I feel it would be fun if it were something unlockable with fairly high requirements to be somewhat equivalent to earning rep and buying blueprints; maybe owning a shipyard could make new research nodes available to unlock ship and/or equipment reverse engineering for each faction.

[dudu200508]

It has to be said that reverse engineering is indeed a quite interesting mechanism... Regardless of whether there is a long-term process or an imperfect version in the middle, even if it is just a simple process of modifying the terrain, the result is probably worth using.
If we want to establish a long-term and process oriented research and development mechanism, a unique new type of ship may be much better than existing ships in other factions. The player's faction has never truly possessed the design ability in ship angles in the past, which is a greater regret
Returning to reverse engineering itself, considering that the official 2025 plan has mentioned plans to increase the capacity of the "diplomatic system", hostile gameplay with other factions may also be added. In this context, the necessity of reverse engineering or other mechanisms for obtaining blueprints through unfriendly means is gradually increasing... To be honest, either permanently losing the blueprint of a certain ship, or only being friendly, or falling into some kind of moral doubt after building a good relationship, this situation is really uncomfortable.