Suggestions for Quality of Life Improvements

[kurushimi0]

I spent time over the holidays playing X4 again. It's a beautiful game. I wanted to post a few suggestions for Quality of Life improvements to the game, though.

RULES, BLACKLISTS, and ALERTS:

1. I frequently start brand new games. But I end up spending the first half hour in the Global Settings menu, just recreating all the alerts, blacklists, and behavior defaults that I like to use. Please provide a way to save these rule sets, so that they can be loaded into new games. That would drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to fire up a new game. (If I have a few hours to play computer games, I sometimes avoid X4 just because of how cumbersome it is to set all those rules up.)

2. The alerts and rules above include the default behaviors I want my ships to follow for "known races" at the beginning of the game. If I'm not doing a custom gamestart that lets me select known races or knowledge of sectors owned by each race, then they don't even show up as options when configuring alerts and blacklists. For instance, I can't create an alert at gamestart for Xenon capital ships, because my ship at the beginning of the game hasn't encountered any Xenon ships yet. The only way to get around that is to either set the Xenon as a known race in a custom gamestart, or select a Xenon sector as a known sector -- and then "Xenon" appears as an option for creating rules/alerts/blacklists. That's simply not possible if launching the game with one of the hard-coded gamestarts, though -- I have to remember to edit the alerts and blacklists once I randomly encounter a Xenon ship, rather than just have it all set up at the beginning. I realize you don't want to put "spoilers" into the game... but the fact that the Xenon exist is spoiler-worthy only to first-time players in their very first game. You store a lot of other player history outside the game file, for calculating budgeted gamestarts, etc. If you also store the factions that a player has encountered in ANY game, and powered the alert/blacklist faction picklists from that information, then you could provide returning players with the convenience of setting up alerts at the beginning of their game, without spoilers.

3. If I do a budgeted custom start with a lot of ships, at the beginning of the game, I often have to go to the Behaviors tab of each ship to specify which Fire Authorization settings, Trade Behavior settings, etc, to use -- and there are a dozen such settings. Once I set those for a ship, using my rules and blacklists, I'd love to be able to save the entire profile to an external file so that I can more easily apply all the behaviors to other ships in the same game with one selection, or even apply the behaviors to ships in brand new games with one selection. (The latter requires that alerts/blacklists be stored externally from the game, as well. But you already use the "customgamestart" folder for stuff like that, right?)

INVENTORY ITEMS:

4. The HQ has a "Personal Office" with a device for storing personally-held inventory items, and once can be found in the science lab, too. Please add that to other player-owned stations, so that if I have illegal wares (that I want to keep), I don't have to fly/teleport all the way back to the HQ just to deposit them. Or consider adding an option to give those wares to another pilot, so that I can order them to take it back to the HQ. (There's already an option to ask them to give their inventory to you -- this would just be the reverse of that.) After a while, it really becomes annoying to search a Data Vault, find a valuable illegal ware, and have to teleport back to HQ just to run to the science lab to deposit it -- it's immersion-breaking, really. Or maybe a "Delivery Service" room even on stations I don't own, that has the inventory storage device from the HQ in it?

5. Put a crafting workbench in the science lab, since that's where the stored player inventory is accessed. If I've got some illegal AGI devices that I want to use for crafting, I have to run to one room to get the ingredients, run to the elevator just to visit the workbench in the traders corner to craft the items, maybe repeat those steps if I see that I grabbed the wrong crafting ingredients, and maybe run back to the science lab or personal office again to store any excess crafted illegal items. It's a lot of un-fun running around from room to room, when a crafting table in the science lab of the HQ could save a lot of time.

TRADE SETTINGS:

6. I often build trade stations early in the game, but it always takes me more than half an hour to set up the rules I want. For instance, for mineral/gas resources, I like to set up buy offers for an Internal Trade rule; for food/medical I like to set up buy offers from anyone at the minimum price, and sell offers for anyone at around the average price; and for all other wares, I often configure buy/sell offers to trade in them either internally or with factions determined by blacklists. This requires 6 to 10 clicks for each and every ware... and after I've done that once, it would be EXTREMELY nice to be able to save that to my player profile (just like I can a station building schematic) so that I can just reload it the next time I build a similar station.

STATION BUILDING:

A long time ago, using the in-game Station Design Simulator, I designed stations and HQ builds that I like to use in multiple games. Some of them are big stations, that I work on over the course of the entire game. And I created separate station schematics for the various stages of completion -- so that stage one has basic factories, stage two adds more advanced factories, etc. The problem with those staged schematics is that they're all or nothing. If I deviate from them in any way, even in the turret loadout of a defense module because I wanted to experiment with a different kind of weapon configuration during a game, then it becomes very hard to use any of the schematics for later stages. (For instance, I can't use my "HQ Stage 3" schematic, if during the game I deviated in any way from the "HQ Stage 2".) This is rigid and frustrating. Several changes to the station builder UI would eliminate this frustration.

7. When loading a schematic for an existing station, where the schematic doesn't include some of the modules in the existing station, those modules show up at the top of the list of changes in red, scheduled for deletion. Please allow the player to "delete the deletions", so that they can build a station from a "Stage 1" schematic, make some dynamic changes to it during gameplay, and later load a "Stage 2" schematic that doesn't require the deletion of the module changes (or weapon loadout changes) that the player made between the two stages. (Let me know if some concrete examples would be helpful, and I'll figure out how to upload the schematics with an example of what I'm talking about.)

8. Allow the player to move entries up and down the list in the build order, so that even if a loaded schematic builds the modules in one order, a player can override that to prioritize the building of certain modules. This would also allow the player to start building a bigger station, but then if the location becomes dangerous and needs some earlier defense modules, they could just add a defense bridge/disc and move it up in the priority queue. (Currently, all modules get added to the bottom of the queue, and the order of the queue can only be tweaked by arbitrarily moving/unmoving modules higher in the list, so that they go to the very bottom of the list.)

9. Allow the player to apply a schematic for a station, even if they don't own all the module blueprints yet in the current game. The space where the module would have been built can just be left empty. In the Station Design Simulator, perhaps I've designed a big shipyard that I want to use in-game, but I don't own the "XL Ship Fabrication" module yet. That prevents me from being able to use the schematic to build all the rest of it -- I can't even start work on the station until I own the blueprint for every single module in the schematic. I'd much rather be able to begin building the shipyard early in my game, even with empty gaps where some of the more expensive modules will eventually be. Then later in the game, when I acquire the blueprints for those modules, I can just reapply the schematic to add the modules that I didn't have previously.

10. My imagination soars at the thought of building really big stations in this game (regardless of what that does to the performance of my computer or the in-game economy). But even though I've built the schematics for them in the Station Design Simulator and have started building them in countless games, I have never, ever finished one of them in a game. It frustrates my imagination. The limiting factor is time, and the fact that only one builder can be assigned to a station at a time. Please, please, please allow for assigning multiple builders to a station -- even if there's exponentially increasing cost. The station builders already only work on one module at a time. If there were multiple station builders, then when each builder finishes one module, they would just start on the next module in the list that other builders aren't already working on.

These quality-of-life improvements would drastically improve my enjoyment of a wonderful game (which can nevertheless be enjoyment-killing for some of the frustrations it imposes on players). I'm sincerely impressed by what you've created in this game. I've bought extra copies of it for family and friends over the years, too. I look forward to seeing how you continue to improve it, and I hope to see the audience for your creation continue to grow.

[kurushimi0]

One last item related to the Inventory Storage device on the HQ:

Please add a button that automatically deposits all potentially illegal inventory items, regardless of whether or not they're illegal in the sector that the HQ is currently in. In custom games, I avoid putting my HQ in Teladi space or unclaimed sectors specifically because illegal inventory items aren't highlighted in red when in Teladi sectors. When I visit the HQ to stash illegal inventory items, because I don't want to lose rep with the Argon for having those items, it's painful to look at the name of each item in the list and trying to remember if it's illegal or not. If the HQ is in Teladi space or unclaimed sectors, the player has no easy way to quickly identify and deposit the illegal wares. It's far too easy to accidentally miss one (such as Hallucinogenics, which appears in the middle of a big list of items) because it wasn't highlighted.

A button that just immediately deposited illegal wares would eliminate that headache. (And I might consider putting my HQ back in Grand Exchange or Heretic's End again, since it's most important use in most of my games is just as the only place in the entire game where I'm allowed to store those illegal wares! That's seriously the HQ's only real purpose in my games.) There's a "Confirm" button, and a "Cancel" button. A "Deposit Potentially Illegal Items" button would save the day.

[CBJ]

Just for reference, laundry lists of unrelated suggestions may be easier for you to write, but they make reading, tracking and understanding how popular each idea is pretty much impossible. They also tend to degenerate into wishlists for features that are anything but "small" QoL suggestions. Ideas are much more likely to be seen and followed by developers if they are posted in individual topic-specific threads.

[Baconnaise]

I like the idea of saving templates for global orders across the board. I spend quite a bit of time as well setting up new saves doing just that. Saving logical overview templates for stations is another one I would love to see happen as well. I spend a lot of time and destroy my wrists and hands clicking everything to adjust them. Kuertee's trade analytics mod I think offers templates in a drop down for logical overview however it's basic. I have done playthroughs where I've set my tradestation and got everything well oiled and running and want it to buy nothing and sell everything at the lowest price possible. Unfortunately that means I have to click through every single item in logical overview uncheck auto and manually adjust. I also have to set a no trade global order as well for buying. PITA.

[kurushimi0]

Just for reference, laundry lists of unrelated suggestions may be easier for you to write, but they make reading, tracking and understanding how popular each idea is pretty much impossible. They also tend to degenerate into wishlists for features that are anything but "small" QoL suggestions. Ideas are much more likely to be seen and followed by developers if they are posted in individual topic-specific threads.

CBJ, thanks for letting me know. I didn't think it would be polite to create 10 threads, but later this weekend, I might hop back on the forums and create some of these as separate suggestion threads.