If we ever get corpos, give us a fixed rep dark mirror to fight

[Raptor34]

One of the big issues in X4 is that you can't just go out to get fights anymore, consequence of no more ship spawning.
Xenon? If you go for any big fights, there is also a good chance that you'll neuter them enough that the lizards would roll in and take the rest of their sectors.
Pirates? Firstly, they run, and there is no big fights with them.
Factions? This one works, but you either go to war with them permanently, or you spend time going up to +30 instead. And even then unless you build up the TRI or go to war with the Terrans, they don't exactly have much military power either, and it's only one faction so...
Khaak? It could work, but it's just S ships, maybe if they had more Ravagers, but it's also kinda boring going against them atm.

So give us a mirror of the player instead, say lock their rep like the SCA, maybe something you can change with a short repeatable quest/diplomacy or something if you want to go from raiding to war and back to peace.
I imagine that like the player, they would also have access to all the same equipment and BPs, so they can also field multi-faction fleets equipped with multi-faction gear. And just like BUC some of their ships would also have modifications too. And in order to make it so that they aren't just a source of free ships like SCA, give all of them full high level crew and marines, and of course have them fly around in fleets for the most part so you don't really get any solo ships to engage. Though just like we might occasionally have solo ships roaming around, give them some too. Maybe with a light escort, or maybe not, if we want some 1v1 destroyer fights.
Of course any fights between the both of you should be ignored by other people, so you can engage each other wherever you want.
I'll also give them an "endboss" and a faction HQ, the endboss would be a shipyard/wharf defended by elite ships with full purple mods while the station itself would be built like a deathstar, like how players would stack hundreds if not thousands of L plasma on it. They can and will rebuild it of course. The faction HQ would be the same but it's just a station, no construction capabilities, no production, perhaps just a trading station. The purpose of the faction HQ is in case you want to finish them off permanently you kill their faction HQ. Otherwise just like the player they can buy stuff from the factions too.

Though of course be careful with giving them too many ships like the ****** VIG swarms, we don't need another performance hog. But, having some carrier fleets with hundreds of fighters to fight would be nice, just don't go overboard with it. And by go overboard I mean we don't need 3 sectors filled with fighters.

Actually, speaking of their faction HQ, I'm assuming it'll be in their own dead end sector that they own, but why not also give them a defense platform bristling with guns in front of the gate, just like how the player would do it. It'll be interesting if we get to see how to try breaking such a blockade. Not the kind where you need to manipulate extending the build plot over the gate though. But just one in front of the gate, maybe at the sides, one's you can build just by slapping a full plot size down without needing to fiddle with the size after that.

And of course as I mentioned earlier, while their rep should be locked, you should also be able to "set" it to what you want, whether by paying them off or whatever, that way you can choose whether you want to be at war, at peace or maybe just raiding each other like how SCA at -10 is nominally peaceful but still pirate your ships.

And as a bonus, maybe make it that if the player goes to open war with a faction, they'll try to shore up their defenses, either by selling ships if you and your mirror aren't at war, or maybe by them declaring war on you instead. Though also make it that you can bribe them to look the other way too, maybe you want to keep them for later fights or something.

[solardawning]

I'm definitely in agreement with you that it'd be wonderful to have more persistent 'enemy' factions to fight. Possibly the future 'diplomacy' system later this year could be built to do this, by giving the player more emergent ways to temporarily have to be enemy to existing factions.

(We could use more pirates, and pirate fleets, too!)

[LameFox]

This sounds more like an extensive mod to me than something likely to end up in vanilla. The cheated crew skills in particular would add extra cheese to an already annoying system and I don't think I'd buy a DLC that put a full faction of that in my game.

I do agree in principle though that trying to fight things kinda sucks in this game. Basically what ends up happening to me is that I get all a factions blueprints/story done and then fight it, and while that eventually provides something to do it is in true Egosoft fashion extremely tedious.

But I think there are other, arguably simpler ways around it: like finally implementing ways to acquire blueprints from a hostile faction (reverse engineering) so that players aren't massively incentivised to be friendly to everyone. This one thing would make it far easier to have actual hostile playstyles, although sadly you'd still have to get storylines out of the way if you wanted their effects.

And while it turned out to be pretty disappointing in the end, there's always the potential to add another, better stage to the "crisis". This might for example be a way to ramp up your Xenon activity on purpose and/or restore them to your universe, which was a pretty common suggestion I saw before we got the current... thing. This also gets them around the issues inherent in having to balance the Xenon threat for everyone at once, including those who might never build an empire to fight them with.

[Raptor34]

This sounds more like an extensive mod to me than something likely to end up in vanilla. The cheated crew skills in particular would add extra cheese to an already annoying system and I don't think I'd buy a DLC that put a full faction of that in my game.

What do you mean by cheated crew skills? Factions already "cheat" with crew skills anyway because they can buy ships with actual crew. I'm not looking for maxed crew here, though having some elite enemies filled with them and also full purple mods would be nice, but in general it'll be the same as if the player uses custom game and sets the crew to elite.
Also an advantage of this is that you get to fight enemies that are not just one faction, but a combo of them. Like how you would build. Imo that is also another appealing part of it.

[Baconnaise]

ahhh hopes and dreams...

[LameFox]

This sounds more like an extensive mod to me than something likely to end up in vanilla. The cheated crew skills in particular would add extra cheese to an already annoying system and I don't think I'd buy a DLC that put a full faction of that in my game.

What do you mean by cheated crew skills? Factions already "cheat" with crew skills anyway because they can buy ships with actual crew. I'm not looking for maxed crew here, though having some elite enemies filled with them and also full purple mods would be nice, but in general it'll be the same as if the player uses custom game and sets the crew to elite.
Also an advantage of this is that you get to fight enemies that are not just one faction, but a combo of them. Like how you would build. Imo that is also another appealing part of it.

They are all fake but a whole faction of high level ones seems especially fake. It's already kind of cheesy the way SCA ships have like 3 crew and 13 marines and somehow repair at super high speeds with no drones. This kind of thing just rubs salt in what I feel is already a bad system.

A faction that uses a wider variety of stuff might be okay on its own, although how intelligently the game would handle that I'm not sure. The current mixed-tech factions often seem pretty haphazard with how they equip things (frankly even regular factions aren't wonderful at it, like how Terrans like to nerf their ships with beams). Maybe that would be something worth improving if such an entity was meant to be actually using each faction's tech for its strengths.

[Raptor34]

This sounds more like an extensive mod to me than something likely to end up in vanilla. The cheated crew skills in particular would add extra cheese to an already annoying system and I don't think I'd buy a DLC that put a full faction of that in my game.

What do you mean by cheated crew skills? Factions already "cheat" with crew skills anyway because they can buy ships with actual crew. I'm not looking for maxed crew here, though having some elite enemies filled with them and also full purple mods would be nice, but in general it'll be the same as if the player uses custom game and sets the crew to elite.
Also an advantage of this is that you get to fight enemies that are not just one faction, but a combo of them. Like how you would build. Imo that is also another appealing part of it.

They are all fake but a whole faction of high level ones seems especially fake. It's already kind of cheesy the way SCA ships have like 3 crew and 13 marines and somehow repair at super high speeds with no drones. This kind of thing just rubs salt in what I feel is already a bad system.

A faction that uses a wider variety of stuff might be okay on its own, although how intelligently the game would handle that I'm not sure. The current mixed-tech factions often seem pretty haphazard with how they equip things (frankly even regular factions aren't wonderful at it, like how Terrans like to nerf their ships with beams). Maybe that would be something worth improving if such an entity was meant to be actually using each faction's tech for its strengths.

Tbh what seems cheesy to me is SCA ships only having 3 crew and 13 marines, not the other thing. But anyway, they don't have to do that, they just have to perform the same way it would as for the player, and the main thing is really to prevent player's cheesing the fixed rep for unlimited good quality ships. The other thing is currently boarding is basically the stupid hard XEN H and the rest, this would also provide an intermediate boarding target.

As for ship equipment, tbh maybe Egosoft should look into actually creating loadouts for the factions instead of whatever RNG system they are using now. Iirc beams are the most expensive anyway, though they do have their uses for anti-fighter since generally TER capitals are already excellent at anti-cap. But coming back to loadouts, creating specific loadouts for the faction for different purposes and then having different tiers depending on the resource situation would help add more immersion. You can also have some with the current system to reflect some level of eccentricity too, but the majority should be standardized based on their purpose.

[TroubledRabbit]

maybe you should give a try X3 where mods giving that exact functionality exists (there is no reason why they should not exists for X4 - this is a matter of work and will).

Or give a try one of the 'universe' mods (Litcube, Mayhem etc...).

I would vote against that as a DLC or game's feature. One broken 'crisis' is enough.