This is the final Space sim. The absolute, glorious space sim that only a PC can have. You can fly anything. You can buy anything. You won´t be able to even dock a ship at the beggining, you won´t be able to win a single fight at the start, your ship will be a piece of crap and you won´t be able to even dock at the majority of the stations. Random squads of pirate fighthers ten times more well-armed than you will be at the majority of sectors corners. Alien enemies with battleships the size of your city clogging entire sectors will mop the floor with your face for their amusement. Yet, you can trade, steal, find or loot weapons, ships, containers with goods or missiles that worth ten times the price of your little fighther in the shipyards. Find your way around. Get rich. get frindly with one of the races, buy super corvettes that can kick the ass of all the enemies that made fun of you, parade in carriers that effortlessly kill hordes of the same things that would vaporize you in the begginning, build your own stations, command remote armies of both honestly bought or captured vessels and conquer entire sectors by force to build factory complexes that put anything ever builded anywhere to shame.

It's one of those game you install, play 20 min, uninstall.
A year later, install, play 20 min, uninstall.
A year later, install, play 20 min, uninstall.
Until one day you get past the learning stage. Then quit your job, say goodbye to your friends, X3 is your life now.

The keyword here is DEPTH.
If you wanna hold your controller, flying from sector to sector, shoot stuff, hear explosion, action-packed, this is not for you. Because all you want is a fly n' shoot experience, in a space setting.
X3TC is a SANDBOX game, it gives you a universe, factions with characters, awesome ships, and a dynamic economy. It can be VERY action-packed, but not in the sense of run n' gun.

What does dynamic economy mean?
That means money doesn't come from no where, NPC actually have to transport products and materials, that means you can compete with them, find a potential market that nobody's aware of, trade illegal goods, establish a monopoly.
Nearly everything can be automated.
How cool it is to set up traders to trade around the universe automatically for you?

"But I don't care about economy!"
Then you have ships, big f*cking ships, small swarming ships, all of them are personally flyable.
You can sit on your I-win ship and crusade from sector to sector, or you can zip around in your lighting fast M5 and watch your big destroyers throwing out energy balls. You can board other ships with your marines, force pilots to bail and claim their ships, and even own a large fleet.

All of those, build upon one of the most versatile engine I've ever seen.
The stuff you want to do is 99% doable, you just don't know how yet. Ask.

Okay, two years after I had bought this game as a part of the X Superbox I feel obligated to write a few words about it. Simply because X3: Terran Conflict (and other X games) are some of the best games EVER made. I would actually hesitate whether to still call this a game. It will steal your life.

First things first. It's probably gonna be easy for veterans of previous X games to get into this one, few slight changes but the same mechanic in a nutshell. For the others though, be warned! This game has one of the steepest learning curves I've ever experienced in a game, yet it is also probably the most rewarding. You start out with one ship in a vastness of space and you can virtually build a galactic empire with hundreds of ships, factories, and resources at your disposal. It's not gonna be fast, it's not going to be easy, but it's going to be fun! And you can really do it! No MMO has ever come close to the level of freedom and complexity of all the mechanics in this game. No other sandbox game provides such a beautiful playground for making all your dreams of becoming an overlord come true. It's a gem, an absolute beast of a game, so patched and so loved that even when the developers provided little to no tutorial (very extensive manual however), you can get all the information you need to become great relatively easily.

It's difficult to recommend this game to just one group of players. You can get a lot of fighting experience in this one, which I personally enjoy very much, but it's not a simple grabba shipz and go pwn everybody rite nao. No... You have to work on your reputation with a faction, you then get to buy the ship of your dreams, then you have to take it and slap dozens of upgrades on it to make it really shine and then you go get yourself some kickass weapons. I love maintaining all these little details, you can change your weaponry on the fly and tear all kinds of enemies apart. There are limits of course, but lemme tell you... I did destroy a class M6 bomber with about 150 MJ shields with a little M5 ship that only has 1 MJ shield.... I did take out a Kha'ak corvette with my M3 Mamba thanks to an insane firepower provided by Mass Drivers and their non-existent energy consumption. This might not mean anything to you now, but trust me, when you get there and live it... you will remember ;)

Ooooor you can pretty much just ignore the whole shooting thing and become a filthy rich and successful trader and buy everyone :D The story isn't important, you write your own. The graphics are very good in my opinion. Music and sounds are more than adequate. Mostly you won't even notice the music, which makes those rare moments of entering a sector that's different than all the others that much more enjoyable.

This game is about options, freedom and passion for honing all your skills. And I love it.

Personal rating 10/10

Ok, this game is hard to figure out. Like really hard to figure out. Not going to lie here, it took me 4 seperate times of me telling myself I was going to figure this game out before I finally got it down. After that it takes some more time to figure everything out. Its really worth the effort though.

Once you start messing around with trading and setting up your freighter pilots the fact that this is a sandbox game gets more apparent. You can do the missions if you want or you can ignore them. Really just do what you want the story dosnt matter. I got maybe halfway through the main story and started building complexes to make more money so I could fly better fighters. Next thing i knew I had fleets of capital ships and cruisers and fighters. I was launching wings of fighters from my personal carrier instead of flying one myself.

Dont let the age of this game fool you as there was a pretty big update maybe a year ago so obviously its still loved. It looks great, it plays great, and its hard in a good way.

First, let me say that I really hate having to leave a negative review for this game. It actually has all the elements in place to make it truly great -- a huge, explorable universe, a complex economy, a huge variety of ships that each have their own use, a nice backstory, good graphics and music -- but it has some really critical flaws with playability that make the overall experience extremely tedious.

This is really three games in one: In the early game, it begins as a 3D space combat and flight simulator, and succeeds quite nicely at this. But in the later game, as you accumulate more resources and ships, it becomes more of a economy/trading simulator and fleet command style of game.

The critical problem is that the entire interface is designed around first-person navigation and combat, and controlling groups of other ships involves absolutely enormous amounts of navigating through menus for even the simplest task, like "move here". Secondly, ships move *very* slowly in this game, even with the built-in option to speed up time by 10X. Thirdly, trading ships, even the upgraded ones that are supposed to be self-sufficient, are stupid and require lots of hand-holding. The net result is that, once you have a large economy and fleet of ships, you will spend 30% of your time in menus, 69% of your time waiting for ships to move from point A to B, and 1% of your time actually doing whatever it is you intended to do in the first place. To build, equip, and move a medium-sized fleet into position to attack something is the work of several hours (not counting the time needed to get money for it), which is just absurd.

What this game *desperately* needs is a way to toggle between first-person cockpit style view and a third-person, RTS-style, "fleet commander" view to ease management of large numbers of ships.

Other minor criticisms are that the voice "acting" is generally terrible (major characters are often voiced by obvious computer-generated text-to-speech), and the quests are pretty simple "go here" or "deliver this to there". The different sectors start to all look the same after awhile. Also, there aren't many capital ship battles, a problem that was fixed in the expansion, X3: Albion Prelude. However, none of these are major problems in what is essentially an open-world game. The only critical problems are the interface and speed of doing anything, but these are enough to make the experience really frustrating.

All this said, if you have lot of patience and a lot of time to burn, I would actually recommend this game. For others, no.

X3 Terran Conflict, at first when I started this game I was lost on what I could do. Even when I found the script edit I was lost because of how big the game is. I then started to understand what I needed to do in the game. After a little while I found the game to be empty, not much was going on. No real wars or anything like that. I went through some really long missions and was starting to get sick of it already so I started to look for mods for the game. What I found was a rich list of really great mods which brings the game to life, I will add the link to the mods at the end of this review.

Wish the mods I give this game a 10/10. Without the mods I give the game a 6/10 or 7/10.

The graphics for the game are good and it is fun to fly around and build space stations. I just like war in space so I needed to have something more which the mods gave me.

Here is the link for the mods. http://forum.egosoft.com/search/index.html?template=default&style=default.css

I hope you have as much fun with this game as I do.

This is my first and only review I've ever made about anything, but this game truly deserves one. Yes, it is hard to learn to play it, there are so many different things you can do that you will basically use your entire keyboard to organize it all. But if you ever wanted to travel the stars, seek out distant planets, interact with different species, have a fleet of ships at your command, (ships that you yourself can fly) build stations in space, and/or build a galactic empire, hijack ships with trained marines, become a merchant/trader, a pirate, war hero, or simply not be known, watch entire fleets trading fire, use a turret while the ship attacks another, fire a barrage of missles at targets, destroy entire space stations, watch an assortment of people/NPCs live their lives all around you, fly thru asteroid fields, or just blow them up, then this is the game for you.

There is a lot I could say about this game, but in short, it's like nothing I have ever played, and I have been gaming for most of my life. I go on to speak about a few things on X3 Terran Conflict, but to be honest, there is just so much to say about this game, that it would take a heck of a lot of space. But here are a few bits, hope they help.

Nearly every ship in the game you yourself can pilot, from tiny fighters to large warships. You can travel the stars in on a large well defended ship, and then take out a fighter in your bay for a quick spin around the sector. The game itself is beautiful, from the stars to the ships down to the stations. It is all a sight to see.

I've played many space games in my time, but none come close to X3. It does have missions you can take on but at your leisure, it is essentially an open ended game; do what you want, when you want. It will take time to learn everything, but little by little you will pick it all up. You will start slow, no money, a poor ship, and lost in the sea of space, but in no time, you will have the money to improve your ship and its armament, and ofcourse you could always come across a abandoned ship in space.

The sad thing about Terran Conflict is that, dog fights are out of the question. All ships have some or the best weapons in the game so you are stuck flying a larger ship with better defenses. Not that you can't use a fighter class, it's just that you will die often, so make sure to save often. For this reason I would recommend you start with X3 Reunion. While dog fights in Terran Conflict are almost suicide, in Reunion they are a must; while also being fun. I myself played Reunion first and learned the basics thru that game, and that made Terran Conflict much easier to learn. Terran Conflict is just a much faster paced game.

I highly recommend this game to all space lovers, for I never felt closer to space than I have while playing this game. The mechanics are hard to learn but great once you get the hang of it. The visuals are a sight to see, and the ability to almost do anything you want is great. As I told a friend once, you could be flying to a far off place, while out of no where your trade ship is being attacked, while one of your stations is also being attacked, while your sector is being invaded, while your patrol fleet is being ambushed, all in a split second. It is truly something.

These few points and explanations do not do it justice, only playing it will.

This game is quite possibly one of the best simulations ever created. I owned it on disc for many years before getting it on sale on steam.
It's an amazing business / management / empire sim, and you can break up the monotony of your spreadsheets by participating in space battles.
Think: Single Player Eve.
It could also be compared to games like Mount & Blade (but you're a spaceship) or the classic EV Nova (but in 3d)
The graphics still look great for a 10 year old game, you don't run into a lot of things where you notice the polygons, and even then since it's all spaceships the polygons don't looks objectively bad.

The only complaints I have about the came are solved with what are pretty much essential mods.

-Micromanaging your 'factories' (space station complexes)
Fix: Station Attendant / Community logistics mod
https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=239498
(this is now actually released on their mainpage as an officaial 'patch' of sorts)

-HORRIBLE autopilot that WILL murder you every chance you give it
Fix: A mod called 'bounce" that fixes the collision detection, and turns off collision with allied ships if you're out of combat
https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=295405
(the original dl link is dead, below is a a steam discussion that links to a mirror)
https://steamcommunity.com/app/201310/discussions/0/1319962599254383536/

-Kind of Clunky UI
Fix: Learn the shortcuts lol
yeah unfortunately there's no mod to fix this, but getting comfortable with the shortcuts and navigating the ui via keyboard can help a bit. As you get used to it, you pick up some QOL tricks to navigating the ui a bit better.
I can't really fault it for this due to it's age, it's actually a pretty impressive UI from it's era.

It's important to note that almost all the mods for this game are actually scripts that can be written yourself, in-game. The built in scripting engine is INCREDIBLE, and there's a built in level editor. You will have to enter a sort of 'cheat' as your name to unlock these 2 features. (externally added mods will still work however)

However: Using any script, including mods like bounce will disable steam acheivements. I don't think it's a very big deal, acheivements are nice but in a game like this they're borderline irrelevant... and without mods like Bounce IDK if it's even possible to get 100% acheivements.

A lot of people complain about the difficult early game. I think it serves as a sort of tutorial for understanding how unforgiving this game can be. If you've already played the earlygame 1 or 2 times, and know how to get yourself from a little M1 scout ship to a space-weed baron... honestly just cheat the early game. Use self control, give yourself a bit of money and rep to 'teleport' you to the 3-5hr mark of a file. I.e. give yourself enough cash and rep to have a fully maxed out Nova, full maxed Discoverer & fully maxed Express, with jumpdrives and whatnot. You don't need to prove to anyone that you can haul energy-cells for 2 hours if you've already done it.

Anyway, i would put this in the rare category of a 'perfect game'. The only reason I can imagine not playing this on a semi-regular basis is because X4 has been released, assuming it's as good (fingers crossed)

If any of you guys at Egosoft happen to see this:
a.) Keep up the good work
b.) please make X4's ui allow multiple windows to be open at once
c.) fix the homicidal auto-pilot lol

An excellent game with a lot of depth.

I agree with the people who describe it as a single-player version of Eve online. You can do any of the following activities:

1) Fly a fighter pilot around shooting pirates to earn commission from your police license (bonus $$ if the abandon ship and you can claim it and sell it)

2) Fly a cargo ship around -- buy low, sell high. Maybe you'll have a good route set up where you take energy cells from a solar plant to a bio-gas plant, trade bo-gas to a bofu farm, trade bofu to a crystal factory, and then take the crystals to a solar power plant. But hope you weren't going to use that route again because now the bio-gas plant has plenty of energy cells and temporarily ran out of bo-gas to sell.

3) Fly a transport ship around, look for missions from passengers willing to pay $$$$$ for you to take them somewhere else

4) Collect enough money to build your own stations, such as perhaps a silicon mine on that asteroid you found

5) Shoot smaller asteroids with a mining laser and scoop them up

6) Why not all of the above at once? Get a fleet of ships, set up a satellite network, and command them remotely.

7) Become a pirate -- terrorise the cargo ships, seize their cargo, force the pilot to eject, capture him too, and sell him as a slave at a pirate base

8) Oh, and there's a series of plot missions as well


I do need to give a warning: With this many different things to do, there's a learning curve. And a long setup time before you can do the major empire-building complex thing. And a need/desire for quite a bit of reference material. This game came from an era when gamers were expected to read the manual, and in this case the manual is hefty (61 pages in the PDF version -- and still lacking information about complex construction, Sector/Universe traders, ...) I'm willing to do that for a game with this much depth and variety but not everyone is.

A worthy successor to X3: Reunion. With more ships (including bombers, which are a powerful addition for anti-capital ship combat). But lets not forget the biggest deal of all. You can play as a Terran! At long last we have seen our Terran brothers again, and can even play as them!

Pro:
+Great Story! (You'll need context of the other games to fully understand it though)

+Wide variety of mission types Combat missions alone include assassinations, defend a station, patrols, escorts, and even convoy hunting, Trade missions have you supplying or delivering wares to stations, or buying used ships (can be a great way to turn a profit when you repair it yourself). Build missions to have you build stations for the universe (thats right, get PAID to build stations. Last type of missions are the "think" missions, which have you transporting passengers, scanning asteroids, returning stolen or abandoned ships, tracking ships, etc.

+Randomly generated missions

+Vast options of ships/equipment to choose from. (Scout ships, interceptors, heavy fighters, bombers, transport freighter normal/heavy/super freigther, "Transport Large" (capital ship sized transport ship), corvettes (like a small frigate), frigates, destroyers and carriers.

+Player HQ (when unlocked) can reverse engineer ships (possibly jump beacons if you can get enough!) build ships, and house many ships,

+Living breathing universe. All those ships you see flying somewhere are doing things around the universe. Be it supplying a station somewhere, patrolling the sectors for hostiles. (Dont worry, escorts and the various ships respawn over time ... stations on the other hand ... dont (exception being shipyards and equipment docks)

+Reputation system for factions (how friendly/hostile they are to you, your clearence from shipyards, trading discounts, etc.)

+Autopilot!. Game can run autonomously in trade/exploration/combat aspects. Just buy the ships, buy the ship software from military bases and equipment docks. And you can have self sufficient fleets that can even automatically do trading across the universe for you (with Trade software MK3).

+Build your own stations. You can contribute to the universe and turn a decent profit when built on the right spots. Especially useful for obtaining some of those harder to obtain wares.

+Piracy, you can steal from freighters, capture capital ships, and smuggle illegal goods accross sectors.

Cons:
- Starts off a little slow. Because it takes a bit of time to work your way up (more from finances than from reputation; which is slightly hard to raise, easy to destroy).

-A little buggy. two story missions can be rather difficult, and can break if you arent careful (Mission six of Terran Conflict can break, so make a special save before you start it). and Mission seven can be annoying because you have to try to board and steal a capital ship (but dont worry, after a time your allies do it for you). Other than that, its pretty much bug free!

- Autopilot can be clunky sometimes. Such as when navigating around the massive Terran stations, or when flying the bigger ships.

- Relatively steep learning curve. This is for those who havent played any X games. If you havent, I suggest doing the tutorial (which only teaches you how to fly and communicate. Then reading up on the basics of trading, or of things in general (could learn even helpful basics in combat)