XRM - rebalance or maybe unbalance?

[broot]

HI,

sorry for TL;DR, but I want to be understood correctly.

Many people say XRM is much better than vanilla game. I've just tried it, played few tens of hours and I don't know, it definitely has much to offer, but for me it actually breaks the gameplay a lot. I love some of its added features, I love design of ships and stations, I like increased dynamics of the world and making it much more dangerous place, I also like some of its rebalancing, for example making jumpdrive available for capital ships only. But other changes to economics or weapons and ships stats are... I would rather say they have unbalanced the game, made it much worst than vanilla.

For me balancing means that each weapon, ship, tactics, etc. has its strengths and weaknesses, but none of them is absolutely better than others, so the choice depends on a play style of the player or his personal needs.

Let's get for example the choice of weapon for our M3. We usually choose between PBE, PRG, HEPT and PAC (and maybe IRE, but It's rather for M5/M4, not M3 ships). Some of them have high damage, but particles are slow making them great for capital ships, but not for other fighters. Some of them have high shields damage, but aren't very good for damaging hulls. Some of them are very power consuming and others not. You choose different weapons for different kinds of ships, for their roles (fighter/bomber), you choose different weapons for front guns and turrets. Sometimes you even choose a ship kind to get weapons you need. This is great.

Now let's look at the stats of these weapons in XRM: http://www.thexuniverse.us/downloads/cmod/XRM/stats/tbl-ap_xrm_guns.html . Their shield DPS is: 3360, 3103, 3060, 2133 and hull DPS: 593, 569, 567, 400. First three of them are basically the same weapons! There is no reason to get slower HEPT, because still it has nearly the same DPS as much faster PRG. Also PAC doesn't have any advantages over other weapons, it's just worse. In practice I found it doesn't make much difference in using one weapon or another - they're kind of the same, only different color of projectiles.

Another example: I like the fact that gaps between ships classes are now smaller. In vanilla you can kill a lot of M4/M5 ships with your single M3 and in XRM even 1xM3 vs 3xM4 may be a tricky fight. I personally like it, but again: it breaks things. Recently I was fighting with a single M4 with my M3 for about 10 minutes until I finally killed it! I don't know, what has been changed: speed of projectiles, speed of fighters, speed of shields regeneration or maybe all of them, but if I attack a group of fighters I often totally ignore M4/M5 fighters and go for M3, because it takes me seconds to take it down and usually several times more for M4/M5. Even if I use PRG - anti-fighter weapon.

For some reason my UT ships are kind of useless. They fly from station to station, buy and sell, but they don't actually make too much money. It was quite hard to train them to lv12, because I think it depends on earned money. I think even with 4xUT I get 90% of my money from bounties. Maybe this is some kind of "advertising" or favoring XRM's added features? I like bounties, but not that much. Also I agree that in vanilla UTs give a lot of money, so earnings from e.g. fighting are neglectable, but on the other hand they require a lot of investment, so maybe it is how it should be.

Most of optional missions are unplayable for long time, because they have time requirement and you sometimes can't even get to the destination without a jumpdrive.

Also I found that changes to weapons and ships stats makes game more chaotic, depending or luck rather than on skills and good management. For example you save the game before some big fight, e.g. 3 capital ships on each side + fighters and it ends up with crushing victory by side A (all capital ships remain and at 50+% shields). Then you load up a game and it ends up with the opposite. It's quite common case and it's the same for player: sometimes you kill a squadron of fighters without much problems and sometimes the same squadron will kill you in seconds, you can't do anything about it. I personally don't like it, because I usually try to play without save&load backup. XRM makes it a requirement, but not because it's harder, but seems more random and independent of user actions.

Summing everything up: I think it is really hard to balance things in the game. Starcraft is a great example: Blizzard was releasing balancing patches for more than a 10 years, I think, even without any changes to game logic! I personally think Egosoft did a good job, I would say vanilla game is quite balanced. They had years for this. XRM has a great potential, it adds awesome things and tries to make a game less casual and more realistic - it's good. On the other hand every change to the game makes it unbalanced and I think it can't be rebalanced without a huge effort. It is resource and time consuming to get things right. I think XRM fails at this point, unfortunately.

Does anyone else has similar impressions?

[mmmcheesywaffles]

You have quite neatly summed up my own feelings about XRM. It's really a mod for those more interested in pew,pew,pew.

I far prefer the SCS script. For whatever imbalance you introduce; you can always find a way to counter balance. [Look at the switch options to understand how]

In my case I prefer not to have to worry about repairing ships [just the hassle of sending them to a shipyard] So I set SCS to allow my Aran to repair ships at a minor cost then if I find I am allowing myself too much I simply hand a few ships over to various factions. I hire the Salvagers to collect all the derelcit ships adn deliver them to a chosen safe sector for me to repair and sell on at my leisure. Again, if I find there are too many ships to keep a reasonable balance I repair them and convert them to another race.

Oh... and once I do see my game has lost balance I tweak my settings in the script to get better balance back. :)

Vanilla X3 keeps good balance between the fighting and trade. Once you alter it too much the balance is lost and it spoils the game. However, for those who only really want the fight then a mod like XRM is fine. So I don't condemn it - just it isn't for me.

[lock]

I prefer Vanilla, it's simple, no rush required to get the job done. I find that every now an then, I have to reinstall it from the backup from disk, and even tho I am playing AP, the Terran version also gets corrupted...(its not played) so I don't know why it gets that way.

On a even note, if I have to do mods, I would have to reload everything everytime something gets corrupted...an its just not worth the hassle of redoing it.

So I prefer the Vanilla and not the flavors that comes with it.

[mmmcheesywaffles]

Actually the beauty of running a script like SCS is that you can run it easily when you install. It really is very easy. As far as I remember SCS can even be uninstalled and you only lose the assets added.

[Informer]

I think XRM was made for making the game much more harder. There are good, and bad things in XRM. Everything is costing a lot, so it can take a while to get any progress. I played it as fighter, but also as a trader / empire builder, but like I said, it is much slower in progress. But I do agree about the UT trading in XRM, they don’t make a lot of profit. But you can change that with to put a other script/mod in XRM.
I just keep the things what I like in XRM, and try to change what you don’t like about it.
But I think it is a great mod.

I am playing 3 X3 total conversions mods at the moment.
The first is XRM, second, the new Litcube Universe mod, and third the Battlestar Galatica mod.

But even when I play total conversion mods or even a vanilla game I try, if possible, to install the following mods:
Life,
Codea,
Salvage command suite (SCS)
Mars
MK3 Improvement Reloaded
Trade overview
IE
IEX

These mods are a must for me, because it makes the game much more interesting as vanilla.
Also I recommend you try the new Litcube Universe mod. A lot of improvements, and it at two evil corporations, what keeps the game even interesting later in the game. I am still playing it, but as far as I can say, you can progress a little faster, but that does not mean it is easier.
The Battlestar Galactica mod, has 2 new start options, one who you must find the Galactica fleet.

But it is nice to see how alive this game still is. The new Litcube universe mod, and even the guys what did make the galactica mod, are still updating, and working on a total new galactica mod.

[Fived]

XRM is a pretty fantastic mod. I think most of the wonkiness in the game is caused by the poor AI, you can make the problems even more visable by turning up your seta and watching what happens.

[Fulcrum]

A huge chunk of your experience with XRM will also be determined by what options you chose when you installed it. It may not seem like much, but the different "hull multiplication packs" are absolutely massive changes to the game. And you're right about those weapons being similar, that's definitely a fault of the mod, but at the same time it's necessary for balance. Fighter weapons can't be too far apart or one faction will always trump another in combat. The differences that you do see are compensated by differences in the ships themselves, because almost all weapons are now faction-specific.

For the most part, you can't mount split weapons on anything other than split ships (and a certain OTAS prototype) and the same goes for other races. This allows them to synergize with a specific playstyle/design in mind. You'll notice that the split weapons tend to fire faster, move faster, and do less damage; just like their ships move faster, turn faster, and have weaker shields & hulls. Statistically, those projectiles are only a little bit faster and a little bit weaker than the ones used by argon or boron fighters, but they feel completely different when used with their ships.

One of the main goals of XRM seems to be making each ship feel unique in its purpose, and I feel they succeed greatly there. Not only are there more than the tradtional M1-M8 classes, but there are also sub-classes and sub-sub classes of ships. There are fighter bombers, M3s tailored to fighting M3s, M3s tailored to fighting M4s, all sorts of minor diffirences that completely define the role of the ship. In vanilla you can get yourself a Split Tiger or an OTAS Boreas or something, and it can do almost anything you need it to. In XRM, your ship will only be able to fill one or two roles at best (with a few hidden jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none options). Because of these role-specific ships, the scale also tends to be bigger. Bigger battles, bigger patrols, bigger everything. It also means battles can be more chaotic, as a ship specialized at killing your M6 might get taken out early in the fighting, or it might survive and completely demolish your ship. You very much have to rely on backup for most situations, and you need to know when to retreat. For instance, as an average fighter you should never even think about coming within 5km of a capital ship unless you want to be shredded by point defences, nor should a capital ship try to engage an M7M since a barrage of slow heavy torpedoes will have no trouble hitting your slow ship.

XRM definitely has its flaws, but many of them become more acceptable when you fully understand the reasoning behind them. It also sucks that the main Argon plot is disabled for X3AP, since I really want to experience it but I can't live without XRM now.

I've never really messed with UTs much since I'm more of a station-empire kind of player, but stations seem about as profitable as ever. Maybe a little less so than vanilla (it's incredibly hard to judge as even different vanilla saves will have different economical situations) but overall I can still fund my modest fleet from a pair of factory complexes.

[Quinch]

I find XRM.... flawed. It has some great ideas - the bounty system, hacking, invasion mechanics - but likewise, the restrictions it has, especially when it comes to equipment, limit as much, if not more, than they add to the gameplay. There are also serious combat issues - a Tomahawk missile, for example, has as many hitpoints as an M5, and considering they tend to be launched in bouquets, they are more than a little overpowered. A predilection for point-to-point weapons also makes capship battles dependant on raw shields and hit points, rather than flying and evasion, and so on. The cost of equipment makes trading income a drop in a bucket, forcing you to play the bounty hunter role instead if you want to make any inroads.

Basically, it's a nice conversion mod with some cool features, but anything but balanced.

Edit: And really, pretty much all the stuff OP mentions.

[Sabrehawk]

also the enemy AI is full of *bleep* ..just play humble merchant sit in your mercury freighter with 2 rear guns, including mars, goblin drones and camp beside a argon missile defense pod and watch the pirates attack elenas fortune throwing wave after wave of fighters and carracks and centaurs through the gate into a core sector of argon defended by colossus and tons of fighters/escorts and often enough they IGNORE all the targets that attack them and go straight for the passive player who has hardly ever shot down a pirate in the entire game. FULL OF *BLEEP*. Same for Xenon I battleships that jump into Argon space and go directly for your tiny little mercury across a whole sector filled with juicy targets, capital ships, bases, etc. Its just R E T A R D E D. Also the AI constantly cheats without having any detection in the sector the jump through a gate as soon as you start moving and leave your secure position, they even camp around a station to which you have docked and the sector security does jack.. about it. Also the AI does the same to kill a Advanced Satellite that is literally parked ontop of a Argon Trade Station despite tons of merchant AI being right in their path. H O R SE D U N G. ^^ Even with Mars i found the player ship turret AI to be horrible, and the fighter drones seem to be outright broken in that mod. Same goes for finding abandoned ships, or pilots ejecting. 30 Hours of watching hundreds and hundres of pirates die and not a SINGLE pilot ejected so far, and only ONE abandoned ship i came across, which ridicolously was a KHAAK interceptor. The dude basically just made everything ridicolously exspensive for a starting player and especially the rank requirements just to get a frigging jumpdrive take forever if you want to play as a trader/salvager. The way you make money as humble merchant is not being a merchant but just collecting missiles dropped in space and selling them of. Beats every trade you can do manually by far.

Essential scripts dont work with this mod either, and its dead for years now.

LITCUBE on the other hand i found to be horrible in corvette type ships u get roasted by trash and missiles in no time while your turrets just bugger around hitting nothing or even only firing every 5 seconds or not at all, making money though is stupidly easy because there are so many ships to claim that u never have to really use traders to make you first 50 million creds.

[thisguyLuis]

i for one have no idea if i installed XRM properly. i read and followed all the instructions. fired up a new game, and sure enough, i got the message saying that XRM was installed. and i checked the new features in the menu. but when i explore the sectors. i notice just about everything else is the same. and i have no idea if there really are any new ships or sectors added right off the bat. as the argon shipyards show the same list of ships as in the vanilla version

[Fived]

Originally posted by thisguyLuis:

i for one have no idea if i installed XRM properly. i read and followed all the instructions. fired up a new game, and sure enough, i got the message saying that XRM was installed. and i checked the new features in the menu. but when i explore the sectors. i notice just about everything else is the same. and i have no idea if there really are any new ships or sectors added right off the bat. as the argon shipyards show the same list of ships as in the vanilla version

I used the fake patch method and it worked. It should give you a ton of new starts if you installed XRM correctly.

[thisguyLuis]

i still don't know what the fake patch is, and the installation never gave a link for it. also, i already installed XRM, so i have no idea if simply adding the fake patch will somehow make it work, or if i have to start the installation all over again from scratch

[Fived]

Fake patch means you install the file and name it as if it was a patch. There should be information on how to do it in the XRM thread.

[AuGuR]

Simple XRM fake patch renaming (as of X3TC/AP v3.4):

For TC on fresh install* (main folder):
XRM1.30_Part_1 renamed to 14.cat & 14dat
XRM1.30d_Part_2 renamed to 15.cat & 15.dat
XRM1.29_Part_3 renamed to 16.cat & 16.dat

For AP on fresh install* (addon folder):
XRM1.30_Part_1 renamed to 05.cat & 05.dat
XRM1.30d_Part_2 renamed to 06.cat & 06.dat
XRM1.30d_Part_3** renamed to 07.cat & 07.dat

* - Other compatible mods may need to be renamed and numbered before the XRM files, IEX for example.
** - Part 3 is no different than the 1.29_Part_3 version.