I don't understand what I do wrong

[Fenrir]

I'm mostly looking for an experienced player or two who can explain some context for me or shed some light on why my campaigns are completely void of activity. I really want to like this game, and there's a long list of reasons why, but I'm finding it to be absolutely painful because as the title suggests: I have never seen a single activity ever occur.

I say "activity" because I don't know a word that expresses the sheer scale of nothing I have experienced after 159 hours in game. The Xenon? Never ever leave their starting zones. They kinda just poke at borders infinitely and then go home if there's nothing to attack. They might plop down a factory at the gate but that's about it. It usually just dies shortly after because they refuse to defend it.

I keep seeing people talking about two factions merging together? I've never seen that happen ever. Factions going to war? Nope. Not once has a single conflict erupted in all my time.

Economy? What economy? No matter how perfectly I follow tutorials and youtube videos, no matter how much station and crew/ship configuring I do, and no matter how extensive and redundant my supply chains are... my stations refuse to make money or products. The miners never mine (something about there never being valid trade options, no matter how many menus and settings I tweak around in), the traders same issue. Just sit there. No valid trade offers. The only time I ever seen the AI visit my stations is to sell me Terran MRE's. They wont even sell me food or anything else if I play as any other faction and/or build in any other friendly area.

And lastly: the supply shortages in materials never gets resolved. I used to say "whatever, I'll just let the AI build the hull parts factory because nobody at my factory seems to care. We might not be able to build any ships now, but if this game has supply/demand functions and an active economy so I can just let that figure itself out". But guess what? The AI never builds or upgrades stations. It puts almost zero effort into delivering what few finished parts there are.

The reason I decided to write this and ask "what is it that I don't understand?" is that I had 10 miners of both types and 10 traders all anchored right in the middle of boron space. 30 ships, all fully leveled up thanks to a mod that lets me buy seminars, and lastly an ore refinery in Rolk's Demise (with 5 each of traders and miners of both types). I built all this using cheat menu mod so that I could spam out the money and just practice playing the game, because playing normally isn't working. It took over an hour to set this up. I went to bed, woke up 8ish hours later, checked the game before walking to make breakfast... Not a single purchase was made at my refinery, not a single ore was gathered, not a single station was built or modified by the AI, not a single scout ship could be built at the AI's boron shipyard because there was only a tiny handful of each resource. But oh my miners and traders had been busy selling a ton of stuff to AI stations. I had soooooo much money but where did all those products and materials go? The xenon are still sitting pretty in their little starter zones. Nobody seems to have changed their relations with each other. It was literally 8 hours of stockpiling cash while the entire galaxy sat on its thumbs.

What do I not understand? Why does nothing ever happen? And does it truly take more than 8 hours to see the smallest of changes in the galaxy? I want to love this game but it just aint happening so far. It's not like I haven't watched every tutorial on youtube. It's not like I'm unaware of how to flick around the information, behaviour, and etc menus. It just... for some reason the simulation will not simulate.

[Pandorian]

Yuki a écrit :

#2: There certainly are. That might have to do with what i mentioned as "unblocking":
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3007263446

Really? Those miners cans support ALL the NPC stations? Or is it just the TER/PIO ones?
Can they even supply the PIO/TER ones? All you showed was a swarm of miners.

Congrats. You proved the AI can build miners which I agree with.
Or did you prove the AI can build miners? I mean you said that you build your own wharf so showing a picture of AI miners proves... nothing? They exist? How is showing a picture of miners a counter example to AI have issues meeting demands of all their refineries?

Further you showed a picture of Terran Economy which is notoriously simplistic and is one of the economies that can stand on it's own. The other being HOP. Is that the issue that I made a general statement and didn't clarify that there are factions that can still operate on a higher level than other factions?
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925-2-11 1:12

It's definitely not a snapshot from the beginning of the game so I'm not sure what exactly you're trying to prove. Are you going to show a picture now of a game where the stations that couldn't be met were decommissioned so they no longer exist? I honestly don't know what the issue is here.

Start a new game
Let it run for a couple of hours
Go look at all the stations that aren't supplied

This is such a common occurrence I don't understand what's controversial about it.

[Yuki]

Pandorian a écrit :

Congrats. You proved the AI can build miners which I agree with.

Which are also shown actively mining in the same screenshot. So keep your trolling contained. Its also just one single system (and only what i can see of it) and lots of Large miners. At this point the asteroid respawn is more of a limit than NPC miners, as also evident from the screenshot.
Thats why there are whole swarms of large miners hugging one roid. And those few supplying all factories in the whole game...stop being silly.
Thats not what it was about. But it stands proven that NPC's can mine very well even.
(Besides other systems dont look too different, just less. Brennans seems to have a higher asteroid respawn. NPC's are strip-mining everything everywhere).
At this point flinging your own mining fleets in there wont make any difference to the systems resource output. It would just net you and the NPC's more idle time.

Pandorian a écrit :

It's definitely not a snapshot from the beginning of the game so I'm not sure what exactly you're trying to prove. Are you going to show a picture now of a game where the stations that couldn't be met were decommissioned so they no longer exist? I honestly don't know what the issue is here.

Me neither. We where talking about pushing empires. Not starting with massive empires.
And clogging up the NPC refineries with massive ammounts of ore for a meager income wont bring you there neither.

Pandorian a écrit :

Start a new game
Let it run for a couple of hours
Go look at all the stations that aren't supplied

This is such a common occurrence I don't understand what's controversial about it.

Did i ever say they will do so automagically? No. But feeding from the bottom just apparently wont make them do so neither.
Okay then, in Layman's terms for you:

Starting out with end-tier goods actually makes them produce and use miners.

Of course they wont look like that at the start. But "pulling from the top" is the way to go there without much planning nor managing. And the most lucrative too btw.

[Pandorian]

Yuki a écrit :

Thats not what it was about. But it stands proven that NPC's can mine very well even.
(Besides other systems dont look too different, just less. Brennans seems to have a higher asteroid respawn. NPC's are strip-mining everything everywhere).
At this point flinging your own mining fleets in there wont make any difference to the systems resource output. It would just net you and the NPC's more idle time.

I've never argued that the NPCs CAN'T MINE. If for some reason you feel the need to re-iterate that miners can mine then I'm going to ask you to quote me where I said something in disagreement with that. I'm addressing the game as a whole not trying to identify and address the outliers such as TER/PIO/HOP.

Yuki a écrit :

Me neither. We where talking about pushing empires. Not starting with massive empires.
And clogging up the NPC refineries with massive ammounts of ore for a meager income wont bring you there neither.

Again something I am in agreement with you and never said anything to the contrary. No clue why you keep reiterating the same points we agree on but putting it in a way that seems like I disagree.

Yuki a écrit :

Did i ever say they will do so automagically? No. But feeding from the bottom just apparently wont make them do so neither.
Okay then, in Layman's terms for you:

Starting out with end-tier goods actually makes them produce and use miners.

Of course they wont look like that at the start. But "pulling from the top" is the way to go there without much planning nor managing. And the most lucrative too btw.

Sigh... how is this in anyway in contradiction to what I said to do? I get that in a conversation in real time it's sometimes necessary to reword, rephrase, and repeat what the other said but it's not necessary when we agree on what is being said in a forum.

You say pull from the top, I say identify the bottlenecks in the supply chain. Either way end goods are going into a wharf/shipyard. In whichever way you want to put it there isn't enough infrastructure to meet the demand of the shipyards and wharfs and that is where the player is expected to focus their attention.

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EDIT: Look obviously there's a communication break down somewhere as most of your points I agree with but most of the things you disagree with me on I never said. So I'm just going to drop the discussion here. We're clogging up the thread over stuff that is teetering on off topic.

[nZ RaifalM3n]

personally i like to lower prices , for example my refined metals and water wares are boosting with clients lol. i had 10,12 ships in a waiting line just at my water / ice factory. Lower prices and they will buy like lunatics haha. Made good money

[db48x]

With everyone squabbling and dumping on the game, I don’t think Fenrir’s questions were ever really answered.

Fenrir a écrit :

The miners never mine (something about there never being valid trade options, no matter how many menus and settings I tweak around in)

Fenrir, could you focus on solving this one problem first, ignoring all of the others? Try going to a more central sector like Eighteen Billion or Grand Exchange or Second Contact II. Scout around until you find a sector that has both a silicon refinery (which might be called a Refined Goods Complex, find one that buys Silicon and sells Wafers). This should be easy to find. If you do this in a game that you have been playing for a while, verify that the station has demand for Silicon, and has not filled up it’s storage of wafers. Best is to find a sector with multiple refineries all hungry for silicon of course, but even one will do for the test.

Now buy a medium mineral miner from the nearest wharf (use the medium loadout) and set its behavior to Local AutoMine Silicon in that specific sector. Observe this miner from out of sector and see if it actually starts mining silicon. It should sell that silicon to a refinery. If it does, let the game run for three hours, then show us a screenshot of the ship’s activity log showing the last three hours. You should see a pretty considerable income over that time, easily more than enough to pay for the ship.

If you cannot get that to work, then something has gone wrong. May you set up trade restrictions, or travel restrictions, that are preventing it from working. Or maybe you have hit a rare bug that really does cause the game to grind to a complete halt. Or maybe the game files are corrupted and telling Steam to verify the installation will fix it. Or possibly a mod has broken the game (wouldn’t be the first time; you can test by trying again with no mods).

[Gibbo]

It's probably one of their mods?

I find it really easy to make credits in this game. In fact this is by far the easiest X game I've played and I started at Reunion.

I can only think they've downloaded loads of mods and then blame the game? I don't know how else so much can go wrong?

[db48x]

Gibbo a écrit :

I can only think they've downloaded loads of mods and then blame the game? I don't know how else so much can go wrong?

Potentially, which is one reason why it is useful to limit ourselves to a small self–contained problem. But they also said that they “fiddled” with all the game settings while trying to get things to work, so maybe they just set up an unfortunate trade restriction or something. We’ll see when the experiment is done.

[Gibbo]

They also mentioned cheat engine and that can ruin a game.

My miners mine. Some of my stations have over 50 large miners. They all mine. My traders trade. I really only use station traders late game. All my sector traders are normally dead lol and they did what I needed them to.

So yeah? User error I reckon.

[Casual Lazy Gamer]

His game is borked not due to vanilla bug, but more likely from the cheat mod.

It removes the requirement of involving in player's contribution to the economy simulation at a whim and thencomplaining there ain't economy simulation.

[Hrochnick]

db48x a écrit :

With everyone squabbling and dumping on the game, I don’t think Fenrir’s questions were ever really answered.

Fenrir a écrit :

The miners never mine (something about there never being valid trade options, no matter how many menus and settings I tweak around in)

Fenrir, could you focus on solving this one problem first, ignoring all of the others? ...

I haven't read through all 5 pages of squabbling, so not sure if this point has been mentioned yet (and apologies if it has) but from what i can tell from the screenshots, the ore storage is full (or practically full, probably incoming deliveries to fill it), so no, the miners won't mine until there is space to deposit it. Or at least, they can't deposit what they have, so they can't go out and mine any more. That's indicated by the little orange asteroid icon above the mining ships.

You've got 5 miners supplying one ore refinery module. it can't keep up with deliveries, so your miners are under utilised and spend time waiting for storage space.

Make more production modules to use the resources faster and/or increase solid storage.

[Wraith]

Fenrir a écrit :

Yep I got all of that configured. Miners set to mine not trade, over abundance of all types of storage because I thought of that too. I don't know how to share screenshots on here but I got a few so I'll try.

Edit: added a third pic that shows the error message I get with almost all my eco ships. I can clear the error by interupting them, but it will only be a few minutes before they break again, and that dolphin I sent to the ore refinery was manual. I was tinkering before anyone asked for screenshots.

https://imgur.com/a/8mushU6
https://imgur.com/a/MrA8NCC

Sorry OP! didn't realize you posted screenshot in Imgur

I thought it would be from steam lol

Ok here a few thing I see
1. you don't have any manual sell or buy amount
This mean your station is fully under the control of the manager whim

2. your supply is looking good with E cell the one being a bit sketchy because it only half fill your station manager might want to fill it.

3. Your finished ware storage amount is low it only 10 percent filled which mean that it very unappealing to customers (storage percentage matters!)

Here a screenshot of my station for reference vs yours

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3007429195

different between yours and mine is
1. I limit my station storage amounts to reasonable level

2. I have buy amount and sell amount manually place
You can see this with the green and yellow lines

3. I have a trade rule to say only my faction can supply this station

4. My produced good is above a good percentage of storage filled appealing to the AI to buy it.

As you can see even though I'm in Tharka's Cascade the Argon are buying my MRE to sell to Segaris Pioneer and I don't even have to extend my station range

[Gibbo]

Long shot, but a sector can make all the difference.

I started building a shipyard in Rolk's Demise. Utter nightmare. Only 15% sunlight. Luckily I could build an energy station in the next sector and I just set some freighters up on repeat orders and it's never been a problem. So, I thought I dodged a bullet, but in fact I hit the jackpot! That shipyard in Rolk's Demise can build Asgards in just under 13 minutes lmao and with seta it's 2 minutes? :D

What is interesting about that is I have a much bigger and badder shipyard in Argon Prime but I think that's 45 minutes to an hour? I dunno why this is? But I love my Rolk's Demise shipyard. I mean everything is a lot quicker. Want a Syn? Just keep you a few minutes sir lmao.

I'm still going with user error.

[Casual Lazy Gamer]

Gibbo a écrit :

Long shot, but a sector can make all the difference.

I started building a shipyard in Rolk's Demise. Utter nightmare. Only 15% sunlight. Luckily I could build an energy station in the next sector and I just set some freighters up on repeat orders and it's never been a problem. So, I thought I dodged a bullet, but in fact I hit the jackpot! That shipyard in Rolk's Demise can build Asgards in just under 13 minutes lmao and with seta it's 2 minutes? :D

What is interesting about that is I have a much bigger and badder shipyard in Argon Prime but I think that's 45 minutes to an hour? I dunno why this is? But I love my Rolk's Demise shipyard. I mean everything is a lot quicker. Want a Syn? Just keep you a few minutes sir lmao.

I'm still going with user error.

I was under the impression that ship building speed depends on number of available building drones across the current building jobs and not tied to a sector.

But yes, X4 is not for everyone, it's a colony building sim at core than a battle sim, and depends on each one's perspective. Such that while the OP thinks only the ship sim part works in this game, I'd argue that it's the most broken part where as the economy sim aspect is a lot better polished since it was rather simple and straight forward, as @Pandorian explained, once you get the working of it.

The problem is, when one fast-track the game via mechanics un-intended by game design (aka, cheats), you remove that aspect of the gameplay, it's rather ironic then to complain about the absence of that particular aspect of the gameplay as non-existent.

[Gibbo]

Building drones? I shall have to check that. I have built them, but I already had loads of cargo drones in one of my stations and I just cannot remember? That does make a lot of sense. Time to readjust my drones I think.

There's lots of stuff in this game lmao.

[Fenrir]

Got my new keyboard. I wasn't going to say anything more here but I forgot to unsubscribe and my alerts were going nuts. The actual problem turned out to be the prices on the stations being too high. I unchecked the automation button and dropped the prices and things started picking. Game is still a mess of poor AI and UI issues so I still uninstalled anyway. I can't find the original post in all that squabbling but whoever you were you were right: dropping prices manually fixed a lot of problems.

With that said you guys have been arguing and show boating your own egos all day. Look at those time stamps. That's like 12 hours of straight arguing. We're all a bunch of turbo nerds playing middle management games about math and numbers I don't know if winning this discourse is the flex you all think it is. Go touch grass you're embarrassing yourselves.