"Best Space Game You've Never Played"

[kalbertb]

Saw that in a video, so I bought X4. After playing for over a hundred hours, I now know why it's the "Best Space Game You've Never Played". It's crappy. And it's not just the bugs, of which there are many.
The manipulations are obnoxious. Random incidents pop up, of course. But the doubling-up on them is annoying. You just get a message about one of your miners getting attacked, and before you can deal with that you've got another pop-up from another miner about something else. Just one example, I've seen this far too many times in different situations in my several attempted playthroughs.
It's intentional task overload. Obviously the developers thought annoying their players this way would make the game "more interesting". Wrong.
The game is aimed at "builder" types - build your empire. So why would the developers start taking away the parts of your empire that you've spent hours building before you can get anywhere ? That's not "challenging". It's frustrating and annoying.
It does make you want to work harder on the game to overcome those deliberate obstacles. But only so far. Then it makes you want to throw up your hands and dump it.
That's where I'm at now. I finally hit my limit on this garbage when I'd spent over 20 tedious hours mining in my starter ship to get several miners. And now, before one of them has even broken even for the $640,000 cost, a random attack wipes it out.
Enough of this crap. I should have left X4 as the "Best Space Game You've Never Played" and never wasted my money on it.

[Doom]

Originally posted by kalbertb:

It's intentional tak overload. Obviously the developers thought annoying

It is not scripted. The reason why your miners are attacked is because there are hostiles in the sector which found your ships. And because your ships have no weapons to defend themselves and no support. The world sort of does not revolve around the player.

Yes, it can be tough early on when you are learning the ropes, because there are no magical insurances and losses can hit hard. But you'll eventually snowball.

For safe mining you could mine right at the argon prime, or in terran space.

[NoDMoD]

Originally posted by Doom:

Originally posted by kalbertb:

It's intentional tak overload. Obviously the developers thought annoying

It is not scripted. The reason why your miners are attacked is because there are hostiles in the sector which found your ships. And because your ships have no weapons to defend themselves and no support. The world sort of does not revolve around the player.

Yes, it can be tough early on when you are learning the ropes, because there are no magical insurances and losses can hit hard. But you'll eventually snowball.

For safe mining you could mine right at the argon prime, or in terran space.

Khaak are indeed scripted and exactly that what OP describes. So are pirates.

There are mods to fix the pirates though, to prevent them from just spawning in. Such as "Spawn begone" and "Chaos and conflict".

[Targaryen22]

Its like dudes expecting not to accumulate losses is the issue. If you want that you gotta figure out some other way to protect your ships rather then relying on turrets which generally struggle to get the job done. But there are gunna be losses. I routinely drop hundreds of millions on batches of ships and I currently have over 1000 in my current campaign eventually the loss of a 20+million credit ship is more annoying for the dead 5 star pilot then it is the loss of investment. If you can't do the work to get to that point and thus be able to protect your interested with military investments that's on you know what I mean?

[NoDMoD]

Originally posted by Targaryen22:

Its like dudes expecting not to accumulate losses is the issue. If you want that you gotta figure out some other way to protect your ships rather then relying on turrets which generally struggle to get the job done. But there are gunna be losses. I routinely drop hundreds of millions on batches of ships and I currently have over 1000 in my current campaign eventually the loss of a 20+million credit ship is more annoying for the dead 5 star pilot then it is the loss of investment. If you can't do the work to get to that point and thus be able to protect your interested with military investments that's on you know what I mean?

There is the issue with escorts being completely useless. So I do understand if new players expect things to work, which don't. It takes time getting used to all the workarounds in this game. Just because it works for you, doesn't mean others won't have issues with it.

There is still a lot to be improved in this game. A lot.

[Winter's Embers]

Originally posted by NoDMoD:

There is the issue with escorts being completely useless. So I do understand if new players expect things to work, which don't. It takes time getting used to all the workarounds in this game. Just because it works for you, doesn't mean others won't have issues with it.

There is still a lot to be improved in this game. A lot.

I agree that there's a lot of work to be done. Egosoft, however, seems utterly uninterested in doing the work. It seems they'd much rather spend their time finding ways that players succeed and looking for ways to nerf, undermine, or otherwise ruin it all in the name of 'difficulty' or in forcing the player to play their way, not in a sandbox way.

[Doom]

Originally posted by Targaryen22:

some other way to protect your ships rather then relying on turrets which generally struggle to get the job done.

L miner with flak turrets and mk3 shields usually will survive most things. It'll cost more than 600k, however. But that's what station missions are for. They're there so you can quickly gather money if you ran out of it.

[Targaryen22]

Originally posted by NoDMoD:

Originally posted by Targaryen22:

Its like dudes expecting not to accumulate losses is the issue. If you want that you gotta figure out some other way to protect your ships rather then relying on turrets which generally struggle to get the job done. But there are gunna be losses. I routinely drop hundreds of millions on batches of ships and I currently have over 1000 in my current campaign eventually the loss of a 20+million credit ship is more annoying for the dead 5 star pilot then it is the loss of investment. If you can't do the work to get to that point and thus be able to protect your interested with military investments that's on you know what I mean?

There is the issue with escorts being completely useless. So I do understand if new players expect things to work, which don't. It takes time getting used to all the workarounds in this game. Just because it works for you, doesn't mean others won't have issues with it.

There is still a lot to be improved in this game. A lot.

Not sayin that it's perfect or anything by any means. Definitely needs a good bit of tlc. But I've found for the most part that solving the issue of your ships getting jumped is less assigning then escorts and more assigning fast patrols in problematic sectors. A small wing of Katanas and gorgons on patrols in sectors your trying to profit off of goes a long long way. The only ships in my empire that gets escorts are military ships larger the mediums lol. Destroyers carriers and battleships and my losses have been minimal for a long while now

[Geist]

"You just get a message about one of your miners getting attacked, and before you can deal with that you've got another pop-up from another miner about something else."

Solution: There is a pause button. No i'm not joking. There are SO many people that don't know that this game can be paused.


Optional: You can also just deactivate the messages and let the ships decide by themselfes how to handle situations. Usualy I set them up to try to escape when attacked.

Except for M miners, because usualy those are only attacked by the Kha'ak anyway and you can't outrun Kha'ak.
So this ships either get an escort, some lasertowers, or are replaced by L miners as soon as I can.

Also 7.0 seems to have rebalanced something on the Kha'ak, they spawn much less regulary atm for me. In the early game I saw so few, that I thought it was a bug or Egosoft had accidentaly patched them out.

"The game is aimed at "builder" types - build your empire. So why would the developers start taking away the parts of your empire that you've spent hours building before you can get anywhere ? "

Because building an empire without having any risk of loosing anything would be utterly boring.

Solution: Learn how to protect your assets. Optional: reloading a safefile or cheat.


" when I'd spent over 20 tedious hours mining in my starter ship to get several miners. "

Your starter ship can't collect ore. What did you mine in it?

With manual mining you usualy can fill up an entire M Miner within 3 minutes.
If its an S miner usualy even one Asteroid is enough to fill it up completely.

You do shoot the little glowing ore deposits visible in scan mode and not the rock itself right? Because you will get MUCH more ore this way and thats the benefit of manual mining.

I ask because many people never mine manualy and don't even know about this and
because it shouldn't take 20 hours to get a few ships this way.
Actualy right now, I play a mining only safegame. (the "Selton Mining Corporation" :-D )
After the first 20 Hours I had more than a few M Miners. To be exact I had 2 fleets of 5 fully outfitted L miners, each paid for only by manual mining (and the mining ships themselfes)

"And now, before one of them has even broken even for the $640,000 cost, a random attack wipes it out."

Stuff like this can happen. Yesterday I build 5 additional new L miners and send them to the maintenance dock to upgrade engines and so on. Sadly they did fly through Hatikvah's choice just in the moment an Xenon I + its friends decided it would be a good idea to camp at the gate.
When I realized what was going on I already had lost 2 and the 3. was halfway down but somehow (probaply using arcane magic) survived flying past it, within its turret range, and managed to escape. The rest I could stop before entering combat range.
So THAT was a loss of enough money to pay off an entire M fleet... But who cares, the game throws so much money at you, that its not the end of the world if stuff gets lost.

The only ship that would annoy me to loose and where I would reload to save it would be my first L Miner, because its outfitted with exceptional mods and has sentimental value.

[PeaceMaker]

Originally posted by kalbertb:

Saw that in a video, so I bought X4. After playing for over a hundred hours,

This is why the "I played this many X hours" means nothing.

How can anyone play 100 hours to realise they think it's bad?

It takes me maybe 5-6 hours on any long sandbox game to know if I like it, maybe 8 hours at most. It shows that your judgement is not very good.

[Vault Traveler]

Yeah the game has issue.

But all you described is literally skill issue.

You probably build something that you could not compensate to lose and simply make a big vent to blame everyone else.

Eve Online Experience 101.

In a singleplayer game no less, reload, look for mods, improve your playstyle.

[Doom]

Originally posted by PeaceMaker:

How can anyone play 100 hours to realise they think it's bad?

In a really complex game it may take 100 hours to reach a complex game-breaking issue. Most of modern sandboxes are not complex games.

X4 has a lot of problems that surface at later date and could be improved, and can easily take hundreds of hours to reach the point where you run into them.

However, protecting miners is not one of those issues.

[Gibbo]

Shame you didn't ask for advice instead of rage quitting. You don't need to spend 20 hours mining to afford some ships. You can get your first M miner within half an hour by picking up loot from battles. Then you send that miner to Oort cloud where nothing will ever attack it as long as you're not at war with the Terrans. Oort Cloud is great. It's like a nursery for miners and new players. You can put 6 M miners in there mining ore, silicon and hydrogen and they will get near to the top price and stay safe all game so there's your passive income. Those 6 miners will quickly allow you to afford a L miner and then all your worries are over as only a huge swarm of Khaak can kill those oh and the Xenon, but you should easily avoid them mining. Pirates won't attack miners so a L miner should survive all game.

Tldr you're doing it wrong.

[SinisterSlay]

I usually make a bofu or water trader in boron space first. Their space early on and for a long time is totally safe, not even a pirate for ages. But eventually that area is oversupplied in those things and you have to hope your trader is now enough stars to be an auto trader. If it's going oddly fast and they are leveling up quickly, I will transfer them to other ships until the bofu and water become unprofitable. Usually by this point the SCA have started showing up, but you have enough money to start making L miners.

My other trick is to set up a power plant at mercury, and a trade station in the void. Set an L trader to repeat order bring energy cells to the trade centre and watch the profits roll in. Works at Pluto too.

I like the automated low effort approach because then I an focus my own ship on doing missions.

[Security Cam #7]

Originally posted by NoDMoD:

Khaak are indeed scripted and exactly that what OP describes.

Khaak can be dealt with and only spawn if they have a hive within a sector. Destroying such hive will prevent khaak from spawning in a sector for like 2 realtime days until the hive is rebuilt.
Move your mining operation to a sector without Khaak if you cannot deal with the stations yet.

[Despiser]

There are multiple ways to solve what X4 throws at you, some not very intuitive and the game does a poor job of pointing you in the right direction. It took me forever just to get repeat orders working. But it's a refreshing change from linear hand holding games where your major input is watching cutscenes.