X4 - Now with more flyable ships

It’s a bit more nuanced than that. From:


Simplified Faction and Location Based Cooperative Multiplayer

  • A new two faction system provides a consistent territory and reputation structure across the entire Evochron quadrant. Players choose the faction they will be allied with, either the Alliance (ALC) or Federation (FDN), in single player when they start a new profile. The new faction system also lets players select either faction temporarily when they join a multiplayer game. Faction selection establishes which systems will be friendly to the player and which ones are hostile. Players can join together with the same faction to team up or join opposing factions for PvP battles and competition. Territory control is now exclusive to ship destruction, requiring changes to a faction’s presence in order to alter a territory control value in a region.

  • Join forces with other players in multiplayer to complete more challenging activities that can offer higher pay. To link with other players, simply travel to the same sector and have one player accept a contract at a local station or city. Cooperative multiplayer objectives can pay all linked players.


I’ve seen the front lines on the map move in single player, so it does seem to work. I’ve done a bit of the war as well, but not as much as civilian stuff.

This game. Its so damn good. Yes it has a long learning curve but also a rewarding one. At each turn you find another well thought out activity, mining is a multifaceted joy. The station and shipbuilding tools give a gentle direction to aim for and a creative outlet, combined with the piracy/raiding boarding and economic aspects come together it gives a sense of building a small barony or merchant pocket empire in space. It will be interesting to see where (if anywhere) the end game goes but right now I am loving it. So many great stories it tells.

I feel bad I never really got into the other X games before. or maybe they were not this good.

RPS Wot I think

Could you describe the “space roads”? I remember that in Earth & Beyond there were fixed nodes that the autopilot always chose when moving back and forth. IIRC, Free Lancer had stuff like this with fancier graphics.

Years ago I imagined that the AI in a game like this could follow the most efficient paths between planetary bodies WRT gravity field lines. (And, thus, ships going to/from the same destinations would tend to congregate along the same paths.) But, in reality, gravity becomes super weak even short distances from a gravity well due to the inverse square law. Plus, with the amount of thrust ships are capable of producing in space video games… Worth it? Probably not.

X3:TC I would argue is a fair bit better at this stage. I think X4 has a higher ceiling and may surpass it in time, but all those things you talked about the games prior to Rebirth have in spades. More weapons, more distinct ships, more distinction between the different races’ ships. It was like a Pokemon game where I just had to collect a ship of each type, especially the ridiculous Terran ones. And the mods that have been developed over the past several years…

One of the highlights in TC for me was pirating an M7 missile frigate. I swooped in with my agile corvette and was able to drop its shields and deploy my marines. You have to keep up the pressure while boarding because if those shields come back online, those marines get fried. So I’m cartwheeling around dodging missile volleys and trying to keep the pressure on while the boarding pods make their way over and eventually slam into the hull. After a firefight, the ship was mine!

The problem was, missiles were pretty pricey and this thing could fill a sector in just one or two volleys. So I set about building up a production chain just to supply this sucker with missiles. That provided at least 20 more hours of fun just right there.

Once all that was finished, I loaded up my M7 and programmed in target priorities for them. I then flew into Xenon space, poked my head through the gate, then Fire! Fire! Fire! I emptied every single missile I had, the radar looked like a blizzard of dots as the flew towards their targets. It was a minute or two of waiting and then the detonations started rolling in. Escort ships blown into dust, capital ships reeling and crippled as dozens of missiles overloaded their shields and destroying multiple component systems.

And then I ordered my fleet in.

Two capital ships flanked by Paranid flak frigates, fast attack corvettes, two wings of fighters… and my other M7 I had captured. The Xenon didn’t stand a chance, that entire system was reduced to dust. I wish recording software was more common then, I would have loved to have saved that battle!

That’s where the limits of X3 showed, though. The galaxy wasn’t truly dynamic in the way X4 is. The Argon didn’t move in to capture the system, their economy didn’t boom without the losses inflicted by the Xenon. Those things exist in X4 and can lead to the issues they’re having with the world economy stalling, but once they get that sorted I think it has the potential to be the better game. I really want to see more variety and distinction in ships and weaponry, though, and hopefully that is either addressed by Egosoft or the modders.

I hear you on these X games, though, they are such a joy if you can get through the learning curve. It’s what made Elite so frustrating for me. While the engine, flight model, and a bunch of other engineering stuff is far superior to X, the game design is just dry as burnt toast. There’s really no comparison between the two.

I don’t disagree with your overall assessment (especially weapon variety - weapons are so easy to make, it’s almost like they forgot to do it) but you had an, uh… different… experience in X3 boarding than I did. ;)

Oh like everything else, X3:TC was finicky, clunky, and difficult to use. That being said, by the time TC came out (that was my first X game) the modding community was in full swing and I was taking full advantage of about a dozen of them. Remember the MARS turret script? That thing was insane, haha. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if I had mods running to help with boarding stuff. It’s been 10 years so I don’t remember which ones I had, but I had a lot!

Another small patch:

• Fixed HQ mission stalling if the escorted ship is unable to dock at its destination.
• Fixed HQ mission stalling if player flew through the anomaly too fast.
• Fixed duplicate and missing weapon entries in the HUD if multiple groups have been setup.
• Fixed ship upgrade builds not starting in certain situations.
• Fixed another cause of rare crashes.

Hey guys, I’m talking to the folks at Egosoft for our podcast tomorrow morning. Anything y’all would like me to ask?

YU NO VR!? :)

Is there an economy jumpstart patch coming? Economies tend to stall over time right now.

What are their plans on the mid & long term? IE: After shipping bugs are fixed when do we get our expansions?

Also please insert “praise from Rod” at length. I am blown away with how good a game they have built.

This game has unexpectedly taken up all of my gaming time. I am loving this.

I was way too happy when I realized you can dock ships on ships.

Ask them about documentation stuff - missing entries in the in-game encyclopedia, , entries that are listed but have no descriptions attached, entries that don’t explain how anything works.

As much as I enjoy the game so far, “guessing” isn’t my preferred way of learning a complex game.

Anyone playing X4 on a low spec machine? low spec = < 1060 GTX? If yes, how is the performance?

Speaking of playing the game:

My lizard man flew me to the space wharf so I can buy some more ships, now that I know you can buy ships there. I had a bunch of money, and I’m now at four ships. One miner, one trader, and two distributors (or whatever).

My miner’s captain had a three-star rating so I swapped him to a cargo ship so I could switch on the auto-trading in the behavior menu. My other cargo ships are piloted by two-star captains so I have them distributing goods from the behavior menu. I’ve also seeded all of Grand Exchange with satellites so they’ve all got something to work with.

I’m wondering if I am doing the trading right, because it occurs to me there are also options that show up in the right-click menu on the map. And auto-trading is one of them. Are commands from the map different than ones from the behavior menu? Are the behavior options just there in case you want to limit what goods they transfer? This is another mystery.

I also checked out on reddit, where someone said it can take like 24 in game hours for a captain to level up. Wow. My lizard co-pilot is a zero a star captain. What a chump.

I’m also on the next leg of the main story mission, where I now have to learn the very basics of station building. I expect this will just add to my existing questions. But even so, I’m enjoying myself.

I’m also speculating that the missing aquatic Boron race are all being used to stock space station aquariums:

I’d like to know what their priorities and plans are. Bugfixing is obviously top of the list, but what after that?

There’s currently far fewer ships and be weapons than X3. Will they be implementing new ones, or are they content with where things are now?

I have a GTX 760, but my PC has been acting up, so I’ll let you know as soon as I can.

What the rest are saying: what are the priorities and plans? Where does balance fit in? How will they address the problems with the dynamic universe? Are there plans to expand ship, weapon, software or consumables lists? Building Shipyards?

I loved where the autopilot ended up in X3:TC/AP. You could give it very precise instructions, including flying to a sector’s coordinates. What are their goals with respect to autopilot?

(what I can think of at the moment)

Oh, and thanks, Brian. You’re definitely not as bad a guy as I keep telling people. ;)

It’s called ‘Foundations’ which is a pretty big giveaway. :) They’ve said:

There will be Expansions, which will bring more races, their ships, stations and lots of missions into the X4 Universe. Our goal is to bring the first big Expansion within about one year.

  • First Expansion planned to be released in 2019
  • Second Expansion planned to be released later

GTX 950 here. The game insisted I put everything on Low. I am still getting screen tearing requiring a reboot, freezes when going to new areas, and one hard crash with an unhandled exception. Don’t know if it’s the game or my card. i7-2700K 16 Gb RAM.