X4 - Now with more flyable ships

Games
823

Thanks for the replies!

Turns out I had not built the claytronics module on my HQ yet, so I did, and damn that thing is expensive, and takes like an hour to build. Oh well, it’s going now. I think I’ll probably also add shields parts and coils to the HQ because I’ve got all the other prereqs, I think.

I also threw down an Argon food and medicine factory in Argon Prime, not for any real reason, but I thought it might be useful when I start to add habitation modules to my (mostly planned, at this point) swath of Argon factories. The weapon components one is chugging along, and I’ve got a massive silicon refinery in Antigone Memorial (well, massive to me anyway, it’s got four or six modules, I think). I think I’m starting to get the hang of factory construction, in that I could put the food factory together in a couple minutes–well, lay down the design, anyway. Not that it’s really complicated.

The most annoying part of factory design is that so many of the production modules can only be put on the top connectors of other modules. I figured out how to rotate the modules so that the left/right/front/back connectors are interchangeable, but it seems you can’t spin them the other way, which is really annoying, and, like, it’s space, you know? So why not?

I also, uh, found, yeah, this Odysseus out in the middle of nowhere. Hooo boy. It was a little challenging to get it out because there were a ton of minefields around and then I had to get through Holy Order space. But on the third try I made it. Now I just need to get to 20 rep with PAR so I can put some front guns on that bad boy. (I did get all the turrets in and then flew it into the middle of a ball of Ps, Ms, and Ns, and holy cow that was awesome to watch.)

Normally when I board an abandoned ship I can do it with the spacesuit but it seems for the Odysseus (and maybe any L or XL?) you can’t do the scan/hack thing to take control, so I had to send a marine. This was weird because when it was captured it destroyed a whole lot of the components (turrets and shields) that cost a couple million to replace. Ugh.

I also found a (pirate) Minotaur Raider and did the cheese thing where you sit behind it and plink it with a gun every 5-10 seconds and wait for all the crew to jump out. But hey, a new corvette!

I do need to give more of my ships cool names. The miners and traders I name by function (and to keep them sorted) but I called the Odysseus From Regions Unknown and my Nemesis Somebody’s Bad Day and it’s much cooler now when announcements about them come up.

Wheee!

824

Also one thing they kept from X3 that I wish they’d ditched is the variations of ship types. I really don’t think it adds anything to have each ship be either a “Vanguard” or a “Sentinel” (or a “Raider”, I guess) and then be slightly faster or tougher or whatever. I can’t think that I’ve ever made a decision based on the variation of a ship and it gets monotonous.

825

Yeah, I really miss the M7M class of missile frigates from X3. The long range missile bombardment was glorious

826

It was also outrageously unbalanced, but was it absolutely awesome! I miss that too. I’ll never forget the first time I fired a full volley of missiles on a M7M and nearly destroyed everything in a whole sector. ;)

827

I didn’t know Shuulo (of VRO fame) is now working on the Star Wars mod as well. It looks real good.

828

I head out to PAR space to take some war missions (against HOP) to get those main guns. The HOP have started laying down some stations in Pious Mists so I fly through there to see what trouble I can cause. There’s a relatively unattended HOP Heracles (builder) near the gate so I figure I might as well see if I can’t grab it for myself. (Little did I know at that point that builders have XL shields, which my little Nemesis (corvette) is not going to touch.) I poke out the engines and turrets and whatnot and then some HOP fighters come through the gate. Then some corvettes and frigates, and then more fighters. Then an Odysseus (destroyer)… and then another, and another, and it turns out I’ve provoked* a seven-destroyer invasion of Pious Mists.

I double-time it out of there and see the PAR three-destroyer response moving in, scattered. I decide to try to pick off the fighters and frigates from the sides, but the PAR destroyers don’t last long enough to give me sufficient cover. I retreat, and several fighters and a corvette follow. I manage to take them out and retreat some more. PAR reinforcements come in, still scattered, and are chewed up piecemeal. But between them and my hit-and-run tactics, we’ve taken out the screening forces, and the Odysseus’s are strung out into a couple clumps. I manage to carefully** take out the engines and turrets on one destroyer, and then another. At some point my Nemesis gets so banged up that I call in my Pulsar (ANT heavy fighter) from the other side of the galaxy and switch to it. The greater mobility makes it a bit easier to pinpoint the destroyers’ systems, but it’s significantly more fragile. Nevertheless, eventually, the first Odysseus goes down to a combination of my own guns and the few defense frigates that have managed to survive (or just come late to the party). Then I pull in From Regions Unkown, my own Odysseus (still sans main battery) and it starts making good work of the remaining (essentially disabled) destroyers. At this point the Battle of Pious Mists is won, and I see if I can’t board one of the HOP destroyers for myself, but once the dominoes start to fall they fall quickly, and it explodes with some 30 of my marines onboard (oh well, they were fresh recruits). So no fancy new capital ship for the Hero of Pious Mists (though I did pick up a frigate and a fighter that were abandoned), but I was a couple million richer from destroyer bounties, and I had my 20 rep.

*I suspect it was coming anyway regardless of my feeble attempts at the builder.
**This took a lot of, uh, reloading, but I did get the hang of it. Though any time I happened in front of an Odysseus I had to scoot right out of there or get blown away by one salvo of the main cannons.

While From Regions Unknown is getting outfitted, I receive a distress call from one of my traders in Teladi space–under attack from a pirate Behemoth (destroyer!). That will not stand, oh no–so back in my Nemesis I chase it down and remove the engines and turrets. This is nearly trivial, compared to the previous battle, but for whatever reason Teladi security ignores the pirate capital ship and my freighters full of (brand new) marines show up and the boarding commences*. The pirates don’t put up much of a fight, and another destroyer is mine. I send the rechristened You Want What Now to get refitted (all flak and plasma turrets) and circle around to get my new rank from the Antigone Republic.

*Modulo a bug where I have to personally pilot each ship before it will launch pods.

I see a message about the Republic mounting a defense in Second Contact (one of the ones they still own) so I head over to see what that’s about. But then I notice another seven-destroyer HOP attack getting underway in Black Hole Sun–my home system*! I figure I can try to repeat the previous performance, but hoo boy–there are so many more fighters this time. (Or at least it feels that way.) Again the HOP make short work of the three Behemoths that foolishly charge them. Again with the hit-and-run**. I have both You Want What Now and From Regions Unknown on standby*** at the far end of the system. This time, however, they are unnecessary. I manage to bait the destroyers towards the defense platform and as I twist and turn in the slow-motion plasma rain the destroyers wink out one by one.

I think that maybe I can snag the Atlas resupply ship, and manage to disable its engines outside the range of the defense platform, but the defense platform’s drones take it out. (There were probably 20 or 30 of them. I’ve never seen such a big ship go down to pulse lasers!) I don’t really feel like the Hero of Black Hole Sun, this time.

*I think. Maybe? I don’t remember.
**Less reloading this time, I’m better at knowing what I can handle.
***Well, From Regions Unknown didn’t make it there by the end of the battle.

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Odysseus destroyers exchanging fire with the defense platform. (Looked cooler in person, I swear.)

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This one’s not going to last much longer.

This raises the question: if defense platforms are so powerful, how the hell am I going to destroy the HOP ones in Second Contact? (Seriously, I think it was only down to 85% by the time it disposed of seven destroyers.)

829

The HOP clearly did it twice :)

More seriously, I’m betting based on that screenshot that the capships were zeroed in on smaller ships and realized they wandered into the defence platform killzone after it was way too late. The capship AI almost never willingly attacks targets from above or below, so engaging the station probably wasn’t their original goal.

Not to say that taking on a defence platform is easy, especially with limited resources. But you can certainly get a better result with decent positioning and a dedicated loadout.

830

You are correct–they more or less followed me to the station. (FWIW the station is out of the ecliptic so presumably they would be coming up from below at some point.)

What kind of loadout would you recommend for taking on a defense platform? I don’t have too much money (i.e. I’m still pretty far off from building my own shipyard), so I should probably focus on building up my income rather than spending it, but, you know, I wanna fight! And I do have several destroyers (though only several).

831

The HOP launched a huge invasion of Argon Prime–three strike forces of seven destroyers. We managed to beat them back, but at great cost–the Argon Federation’s (only?) wharf was destroyed. They don’t seem to be rebuilding it, AFAICT, so we’re in a bit of a bind for S/M ships. Even repairing is tricky as the repair dock is far off in one of more distant Hatikvah’s sectors, and there’s a Xenon I camping the gate at one end of the nearer sector. (Those things are huge!)

I did walk away from the battle with two more Odysseus destroyers and a Heracles builder, which is nice. Definitely getting the hang of boarding ships now. (So much easier than in X3TC.)

My advanced electronics production modules area just coming online in Argon Prime, which should help relieve that shortage–though without the the wharf there’s going to be a bit less demand for them, sadly. I also put a couple habitation modules on there to try to speed things up but population growth is pretty slow.

Is there a way to set up trade or delivery routes? I have a separate food and medicine factory and I’d like to ship the food to the other factories, but I can’t see it in the UI. It was a key part of my X3TC factory network, IIRC.

Also, how do you all make money? I’m trying to throw down a bunch of smaller factories (silicon wafers, refined metals / hull parts, even energy cells) and also greatly scale up the network of mining ships, but I’m having a hard time telling what the most effective income generator is.

Oh, and I outfitted a captured Nemesis with 5x rail guns (or was it mass drivers?). Those things are weird and kinda fun. I haven’t quite figured out what the deal is with their heat situation–with the hold-to-zoom mechanic they end up sometimes not firing when I think they should. But I did cackle quite a bit when I managed to snipe some Ps from 15 km out. I think if I can add some mods to them they might be quite… nice.

832

If you assign a station manager to the station, you can then assign trading ships to them. The AI seems pretty good at supplying stations and selling their wares. If you want even greater control, there’s a Mules and Warehouses mod that allows you to do some cool things. The base game AI seemed to do pretty well in my experience, though.

So not trade routes per se, but you can definitely have a station manager AI do a lot of the work for you. Note that they get better as they level up (extends the range the ships under their control can operate, IIRC).

Hull Parts have consistently been good money-makers for me. They’re don’t require a massive chain of materials and they are used in both constructing ships and stations so they always seem to be in pretty high demand.

833

The AI will eventually rebuild, but not necessarily in the sector where it was before, although if they remained in sole control of the sector it’s more likely to stay. It takes an hour or so for the build plot to be allocated and then shipyards take a long time to build. If you can’t find it after a couple hours you can try asking an NPC and they’ll direct you to it if it’s operational.

As for attacking stations, you want the longest range turrets. You want to maximize firepower while staying out of range of as many enemy defence modules as possible. For large turrets that’s plasma cannons and for M turrets you ideally want missile turrets with heavy missiles although the resupply for that can be very expensive.

834

Yeah, in principle it shouldn’t really matter if I distribute the goods from my food stations to the production stations and sell the extras vs buy and sell on the open market. I’ll probably just stick with the managers for now, though I am somewhat partial to the idea of concentrating the outputs in one place. But that’s probably inefficient.

How many freighters (and miners) do you assign to a station, typically?

Yeah, I’ll probably add more of those. I always seem to be needing more hull parts for my own stations, at least!

Yeah, I’ll have to look into the missiles and see if that makes financial sense. I’ve been replacing the missile turrets on my captured destroyers because they seem to run out of missiles really quick (when they are used against me, at least) and then they’re just really underpowered. But maybe they just use the missiles to clear everything away before I get there and there are a ton of dead good guys that I’m not seeing.

Will the AI destroyer captains stay back if I just give them long-range weapons? (I’m considering handing the mass driver Nemesis (the Ploinker) to an AI captain, just to see what happens.)

I’m also thinking about building a defense platform myself in the sector I want to recapture as part of the attack. Is that generally worthwhile? Really expensive? Too long of a build time to pull off?

835

Oh, that’s a tough one. I don’t think there’s a standard amount, but I would say typically no more than 2-3 M-size freighters per station for me. For miners it just depends entirely on how big my station is, as long as Ore/Silicon/Whatever is not bottoming out I leave it. If production halts due to a material shortage I add another. That sort of thing.

For concentrating outputs in one place, that’s where the Mules and Warehouses mod comes in handy. You can designate “Warehouse” stations where your traders will both build up a stockpile and pull from it where necessary. I didn’t enable that mod until the very end of my run, though, for the most part the default AI did an okay job. Mules and Warehouses gave me a little more control when I hit the point where I had 20+ stations scattered around but it was more of a cool thing to have rather than feeling like a necessity, if you know what I mean.

836

Small ships will not. Capital ships usually will. The vanilla capital ship AI has all kinds of problems with repositioning too much and in dumb ways, but against a stationary target it’s usually fine.

It won’t be too expensive, but it may be difficult to find and transport the needed materials. Advanced Electronics in particular are commonly low on stock and you need them for the turrets. Plus the enemy may try to kill the station while you’re working on it. On the upside, turrets will come online as their modules get built and materials are available - it doesn’t need to be completely finished to be able to provide fire support.

837

The destruction continues. Some Holy Order ships wandered into another Antigone-owned region of Second Contact and a minor fight brewed up. That was resolved fairly easily, but then I seem to have baited (again!) two seven-destroyer task forces into The Void. They overwhelmed the first defense stations and the scattered ANT response, and I’m currently trying to bait them piecemeal into the second defense station, but they keep getting distracted by builders and large freighters, which is OK as now I’ve removed almost all of the fighters, corvettes, and frigates. They did destroy the trading station, which is bad, I guess. (I don’t really know what they’re good for other than as a place to unload nvidium.)

I did manage to capture a pirate phoenix (another destroyer, maybe not so effective, but at least it looks cooler than the Paranid hairdryers) and a HOP resupply ship that wandered alone into ARG and HAT space. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it–probably strip it and sell it to try to save up for S/M fabrication bay plans.

I really don’t know how the HOP have so many ships, at least compared to ARG and ANT. I guess the fact that Argon space is cut in half with the HOP occupation of Second Contact II doesn’t help.

838

The money is coming in. I finally had the experience where I looked down at the money ticker and it was a lot higher than I remembered it being, heh. I do have probably 10 silicon miners, a couple nvidium miners, and a few ore / gas miners as well. And the factories are starting to come in–my food and medicine factory, weapons/advanced electronics factory, and HQ factory (various components and claytronics) all made a few million profit in the amount of time between when I clicked the “accept estimate” button on operating expenses and then checked back (maybe an hour or two?).

I sold off the Atlas (resupply ship) and an extra Heracles (builder) that I captured. I have almost 100 million, so I’m coming up on the cost for an S/M fabrication bay, but I’ll assume that there’s going to be a further enormous cost in getting it up and running, and the supply of actual ship materials. I haven’t yet decided if I should put it in Argon Prime, because I want to shore up Argon power, or in Teladi space where my HQ is.

839

Couple questions:

  1. Is there a reason to have your own builder? The 50k cost for hiring one is not particularly significant and AFAICT you can hold on to it indefinitely if you keep building. I only rarely have trouble finding a free builder.

  2. If I put missile turrets (on a station or a ship) and I give them, say, heavy cluster missiles and light smart missiles, will they know to use the one on capitals and one on fighters?

840

For #1 I didn’t have much of an issue relying on NPC builders. Their build speed is determined by the number of construction drones (although there’s a cap. 35 maybe?) so you will know your own will build at max speed, at least. Wasn’t that important to me, though.

I’m not sure on #2, hopefully someone here has more experience with missile turrets.

841

Thanks @KevinC, I haven’t really noticed a difference, either.

I have arrived! By which I mean I think I’ve made it over a bump in the power curve (well, the money curve). My ~20 or so miners just keep the money coming in, and after blowing 125 million or whatever on the fab facility, I got back up to 100 million pretty quick. Well, half of that was probably from some other things, such as:

  1. Completed a mission to capture an Odysseus, which was challenging because it was in a task force with six other destroyers, a resupply ship, and other supporting craft. I pulled it off by managing to string them out into an ugly fight in the asteroid fields of Second Contact II and bringing in my own task force. (It helped that they seem to be underequipped in terms of number of missiles, given the number of missile turrets they had. So once those were out my forces were significantly stronger.) In addition to the 7 mil for the mission, I got to keep the Odysseus (which I wasn’t expecting, for some reason)

  2. I also captured the resupply ship, which was probably a good 10-20 mil itself.*

  3. A couple other captures, various frigates and fighters, about half of which I sold.

  4. I took a building mission and built a tiny defense platform (7 million, probably 6 or 6.5 million after costs), and got together a fleet of a carrier, destroyer, and three frigates for about a 100% markup. (I just used the Argon’s own yards, which was a little strange–I could rationalize the part where I delivered them vastly underequipped by assuming that the government would outfit them after the fact, but really all that the mission consisted of was putting in orders and then running some hull parts around.)

*It’s really annoying that you have to strip down the ships for sale before selling them, otherwise you lose out on a bunch of money. Grr…

My defense platform is way stronger than it needs to be. (I think, I haven’t tested it against anything other than fighters.) But it is awesome to stand on the docks and see a fighter coming in and then watch an enormous sheet of flame reach up and pluck it out of the sky.

I also destroyed the two HOP defense platforms without any trouble at all. They didn’t have any missiles, despite having only plasma and missile turrets. And it seemed that only a couple plasma turrets could fire at my fleet at any given time–much worse fields of fire than what I remember the Argon platforms putting out.

Then I built an administrative center on my defense platform, and… Second Contact II Flashpoint is mine! Fwahahaha! (Of course the Argon have since built a defense platform with an admin center, but the sector is still outlined in green, so… finders keepers, I guess?)

842

Holy smokes, running your own shipyard is where the real money is. It seems like every time I check back in on it there’s another 20 million ripe for embezzlement reassignment. I just laid down an L fabrication bay and we’ll see how that goes…

I am suffering from a really frustrating bug, though (at least I assume it is a bug). In both my HQ and the wharf build storages, I seem to have several thousand hull parts locked up as a “ware reservation” from the main factory. I don’t know how they got there (maybe I added a bunch of transfer orders from the main factory to the storage and then cancelled them or something?) and I can’t figure out how to get rid of them. It’s really annoying because they’re in the build storage but they can’t be used for building, and they seem to sometimes block the transfer of goods to or from the build storage. For example, I’ve got a large freighter docked to the build storage and it’s been waiting to transfer goods for like 10 minutes now.

Anyone seen anything like this? @KevinC or @Mysterial?