this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023

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X4 Foundations

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A place to discuss the video game X4 Foundations by Egosoft. This is an unofficial community, nothing in here is any kind of official statement by Egosoft (unless they come in here and say stuff). #X4Foundations Handy links: 1: **Egosoft Official Forums:** https://forum.egosoft.com/ _The official forums over on Egosoft's website._ 2: **Roguey's X4 Site for X4 Foundations:** https://roguey.co.uk/x4/ _The best site on the internet for looking up stats for basically everything in the game, from ships, to weapons, to wares, etc._ 3: **The X4 Station Calculator:** http://x4-game.com/#/station-calculator _Online calculator that allows you to pre-calculate production quantities and station costs. A God-send for planning stations of all sizes, from tiny refineries up to giant galaxy-fueling mega-complexes capable of making even the Ancients shed a tear in awe._ 4: **X Universe Kbin Magazine:** https://kbin.social/m/Xuniverse _A Kbin magazine for discussion of the X games in general, including previous titles such as X-BTF, X-Tension, X2, X3, X3TC, X3AP and X3FL._

founded 1 year ago

What are everyone's favorite mods? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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So, what are everyone's favorite mods then, if any?

I'll figure I should start first so I'll list the three that I refuse to play without.

More Ship Rooms - https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/609

This is just pure immersion, and it's amazing It gives all capital ships explorable interiors by mapping various in-game interior spaces into your L and XL class vessels. I literally can't play without this. Having a captain's quarters on your Raptor is a total game-changer.

Fire and Smoke - https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/433

More immersion. The vanilla explosions are somewhat (massively) lacking, which is strange considering that the previous title (the one we don't talk about), running on the same engine had fantastic explosions... This mod fixes it by (iirc) porting the explosion code from the previous title to the current one, or the code was already there anyway and they just switched it back on, can't remember which. Either way though, I've never noticed any issues with it hitting my CPU/GPU at all and it completely changes the feel of combat in the best way possible. Standing on the bridge of a capital ship and watching fire billowing out of the remains of turrets, smashing the engines of other capital class vessels, and watching them stream fire and smoke out into space... It's amazing and works flawlessly.

Faster Crew Levelling - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2050537227

Whoever the hell decided to wall off the AI in this game behind the goddamn crew levelling mechanic, whilst also making it basically impossible for the said crew to ever actually level up has a special place in hell imho. This mod fixes it. I looked at a few mods to address this bullshit, but most of them just remove crew levelling by making everyone five-star or whatever. I actually like the mechanic itself, but see no point in it taking 3000+ hours of in-game time to get your first 3-star pilot, because just no. This mod allows you to still have the mechanic in play, so personnel management is still a thing but brings down the training time to far more sane levels so that you actually can grow your workforce's skillset over time. Great mod. Considerably un-fucks a lot of the AI problems too since your entire company isn't filled with unskilled morons at all times.

Anyone else have any favorites that they can't do without?

#X4Foundations

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My first game was vanilla and I only now started looking into various mods, but I don't want it to feel too cheaty though.

How long does it take to get to 5 star pilot with Faster Crew Leveling? I hate how slow it is in vanilla but I also dont want to end up with 5 star crew overnight.

This is what I've got so far:
Inventory Collector
Faster Crew Leveling
Crystal Rarities
Secret Stash
Fly-by Looting
X4 Fire and Smoke
Better Kill Credit
Head Hunter

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Holy Hell, there's someone here!

I set this community up because I couldn't find one on here when I switched from Reddit, but, not gonna lie, I wasn't expecting anyone to actually find it. Welcome, I guess.

How long does it take to get to 5 star pilot with Faster Crew Leveling?

Honestly, a while. Three stars is relatively easy but five takes some time. It's a pretty good balance of still having to work towards having good staff, but at the same time be able to actually have the mechanic exist.

I haven't timed it, but, to give an idea:

I set up a ton of stations in a system recently to run a self-sufficient shipyard and wharf. Probably around 20 stations or so spread around one sector, each station started with four M class freighters. High volume stations like refined metals, hull-parts, microchips, etc, got swarms more ships, probably 15-20 each, plus a couple of fleets of L transports to help out, then another 40 or so M's for the shipyard and wharf logistics... Some stations had a few more M transports added where needed, not too many though.

That was probably started around 60ish hours ago?

A couple of days ago I made two fleets of five Behemoths each and wanted five-star pilots for them so I started the internal promotions, I struggled finding pilots for the last three destroyers. I got 10 five-star pilots in the end but definitely had to look around. Most pilots were around mid-three to mid-four stars. I assume the fives were some of the first ships for the first stations built.

It's a fairly similar timeframe to how the universal trader software would skill up in X3, if you have any experience with that. I'm fairly sure that you can tweak the mod too, if you want.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hahah I know the feeling, I keep stumbling upon desolate communities and I'm never sure if there's anyone else there but it's worth giving them a try. People do tend to slowly trickle into them even if they are not 'marketed' too much, as long as they see at least some activity. It's hard to match the amount of content that reddit has but so far I found that you don't need thousands of people to have a nice vibe going on (but it helps to have at least 10-100).

Thanks for the details, tbh I'm not that far into the game to have fleets of capitals but I have a few stations with basic productions, a dozen or two miners (M and L mostly) and dozens of S-scouts doing the exploring and price-updating for me. I remember reading about a mod that scaled xp gain for larger actions (so a freighter selling a full cargo for huge profit gets more xp than a scout selling 1 energy cell), but also saw comments that said this made it completely OP and they were swimming in 5 stars IIRC. If FCL is reasonably balanced it's definitely something I'd like to try out. I did play a lot of X3 but that was like a decade ago ^^

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yeah, during the first week or so of the big surge from Reddit I was watching the new magazines panel and I was seeing people arrive and immediately make dozens of new magazines for all of the big Reddit subs. Not sure if they were bots or whatever but I'm pretty sure most of them just got squatted, so they're mainly dead.

Kinda glad that the X games are niche enough that they seem to have been missed. Depressing that it happened though.

As for content, I don't think there's really a need to compete for quantity. One thing that seems fairly prevalent here on Kbin/Fedi is that people seem to be having actual discussions. There's decent quality content here even if there isn't the vast torrent of it like back on Reddit. I quite like it tbh, there's less seeing a thread that you'd like to engage in and realizing that since it was made two hours ago, there are now 13,000+ replies and no point in posting anything. I'm enjoying being able to actually "Take part" here a lot more than was possible on something the size of Reddit.

I think we just need enough content of actual quality, and it'll be good enough.

I did play a lot of X3 but that was like a decade ago ^^

I know what you mean, but if you remember how sector traders would eventually turn into universe traders and use the jump drive, this feels similar in how it's balanced.

I'm halfway positive that most of the legitimate complaints about the AI in this game come from the implementation of the glacial skill leveling for pilots though. Five-star pilots are hardly perfect beings, but Jesus Christ they at least work.

In case you're wondering, in the current patch, having a fleet of destroyers attack a station OOS actually works if you're using five-star pilots. Like, it works consistently. If you have other forces to handle enemy reinforcements coming to help the enemy station, a fleet of destroyers is literally a guaranteed kill on that station by just issuing an attack order. If the pilots are 5-star and you have destroyers with 10km main guns.

Meaning, the AI works, but is artificially broken on lower-star pilots, which are all you can really get without mods... Egosoft, there's always something, isn't there?

How are you finding Better Kill Credit? I was thinking that it sounded pretty good but then I saw some posts about just how much money people were getting and backed off as it seemed like it would be inadvertently a bit exploity. I like the idea of it, I just didn't want it to break the game progression the first time I place a defense station.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My only fleet combat experience was sending my ragtag group of a destroyer i got from the terran story, some medium ships and a few fighters to defend miners from khaak - thanks to their low patrol / defend range i had to manually instruct them on how to find enemies. My other experience was sending them to grind xp by participating in gate defense against xenon (one of the chokepoints that is always contested) and I think I lost half of the fleet almost instantly due to the explosion from a larger capital ships.

So for now I'm just hiring L ships immune to khaak, and letting argon and terrans defend from xenon that can't really do much anyway. Good to know about how much skill level matters, but is it just for "leaders" of fleets and wings or does every individual pilot need to have it too? It really seems troublesome without the mod.

Egosoft, there's always something, isn't there?

I really feel like at some point they just need to dedicate a month or two to playtesting and fixing some of the nonsense in the game, from crew management to mission design or similar basics. I know it makes sense to veterans by now but it is just so counterintuitive at first, you really can't play the game the way it would make sense - you have to figure out what the devs intended and then just follow that instead.

At one point I wanted to setup constant transfer between my two stations. The logical solution to me was to create a repeat order of a transport "loading resource to max at station A, then unload resource to 0 at station B". There was no indication in the game at all why this doesn't work, I had to google to find out that repeat order won't work with it and instead I had to use the cumbersome warehouse station UI, blacklists and whitelists, setup trade prices, and all of this messed up my regular trade orders with NPCs as well ofc. Or why my L ships wouldn't unload wares despite everyone being loaded with cargo drones (you still need the dock apparently, but there's no warning for that anywhere). The game hates me 😁

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Loool, stop or you'll trigger my PTSD from the time a few versions ago when I tried to get a combination of the following to work when trying to funnel mass resources from FRF space to ZYA with about 40 L transports:

Repeat orders,
Mimic Commander,
Transfer Wares,

I must have spent two or three hours trying to figure out why nothing seemed to work like it obviously should, only to find out that it was because you just can't, and fuck you if you ever wanted to.

Instead, it's setting up trade routes with buy/sell prices between point A and point B, Repeat Orders, do it again but reversed, with reversed buy/sell prices for point B to point A, then do it again 40 times because there was no way to do any of this to a fleet of ships at once... Oh, and if you, for whatever reason, like pirates or xenon or anything, have to issue an actual order to one of these ships in an emergency, you'd best remember exactly what they were doing, their prices, their destinations, wares etc, because you'll almost certainly have to nuke their order list in order to make the pilot actually do what you want at the time so that he doesn't die. Fml.

All I wanted to do was to stick 39 ships into a fleet with the 40th being the commander, and have the commander do a thing, with his fleet mimicking that thing. The "thing" was move shit from one place to another. Was that too much to ask? Was it? They must have wanted to do something like that at some point and realized that it was necessary, surely?

Hilariously enough, I think that they actually added something like that in a more recent version. I wouldn't know for sure, I've been too scared to go back and touch the idea again. :p

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeahhh, I gave up on mimic commander and wings for non-combat ships completely, it's an absolute nightmare! And they didn't even think of folders or groups so my fleet window is just a flat list of miners, transports, traders, scouts sorted alphabetically! I really expected more from german engineering and like half a dozen games in the franchise, instead even the basics are a struggle :P

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I really love Egosoft's games.

Like, not sarcastically at all, I've been playing them since XBTF back in 2000/2001 (I skipped X2 because I didn't have a PC at the time, and Rebirth because... well...). But if there has been one phrase that has always sprung to mind in every iteration of this series when using the UI it would be "Built by engineers, for engineers".

And as messed up as the X4 UI can sometimes be, it's by far their best shot so far.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hi, great that there is something here for X4 now, there wasn’t initially when I’d looked. Thank you for making this place!

Anyways, I’m really new to X4 but I’ve got a load of mods. I have most of the ones that are used in this let’s play poorly series by ArquebusX: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsYaAtYv_5eUWXYG8NJCZ_hDvLEORmIQw

They are all rather nice, but in addition I’ve added the Waypoint Fields for Deployment mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/585?tab=description

It’s really nice to not have to right click through the menus and add in a couple hundred orders to deploy laser towers, makes my wrists hurt!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Welcome!

great that there is something here for X4 now, there wasn’t initially when I’d looked

Yeah, same. I mean, when I came here I wasn't really expecting to find anything either, but then thought about it and realised that at some point someone was going to just have to go ahead and do it. I wondered about it for a bit and eventually was just like "Ah, fuck it, why not? Lets just set up a community and see what happens"

but in addition I’ve added the Waypoint Fields for Deployment mod

So that's how everyone's posting pictures of those beautifully tidy satellite arrays. That's awesome!

Jesus, it even gives you the ability to finally deploy working minefields?! I may have to get that up and running, looks great.

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