What is the most fustrating experience u constanty get by playing this game..

[geldonyetich]

surface elements?

The shields, turrets, and engines on the outside of capital ships are called "surface elements." They're all destroyable if enough firepower is brought on them, and having a lot of fighters can do this. Without them, a capital ship is useless, nothing but a free-floating bunch of hull points. This is why VIG eat them alive.

First spoiler, what do you suggest here? what type of ship do you mean?

See other two spoilers for some suggestions. But really, anything that suits anti-fighter tactics will work better than just sending the capital ships alone.

Second one, in X3 you could dump 100 lasertowers at once.... X4? No way...

Yon can actually bind a key to it now and spam out hundreds of them by hammering the keys. Although the mk2 laser towers take longer because they're deployed via docks.

For NPC capital ships versus VIG, if you don't want to manually order them to deploy their laser towers, you could order them to flee and deploy laser tower on their behavior tab under react to attack. That would automate your laser tower deployment. Granted, that'd only make sense when they're under attack by fighters, and the behavior tab has no way of telling the difference between that an any other attack.

[TroubledRabbit]

The solution:

or you can

Spoiler

Show

blatantly build anti-fighter fitted stations on the crucial crossroads (ca. 6mln each) while you are kind of 'friendly', putting gazzillion lasertowers around won't hurt either ofc. modded AA Syn in the players' hand will do just fine (if you load LTs to the roof) other non-PC capitals will just die. Drones put as distraction have their use, too.
Then just relax and enjoy the slide-show.

Seriously, whoever got the idea of connecting so many small ships with the asteroid field (not mentioning the design of the systems themselves, my wife called them 'Morning Sickness' ) should get monthly award for 'bad, ugly and worse'.
And why there is no 'weaponized' manticore?

[Mr.Killer]

surface elements?

The shields, turrets, and engines on the outside of capital ships are called "surface elements." They're all destroyable if enough firepower is brought on them, and having a lot of fighters can do this. Without them, a capital ship is useless, nothing but a free-floating bunch of hull points. This is why VIG eat them alive.

I know what surface elements are, but you said "bring something other than capital ships, whose surface element vulnerability makes them useless against that many fighters." that, what do you mean by it.
Something other means either a big carrier cargo ship or something in that class, you mean to offer it to them?, but that would be a waiste of money in my opinion, and that is needed for, well, more usefull things...

Thanks though...

[Mr.Killer]

Could you give us/me a number of ships you had, did I had not enough what I summed up? So hard to find the right balance and the right time to get there.

If I recall correctly (it was a year or so ago) fleet consisted of 1x Condor (fleet command), 10x Phoenix (bombardment), 40x Moreya (interception), 10x Osprey (interception), 1x Stork (supply fleet). Enjoyed the battle so much I reloaded the save I'd made just before it so I could fight it over & over again, in part to test different loadouts on the frigates, a relatively recent addition to the fleet at the time.

I guess that 'defend' is not enough for the small fighters, or is it?

Would not recommend it. Generally my carrier's fighters use interception. Means they launch as soon as an enemy S/M enters the carrier's radar range (usually 40km). Ships assigned to defend only go to work after the ship they're protecting has been hit - if that hit's the first torpedo (with several more following along behind) that may well be a bit too late...

Although not present in this particular case I often also have heavy S fighters assigned to bombardment on my carriers, to assist the destroyers during fleet battles. Essentially those heavy fighters harass & delay enemy capitals, while my destroyers blow them to bits from long range.

Only real use I have for defend role in my fleets is for non-combatants which are not intended to participate in the battle, but which I do want to be formally associated with the fleet so they're easy to find on the ship list, e.g. freighters full of missile parts, spare fighters or frigates stored on the auxiliary, etc. If they're S or M they generally have the docked status so they won't launch even if their superior is attacked.

Do the BUC in your game also kill off adv. satellites? all the time?

Not any more...

Spoiler

Show

if you side with the Duke during the Paranid plot they leave your stuff alone.

Defend is not what I use too, except if I want to capture a ship, at some point I have to disable all turrets on my destroyer, or they will keep firing until they kill the ship and my marines, stupid really! But fighters that have the intercept setting still go far out in front and wait in the next sector for it's defending ships' arrival, even if it is harassed by SCA or attacked by Khaak/Xenon, I always go to the ship and see what the protector does, and more than often they do nothing, so I have to intervene.
But,
I would love to see that savegame of yours....

[geldonyetich]

I know what surface elements are, but you said "bring something other than capital ships, whose surface element vulnerability makes them useless against that many fighters." that, what do you mean by it.

Something other means either a big carrier cargo ship or something in that class, you mean to offer it to them?, but that would be a waiste of money in my opinion, and that is needed for, well, more usefull things...

A big carrier cargo ship is still a capital ship. I meant anything other than something with surface elements.

Then I followed it up with two examples in the other two spoilers.

As long as you're not wasting money on mk3 equipment, fighters can be quite a bit more bang for your buck than L sized ships

[Mr.Killer]

I know what surface elements are, but you said "bring something other than capital ships, whose surface element vulnerability makes them useless against that many fighters." that, what do you mean by it.

Something other means either a big carrier cargo ship or something in that class, you mean to offer it to them?, but that would be a waiste of money in my opinion, and that is needed for, well, more usefull things...

A big carrier cargo ship is still a capital ship. I meant anything other than something with surface elements.

Then I followed it up with two examples in the other two spoilers.

As long as you're not wasting money on mk3 equipment, fighters can be quite a bit more bang for your buck than L sized ships

Yes, if the idiots can follow simple orders, because I am having a sore hand shooting at a Xenon solarstation, in the mean time I destroyed while doing that it's turrets and 3 Xenon K ships, and all I ask from my other destroyers is to kill the station. But they flea, stop and wait or simply anger me to the point where I need to go over there and slap the idiot captain in his face and tell him to wake the **** up and start doing his F-ing job!
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/453cp45o ... 14nvv&dl=0
But soon this savegame is gone, I used a cheat to get this VIC mission to pass, that's it and I can't understand why non of the options do what the are built to do, ATTACK G*DAMN! (Sorry, but it is really frustrating to do everything by myself)

[Good Wizard]

For me one of the most frustrating things are the pilots performances in IS.

Did pause a few months, started a new game (creative, but with fairly low value, V6.2), have a Katana as my only ship. Flew around a bit, fought several Xenon at gates and near stations, played several hours, and at this point my pilot had 2 1/2 stars.

Asked him to fly to a certain point several sectors distant, while parked in a station (I visited the Split to receive my +10 rank). He flew out very nicely, and then as soon as he left the hangar he tried to go into the direction of the gate. Through the station, bumped around for minutes, until he manged by pure luck to find out...

I have no HQ yet, hence no teleport, or I would have teleported away in disgust...

This becomes worse every version since 4.2! Now in 6.2 I have in nearly EVERY auto pilot flight an 'epically fail'. And my pilots cannot leave a station without bumping into it several time. And it is not a too big hit box, they really try to fly through parts of it. There is something seriously wrong with the game. This is extremely annoying, a basic function growing worse and worse. Is it really so hard to make the NPC pilot flying out of the hangar in a fairly straight line until he has several kilometers distance from the station, and then changing course to the target?

[Joe McCracken]

The most annoying thing for me is trying to steal blueprints.... You set off the bomb on a flat surface of a station and you run into an invisible wall... or.... the bomb goes off and the data leaks are below the surface of the station. Can't get to them, can't see them... Can hear them though! Yay!

I really hate it when you are looking at the leak right in front of your nose, and you still can't decrypt it.

[Ergoswot]

For me one of the most frustrating things are the pilots performances in IS.

Did pause a few months, started a new game (creative, but with fairly low value, V6.2), have a Katana as my only ship. Flew around a bit, fought several Xenon at gates and near stations, played several hours, and at this point my pilot had 2 1/2 stars.

Asked him to fly to a certain point several sectors distant, while parked in a station (I visited the Split to receive my +10 rank). He flew out very nicely, and then as soon as he left the hangar he tried to go into the direction of the gate. Through the station, bumped around for minutes, until he manged by pure luck to find out...

I have no HQ yet, hence no teleport, or I would have teleported away in disgust...

This becomes worse every version since 4.2! Now in 6.2 I have in nearly EVERY auto pilot flight an 'epically fail'. And my pilots cannot leave a station without bumping into it several time. And it is not a too big hit box, they really try to fly through parts of it. There is something seriously wrong with the game. This is extremely annoying, a basic function growing worse and worse. Is it really so hard to make the NPC pilot flying out of the hangar in a fairly straight line until he has several kilometers distance from the station, and then changing course to the target?

You should make a dedicated thread about this and hopefully get a response from egosoft.

[SirLosealot]

Here are 3 things that annoyed me constantly:

1. Everybody knows it. The AI. Specifically, the capital ship AI in both IS and OOS. The S and M ship AI is far from perfect but at least they are adequate. As for the capital ships, in OS, they often engage in a "dancing" ritual where they move around and upward with the Xenon capital ship without pointing their main batteries at the Xenon. In IS, they do aim their main batteries at the enemy but only if the enemy is not too close to them (which the Xenon loves to do since their weapon's range is short). If the enemy are too close, they don't reverse and shoot their main batteries like player does, they turn around and flee

2. The performance: If there are no fleet battle or looking at a mega station, my fps is in the 3 digits area. But if there are, say, 10 destroyers engaging a swarm of Xenon S and M ships flooding through the gate, my fps drops to 30 fps. And my game is vanilla, no mods whatsoever.

3. Ship's modification and crew's training seminar: I lump them up together because they invoke the same feeling in me which is mindless menial tasks. For crew's seminar, you have to go to a trading, hope that they sell the seminar, buy them, then apply them manually to each crew member. Why can't I only buy the seminar once per playthrough (with increased cost) and apply it to all my existing crews and future crew. Or at least make it apply per ship. As for the ship's modifications, the RNG is just unnecessary, it just means that I will mind numbingly clicking my left mouse button until I get the result I want. Seriously, increase to modification cost and remove the RNG altogether. Also, I cannot apply modifications en masse for my fleet easily.

[gbjbaanb]

TGhe one little thing that gets me is right clicking on an NPC station only to get a popup that says "you can;t give order to a station you do not own". So I have to left click it and then right click to get the menu open.

I'd love for that "you did wrong" popup to be replaced with the menu I wanted all along - if I can't pop the interact menu, then fall-back seamlessly to the NPC trade menu.

[Scoob]

I'll preface this one saying that things have been improved somewhat in the v7.0 beta, though I feel more can be done.

A cause of major frustration for me has been Pirates accosting my ships, and my ship's reaction being the SINGLE cause of their demise. For example, I have an M-Class Transporter using its Travel Drive dashing across a sector. A Pirate "harasses" it from 20km+ away, my ship notifies me. I jump to view my ship on the Map, and see it still moving at travel speeds and now closer to 40km away from the would-be pirate. IT'S. PERFECTLY. SAFE. Period.

This is when the frustrating thing happens, my ship - that's 40km or more away from the Pirate at this stage - decides to flee the non-existent danger. How does it do this? Well, it STOPS first and foremost, then seems to faff around for a bit, before choosing an "escape" vector that's often far far from appropriate. For example, it's about to dock (safe) yet it flies AWAY from the station, or it's about to gate transition (safe) but, stops and turns around. While it does eventually re-engage travel mode, this all takes WAY longer than it actually should. I.e. The ship CAN turn end-to-end (180 degrees) in just a couple of seconds, but it'll take 5x that (or more) when picking that new vector. It can also engage travel mode in a couple of seconds but, when "flee" triggers, it can take 5x that. Most of the time it's simply so far away from the Pirate and travelling at sufficient speed that just continuing its current order is 100% the best option. All of these combine to see a previously PERFECTLY SAFE ship, fall to Pirates.

We've asked for an "Ignore" option forever it seems, but it's never happened. In v7.0 Beta there's a feedback thread for Flee in general, I have provided feedback there, but it's more about the game being aware of when NOT to flee. The game currently, if set to flee in response to Pirate Harassment, will flee when harassed even if it's in no danger. For Pirate Harassment specifically the game needs to be more aware of the actual danger to the ship, if any. OR simply give us an IGNORE commend to Pirate Harassment and let the "attacked" behaviour deal with it if the ship actually, genuinely in danger. Nine time out of ten, at least ignoring harassment will be the PERFECT response to keep the ship safe.

The simply logic I'd suggest is:

- Ship Harassed, check distance to Pirate.
- There's then a short delay before the ship decides what to do.
- Flee response to Harassment? Check distance to Pirate.
- If the Pirate is now further away than before DON'T trigger flee, else flee as normal (but make better vector choices please lol).
- This is basically "intelligent Ignore" if you will, but plain old fixed ignore would work almost as well.

That logic alone would cover 95% of all the Pirate Harassment encounters I experience. You could go far deeper, examining current vector, speed etc. etc. but, I think that this simple logic would really do most of the work more sophisticated logic could achieve. Most of the times I manually intervene, it's these scenarios I'm dealing with.

As mentioned, there have been improvements in the v7.0 Beta. However, I am still constantly manually intervening when my ships try to Flee after Pirate harassment. My over ride - literally just CLEARING the Flee order - is pretty much ALWAYS better than whatever flee decides to do.

[Koizuki]

As far as I'm aware, the devs actually are looking for feedback on flee behavior over on the beta forum; I imagine suggestions for changes might be better there, but I do agree that it could be improved.
On the other hand, improvement to the point where your ships basically have a 100% escape rate would also essentially make pirates an obsolete threat. In this case I'm a bit mixed about it.

I got around it by just farming BUC and equipping all of my traders with the Mirage mod, but earlier-game before I started farming them I was basically having to patrol manually with my Katana and respond to threats myself because Flee in v6.20 was so poor. They would never try and dock at the nearest station, and instead prioritized going to gates/highways that were much farther away. I think 7.0 has improved this significantly based on the bit of feed back I read on the first page of that feedback thread, so hopefully it's acceptable once it goes live. I definitely wouldn't mind switching all those Mirages over to Nanotubes or something for more speed.

[SirLosealot]

As far as I'm aware, the devs actually are looking for feedback on flee behavior over on the beta forum; I imagine suggestions for changes might be better there, but I do agree that it could be improved.
On the other hand, improvement to the point where your ships basically have a 100% escape rate would also essentially make pirates an obsolete threat. In this case I'm a bit mixed about it.

I got around it by just farming BUC and equipping all of my traders with the Mirage mod, but earlier-game before I started farming them I was basically having to patrol manually with my Katana and respond to threats myself because Flee in v6.20 was so poor. They would never try and dock at the nearest station, and instead prioritized going to gates/highways that were much farther away. I think 7.0 has improved this significantly based on the bit of feed back I read on the first page of that feedback thread, so hopefully it's acceptable once it goes live. I definitely wouldn't mind switching all those Mirages over to Nanotubes or something for more speed.

Then they need to make pirate to use boost or travel drive too to catch up with the fleeing ship too. Actually, having the AI to use travel drive or boost aggressively may make them better. Also, pirates can be made obsolete currently already by using military ships as freighters which I like to use. They will never be targeted by the pirates.

[Koizuki]

Also, pirates can be made obsolete currently already by using military ships as freighters which I like to use. They will never be targeted by the pirates.

Early game, trying to get any L-sized military ship for trading purposes is quite difficult to get to (outside of that one abandoned Oddy, I suppose.) That's the time where you deal with Pirates the most.
Later-game when you can afford to do that, you can also afford to just slap Mirage mods on every civilian freighter for a similar effect (granted they still won't be as hardy against Xenon/Kha'ak.)
And honestly, all you need for the latter is a decent Fighter/Corvette and a satellite -- drop one in BUC space, kill every fighter it spawns trying to destroy that satellite, collect near-infinite purple chassis mods, and Mirage takes zero rerolling. This process can even be automated fairly early-game.

Either way, I think this is fine because it's a later game thing, and is a result of active counter-play against the pirates.

That said, imagine if they actually used EMP missiles properly... Yikes.

[flywlyx]

Early game, trying to get any L-sized military ship for trading purposes is quite difficult to get to (outside of that one abandoned Oddy, I suppose.) That's the time where you deal with Pirates the most.
Later-game when you can afford to do that, you can also afford to just slap Mirage mods on every civilian freighter for a similar effect (granted they still won't be as hardy against Xenon/Kha'ak.)
And honestly, all you need for the latter is a decent Fighter/Corvette and a satellite -- drop one in BUC space, kill every fighter it spawns trying to destroy that satellite, collect near-infinite purple chassis mods, and Mirage takes zero rerolling. This process can even be automated fairly early-game.

VIG Barbarossa is an easy target for early-mid games. And pirates will ignore it.

[Mr.Killer]

For me one of the most frustrating things are the pilots performances in IS.

Did pause a few months, started a new game (creative, but with fairly low value, V6.2), have a Katana as my only ship. Flew around a bit, fought several Xenon at gates and near stations, played several hours, and at this point my pilot had 2 1/2 stars.

Asked him to fly to a certain point several sectors distant, while parked in a station (I visited the Split to receive my +10 rank). He flew out very nicely, and then as soon as he left the hangar he tried to go into the direction of the gate. Through the station, bumped around for minutes, until he manged by pure luck to find out...

I have no HQ yet, hence no teleport, or I would have teleported away in disgust...

This becomes worse every version since 4.2! Now in 6.2 I have in nearly EVERY auto pilot flight an 'epically fail'. And my pilots cannot leave a station without bumping into it several time. And it is not a too big hit box, they really try to fly through parts of it. There is something seriously wrong with the game. This is extremely annoying, a basic function growing worse and worse. Is it really so hard to make the NPC pilot flying out of the hangar in a fairly straight line until he has several kilometers distance from the station, and then changing course to the target?

I still find it amazing though that a pilot can fly through stations, asteroids, ships with no problem and If I would try this? I fail all the time... So it is mechanics I guess... But yes, it is annoying.
(I did not mention some flight paths that the pilot takes through an asteroidfield, stopping, make weird moves, start travel drive, stop again, weird move, start traveldrive again.... and so on, while simple move a bit to the left, right , upwards or downwards would steer simply clear of them asteroids. )

[alt3rn1ty]

For me one of the most frustrating things are the pilots performances in IS.

Did pause a few months, started a new game (creative, but with fairly low value, V6.2), have a Katana as my only ship. Flew around a bit, fought several Xenon at gates and near stations, played several hours, and at this point my pilot had 2 1/2 stars.

Asked him to fly to a certain point several sectors distant, while parked in a station (I visited the Split to receive my +10 rank). He flew out very nicely, and then as soon as he left the hangar he tried to go into the direction of the gate. Through the station, bumped around for minutes, until he manged by pure luck to find out...

I have no HQ yet, hence no teleport, or I would have teleported away in disgust...

This becomes worse every version since 4.2! Now in 6.2 I have in nearly EVERY auto pilot flight an 'epically fail'. And my pilots cannot leave a station without bumping into it several time. And it is not a too big hit box, they really try to fly through parts of it. There is something seriously wrong with the game. This is extremely annoying, a basic function growing worse and worse. Is it really so hard to make the NPC pilot flying out of the hangar in a fairly straight line until he has several kilometers distance from the station, and then changing course to the target?

I still find it amazing though that a pilot can fly through stations, asteroids, ships with no problem and If I would try this? I fail all the time... So it is mechanics I guess... But yes, it is annoying.
(I did not mention some flight paths that the pilot takes through an asteroidfield, stopping, make weird moves, start travel drive, stop again, weird move, start traveldrive again.... and so on, while simple move a bit to the left, right , upwards or downwards would steer simply clear of them asteroids. )

Oh yes, drilling through station modules/asteroids/side of gates when approached from 90 degrees .. The Auto-Pillock has been a constant in all X series games, but I find it to be worse in X4 than any previous game.

Stations designed with Paranid egg shaped modules seem to give a high occurrence of snaring a landing/taking off ship.

Stations with Terran enclosed wharfs (the dome shaped one with M ships docked on the outside, and S ships have to go through that narrow tunnel), S ships with an NPC pilot jiggle about a lot trying to land, and occasionally instead of landing at the pad they will fly out the other side of the wharf before turning back in to eventually land at the S dock inside.

Recently in the 7 Betas I am noticing a new behaviour, a ship you are in which is being piloted by an NPC, when it comes into dock (any dock, even the Luxury flat ones with no sides) it will sometimes approach the dock from underneath the dock, so the ship then drills through the whole of the dock to get to the landing pad on the other side.

Tried producing a save prior to docking in various scenarios to offer to egosoft as a reproducer .. but as usual with these things I cant even reload those saves myself and reliably reproduce the issue, so its just pointless trying.

I tried also making a bug report topic documenting with many saves and many videos all of the occurrences throughout the X 'verse, I was at it for about two years. I think it helped them to focus on S/M enclosed wharfs and refine the approach to them and take off, which is these days a lot better than it used to be. However there is still a bit more work on them to be desired, and especially on Terran S/M Wharfs. The intro video to Cradle of Humanity shows a Terran Fighter landing at one of these Wharfs https://youtu.be/iSWzoGOscQc?t=89 ..

.. I view that video and think "False advertising", Wish the in game experience was really that smooth.

[Daemonjax]

1) Ship mods -- some have too much RNG variance, and they seem balanced around that. That might work in an online game, but in a single-player game it just encourages save scumming. Instead, they should have a much tighter RNG (like a maximum of -13% total effectiveness) and just cost much more components.

2) Docking/undock management of ships that are carried in M+ size ships

3) Drone management for M+ size ships

[LameFox]

I think what frustrates me most about X4 is that for what is nominally a sandbox game there aren't really many ways to play it, in the sense that if you're not building a trade/industrial empire there is zero depth or progression. Any playstyle involving only one personal ship is very shallow, because the volume of equipment and ship modifications just doesn't extend very far, and most of the things you can actually do in person (mining, trading, etc) just do not have any complexity to them at all. Piracy scales terribly because only the player can do it, and is very cumbersome as a focused playstyle due to the way equipment works now (you can't loot it or strip it off a captured ship). Hostility kills progression due to the half baked ability to steal blueprints. Salvaging turned out to be just mining, reskinned. Exploring is just flying around opening crates and occasionally having a few bewildered ships teleported on you.

There's a hilarious line on the steam page which says "EXPLORE space or manage an empire", and I find that so funny because what do they mean "or"? Is opening boxes forever being presented as a comparable option to empire management? This is fundamentally an empire management game, and even in that it constrains your playstyle with issues like blueprint acquisition. It's not bad at being an empire management game, but I wish they'd add some depth to anything else they pretend it contains.