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X3: Albion Prelude expansion released - Turning your [Terran Conflict]s into Terran Wars
Archonex
No hard feelings, right?Registered User regular
No hard feelings, right?Registered User regular
So I didn't see a topic about this, so I figured since the X series has had a topic on the boards in one form or another for the past year or so, there should be a topic about it.
Albion Prelude is an expansion pack to Terran Conflict, which itself is a stand-alone game that was built off of X3. The X series are an "Elite" type of game taken to an insane extreme. You (typically) start out playing the role of a fighter or freighter pilot in a large, intelligent galaxy. Much like Elite and other space sims, the galaxy in question is filled with NPC's that actually do stuff like raid convoys, trade, and other space sim sort of stuff. However, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
See, the X series is a bit nuts. It's the sort of game that looks at conventional games with their tiny manuals filled with a select number of features, chortles belligerently at you, then smacks you in the face with a dictionary sized game manual. Half of which is required reading to get to the point where you do the more interesting things easily.
The X series presents itself as a space shooter/trade sim at first glance, in the vein of the many games that have you pilot small ships while flitting around the larger, nastier, capital ships. But in reality, it's more like an space empire/corporation building game that plays with you in the cockpit or on the bridge of a ship, instead of in some sort of nebulous meeting room that you never see.
There is nothing stopping you from getting enough money to build a freighter. Then crewing that freighter with a trade staff that will automatically make money for you. Then using the money from that freighter to build or buy more freighters. Then using the money from that to build yourself your own space station to produce products. Then build or buy yourself a capital ship to pilot yourself, or a fleet of fighters to guard your trade routes, ad infinitum, until you blow your brains out from the sheer complexity of it all get bored and decide to do something else. Which usually involves turning your fleet of benign pirate hating traders, capital ship captains, and fighter pilots into galaxy burning death machines.
Alternatively, there's also nothing stopping you from just burning down someone else's stuff to get to that point, then running off into the sunset with all their ill gotten gains. Something that's gotten a bit more easier to do, in fact, with AP.
While you're doing that, other NPC's will be doing their own thing too. That company trade ship you see in the distance being flanked by four fighters is actually delivering supplies to one of their company stations. Or selling products. Likewise, those pirates who are burning their way across the system are either running from an incoming attack squadron of system defense fighters, or are about to make someones day very miserable.
In between all of that is an insanely huge universe, which has consistently expanded in size with each game. There's all sorts of things to do, including mining, trading, privateering, cold war actions (In TC.) missions of varying types, story missions, combat missions, finding the many well hidden easter eggs, salvaging, and more.
Adding onto that, the game has an insanely large modding community, that does everything from adding in single features, to designing new quality of life features that make the game easier to play, to stuff like X-Tended, which basically takes the size of the game and multiplies it by five all around.
Terran Conflict refined the content of the previous games down to a very fine point.
It's been mentioned on the forums, and even had a large topic for quite awhile. TC looked at X3, and did a lot of things to make the series better, including making the game easier to get into, and making it easier to get into the "empire building" part of the game where you can roll around with fleets of ships while piloting a pimped out carrier.
The problem with TC was, much like previous X3 games, once you reached the point of having your own system, your own massive fleet of ships, and your own corporate headquarters, there really wasn't anything left to do except for finding some of the secret ships, doing some of the high tier story-lines, or wiping out Xenon sectors. This lead to a sort of blues balls situation for a lot of players, since they'd spend all that time looking at those shiny super caps and lusting after them, only to realize that when they got them they were already the king of the proverbial space hill. Albion Prelude looks to answer that by continuing on the story of TC.
See, in Terran Conflict, the story focused around a burgeoning cold war between the newly discovered Terrans, and the Argons (Read: Humans that got lost in space, essentially. More on that later.). Albion Prelude is the direct prelude to the sequel that takes place after TC. The sequel being a reboot of the series that will not apparently be featuring the player controllable insane capital ship fights, or many of the other things that makes the X series so awesome. This is, in the story, apparently because the gate network that connects every planet is completely shut down, because
Albion Prelude itself, however, details how the shit hits the fan, and the game is centered around a time where the galaxy has pretty much plunged into complete chaos. If you're familiar with what happens in X: Reboot, you know that it only gets worse from there.
What this means in terms of gameplay terms is that the universe is a hell of a lot more dynamic. In previous games, large swathes of space were fairly stable and nothing would really ever change except for market prices. The only time you really had to worry about seeing a sector of space getting burned to the ground is if you were hanging out near Xenon sectors. Not so much in AP. AP, much like how TC looked at X3 for the best player mods for inspiration, takes cues from the best mods of TC.
This includes the race warfare mods, race response fleet mods, and more. It also fixes a few bugs with the AI that kept certain ship classes (Bombers.) from firing their missiles properly. A single bomber can lay waste to an entire sector if he has a full cargo hold of missiles. And the nations do build their own navies to actively try and purge the other faction off the map, now, and will exploit bombers ruthlessly.
This also gives you something to do at the end-game, instead of just un-installing the game. Instead of milling around after a 20 hour stint to becoming the God-Emperor of the galaxy, you can, from day one, pitch in with the war effort and help take over sectors. In fact, there's two new starts that put you on one side of the conflict, or the other. And the two big sides have brought some really crazy ships to the fight to compensate for player ability, too.
Case in point, check out the new Terran flagship:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxRmZH6bE04
Taken directly from the Steam sale page:
So a lot of new stuff. Which will probably be taken into insane new directions by the mod community, given that the developers have included fan favorite mods in as features built into the game itself.
In addition to that, the AI, and many ships received rebalances to make the game more interesting. Laser Towers, for instance, went from being shit-all-useless, to being really goddamn deadly against ships of all types. And the factions will use them.
Likewise, and i'm bolding this as a warning for new players coming in from TC, Bombers will wreck your shit now. The AI on them has been updated to work so that they'll spam missiles. In fact, if you enter a sector with one actively camping in it, be prepared to hear literally 50 "Missile Incoming" warnings. They are just as much the destroyers of worlds in the AI's hands as they were in your hands in TC, now. Also, this should be obvious, but they will literally raze entire sectors to the ground if they have a full cargo hold. So take them out if you want to help the war effort for your side.
I've just now picked it up, since apparently the release of Albion Prelude was never even really advertised. If I hadn't of chanced across a banner on Steam, i'd have never of even known it existed. Which is also another reason I made this topic. I'll post impressions once I get some more time with it, and maybe update the OP a bit more.
It is free if you already own the X3 Superbox. Albion Prelude requires TC to play, and only costs $9.99. Which is a steal given the new content it adds in. If you don't own TC, then you can pick both it and Albion Prelude up for $19.99 via the Terran War Pack.
To my knowledge, Albion Prelude is only going to be released on Steam. Which is where Egosoft, the company that makes this series of games, seems to be gravitating to as their main platform of distribution for the next game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ7z1HVonUM
What is Albion Prelude? In fact, what is this X3 thing I see in the title?
Albion Prelude is an expansion pack to Terran Conflict, which itself is a stand-alone game that was built off of X3. The X series are an "Elite" type of game taken to an insane extreme. You (typically) start out playing the role of a fighter or freighter pilot in a large, intelligent galaxy. Much like Elite and other space sims, the galaxy in question is filled with NPC's that actually do stuff like raid convoys, trade, and other space sim sort of stuff. However, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
See, the X series is a bit nuts. It's the sort of game that looks at conventional games with their tiny manuals filled with a select number of features, chortles belligerently at you, then smacks you in the face with a dictionary sized game manual. Half of which is required reading to get to the point where you do the more interesting things easily.
The X series presents itself as a space shooter/trade sim at first glance, in the vein of the many games that have you pilot small ships while flitting around the larger, nastier, capital ships. But in reality, it's more like an space empire/corporation building game that plays with you in the cockpit or on the bridge of a ship, instead of in some sort of nebulous meeting room that you never see.
There is nothing stopping you from getting enough money to build a freighter. Then crewing that freighter with a trade staff that will automatically make money for you. Then using the money from that freighter to build or buy more freighters. Then using the money from that to build yourself your own space station to produce products. Then build or buy yourself a capital ship to pilot yourself, or a fleet of fighters to guard your trade routes, ad infinitum, until you blow your brains out from the sheer complexity of it all get bored and decide to do something else. Which usually involves turning your fleet of benign pirate hating traders, capital ship captains, and fighter pilots into galaxy burning death machines.
Alternatively, there's also nothing stopping you from just burning down someone else's stuff to get to that point, then running off into the sunset with all their ill gotten gains. Something that's gotten a bit more easier to do, in fact, with AP.
While you're doing that, other NPC's will be doing their own thing too. That company trade ship you see in the distance being flanked by four fighters is actually delivering supplies to one of their company stations. Or selling products. Likewise, those pirates who are burning their way across the system are either running from an incoming attack squadron of system defense fighters, or are about to make someones day very miserable.
In between all of that is an insanely huge universe, which has consistently expanded in size with each game. There's all sorts of things to do, including mining, trading, privateering, cold war actions (In TC.) missions of varying types, story missions, combat missions, finding the many well hidden easter eggs, salvaging, and more.
Adding onto that, the game has an insanely large modding community, that does everything from adding in single features, to designing new quality of life features that make the game easier to play, to stuff like X-Tended, which basically takes the size of the game and multiplies it by five all around.
So what is Albion Prelude, exactly?
Terran Conflict refined the content of the previous games down to a very fine point.
It's been mentioned on the forums, and even had a large topic for quite awhile. TC looked at X3, and did a lot of things to make the series better, including making the game easier to get into, and making it easier to get into the "empire building" part of the game where you can roll around with fleets of ships while piloting a pimped out carrier.
The problem with TC was, much like previous X3 games, once you reached the point of having your own system, your own massive fleet of ships, and your own corporate headquarters, there really wasn't anything left to do except for finding some of the secret ships, doing some of the high tier story-lines, or wiping out Xenon sectors. This lead to a sort of blues balls situation for a lot of players, since they'd spend all that time looking at those shiny super caps and lusting after them, only to realize that when they got them they were already the king of the proverbial space hill. Albion Prelude looks to answer that by continuing on the story of TC.
See, in Terran Conflict, the story focused around a burgeoning cold war between the newly discovered Terrans, and the Argons (Read: Humans that got lost in space, essentially. More on that later.). Albion Prelude is the direct prelude to the sequel that takes place after TC. The sequel being a reboot of the series that will not apparently be featuring the player controllable insane capital ship fights, or many of the other things that makes the X series so awesome. This is, in the story, apparently because the gate network that connects every planet is completely shut down, because
The AI's that the Terrans made about a century ago have pretty much overrun the entire galaxy outside of the gate system, and the ancient race that built them may be trying to keep everyone alive by keeping the main Xenon force from getting access to it and zerging them into oblivion. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of plunging the galaxy into the dark ages for a little while until the new means of travel are more firmly established.
Albion Prelude itself, however, details how the shit hits the fan, and the game is centered around a time where the galaxy has pretty much plunged into complete chaos. If you're familiar with what happens in X: Reboot, you know that it only gets worse from there.
What this means in terms of gameplay terms is that the universe is a hell of a lot more dynamic. In previous games, large swathes of space were fairly stable and nothing would really ever change except for market prices. The only time you really had to worry about seeing a sector of space getting burned to the ground is if you were hanging out near Xenon sectors. Not so much in AP. AP, much like how TC looked at X3 for the best player mods for inspiration, takes cues from the best mods of TC.
This includes the race warfare mods, race response fleet mods, and more. It also fixes a few bugs with the AI that kept certain ship classes (Bombers.) from firing their missiles properly. A single bomber can lay waste to an entire sector if he has a full cargo hold of missiles. And the nations do build their own navies to actively try and purge the other faction off the map, now, and will exploit bombers ruthlessly.
This also gives you something to do at the end-game, instead of just un-installing the game. Instead of milling around after a 20 hour stint to becoming the God-Emperor of the galaxy, you can, from day one, pitch in with the war effort and help take over sectors. In fact, there's two new starts that put you on one side of the conflict, or the other. And the two big sides have brought some really crazy ships to the fight to compensate for player ability, too.
Case in point, check out the new Terran flagship:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxRmZH6bE04
I'm not new to the X series. Can you just give me a list of features that Albion Prelude includes?
Taken directly from the Steam sale page:
About the Game
X3: Albion Prelude is the latest game in the X3 space game series. TRADE, FIGHT, BUILD, THINK in a living and breathing universe. A new plot and many additions to the open free-form gameplay.
A Bridge Between the Old and New X Universe
X3: Albion Prelude plays in a time between the old and the new X Universe. It shows a universe in flux, and prepares players for things to come. The old X Universe is passing; a new X Universe is about to be created.
War!
The X universe is undergoing a period of massive change. What started as a conflict of interest between the Earth and the races of the X Universe has now escalated into a full scale war. Play a part in a war scenario bigger than anything the X Universe has ever seen before!
Corporations Compete for Control of the Future
With the war as a backdrop, corporations old and new are vying for power and are driving the X Universe in a new direction. A technological breakthrough will soon allow massive accelerators, forming highways in space and allowing the economy to expand on an unprecedented scale. Highways, a key feature of X: Rebirth, are not yet ready, but you can see them being built and participate in the power struggles around the construction of much larger self sustaining economies.
Key features:
A new plot throws you into the power struggle between corporations at a time of war.
New Stock Exchange feature allows advanced investment strategies
Improved graphics quality setting for high end machines
Improved UI introducing charts to visualize economic developments
Support for head tracking
So a lot of new stuff. Which will probably be taken into insane new directions by the mod community, given that the developers have included fan favorite mods in as features built into the game itself.
In addition to that, the AI, and many ships received rebalances to make the game more interesting. Laser Towers, for instance, went from being shit-all-useless, to being really goddamn deadly against ships of all types. And the factions will use them.
Likewise, and i'm bolding this as a warning for new players coming in from TC, Bombers will wreck your shit now. The AI on them has been updated to work so that they'll spam missiles. In fact, if you enter a sector with one actively camping in it, be prepared to hear literally 50 "Missile Incoming" warnings. They are just as much the destroyers of worlds in the AI's hands as they were in your hands in TC, now. Also, this should be obvious, but they will literally raze entire sectors to the ground if they have a full cargo hold. So take them out if you want to help the war effort for your side.
I've just now picked it up, since apparently the release of Albion Prelude was never even really advertised. If I hadn't of chanced across a banner on Steam, i'd have never of even known it existed. Which is also another reason I made this topic. I'll post impressions once I get some more time with it, and maybe update the OP a bit more.
So how much does it cost? Where can I get it?
It is free if you already own the X3 Superbox. Albion Prelude requires TC to play, and only costs $9.99. Which is a steal given the new content it adds in. If you don't own TC, then you can pick both it and Albion Prelude up for $19.99 via the Terran War Pack.
To my knowledge, Albion Prelude is only going to be released on Steam. Which is where Egosoft, the company that makes this series of games, seems to be gravitating to as their main platform of distribution for the next game.
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Note that because X3 AP just came out and is an expansion of TC, and TC has a huge modding community, some of these mods might not be completely ported over to AP yet. I'll try and make notes of this in each mods description, if it's a known issue. Otherwise, assume they work.
If a mod contains a summarized list of up to date features in its OP for the topic about it, i'll post them in spoilers, too.
Gameplay enhancing mods
MARS Fire Control: A must have mod. It makes turrets not be dumb as hell. Typically turrets will blow all of their energy at once. MARS creates a system of AI for turrets that has them not only conserve energy if they can't hit a target, but will also pick out targets it can hit. Also, it has a unique and extremely useful system for expanding the usage of drones like the Keris and fighter drones, making them into a must have utility for capital ships and transports.
They gleefully fire a 30 sec salvo on an M5 when the proverbial snow ball in hell would have a higher chance of hitting.
This was too depressing to watch so I set forth on my personal crusade to create the perfect turret script. (YMMV
One that only fires on those targets that it can hit.
MARS consists of 5 systems:
Fire Control (Turrets)
Goblins (your obedient minions)
Automatic cargo collection
Satellite deployment
AL Plugin, that makes MARS available for AI capital enemy ships (optional
Hotkeys:
Launch goblin (Fighter Drone)
Launch goblin Mk2 (Keris, Fighter Drone Mk2)
Deploy Satellites (Advanced Satellites)
Cease fire / Ignore target
Set priority target
Fighter drones: Attack Shields
Fighter drones: Shutdown
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=217470
Cycrow's Cheat Package: Adds in a ton of cheats. Obviously useful for cheating yourself something or to fix a screw-up with a bug in a mod. Also required for a few mods in order to function properly.
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=216691
CODEA Weapon Systems: One of two popular mods that handles carrier and battle-group supply and operations. Makes running a dedicated carrier doable, without tons of work. CODEA is much more complex then Anarkis, which is mostly focused around assigning squadrons, configuring load-outs, and re-supply. While I haven't used it myself, CODEA appears to allow you to design entire battle-groups and handle intricate functions within them, like launching dedicated bomber wings, defensive and offensive capital ship class actions, and handing out sector wide commands, like telling a ship class to retreat.
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=259730
Anarkis Defense System: Another mod that makes carriers easier to use. See spoiler for more details.
Automated Carrier command to be added to your patroling carriers
Sector Defense command to be used on docks with a bunch of docked fighters to defend your sectors
Those commands are highly effective against any foe and are 100% automated
Very easy to setup, you can even copy settings from a carrier to others in a few seconds
Apply homebase, turret, jump, missile, ..., settings on all the docked ships at once
Quick keyboard shortcuts for your personnal carrier
Train your Marines in your M1 and Stations
You can hire mechanics to repair your docked ships
Ships use the transporter device to teleport into the carrier
A warning message (audio or text) is display when a carrier is in danger
Fast & Easy buying and selling of wares from/to the carrier
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=246767
Complex Cleaner: This mod cleans up complexes, which are groupings of stations you attach to each other. Good for increasing FPS in a core sector of yours that you want to make more efficient. Or just removing an eye-sore and making it more efficient in terms of space.
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=225042
NPC Bailing Script: Alters the rate NPC's eject from their ships by adding a bravado stat. Very useful if you're playing a pirate, otherwise the game gets a bit tedious. Also, see attached mods, which include adding in "competition" in the form of other salvagers.
Total Conversion/Content Mods
XRM: Probably the big mod for Albion Prelude at the moment. It does and adds so many things, I can't even list it all here. Does an insane amount of rebalancing as well, and includes its own set of mods that go with XRM as optional additions, including adding in cockpits for fighters, something that was removed in TC.
Notably, it makes the war in Albion Prelude much more interesting. Not only does it ramp up ship production (Every station classified as a national "shipyard" now produces ships ranging from fighters, to capitals, for military usage. Assigns command fleets that will attempt to achieve objectives independent of the player, too.), it diversifies the content available by adding in visible objectives to the war that can win it for your side.
I recommend reading the topic for it, which is located here:
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=304158
Improved Races: Another big military/race altering mod. Of note, it re-adds the Khaak, and makes both them, and the Xenon, huge, galactic threats. Includes an insane number of features as well, all of which are configurable, or can be turned off.
Sadly, it's been temporarily abandoned in favor of the mod maker finishing his other mod "X: Timelines". Which is apparently going to include all the content of IR. Unfortunately, Timelines does not appear to be available in any downloadable format yet, and IR was abandoned prior to AP being released, meaning some features don't work properly/at all. That being said, IR is very much worth a download and an updated version for AP is planned for the future. I've only found only a few features are inoperative in AP with XRM installed. And the ones that are are easily worked around.
Keep in mind that running both XRM and IR will basically super-charge each nations forces unless you disable the military features. As each one uses shipyards as a means to construct ships. This can lead to slow down in game if you don't have an extremely good rig. It does make the game very interesting, if you can handle the load, though. Watching two dozen capital ships go at each other, complete with their frigate, corvette, and fighter escort forces (And their MARS drone forces if you let NPC's use MARS equipment on their ships.) is a very impressive sight.
If nothing else, i'd recommend downloading this, and turning off everything but IR's sector control feature. As it will feasibly let the AI of each nation wipe out other nations in extremely long games, which gives a big point to the war, and creates a very interesting land-scape to play in. Also, it will let you invade sectors yourself and take them over for yourself. Taking control of a sector will let you tax it depending on stations within, and whether or not the planets in the sector are inhabitable.
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=273973&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
Pirate Guild V3: Expands the AI and player functionality of pirates and piracy by an insane amount. This ranges from letting players join the "guild", to making it so that the AI pirates actually benefit from pirating. This means that if you steal a ship, and sell it to them, then yes, they'll use it and crew it with a pirate. Likewise, AI pirates that join the guild will take their ill-gotten gains back to their base and use it to construct bigger and better things, like a base that's heavily defended, or new ships. This can lead, in a game like AP, to pirates taking advantage of weakened regions to make entire fleets of ships, up to and including their own M1 class ship, the Galleon, to lead them.
It also includes a number of other features too, and will interface with Anarkis Defense System. If it's installed, then pirate bases will order their wings of fighters and lighter craft into squadrons for efficient defensive actions and raiding.
When attacked pirate stations will respond with lethal forces
The Guild will favor attacking the race which deals the most damage to it
Lasertower and M6 deployment for PB defense purpose
Ability for the player to befriend the pirate faction and the Guild
Two Pirate Shipyards are spawned in the universe
Mobile Guild HQ attacking enemy sectors and rearming at the PB (Galleon M1)
Ability for the Guild to buy a Brigantine M2 to defend its stations
PB selling / buying more goods (weaponry, software, shielding)
Pirate Guild ships are using the jumpdrive to travel
Ability for the plugin to use custom ships and weaponry (from mods)
The player gain additional money for the destruction of pirate guild's assets
Pirate economic system (raids give money used to buy ships / defenses)
Setup menu allowing to select the Guild's strength
Comm. with the PB through a hot-key allowing to access various services
Dynamic Defense System with endangered PB calling patrolling M7 for help
The Phanon Corporation: This mod is interesting.
It adds a new company that aggressively pursues a monopoly on the galactic market. It will trade, steal, raid competing businesses (IE: You, and other companies.), and make dirty deals with other factions to make money. In other words, it's your character, in an AI format. Notably, it doesn't do this by just spawning assets like most games would. The Phanon Corporation has to send ships to shipyards to buy ships, just like you, along with make the money to afford them first. In essence, the mod creates a rival corporation that will provide a long time rival to you, with the rivalry inevitably exploding into outright corporate warfare between your two companies.
The Phanon Corporation
- Everything The Phanon Corporation buys, it pays for
- It will not purchase anything if it doesn't have the funds required
- Buys stations, traders, headquarters, fighters, capital ships
- Maintains a proper fleet ratio (i.e. X number of m5s to m2s)
- Corporation tasks include:
... Trading
... Search/Kill operations for enemy companies
... Station importers / Exporters
... Sector guardians
- The Phanon Corporation earns money by trading
- The more it earns, the more it buys
- 8 consecutive subsidiaries, increasing with buying power each generation (8 "levels", if you will)
- You will have an impact on their earning potential - kill a TS, and they have to buy a new one, and you decreased their trading income. They're just like you.
- They will respond to their stations attacks, if they have the military available
- Southern, Western most Unknown sector used in this script (see notes below to change)
- This script uses Race 1, so might be incompatible with those scripts using Race 1.
- Race 1 is set to neutral for all races. So shooting them will not effect your notoriety with anyone else. Also, Kha'ak, Pirates, and Xenon will leave them alone (The Phanon have some mysterious allies )
My goal in creating this plugin was to create some life in the Universe that carried on with out you, reacting to the game state. I also have a passion for performance, and paid close attention to the impact that this script might have on other factors in the Universe. I can avoid loop checks by storing pertinent information in arrays, and save script cycles by using priority sequence step timing (non-important tasks only checked once every 5 mins, etc.). Many months of testing went into this so far, and it's stable, but that's only on my PC. To me, it's not beta, but a release candidate; but you know what happens with new releases.
This AL Plugin can represent a challenge, especially in later levels, as The Phanon Coporation will steal trade opportunities, and actively hunt and destroy your ships and factories with M6 / M7 led fleets. As they gain more money, they will purchase capital ships to guard their HQ. Especially in later generations, the HQ can be difficult to destroy, as the sector will be well fortified.
If you want quick action, this script isn't for you. It was intended to be started at roughly the same time as a player as a means to incite the player to get moving on creating his empire. Because if you don't, The Phanon Corporation will. And eventually, they will take over; but at a non-cheating pace. It can take just as much time for The Phanon Corporation's subsidiaries to build an empire as a player in the early generations. However, disturb them (kill their corvettes, cap their traders), and this progress will obviously slow.
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=3290168#3290168
Utilities
Plugin Manager: A third party piece of software that makes loading, disabling, installing, and uninstalling mods extremely easy. With this, you won't have to mess around with file replacements through the fake patch method. Highly recommended if you're going to do a lot of modding, as it'll make your life a lot simpler.
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=265915
(Post Reserved for future information like races, recommended mods, strategies to start out with, screenshots, new ships, and more.)
How hellishly difficult is the learning curve? I don't expect to be a strategic genius and Space Dictator in just a few hours, but is it a game where I will have to invest fifteen hours in reading online tutorials and various manuals in order to grasp even the basics, or can a working knowledge of entry-level gameplay be picked up by reading some basic instructional material and fumbling through the beginning of the game?
Terran Conflict really removed a lot of the "grind" from the game. It also cleaned up the UI and made it much easier to read and navigate. So long as you keep your eye out for decent missions, you can get into the more advanced aspects of it fairly easy. Just be prepared to make mistakes at first, and leave some funds left over to compensate for it.
I'm pretty sure the new stock market features are going to ruin my character financially a few times before I figure out how to play them properly. Though the idea of burning down some companies wheat farms to buy stocks in them on the cheap, or even take them over (If this isn't implemented yet, you can damn well bet modders will do it eventually.) through a controlling share is enticing enough to make me gamble on it.
I would recommend checking out the forums though. There are some mods that make the game much easier to play on the UI side of things. And really, part of the fun factor of this game is the mods. Players do some insane things with the tools the developers give the players.
Outside of that though, things like the Anarkis Carrier mod make running a carrier fleet much easier. And some of the trade mods let you set up insanely complex routes for supplying or selling materials easily. No idea if TC mods work in AP, however. I'll have to check. If so i'll list a few recommended mods in the second post.
How's the factional warfare in these games? What I'm really looking for is a game that lets me set up a little kingdom and slam capital ships into each other, and it sounds like this game is ideally suited for that.
I can't really give impressions yet as I just started out, but some of the posts I see on the forums, and a few videos i've seen, imply that they really amped up the faction warfare in this iteration of the X series. It exists as not only a feature as you play the game, but as something to give you to do at the end-game too. Just take a look at that flagship video I posted up above. That's one of the Terran navies new flagships. Apparently, if you cause enough trouble in attacking a sector, or another empire causes enough trouble, the Terrans will retaliate by sending in that ship along with a large carrier/battle group in to wreck the faces of whoever is bothering them. Other factions have similar ships, too.
Terran Conflict never really did anything with the empires duking it out on a large scale. Just the occasional border skirmish.
For AP, it looks like they took a look at some of the big warfare mods like race response fleets (The AI for empire military ships would, in this type of mod, jump to a location to defend it from pirates/players/other races/xenon/khaak if they attacked an asset provided they had enough fuel.), race warfare (Races go to war, and actively cap sectors.), and corporation warfare (Ditto on this, only instead of it being sanctioned warfare, it's a bunch of corporations trying to kill you and each other in little black ops style attacks. Or not so little attacks if they think they can get away with it.), and incorporated them into the main game, all while refining them to commercial game levels of quality.
Then on top of that they added in economic and corporate warfare in the form of a stock exchange, and apparently there's something in there about competing and participating in the creation of the new transit system that'll feature in the next game. Which i'm not sure is code for an optional story-line, or something you can actually do. Blockaind a sector and bombing enemy corporations transit systems if they try to pick a fight with me would be a fairly ingenious way of screwing them over.
Reading up on it, there's an entire new set of features and mechanics, too. For instance, if you choose the starting history that puts you on one side of the war, you'll get instant access to regular war updates saying where the fighting is/where it's going on/where it's expected/etc/etc. And it looks as if it's entirely possible for one empire to be wiped out.
Couple that with the sector control mods from TC that let you claim a sector yourself, and you could even finally fully simulate building up your own nation, too.
Why Terrans? Because if you can be the best of the best of the Terrans, you can beat anyone.
Alternatively. I've found a few work arounds for that.
One: Don't piss off the Terrans. According to the forums, so long as you don't choose the Argon aligned military career, it's possible to not be enemies with them. Which means they'll leave you alone. If you choose the Argon aligned military career, however, you're shit out of luck. Which is the point of that career, you start out with good starting resources, but are also expected to take part in the war effort.
Two: Find a good place to set up shop. I'm playing a Terran military start. And it's pretty obvious from the call outs on which sectors are getting attacked/defended that the Terran ship distribution at the start leaves a bunch of holes in their offenses and defenses. I confirmed that this isn't random distribution either. Three restarts so far, and each time certain sectors like Circle of Labor have come under fire with Terran ships in them, leading to a nearby battle group (And holy shit, this game really upgraded the empire navies from last game. That battlegroup had four corvettes in it, twenty-five fighters, and a destroyer. And it appears to be one of the lighter groups, too. Given that the responses are supposed to be proportional, I can only imagine what was going on in that sector.). warping out to try and back them up.
Three: Work for the Terrans. They get a ton of secure sectors. In fact, i'm kind of annoyed right now on my Terran Commander. He starts out in a fully equipped Katana class corvette. Which is awesome. But at the same time, i'm smack dab in the middle of Terran space, near the homeworld. And I can't remember which gate path leads out to the greater galaxy.
Four: War is good for business. It's a war. Things are getting burned down left and right. Don't look at it as the stable galaxy of TC and previous X games. Look at it as two groups of empires basically raping and pillaging their way across the galaxy in an attempt to slaughter the other. This creates profit opportunities for the enterprising war profiteer/privateer.
Five: Do the main quest. According to the forums, it's possible to have a destroyer in an hour if you progress far enough down it. No clue if that's true, but if so, that'd greatly help with raiding issues.
Also, Terran ships kind of suck. While a properly equipped one (Not sure if AP includes their special beam type. Which is basically a giant fuck off laser cannon that fires solid beams of energy out. It wasn't available in vanilla TC. Though it was supposed to be.) can ruin just about anythings day, from corvette class up, most Terran default ship armaments are pretty vanilla and weak compared to other navies high end armaments. This was because their best armaments weren't buyable/produce-able in vanilla TC. If that's changed in AP, though, then yeah, they're a huge threat. Though there's a few ways around them that i've learned from playing a Terran weaponry enabled game.
ATF ships are far, far more deadly. Which reminds me. I'm already seeing another feature I never saw in TC. A small escort group of ATF Vali's (Corvettes.) was escorting a weird looking transport ship through a sector I was in. I've never seen them outside of their sectors before. It appears they're actively participating in the galaxy now. The Terran Atmospheric Lifter appears to finally be used properly, too. It was the Terran TL in TC, but never functioned properly in terms of AI usage. Already saw one tooling around a secure Terran sector, moving goods.
Edit: New feature discovered. Maybe I forgot it existed in TC, but it appears that sectors now tell you who controls them at the time, upon discovering them.
Edit: Okay, yeah, military groups are much more prevalent now. I restarted as an Argon military man. Jump to Circle of Labor to see what's there that has the Terran military panicking. There's two Argon Colossus's next to the gate, and three Argon Titans. Along with a full fighter and corvette escort detachment for each one. That's more heavy capitals and ships in one area of the zone then i've seen in the entirety of vanilla TC. I stuck around long enough to blow up a couple of ATF and Terran fighters that were unlucky enough to get caught at the south gate as they jumped in, before docking at a nearby ore mine and exiting the game.
Selected Humble Merchant and am currently in the Ore Belt running ore between the mines and the light side arm factories. Things have been going great and I quickly made 200k+, but now a squadron of pirates have entered the system and are making life very difficult.
What, if any, mods do you all recommend?
edit-
Okay these pirates are pissing me off. I basically cannot do anything, they are flying around the station I am docked with and the second I undock they are on me. I'm not sure if the Argon navy is suppose to show up eventually or what. I know I had seen a patrol of fighter craft in this system, but they do not seem to want to tangle with the pirates. Will the pirates eventually leave or do I need to restart my game?
edit 2-
Alright, I was able to sneak away finally. Now to figure out how I can combat pirates while still trading. Or at least run away fast.
For someone starting out as a merchant, i'd start by recommending MARS and the Anarkis Carrier mod for functionality. MARS makes turrets smart. They'll only fire when they know they stand a chance of hitting something, instead of blowing all their energy at once. It also makes drones damned useful. They can repair ships in flight, fight, collect cargo, and more. Anarkis's carrier mod basically restructures carriers of all types, from transports, to actual full blown system crushing M1 carriers, so that you can structure fleets of ships, restock supplies, alter turret commands, and launch and dock wings of fighters easily. It also includes commands to let you automate your own carriers, so that they'll patrol, or allow stations to launch defensive wings.
I wouldn't recommend XRM or IR for someone just starting, though. It gives the war a point and objectives, but also makes things more epic. You'll see battle fleets duking it out, militaries will actively engage in strikes on systems, and more. Also, they make the national and combat AI much smarter. Improved Races in particular also re-adds the Khaak and makes them a galactic level threat again. I''m six hours in from adding IR in and the Khaak have taken eight systems so far. As in, the system stations were wiped out, and they built their own (ship spawning) stations in place of them, with sector control on the map listed as theirs.
The Xenon, Yaki, and pirates also get boosts that can have them laying waste to entire solar systems and taking them over.
On the economic end of things, both mods, when used together, basically create a system of AI where it will actually look at their economy and sustain it. This fixes the issue that was in TC (And I think was actually fixed in AP.) where the Terran economy would tank due to a lack of supplies. If they lose a station, they'll try and rebuild it. And they'll patch "holes" in their economy in terms of supply and demand over time, creating a dynamic universe in terms of economic profits compared to the base game.
Interestingly enough, when used with XRM, IR also uses both mods war features to dynamically expand and empires.
To give you an idea of how the universe is different in an early XRM/IR game:
There was an epic twelve hour long siege of Circle of Labour, where the Terran forces I was sided with were trying to expand past the choke point the Argon start with. Two command battle fleets (IE: The objective fleets that actively attack in XRM. They even come with uniquely named flagships like "Lasting Vengeance", or "Bragi". I've seen eight of them hanging around Terran space so far.) were destroyed, and later rebuilt, and about a dozen IR attack fleets were destroyed on the Terran side of things.
Argon casualties were much higher. After building up my own personal military some, I grew irritated at Argon Buster and Nova squads slipping past the Terran blockade of Heretics End by using magnetar transports as an impromptu means of using jump-drives (XRM limits JD's to transports, and corvettes or higher. Also, the AI is really goddamn smart, and will do stuff like that with them installed.) to jump past it. Once past the blockade, the average strike force's life-time was usually limited, but some of my transports traveled through the fringes of the solar system (Terran space is actually just one solar system, sol.), where their more elite groups snuck in at.
This lead to it getting so bad, that I ended up seeing a pirate base set up in Darkspace's HQ sector. Which made things worse for my merchant fleet. So I loaded up with Tau class missiles on three corvettes, and one frigate, and then jumped in to the sector behind Circle of Labor and nuked the Argon Shipyard before the two dozen destroyers and carriers could kill me.
Following that, the Argon lacked the ability to effectively restock their ship losses easily in that region. Coupled with a massive Khaak incursion in Argon core space (IR said there was many as 4000 Khaak ships in-game.), they lost the region in a bloody battle.
I personally tallied something like 50 capital ship deaths. With ten of them being carriers/battle-carriers. Maybe 100+ corvette and frigate deaths. And an uncountable number of fighters and drones.
For the pirates, it depends on the ship you're piloting. A merchant's best bet is to get a few missiles, a few drones, and use your turret to turn their little area of space into a wall of fire until they screw off or die. Using your maneuvering thrusters is key for that.
Albion Prelude is only 9 bucks on Steam, though. For the price of an expansion pack that's pretty damn cheap. Especially since it's going to be the last space sim game with this level of scope that we're going to see for awhile, if Rebirth, the next game, is any indication so far. AP also adds in a ton of community must haves like saved loadouts for HQ's. The new ship classes (Dreadnaughts like the Kyoto and the new Xenon super-cap, Light Escort Carriers, etc, etc.) are pretty awesome, too. Looks like they're designing even more content right now, too.
Once the modding community starts to catch up it's going to produce some amazing mods, too. The new hard-coded support for total warfare and stock exchanges should make things fairly interesting. Also, it seems to be getting the "bonus content for years afterward" treatment that TC got, if the current bonus pack released for it is any indication.
Got an i7-875k and a AMD 5870 for reference.
Also, how are terran guys getting started? In my game the terran can't seem to expand past circle of labor so I'm stuck in the starting terran sectors and can't really find anything to do to make money.
God damn that is a right helpful post. I've been looking at a ton of mods for X3, but most of their descriptions seem to assume (and I don't fault them for it) that you understand what the heck they are talking about.
I did grab the IR mod since it sounded cool and it is. I'll have to look up XRM, MARS, and Anarkis Carrier.
I also installed the NPC Bailing Mod, which is great combined with the Salavage Mk1 mod, and to balance things out I added the NPC Salvager mod.
Subsequently found that there is so much love for X3TC that I decided to play a Humble Merchant. After hours and hours I had 150k credits, an upgraded Mercury, and that's it. Started an Argon Patriot in X3TC, got up to a quest where I have to follow a pirate.
I really don't like the fact that X3TC doesn't have crazy enemy fleets and warzones like X3AP...unless you mod it. I think I'll stick with X3AP, since the 2.0 patch is coming out later this month.
Rigorous Scholarship
BF3: Spazzway
Steam : Paul [Team Bad]
The Improved Races mod is relatively small and works for both TC and AP. Very easy way to have the universe descend in to war. In fact it will start several different wars other then just Terrans vs. Argons. Plus the different factions actually conquer and hold sectors and there is even an option to allow you, the player, to personal claim a sector.
As a tip for being a merchant, go to TerraCorp HQ, buy yourself the Best Buys and Best Sells software since this will list the best prices in a given sector without having to dock there or check them out one by one. Then head to Ore Belt, either fill your cargo hold with ore or buy as much as you can, then head next door to Cloud Base South East and sell it. In no time at all I was able to get enough money to field two other Mercuries and have them set to Sector Trader, thus making me even more money.
I now have a squadron of 5 Novas, plus the Centaur you get from the plot (which is the easiest and fastest way to get one), a fleet of 10 Mercuries set to Universe Traders, an ever expanding station complex to produce weapons and shields for my Nova squadron, and around 56mil in my account.
I started with AP, but switched to TC since all the mods work for it. Though there are a fair number of mods that do work with AP. In fact here is a handy link for AP players that lists numerous TC mods that are compatible with AP.
About the only thing that can "break" going from TC to AP, it seems, is stuff that deals with race response fleets and the military of each faction. It requires some tweaking, apparently, to keep things working. Also, obviously, there's some hilarious bugs you can find, too.
Like having a pirate command fleet that XRM spawns be hostile to you when the pirate guild fleets are friendly to you. But I just wrote that off as competition between pirate factions. Which it really is, within the code. It does turn Talonfire into a hotbed of combat, though. I counted something like four different factions duking it out for the sector, thanks to XRM pirate fleets basing themselves there, the pirate guild having a shipyard and fortress, and the Teladi and Khaak wanting to move in on the place.
It did make for some incredible bounties, too. Been tooling around with the Pirate Guild mod in AP. AP is very mod friendly, it seems. Despite Pirate Guild not being updated in at least a year, it works perfectly. Throwing in XRM makes things very interesting, too. The guild starts putting out bounties on the race response ships XRM sends to clean up sectors and defend them. Which confirmed my theory that it isn't just despawning ships when it doesn't need them anymore. The XRM (And AP) military ships just go chill in a sector they're defending when they aren't needed, while restocking on supplies, fighters, and drones.
Made for a nasty surprise for a destroyer Apparently the captain of this ship decided to go nuke (Literally. It had some really nasty torpedoes on board.) a pirate base into oblivion, along with all of its nearby pirates. When a NPC kills a pirate guild NPC, it gets a bounty. The amount and scale of the kills this captain scored made him a prime target, and literally #1 on the most wanted list of the pirates. I scored eighty million credits with one kill, by pulling off an insanely elaborate assassination. First I paid the local guild pirates to raid one sector to draw the majority of the defense forces in a core sector off. Then lured the Khaak in to the sector south of it by jumping into a nearby Khaak held sector and dropping a few torpedoes on their station.
Then, as a horde of angry space bugs followed me into the southern sector, and the defense forces split again, I jumped in to the sector with the destroyer restocking in it and ordered a fleet of light corvettes (Cobbled together from various races parts. Pirates are awesome like that.) and my one other frigate in. Cue me bombarding it with an insane amount of missiles, and jumping out with enough money to outfit myself with two more frigate class capitals.
I'll update the OP with more mod recommendations soon, along with an explanation of the races and what role they play. I'll also bump the topic for people interested in that, since I know there's a few. If you have any recommendations to add, also, just PM me.
How are you getting playable framerates with all of that? With vanilla AP my fps is around 15-20 during large battles (60 most rest of the time). I tried installing XRM because apparently the combat mod is rolled into it (which gave me a nice fps boost in Reunion and TC), but my fps dropped dramatically (in Argon prime at the start of a new game I was getting 25fps with nothing going on).
I'm thinking about going back to TC anyway until Patch 2.0 is out b/c I'm getting sick of Rapid Response ships jumping away at the last minute before you kill them and then returning with full health and shields a minute later. Really frustrating since the whole war thing is everything I've ever wanted in X3.
The odd thing about most of the X3 scripts/mods is that they tend to couple ridiculous changes with gameplay "improvements" and fixes. Rapid Response was supposed
to be the answer to just being able to hop into a core sector, pop all the mainstay capitals and then having 0 threats besides enemies who just happen to patrol into the sector.
The RR ships will jump out during boarding ops too, and come loaded to the brim with missiles, basically having them exist solely to harass the player. Its a really lazy and cheap way to fix the original problem of players being almost invisible to military ships(at times).
I'm running a custom built computer I made just this year. It has about 8GB ram and a fairly powerful CPU.
Keep in mind that graphical mods tend to be skewed towards reducing the strain on systems. It isn't an insane number of ships that will kill your frame-rate (Though if you have a crappy CPU, the computations the computer needs to make to wage war on a large scale might.), it's the particle effects from two hundred or more guns firing their space lasers off all at once that does it.
What this means is that most of the time, you can have upwards of 200 ships fighting in sector with even a moderately decent GPU/CPU. But if they cluster together in a furball (XRM, MARS, and CODEA enabled NPC's seem to love to do this, because it optimizes their effectiveness against certain ship types when targeting NPC's. Also, if they have flak arrays of some sort it can let them group up to output fire against bombers and fighters easier.) consisting of multiple battle-carrier/carrier class ships, complete with their fighters, MARS utility drones, and more, duking it out, looking at the fight can send your system screeching to a halt until you look away, because there's all sorts of flashy special effects going on in the distance.
The counter to this is to have a good graphics card. Or to just download a mod that removes some of the more prevalent and intensive graphical effects. TC, X3:R, and if not AP already, all have had them in the past. They were god-sends for older computers and a few of them were recommend back during X3:R, when computers weren't as beefy as they are today, and people were still wanting to pull off "galactic war" scenarios.
Got a ton of new and interesting mods i've sighted out that i'll add to the OP later. And i'm typing up the description for the races, main characters of the storyline, and more, right now. Should add it to the OP underneath the mods when i'm done. I'll also bump the topic once it's up for those interested.
Specs I saw for it on amazon claim your laptop has an i3 at 2.2 Ghz and an HD 3000 graphics card? If that's accurate then you can technically run it, but I doubt it will run well.
The engine is old and was built to run on nvidia 5000/6000 series cards, so a new intel integrated chip may actually be able to handle (seems it can handle some modern games at very low settings: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/11), so you may be ok there.
The cpu is pretty slow....which is not a good thing, because that's the main bottleneck when trying to run X3. I have a feeling that if you keep the settings low, you'll get playable fps through most of the universe with major slowdowns in certain sectors (anything with terran stations or tons of asteroids). Any type of combat above a few ships may make the game completely unplayable.
The guy who uploaded this video:
Also, if you have any ambitions of gaming on your laptop....get a cooling pad with fans to sit under it. Laptops get hot pretty fast, especially when under stress. Long enough gaming sessions may cause it too overheat.
I don't have any unlocked really, except for the basics -- Nostalgic Argon is interesting (you literally start off the exact same way as X3: Reunion did), and Bankrupt Assassin remains interesting. Apparently the Teladi and Paranid starts are unlocks now, and give free ships if you complete their special starting missions in time.