Here is something to try in each ship. Start travel and then boost and see at which speed the boost stops because it intersects with the travel speed. You know how, when you exit an acceleration gate and hit travel drive, regardless of whether or not you are using a fast charging drive you enter travel mode right away with no slowdown? I think that as you enter travel drive there is a tickup from your bottom speed. If you hit this point you enter travel mode properly regardless of the charge timer. Similarly as you leave travel mode there is a tick down from your top speed and this is how fast you shed speed once you leave travel mode. Terran engines might have a low attack and so can boost into travel mode very fast. But have a low release and so take forever to slow down
Thanks for the alternate to roguey; I was clinging to a few precious cached tabs that I could still change engines on, which were NOT any of the ships I own, let alone the models I've staged for engine testing (Rapiers and Asp Raiders).
Once I've worked out what the travel acceleration values should be, I'll record some samples from my test ships going 0-Max, plot those against the line, then try the boost -> travel if the deltas aren't sufficient to work out what's happening.
But if my theory is correct, attack == time (s) to max thrust, the TER drives should fit the straight line pretty closely, while the Split-C should noticeably lag, and I should be able to recreate the curve mathematically.
But first things first, I left them game up for an hour to see how stable things were, and they are not.
According to the log book they filled with red names, I think the ZYA is going to pop an Elephant and a Rattlesnake out of the FRF shipyard, and my idiot home guard is going to get slaughtered.
I started a new game and haven’t interacted with the split all that much yet. Probably won’t until I want to get to enough rep to buy some blueprints.
I did however hit the hilarious “bug” relating to the second Terran start
you start by dropping some satellites and then Richard Feynman has you go repair some nodes on his super secret research station. And it’s that station and then boso ta steals it and you. The bug is that you only have Terran BPs and so can’t build the dock easily since there is no Terran production nearby. It would have been “better” if the Terran areas were still split until you were able to teleport back with the station but that would have been way too much for efosoft to attempt
As an aside I love the fact that the science Terran faction are all African.
That should (?) be fixed with the newest nvidium drivers released today. I say should because the newest nividia drivers released today do fix an old graphics bug relating to dropping UI elements. And they did say nividia was hard at work on a quick fix
I started a new game and haven’t interacted with the split all that much yet. Probably won’t until I want to get to enough rep to buy some blueprints.
I did however hit the hilarious “bug” relating to the second Terran start
you start by dropping some satellites and then Richard Feynman has you go repair some nodes on his super secret research station. And it’s that station and then boso ta steals it and you. The bug is that you only have Terran BPs and so can’t build the dock easily since there is no Terran production nearby. It would have been “better” if the Terran areas were still split until you were able to teleport back with the station but that would have been way too much for efosoft to attempt
As an aside I love the fact that the science Terran faction are all African.
While I do admit it would fit the "lost in a strange land" motif a lot better, I think I would have been quite annoyed if I had zero access to Terran things after buying the Terran DLC just because I picked the "Wrong" start that flung me out of Terran Space and kept me from going back 10 minutes into it until I could build up to the point I can teleport the station.
Man, I forgot how much of a PITA is to rebind controls.
On the other hand, WOO, TERRANS! I like that I've got a wingman for the first several (handful? dozen? haven't made it far enough ...) of missions.
It's like the game was made primarily with KBAM in mind, just not my pawltry 3-button "M".
Exhibit A: "Fire secondary" (aka Missiles) is bound by default to a mouse side button you may not have, or L, a key you can't press while using WASD and a mouse.
Re: Speed tests. Ships appear to use a default acceleration curve, and my current guess is that, like "travel/boost thrust," "travel/boost attack" and "travel/boost release" modify a default "attack" property.
Unlike thrust, the default curve values aren't enumerated in the macros.
Which is to say: I'm giving up, because I could cut a video, then go frame by frame to extract the curves, but I really don't want to, and a self operated stopwatch is not accurate enough.
So i started again because that is generally the best idea for a new XPAC (though apparently the Terrans don't need the help) and did one of the terran story lines. But not the one where you normally get Terran Rep. And Terran's hate giving out missions. So i found a "workaround"* to grinding rep.
You see, you gain rep based on the number of trades not the quantity of trades you make. So you go get a ship and fill it full of energy cells. Then sell those cells, one at a time, to a terran station. +5 to +10 in a few minutes (though a lot of clicking)
Also fr the X4 people in here I was messing around with weapon groups and post patch have been noticing weapons on off groups cooling down when weapons are still firing. So you could be able to cycle a high weapon ship individually to get huge DPS out of things like Plasma.
But it also makes me super interested about how the AI handles it
Current favorite means of ship capturing civilian ships:
Have a Buffalo (56 crew, fast enough to catch anything) or two follow a target, they will get very close and stay there. Then tell them board at Very Strong/Very Strong and "Keep distance"
(Typical) Result: they spam out their boarding pods, because they were already in range, then fuck off to a safe distance. Then cancel their boarding order, and find them something else to do, like buy more marines.
30 minutes later, because it takes forever to breech the hull at 100%, a shiny new green ship will just appear somewhere in the galaxy, and you can keep it or sell it.
Also fr the X4 people in here I was messing around with weapon groups and post patch have been noticing weapons on off groups cooling down when weapons are still firing. So you could be able to cycle a high weapon ship individually to get huge DPS out of things like Plasma.
But it also makes me super interested about how the AI handles it
The number of weapons that share cooling is still the number of weapons that aren't cold, so you can see your inactive guns cooling rate slow when you fire your active group. But it's still nice to have Plasma on secondary and (for example) pulse lasers on primary, and as a human you can easily squeeze more DPS-on-target out of that.
What I know about AI: The AI uses the group(s) you assign them, like turret modes. If you leave them with a Plasma secondary, they will still seems to use it as often as possible, and without regard to target agility.
What I have not played with, because I keep forgetting it exists:
The command modifier that specifically forbids certain weapons, and whether this causes the AI to define custom groups, select the best groups, or simply won't fire its assigned group if it includes that weapon. The first two could make managing groups easier, currently I manually switch my Dragons secondary group to Plasma or No-plasma depending in the job.
You see, you gain rep based on the number of trades not the quantity of trades you make. So you go get a ship and fill it full of energy cells. Then sell those cells, one at a time, to a terran station. +5 to +10 in a few minutes (though a lot of clicking)
Interesting. Under 20, I did seem to earn a good portion of my rep via an S trader who I just left on "Distribute wares" and assigned to food.
But recently I've had a team of 5 S miners grinding the bountiful Ore fields in the FRF core system, and it doesn't seem to have done much for their skill or my rep (25), despite spamming my console with their sales.
But recently I've had a team of 5 S miners grinding the bountiful Ore fields in the FRF core system, and it doesn't seem to have done much for their skill or my rep (25), despite spamming my console with their sales.
It takes a lot longer to get a much higher rep. As an example it took about 150 trades to get from 10 to 14. 150 trades in an S miner cycling every 20 minutes is is 50 hours. So 5 miners would do that in "only" 10 hours. A fast "transport" like a travel engine rapier, set to cycle a small number of goods between close together stations on repeat will do probably 24 transactions/hour and as a result will provide 8 miner hours per hour of net rep
Current favorite means of ship capturing civilian ships:
One thing i will do sometimes is be in like... An Odyssey. And dock an M transport full of marines in it. Then when boarding something you undock the transport to get access to 20 more marines
Some interesting travel mode analysis of terran L/XL engines
Note that this is the travel and not all around engine but if you dug into the files and found the all around/travel mode attacks are similar it probably holds up
Have a Buffalo (56 crew, fast enough to catch anything) or two follow a target, they will get very close and stay there. Then tell them board at Very Strong/Very Strong and "Keep distance"
(Typical) Result: they spam out their boarding pods, because they were already in range, then fuck off to a safe distance. Then cancel their boarding order, and find them something else to do, like buy more marines.
30 minutes later, because it takes forever to breech the hull at 100%, a shiny new green ship will just appear somewhere in the galaxy, and you can keep it or sell it.
How does this not just cause your boarding pods to get shot down? When i try that i instantly get "boarding failed" as all the pods are shot down before they get close to the target
Have a Buffalo (56 crew, fast enough to catch anything) or two follow a target, they will get very close and stay there. Then tell them board at Very Strong/Very Strong and "Keep distance"
(Typical) Result: they spam out their boarding pods, because they were already in range, then fuck off to a safe distance. Then cancel their boarding order, and find them something else to do, like buy more marines.
30 minutes later, because it takes forever to breech the hull at 100%, a shiny new green ship will just appear somewhere in the galaxy, and you can keep it or sell it.
How does this not just cause your boarding pods to get shot down? When i try that i instantly get "boarding failed" as all the pods are shot down before they get close to the target
I've only tried it on Builders and Argon L Miners.
The key is that the target ship doesn't react quickly enough to escape the pods (or draw out their approach), it probably doesn't work on stuff like Wyverns or Terrans.
Don't give the boarding order until they've settled into a tight 'follow,' and the target has effectively stopped, like post-jump route corrections, mining, building a station, counting stars, etc. If your ships are right on top of them, the pods should only be in the air for a few seconds, and the enemy turrets never seem to re-prioritize the pods over the freighters in time to matter.
Possibly relevant / possibly superstition: I always stay IS until the pods are clear.
I tried it on a Wyvern and they blew the pods up as soon as they were launched
Will try it on something with fewer guns. I could use a builder anyway
Another thing that is interesting/funny.
Most places in the galaxy have like 0% to 200% solar efficiency(i am playing with a mod that gives the rest of the galaxy differing solar efficiency). 0% almost exclusively at the end of the places in Sol like the OORT cloud et al.
Except Mercury. Mercury has 680% efficiency. The galaxy can't trade there because the terrans have shut Sol off to the other factions. But a solar farm there makes 20.4k energy cells/hour before efficiency bonuses. There are like 3 Solar Farms, each with at least 6 arrays, there that just have 100% full energy stores forever, selling at 9 per unit, sell order of 980,000. making 122k energy/hour. Quite possibly enough to supply the entire galaxy
edit: Oh man if builders don't typically have a lot of marines that is an amazingly mean thing you can do.
Step 1 make a station in the ass end of nowhere. Build anything.
Step 2: hire a builder
Step 3: Oh look a builder is in the ass end of nowhere right next to my fleet of marines. How convenient
edit: Mercury Solar Farm shenanigans. Not counting my station that i am building there there are 3 solar farms in Mercury with 29 solar arrays between them. At minimum efficiency this produces 591,600 energy cells per hour. An entire Terran production cycle (which is to say one of each ship producing module and the requisite goods to supply the population) requires about 30,000. One of these stations could supply the entire Terran economy and then some.
edit:
Ship capture notes
1: Not all ships have defensive turrets. You can scan a ship without rep loss if you have a police license. This will let you know whether or not its risky to board. In general. Turrets= Slightly Risky. Turrets+OOS(or not in the immediate vincinity) = Hella risky
So long as you only capture the ship and don't damage it, no rep loss.
2: Don't go buy more marines. Have a backup ship or two to store and shuffle marines around. Ships that you own can transfer crew over infinite distance for zero time. (this did not used to be the case, but now they have super teleport). So it does not matter where that ship takes your super marines you will get the survivors back.
Can confirm this stopped the crashes! also I got very VERY lucky securing a 3070 where a local store had 2 pop up and I excused myself from work to buy it.
The drives also fixed another extremely specific but seemingly related bug where if you're using VLC AND Facebook Messenger video chat it'd trigger this error.
So i am in my brand new Osaka. Rigged to the gills(ok not quite but it was with what i had). And i have this terran mission to go kill some split trader. And i am -19 so really close to being declared war on and am kind of worried about what will happen if that does happen. Because the Osaka may accelerate fast but its still a destroyer and i don't have a fleet with me.
Anyway i get there and do the thing and am still at -19, juust barely. And as i turn to leave the Xenon invade, 3 K's, and I, and a bunch of other stuff.
I got back into Elite Dangerous and started to get a hankering for a space game with more empire building aspects. I know that the combat and actual activities will not be as fleshed out as Elite, but is the progression and building up your company/empire fun?
I got back into Elite Dangerous and started to get a hankering for a space game with more empire building aspects. I know that the combat and actual activities will not be as fleshed out as Elite, but is the progression and building up your company/empire fun?
IMO yes.
For DLC things vary. The newest DLC introduced the terrans who have a wildly simplified building method (it has advantages and disadvantages) which will mean that, if you choose to use that method, it will be far easier to acquire materials to do so and so the management aspect will be toned down. (Perfect for someone restarting a game rather than getting into the game). The game can be quite difficult making money honestly* but it’s definitely do-able and enjoyable.
I quite like combat as well. Once you get past the smallest ships it’s much more strategic than twitchy. Utilizing slides and boosts to get yourself into a good position.
*and the ways to make money dishonestly are myriad and hilarious. There is the good old “just take someone’s ship” method. There is the old “satellite arbitrage” method. There is the “military contracting” method and this doesn’t even get into the harder to find ones.
So X4 4.0 has a new economy and it’s pretty sweet.... if playing in the economy is your thing. One of the complaints from 3.0 was that the economy reacted too fast and as a result there wasn’t much of a space for profit. Well the economy in X4 now reacts on like a two hour delay, which is enough so that systematic inefficiencies will present themselves. And keep going because the triggers to cause them to produce can be hamstrung. Auto traders actually make money now. Not as much compared to miners. But money none the less. And they make things work! Which is super nice.
In general, profits/investment is miners->traders-> stations and medium -> large in terms of ship sizes. Before it was miners -> stations.
This inefficiencies occur mainly in the universal(pre new DLC) build method. This is because the universal build method has grebles and the Terran method is smooth. There are three Terran goods required to make anything (plus energy cells) and the net efficiency boost you can get from population is like... 20%. There are 25 non-agricultural goods (plus e-cells) and the efficiency bonus is like 40% per good with at least two production methods(sometimes 3) between yourself and an end product. You need hull parts to make ships. You need refined metals and graphene to make hull parts. You need methane and ore to make graphene and refined metals. You can get a 137% boost for hull parts, a 146% boost for graphene and a 143% boost for refined metals.
But to do that you have to move stuff through three different stations(or have a dedicated station) and have population to support the efficiencies. And the non-Terran economy has a lag in its handling of dealing with them.
So no matter what you do the terran economy will hum right along. While the rest of the universe needs help. As an example. If, after the first hour or so, you buy a ship at the argon dockyards there is a high probability that the station will be out of materials. (Especially if buying tier 2 equipment). The Terran dockyard are never out. No matter what you buy. Even if you arbitrage their goods to the argon*.
The biggest thing you can do in order to make trading work is getting a trade subscription.... or planting a satellite at every station in a region. A trade subscription will update prices and offers and this is necessary for ease of manual trading. One thing you can do with a vast network of satellites is zoom out and open the trade filter, click a good and instantly find the best offer and best sale. Not only will this let you know what kind of trade inefficiencies exist if you right click the offer you will go right to the buy/sell without having to search for the station. And your piloted trader will go right there.
Anywho, profits in order again. Miners are easy. Medium make the most per investment but are liable to explode from too much Khaak. Large miners that have a shield almost never will. Just set them on automine and forget them. Advanced techniques involve building a mining station. Not a refinery, a mining station. Just a dock and a container of the appropriate type. You have one (or more) miner mine(set up your station to only buy internally) and the other trade. This has a larger up front cost than a sector auto miner but offers a lot of flexibility. And also connects to build empires easier.
Trading is next. Autotraders are great but you need a 3 star pilot and that suuucks. Instead we are going to use “repeat orders” to do something similar if dumber. Find a cycle (the longer the better) between two places that seem to be decently close and have a good price differential. Set a buy order with a profit threshold at every station in the area you want to buy from and a sell order with a profit threshold at every buyer in the area. And then repeat for your full cycle. Your trader will go, in order, to each station, buy until they are full and then go to the next order which has them sell, in order. If their hold is full they will skip an order to buy because the order cannot be done. If their hold is empty they will skip an order to sell for the same reason. As a result a trader that buys refined metals, sells refined metals, buys hull parts, and sells hull parts is just a list of buy orders and then sell/buy orders on repeat. It’s dumb and will always go to the same station first. But so long as your buys and sells have a minimum margins you will only be stuck with goods if no one is buying.
Stations are next. Stations... well universal stations, Absolutely need efficiency bonuses from population to run well. Net profits about double at average prices (less so if input prices are very low and output very high) and this means you want to place your stations in a place where they can get a bunch of workers very fast. A refinery in argon prime will fill up with workers ASAP. They’re just a long way from all that ore... but wait a second we already built a mining station for that! Now by the time we are ready to make our big factories we will already have the infrastructure in place to move goods and won’t have to wait until workforce spools up.
(A note: teladianium uses more ore and less EC. At average prices this is very good but EC tends to be easier to buy cheap compared to ore. Though if you add solar panels to your station this will reduce worker costs because you won’t eat any on people working the solar panels... which while solar panels are hella profitable in paper... don’t scale well with workers because they have more input goods. )
*Oh, let’s talk about arbitrage. The main arbitrage that can occur is a result of equipment docks not selling inventory. Equipment docks are used far less often than shipyards but keep buying materials to fill their massive storage capacity. (They can often be closer to a super highway and so sometimes supercede the shipyard in AI trade algorithms too!). As a result they have full storage. The reason this matters is that equipment prices are a function of the what the equipment sell price would be based on the material conversion rate. And equipment removed is credited 100% and turned back into resources. So if you equip a ship at the equipment dock and unequip it at the wharf (wharfs are more heavily used than shipyards) you can net upwards of 50% profit. I think, but am not sure, you can build a ship, Up-equip it at an equipment dock, and then sell it for profit (which, if this is possible, has the added benefit of giving the AI a ship they can use). I think you can even move some types of goods across Terran/universal build type in this manner by changing your preferred build type after equipping at your own dock. This is... kind of arbitrage and kind of not. Equipment docks are often just sitting on resources that could be better used building things. Dont feel too bad about doing this is. Especially if you’re looking for some dang advanced electronics. Thinking about it. I wonder if you could buy a Terran ship and immediately sell it to the rest of the world at a profit?
I've been pining for Fractured Space (may-she-rest-in-peace) lately and looking for something to scratch that itch. I've never tried Dreadnought, but apparently it's still limping along. From Steam reviews, it seems like it has the same player base problems that killed Fractured Space. There are also some people doing 4v4 tournaments in modded Space Engineers, but that's even less amenable to jumping in and playing for at least two reasons.
I don't think there are a lot of viable options out there in this niche and I wish Fractured Space had been more popular or developed sustainably.
Trading is next. Autotraders are great but you need a 3 star pilot and that suuucks.
3 star pilot is actually really easy now with training manuals.
I never bother with training manuals. This is a management game not a micromanagement game. Someone other than me should be doing that HR shit.
That being said there is supposed to be pilot training at the HQ and I haven’t figured that out yet so maybe that helps
And starsector .95a released so... maybe wont see it for a while
They changed it so you just need 1 manual per star. Since you can get basic from any trader and the 1 star manuals are common enough to have a few if you remember to buy it any time you see it, autotrading is usually just a guild mission chain away.
Also, while I've never tried arbitrage, one of the first things I do when it's time to build traders is to find the ALI wharf hiding in Trinity Sanctum VII, which sells all S and M sized traders for the base factions (along with all scouts and their unique Nodan Fighter, which unlike other faction-unique ships you don't need higher rep to purchase), and like most equipment docks, it pretty much never gets used and is therefore always full with cheaper prices than the standard wharfs; I've definitely bought a few M traders through them for around the same price other stations were selling their S traders. Especially good if you're playing with the start that has you already with the HQ and boso ta in research, since that one starts with +10 with ALI and gets an additional discount and access to every base faction's S and M sized weapons too.
I've been pining for Fractured Space (may-she-rest-in-peace) lately and looking for something to scratch that itch. I've never tried Dreadnought, but apparently it's still limping along. From Steam reviews, it seems like it has the same player base problems that killed Fractured Space. There are also some people doing 4v4 tournaments in modded Space Engineers, but that's even less amenable to jumping in and playing for at least two reasons.
I don't think there are a lot of viable options out there in this niche and I wish Fractured Space had been more popular or developed sustainably.
Thanks for that. Downloading Dreadnought now. I really liked Fractured Space, maybe Dread will scratch that itch.
Hopefully fixes are on the way but at the moment player shipyards produce losses. That is. The sale value of ships produced via faction production orders is less than the sale value of the raw materials (at all but the minimum price for input goods and maximum price for ships).
Producing your own ships still has value as the resource price of ships is far below the sales price of ships from wharves. But... still.
Hopefully fixes are on the way but at the moment player shipyards produce losses. That is. The sale value of ships produced via faction production orders is less than the sale value of the raw materials (at all but the minimum price for input goods and maximum price for ships).
Producing your own ships still has value as the resource price of ships is far below the sales price of ships from wharves. But... still.
Miners -> Stations -> Ships(only for yourself)
I haven't had problems making money with wharfs set to 150% sell value
Hopefully fixes are on the way but at the moment player shipyards produce losses. That is. The sale value of ships produced via faction production orders is less than the sale value of the raw materials (at all but the minimum price for input goods and maximum price for ships).
Producing your own ships still has value as the resource price of ships is far below the sales price of ships from wharves. But... still.
Miners -> Stations -> Ships(only for yourself)
I haven't had problems making money with wharfs set to 150% sell value
You make money, but not marginally, which is to say you lose money, you just don't see it.
Lets say you have a factory that produces Antimatter Cells. This factory buys Hydrogen and Energy Cells and produces Antimatter cells. If you mine the hydrogen yourself the profit is 550,455 credits per hour. But unclick that and you find you're losing money at average prices.
If you had just had the hydrogen miner going and mining that much hydrogen and selling it at average prices to AI Antimatter Cell factories you would be making 556,800/hour. You lose money by turning hydrogen into Antimatter. And... at average prices for input and output this is fine. Hydrogen prices will fall as you add more miners. And antimatter prices will increase as more things requiring it are built and you can get efficiency gains by adding workforce (with 180 workers your profit goes to 178k at average prices!).
Well we can make the same analysis for any factory that uses Antimatter Cells. If i am thinking of adding an engine part production factory onto my antimatter cell production factory i should only do so if the engine part factory makes money at the current prices. Otherwise i should sell those antimatter cells to current engine part factories and let them take the loss.
You can do the same thing with engine parts to engines. You should only add the shipyard if turning engine parts into engines makes money. And it most decidedly does not unless engine part prices are minimum (and if engine part prices are minimum you should be selling your antimatter cells to AI engine part factories.
But with a ship production facility you need both 150% sales price and minimum resource prices in order to break even over just selling the base resources. You could sell the base resources instead, shipping them to wharves and make more money so long as those wharves were not 100% full of resources.
It make sense to produce your owns ships, because you only pay the resource price (minus all the blueprint costs...) but it doesn't make sense to sell the ships.
I've run into one of the things that usually make me bounce off X games for a couple of months.
Following along a quest chain, it's a lot of flying around, checking out stations, engaging Xenon patrols, etc., and then the next step in the chain is an attack by ...
A Yaki heavy fighter and a huge swarm of Xenon
... which basically shreds any ship I've got in a single pass, and without shields you can't boost, so now I need to find some way to not progress that quest at all until I go get a couple million credits for a decent combat ship. And just the difficulty cliff is so offputting.
I've run into one of the things that usually make me bounce off X games for a couple of months.
Following along a quest chain, it's a lot of flying around, checking out stations, engaging Xenon patrols, etc., and then the next step in the chain is an attack by ...
A Yaki heavy fighter and a huge swarm of Xenon
... which basically shreds any ship I've got in a single pass, and without shields you can't boost, so now I need to find some way to not progress that quest at all until I go get a couple million credits for a decent combat ship. And just the difficulty cliff is so offputting.
Sounds like an X game!
I really wish their mission jank was less, well, janky.
Posts
Thanks for the alternate to roguey; I was clinging to a few precious cached tabs that I could still change engines on, which were NOT any of the ships I own, let alone the models I've staged for engine testing (Rapiers and Asp Raiders).
Once I've worked out what the travel acceleration values should be, I'll record some samples from my test ships going 0-Max, plot those against the line, then try the boost -> travel if the deltas aren't sufficient to work out what's happening.
But if my theory is correct, attack == time (s) to max thrust, the TER drives should fit the straight line pretty closely, while the Split-C should noticeably lag, and I should be able to recreate the curve mathematically.
But first things first, I left them game up for an hour to see how stable things were, and they are not.
According to the log book they filled with red names, I think the ZYA is going to pop an Elephant and a Rattlesnake out of the FRF shipyard, and my idiot home guard is going to get slaughtered.
I did however hit the hilarious “bug” relating to the second Terran start
As an aside I love the fact that the science Terran faction are all African.
Want to play co-op games? Feel free to hit me up!
Man, I forgot how much of a PITA is to rebind controls.
On the other hand, WOO, TERRANS! I like that I've got a wingman for the first several (handful? dozen? haven't made it far enough ...) of missions.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
It's like the game was made primarily with KBAM in mind, just not my pawltry 3-button "M".
Exhibit A: "Fire secondary" (aka Missiles) is bound by default to a mouse side button you may not have, or L, a key you can't press while using WASD and a mouse.
Re: Speed tests. Ships appear to use a default acceleration curve, and my current guess is that, like "travel/boost thrust," "travel/boost attack" and "travel/boost release" modify a default "attack" property.
Unlike thrust, the default curve values aren't enumerated in the macros.
Which is to say: I'm giving up, because I could cut a video, then go frame by frame to extract the curves, but I really don't want to, and a self operated stopwatch is not accurate enough.
You see, you gain rep based on the number of trades not the quantity of trades you make. So you go get a ship and fill it full of energy cells. Then sell those cells, one at a time, to a terran station. +5 to +10 in a few minutes (though a lot of clicking)
*Exploit
But it also makes me super interested about how the AI handles it
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Have a Buffalo (56 crew, fast enough to catch anything) or two follow a target, they will get very close and stay there. Then tell them board at Very Strong/Very Strong and "Keep distance"
(Typical) Result: they spam out their boarding pods, because they were already in range, then fuck off to a safe distance. Then cancel their boarding order, and find them something else to do, like buy more marines.
30 minutes later, because it takes forever to breech the hull at 100%, a shiny new green ship will just appear somewhere in the galaxy, and you can keep it or sell it.
The number of weapons that share cooling is still the number of weapons that aren't cold, so you can see your inactive guns cooling rate slow when you fire your active group. But it's still nice to have Plasma on secondary and (for example) pulse lasers on primary, and as a human you can easily squeeze more DPS-on-target out of that.
What I know about AI: The AI uses the group(s) you assign them, like turret modes. If you leave them with a Plasma secondary, they will still seems to use it as often as possible, and without regard to target agility.
What I have not played with, because I keep forgetting it exists:
The command modifier that specifically forbids certain weapons, and whether this causes the AI to define custom groups, select the best groups, or simply won't fire its assigned group if it includes that weapon. The first two could make managing groups easier, currently I manually switch my Dragons secondary group to Plasma or No-plasma depending in the job.
Interesting. Under 20, I did seem to earn a good portion of my rep via an S trader who I just left on "Distribute wares" and assigned to food.
But recently I've had a team of 5 S miners grinding the bountiful Ore fields in the FRF core system, and it doesn't seem to have done much for their skill or my rep (25), despite spamming my console with their sales.
It takes a lot longer to get a much higher rep. As an example it took about 150 trades to get from 10 to 14. 150 trades in an S miner cycling every 20 minutes is is 50 hours. So 5 miners would do that in "only" 10 hours. A fast "transport" like a travel engine rapier, set to cycle a small number of goods between close together stations on repeat will do probably 24 transactions/hour and as a result will provide 8 miner hours per hour of net rep
One thing i will do sometimes is be in like... An Odyssey. And dock an M transport full of marines in it. Then when boarding something you undock the transport to get access to 20 more marines
Some interesting travel mode analysis of terran L/XL engines
https://www.reddit.com/r/X4Foundations/comments/macfx4/large_engine_travel_mode_comparison/
Note that this is the travel and not all around engine but if you dug into the files and found the all around/travel mode attacks are similar it probably holds up
How does this not just cause your boarding pods to get shot down? When i try that i instantly get "boarding failed" as all the pods are shot down before they get close to the target
@Goumindong
I've only tried it on Builders and Argon L Miners.
The key is that the target ship doesn't react quickly enough to escape the pods (or draw out their approach), it probably doesn't work on stuff like Wyverns or Terrans.
Don't give the boarding order until they've settled into a tight 'follow,' and the target has effectively stopped, like post-jump route corrections, mining, building a station, counting stars, etc. If your ships are right on top of them, the pods should only be in the air for a few seconds, and the enemy turrets never seem to re-prioritize the pods over the freighters in time to matter.
Possibly relevant / possibly superstition: I always stay IS until the pods are clear.
Will try it on something with fewer guns. I could use a builder anyway
Another thing that is interesting/funny.
Most places in the galaxy have like 0% to 200% solar efficiency(i am playing with a mod that gives the rest of the galaxy differing solar efficiency). 0% almost exclusively at the end of the places in Sol like the OORT cloud et al.
Except Mercury. Mercury has 680% efficiency. The galaxy can't trade there because the terrans have shut Sol off to the other factions. But a solar farm there makes 20.4k energy cells/hour before efficiency bonuses. There are like 3 Solar Farms, each with at least 6 arrays, there that just have 100% full energy stores forever, selling at 9 per unit, sell order of 980,000. making 122k energy/hour. Quite possibly enough to supply the entire galaxy
edit: Oh man if builders don't typically have a lot of marines that is an amazingly mean thing you can do.
Step 1 make a station in the ass end of nowhere. Build anything.
Step 2: hire a builder
Step 3: Oh look a builder is in the ass end of nowhere right next to my fleet of marines. How convenient
edit: Mercury Solar Farm shenanigans. Not counting my station that i am building there there are 3 solar farms in Mercury with 29 solar arrays between them. At minimum efficiency this produces 591,600 energy cells per hour. An entire Terran production cycle (which is to say one of each ship producing module and the requisite goods to supply the population) requires about 30,000. One of these stations could supply the entire Terran economy and then some.
edit:
Ship capture notes
1: Not all ships have defensive turrets. You can scan a ship without rep loss if you have a police license. This will let you know whether or not its risky to board. In general. Turrets= Slightly Risky. Turrets+OOS(or not in the immediate vincinity) = Hella risky
So long as you only capture the ship and don't damage it, no rep loss.
2: Don't go buy more marines. Have a backup ship or two to store and shuffle marines around. Ships that you own can transfer crew over infinite distance for zero time. (this did not used to be the case, but now they have super teleport). So it does not matter where that ship takes your super marines you will get the survivors back.
@Botznoy
Hotfix released
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/441223/announcing-geforce-hotfix-driver-46207-released-32/
Personally I think it is just a story to tell PC gamers on frightful nights.
quoted this to a friend (along with Axen's follow-up) and they opined that everything after "X4 has a random chance of crashing" is redundant.
Can confirm this stopped the crashes! also I got very VERY lucky securing a 3070 where a local store had 2 pop up and I excused myself from work to buy it.
The drives also fixed another extremely specific but seemingly related bug where if you're using VLC AND Facebook Messenger video chat it'd trigger this error.
Want to play co-op games? Feel free to hit me up!
Anyway i get there and do the thing and am still at -19, juust barely. And as i turn to leave the Xenon invade, 3 K's, and I, and a bunch of other stuff.
So now i am at +15...
I got back into Elite Dangerous and started to get a hankering for a space game with more empire building aspects. I know that the combat and actual activities will not be as fleshed out as Elite, but is the progression and building up your company/empire fun?
For DLC things vary. The newest DLC introduced the terrans who have a wildly simplified building method (it has advantages and disadvantages) which will mean that, if you choose to use that method, it will be far easier to acquire materials to do so and so the management aspect will be toned down. (Perfect for someone restarting a game rather than getting into the game). The game can be quite difficult making money honestly* but it’s definitely do-able and enjoyable.
I quite like combat as well. Once you get past the smallest ships it’s much more strategic than twitchy. Utilizing slides and boosts to get yourself into a good position.
*and the ways to make money dishonestly are myriad and hilarious. There is the good old “just take someone’s ship” method. There is the old “satellite arbitrage” method. There is the “military contracting” method and this doesn’t even get into the harder to find ones.
In general, profits/investment is miners->traders-> stations and medium -> large in terms of ship sizes. Before it was miners -> stations.
This inefficiencies occur mainly in the universal(pre new DLC) build method. This is because the universal build method has grebles and the Terran method is smooth. There are three Terran goods required to make anything (plus energy cells) and the net efficiency boost you can get from population is like... 20%. There are 25 non-agricultural goods (plus e-cells) and the efficiency bonus is like 40% per good with at least two production methods(sometimes 3) between yourself and an end product. You need hull parts to make ships. You need refined metals and graphene to make hull parts. You need methane and ore to make graphene and refined metals. You can get a 137% boost for hull parts, a 146% boost for graphene and a 143% boost for refined metals.
But to do that you have to move stuff through three different stations(or have a dedicated station) and have population to support the efficiencies. And the non-Terran economy has a lag in its handling of dealing with them.
So no matter what you do the terran economy will hum right along. While the rest of the universe needs help. As an example. If, after the first hour or so, you buy a ship at the argon dockyards there is a high probability that the station will be out of materials. (Especially if buying tier 2 equipment). The Terran dockyard are never out. No matter what you buy. Even if you arbitrage their goods to the argon*.
The biggest thing you can do in order to make trading work is getting a trade subscription.... or planting a satellite at every station in a region. A trade subscription will update prices and offers and this is necessary for ease of manual trading. One thing you can do with a vast network of satellites is zoom out and open the trade filter, click a good and instantly find the best offer and best sale. Not only will this let you know what kind of trade inefficiencies exist if you right click the offer you will go right to the buy/sell without having to search for the station. And your piloted trader will go right there.
Anywho, profits in order again. Miners are easy. Medium make the most per investment but are liable to explode from too much Khaak. Large miners that have a shield almost never will. Just set them on automine and forget them. Advanced techniques involve building a mining station. Not a refinery, a mining station. Just a dock and a container of the appropriate type. You have one (or more) miner mine(set up your station to only buy internally) and the other trade. This has a larger up front cost than a sector auto miner but offers a lot of flexibility. And also connects to build empires easier.
Trading is next. Autotraders are great but you need a 3 star pilot and that suuucks. Instead we are going to use “repeat orders” to do something similar if dumber. Find a cycle (the longer the better) between two places that seem to be decently close and have a good price differential. Set a buy order with a profit threshold at every station in the area you want to buy from and a sell order with a profit threshold at every buyer in the area. And then repeat for your full cycle. Your trader will go, in order, to each station, buy until they are full and then go to the next order which has them sell, in order. If their hold is full they will skip an order to buy because the order cannot be done. If their hold is empty they will skip an order to sell for the same reason. As a result a trader that buys refined metals, sells refined metals, buys hull parts, and sells hull parts is just a list of buy orders and then sell/buy orders on repeat. It’s dumb and will always go to the same station first. But so long as your buys and sells have a minimum margins you will only be stuck with goods if no one is buying.
Stations are next. Stations... well universal stations, Absolutely need efficiency bonuses from population to run well. Net profits about double at average prices (less so if input prices are very low and output very high) and this means you want to place your stations in a place where they can get a bunch of workers very fast. A refinery in argon prime will fill up with workers ASAP. They’re just a long way from all that ore... but wait a second we already built a mining station for that! Now by the time we are ready to make our big factories we will already have the infrastructure in place to move goods and won’t have to wait until workforce spools up.
(A note: teladianium uses more ore and less EC. At average prices this is very good but EC tends to be easier to buy cheap compared to ore. Though if you add solar panels to your station this will reduce worker costs because you won’t eat any on people working the solar panels... which while solar panels are hella profitable in paper... don’t scale well with workers because they have more input goods. )
*Oh, let’s talk about arbitrage. The main arbitrage that can occur is a result of equipment docks not selling inventory. Equipment docks are used far less often than shipyards but keep buying materials to fill their massive storage capacity. (They can often be closer to a super highway and so sometimes supercede the shipyard in AI trade algorithms too!). As a result they have full storage. The reason this matters is that equipment prices are a function of the what the equipment sell price would be based on the material conversion rate. And equipment removed is credited 100% and turned back into resources. So if you equip a ship at the equipment dock and unequip it at the wharf (wharfs are more heavily used than shipyards) you can net upwards of 50% profit. I think, but am not sure, you can build a ship, Up-equip it at an equipment dock, and then sell it for profit (which, if this is possible, has the added benefit of giving the AI a ship they can use). I think you can even move some types of goods across Terran/universal build type in this manner by changing your preferred build type after equipping at your own dock. This is... kind of arbitrage and kind of not. Equipment docks are often just sitting on resources that could be better used building things. Dont feel too bad about doing this is. Especially if you’re looking for some dang advanced electronics. Thinking about it. I wonder if you could buy a Terran ship and immediately sell it to the rest of the world at a profit?
I never bother with training manuals. This is a management game not a micromanagement game. Someone other than me should be doing that HR shit.
That being said there is supposed to be pilot training at the HQ and I haven’t figured that out yet so maybe that helps
And starsector .95a released so... maybe wont see it for a while
I don't think there are a lot of viable options out there in this niche and I wish Fractured Space had been more popular or developed sustainably.
They changed it so you just need 1 manual per star. Since you can get basic from any trader and the 1 star manuals are common enough to have a few if you remember to buy it any time you see it, autotrading is usually just a guild mission chain away.
Also, while I've never tried arbitrage, one of the first things I do when it's time to build traders is to find the ALI wharf hiding in Trinity Sanctum VII, which sells all S and M sized traders for the base factions (along with all scouts and their unique Nodan Fighter, which unlike other faction-unique ships you don't need higher rep to purchase), and like most equipment docks, it pretty much never gets used and is therefore always full with cheaper prices than the standard wharfs; I've definitely bought a few M traders through them for around the same price other stations were selling their S traders. Especially good if you're playing with the start that has you already with the HQ and boso ta in research, since that one starts with +10 with ALI and gets an additional discount and access to every base faction's S and M sized weapons too.
Thanks for that. Downloading Dreadnought now. I really liked Fractured Space, maybe Dread will scratch that itch.
Edit: Played a few rounds. Pretty cool.
Producing your own ships still has value as the resource price of ships is far below the sales price of ships from wharves. But... still.
Miners -> Stations -> Ships(only for yourself)
I haven't had problems making money with wharfs set to 150% sell value
You make money, but not marginally, which is to say you lose money, you just don't see it.
Lets say you have a factory that produces Antimatter Cells. This factory buys Hydrogen and Energy Cells and produces Antimatter cells. If you mine the hydrogen yourself the profit is 550,455 credits per hour. But unclick that and you find you're losing money at average prices.
If you had just had the hydrogen miner going and mining that much hydrogen and selling it at average prices to AI Antimatter Cell factories you would be making 556,800/hour. You lose money by turning hydrogen into Antimatter. And... at average prices for input and output this is fine. Hydrogen prices will fall as you add more miners. And antimatter prices will increase as more things requiring it are built and you can get efficiency gains by adding workforce (with 180 workers your profit goes to 178k at average prices!).
Well we can make the same analysis for any factory that uses Antimatter Cells. If i am thinking of adding an engine part production factory onto my antimatter cell production factory i should only do so if the engine part factory makes money at the current prices. Otherwise i should sell those antimatter cells to current engine part factories and let them take the loss.
You can do the same thing with engine parts to engines. You should only add the shipyard if turning engine parts into engines makes money. And it most decidedly does not unless engine part prices are minimum (and if engine part prices are minimum you should be selling your antimatter cells to AI engine part factories.
But with a ship production facility you need both 150% sales price and minimum resource prices in order to break even over just selling the base resources. You could sell the base resources instead, shipping them to wharves and make more money so long as those wharves were not 100% full of resources.
It make sense to produce your owns ships, because you only pay the resource price (minus all the blueprint costs...) but it doesn't make sense to sell the ships.
Made by a team of fans and getting released by Egosoft in May, it's called X3: Farnham's Legacy
Following along a quest chain, it's a lot of flying around, checking out stations, engaging Xenon patrols, etc., and then the next step in the chain is an attack by ...
... which basically shreds any ship I've got in a single pass, and without shields you can't boost, so now I need to find some way to not progress that quest at all until I go get a couple million credits for a decent combat ship. And just the difficulty cliff is so offputting.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Sounds like an X game!
I really wish their mission jank was less, well, janky.