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X4: Foundations

Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2018 8:22 am
by Rusty
On a whim, I bought this late Saturday night (actually early Sunday morning) as, although I hated rebirth, I really enjoyed the original game. It was such a massive scope with you owning massive factories/spaceports and a fleet of ships.

So starting up and first impressions are it reminds me so much of no mans sky (the good bits) crossed with Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen.
It has bugs but EgoSoft tend to be quite good in eventually nailing them down.

Playing it is pretty hard. There must be more keys than Elite. I struggled to get my HOTAS working so stuck with keyboard and mouse and it actually worked out quite well.

I'm still only a few hours in and have had fun just exploring stuff. Finding new sectors, tackling a few criminals, trying to complete missions, trying to spacewalk (god that inertia!), buying new ships and trying to fight the god awful UI.

Simple things are not simple as they should be. It might all suddnly click but trying to find things out is a task. Thank god for youtube and reddit.

I've left the game running whikst I'm at work to see how an AI handles autotrading. I have a feeling they're going to cost me money as I haven't setup things like satellites to monitor prices.

I was thinking about trying out trading mysefl but I can't find anything obvious that would make money. The stations that specialise in certain items don't seem to sell them cheap. They're all over the average price. Again, I wonder if the lack of satelittes is killing it. It seems that the map has a fairly easy UI to see prices all around but nothing is a real profit maker. Maybe I need to buy larger traders with thousands of tons spare to see the profits?

I've yet to make my first million.

Re: X4: Foundations

Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2018 10:21 am
by DjchunKfunK
I briefly watched a stream of this over the weekend and boy does the UI look horrendous. The scope does sound amazing and I've seen people on Steam liken it to Elite Dangerous but with much more to actually do. I do love a good space game but the price and time investment necessary is putting me off right now.

Re: X4: Foundations

Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2018 8:14 pm
by Rusty
Something just clicked after work today. I finally got my HOTAS working and that made it much nicer to control. I've finally got an auto miner working and that's pulling in a small but consistent wage for me :)

Re: X4: Foundations

Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2018 10:58 pm
by Lee
I'm going to leave it for a while. I'm a massive fan of the X series till Rebirth and hope they can fix the UI as it is indeed one of the biggest grips people have with it so far.

Re: X4: Foundations

Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2018 12:58 pm
by Rusty
I also worked out why the steering was all wonky and annoying, I'd turned off flight assist by mistake (Ctrl-Space) when I was probably aiming for mouse steering (Shift-Space). And that HOTAS control makes it so much better.

Decided to build 2 more miners to go to work. I've left my PC running whilst I'm work to see what they can do. I'm hoping for either a small fortune so I can get a nicer ship for myself or else a crash to desktop. It'll be 50/50 chane for either (i jest as I've not had one crash yet)

I've also started to build my own space station so let's see how that pans out.

Re: X4: Foundations

Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2019 5:59 pm
by Rusty
Still playing this bad boy. Racked up a few hours so far (about 96! some of which was AFK).

I wrote a little python script to help keep track of my miners (there's nothing in game to do this!).

I have enough moeny to buy pretty much any ship in the game. I switch from a small 6 gun fighter to a 4 gun medium corvette. I spend most of my time investigating radar anomilies or fly to Xenon space (one of the baddies) and kill me a few metal heads.

I have about 20 miners going about their busy making me money allowing me to get on with the fun stuff.

I haven't bothered too much with the station building but that'll be a whole new side to the game.

Apparently the newest patch could be introducing faction wars so the current slightly quiet sectors may be torn up by everyone trying to take each other's sectors.

Re: X4: Foundations

Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2019 8:37 pm
by Solitaire
I stumbled across this, having no idea what it was - looks epic. I think I'll have to buy this :)

Re: X4: Foundations

Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2019 9:23 pm
by Rusty
Shout if you do and then need any pointers.Can be a bit obtuse to start up with

Re: X4: Foundations

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2019 5:19 pm
by Solitaire
A bit, indeed . . . I'm beginning to regret this purchase, honestly. There's way too many issues. I know, I know - the devs are great at patching/etc. Now that I've investigated the game/franchise *after* what is for me an unusually impulsive buy, it looks like I'll be waiting a year for it to be fun to play :(

Re: X4: Foundations

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2019 5:48 pm
by Snowy
They have form on that front Todd - X3 was a dog's breakfast (I bought that one on impulse) and never built up the enthusiasm to go back, even when I heard it was much better a year or two downstream.

Elite Dangerous is the only space game for me, I just love it to bits. The old "there is no content" argument just doesn't hold up these days either, the devs have laboured to add in so much.

Re: X4: Foundations

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2019 6:14 pm
by Sly Boots
I bought X2 (I think) way back when it was on budget. I think I sat there staring at the screen in confusion for about five minutes, tentatively trying a few buttons to no great effect, before turning it off and uninstalling.

And that's my entire history with the X franchise :lol:

Re: X4: Foundations

Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2019 4:57 pm
by Rusty
Well, I'm still here if you have questions (not saying I'll know them all though)