Mount and blade in space

X3: Reunion/Terran Conflict/Albion Prelude appreciation thread

Who 200+ hours here?

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So where do I start with these games?

Same question here. Never heard of them but the description of Mount and Blade in space sounds wicked.

>mount and blade in space
But that's Starsector

X3: Albion Prelude. You can start with Reunion but the story isn't really that good desu. Mods improve the game by a huge deal. Learning curve is Dwarf Fortress-tier but its all worth it if space games are your thing.


The usually agreed upon best mods for this game are

>XRM
>Xtended
>Litcube's Universe

Who's your shipfu?

Is shit

Woah, don't tell them to start playing for the first time with mods, especially XRM. Its a nice mod but it makes the game a lot harder since it makes everything more expensive and adds in a lot more enemy spawns.

Start with Terran Conflict instead. Albion Prelude is a better game, but has a punishing "war" area that fucking murders new players and their ambitions.

Once you've gotten some experience, you can move over to AP, and from there to the other versions. Litcube's Universe is the most ambitious of the mods, shifting the game from space trucking and privateering to a slow grind building a fucking war machine from scratch.

>tfw comfy space space miner

Just recommend one complete game. It's retarded to play all of them if one version is best and ultimate. So which one is the best and most recent?

X3 is probably the most robust single player space sim available right now. Especially with mods.

Funny thing is the mods typically don't even add new features, they just automate bits of the game because it's so fuckhuge that you'll go 200/300 hours not knowing x feature even existed.

Albion Prelude

Play Terran Conflict first, or just play Albion Prelude with this mod that adds the Terran conflict story into AP so you can have both in one version.

forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=324236

Albion Prelude

The Nova or the Venti
Argon for life

Most recent is X:Rebirth; neither best, nor ultimate.

The game expects a certain degree of competence in its later installments, which means Terran Conflict is the best choice for new players with its more peaceful and structured design, which leads into the stand alone expansion Albion Prelude, which all the modding and scripting is handled for at this point.

You would not tell an new RTS fan to skip the original Starcraft campaigns, so why would you tell a new X3 player to skip the fundamental basis of the sandbox space sim with TC?

Bumping.

I have fond memories of X2. I played Terran Conflict for about 30 hours recently, got me some ships and independent traders that make money for me jumping around the universe selling stuff and then bought a fighter of some sort...

Then I got bored.

Am I not good enough for spacejewing?

Whay about X2? Is the one that I bought at sales...

>start as fighter pilot mercenary
>go up against pirates and rogue ai
>sometimes they eject or their ship becomes disabled
>build up a small squadron of 4 repurposed/salvaged light fighters
>buy a military freighter (Argon Magnetar)
>freighter has 4 fighter bays
>become comfy space trucker packing enough heat to beat off minor pirate squadrons

worse graphics and less ship variety, otherwise quite similar

So can you.. like.. start your own empire, take territory, war other factions, have large battles, etc like in mount and blade?

I love mount & blade and I love sci fi/space, but space sims or a mount & blade in space doesn't really excite me for some reason. (unless I can walk out of my space ship, board their ship with a party and shoot people in the face. )

But then again I've never really played a space sim before..

>try litcube's universe
>make living as salvager
>be attracted to sectors where massive fleet actions take place
>make millions from selling salvaged torpedoes, missiles and ejected freight
>start buying and leaving navigation satellites in sectors which send me alerts if they detect derelicts and abandoned ships
>amass a respectable fleet of 10+ ragtag freighters from almost all factions
>Assign them as universal traders, meaning they ply the galaxy for wares to buy low and sell high
>passive income trickles in
>now getting ready for the next step of my space jew business, mobile mining
>buy a Terran Tepukei TL, basically a massive capital freighter with a cavernous hold and hangar bays capable of storing 10 miners
>choose the Split's Chimera miner because they can mount 8 mining lasers on their loadout
>currently in the process of outfittting said miners with the lasers (rare and expensive) and the appropriate mining software

Fuck i love LU

>Not becoming Star Fox

>So can you.. like.. start your own empire, take territory, war other factions, have large battles, etc like in mount and blade?

Yes

>I love mount & blade and I love sci fi/space, but space sims or a mount & blade in space doesn't really excite me for some reason. (unless I can walk out of my space ship, board their ship with a party and shoot people in the face. )

You can
>space walk
>get marines to board other peoples ships

You can't
>shoot people in the face

>Argon

My nigga

Is it really M&B in space? How so?

Sounds good if accurate.

Egosoft: Making the same thing for two decades and still fucking up every attempt.

I loved the shit out of X3 & X2, and I've played every game in the series, and I still look forward to X4.

Am I a masochist?

By buying a HOTAS. If you don't do that, don't bother.

Aren't all space sim fans? We have to take whatever we can get.

See
Egosoft is really good at what they do.
But what they do isn't make good games.

No X game will ever have these features working better than a comatose monkey could program:
> AI
> Working missions
> Scalability of performance and interface
> Content and balance that doesn't require 2-5 years of modding to meet the launch price

Vanilla M&B is better in all of these aspects than the most modded install of the best X game.

The only people who did a better job of fucking up great concepts in execution was Derek Smart.

To their credit, their most recent fuckup was at least different this time, by fucking up trying to make the game more accessible. Not only did it backfire in cutting a shitload of features that made the series stand out, but they also managed to make it LESS accessible.

>3000 hours in the x series
>1000 hours in ED

Fucking space man, really flares up my autism

I've heard people say Elite: Dangerous is better. How true is that statement?

Thank you Cadius for making real M3B bombers a thing. Not that M8 bullshit.

ED has far better sound design and scale.
It's horrifically autistic though.

It's like comparing two dog turds from two different dogs. But you've stopped at a dog-turd connoisseur convention to ask.

As one of said turd connoisseurs, X will never have multiplayer, but in terms of modability and overall flexibility and average single-player potential experiences X is arguably better.

>ships have max speeds
>in space

I want a purely singleplayer experience to get comfy in space with, possibly chilling with a VR set in the future, which game do I buy?

X3/Rebirth
Elite: Dangerous
Evochron Mercenary
Star Citizen

ED has proper VR support and is a "finished" game. You will either get bored very quickly or lose your soul to it though, there is no real middle ground
Star citizen never
rebirth fuken sucks.
Evochron doesn't support VR last i checked but it does have Track IR

Elite probably or Evochron. I don't know how X3 works with VR and Scam citizen is never going to see the light of day.

Played this but lost all interest in the series after Rebirth. Have they patched the game worthwhile, and/or talked about a true X4?

The whole series is built around limitations of the original 1999 game.

Space is split into "sectors" ( AKA memory limitations when you don't know how to program seamless open world games ) connected by "gates" ( AKA loading screens ). Of course, many many games later, these gates and clustered sectors still fuck up all AI and player traffic because chokepoints + shittyAI = fun. Good fucking luck when you actually start to get a fleet and attempt coordinated military action. Even the AI can't without blowing up their own ships.

So of course it's got stupid shit like speed limits! But the Devs are simultaneously deadly-autistic about "realism" ... like one ding in your ship costing more to repair than buying a new one but you can still sit outside and "weld" your ship back to full health if you're willing to tape down a key and walk away for a few hours because time compression is a feature for a reason but not when you're doing repairs because fuck you.

Series fans will defend some weird design decisions to death just because they've always been there. Doesn't help they royally screwed the time they finally tried to move away to less retarded ideas.

What makes Rebirth so bad?

The fact that nothing makes it good.

The lack of Starpoint Gemini in this thread is fucking outrageous.

What did the X series do right and what did it do wrong?

...

Starpoint Gemini isn't that great. There's nothing I detest more than arbitrary gating of my progression behind "ranks" in singleplayer games. If I manage to capture a ship, I should be able to pilot it provided I can fund it. Not be prevented from piloting it because I am three exp away from the next "rank". It's what caused me to drop the game because I got too fucking tired of boarding and stashing ships away or selling them instead of using them.

>no multicore support
>legacy code from previous X's
>various bugged/inefficient scripts
>bad sound/video codec implementation
>unused (but loaded into memory) game content data e.g. videos, sound files, mission texts
>no 64-bit support meaning 4Gb RAM limit
>no support for latest instruction sets e.g. hardware encryption, matrix dot product, vector things, SSExxx

Are the graphics here modded?
Is this Albion Prelude?
Am I too stupid to find the third person view in Terran Conflict?
Where did the cockpits go that I was used to in X2?

Having the ships set a speed limit isn't totally retarded.
Having one of the fuck massive carriers got 20000 m/s and enter the gravity well of a planet would rip the thing to shreds.

>Be 12 years old
>Play the original X
> holy fucking shit
> like
> holy shit
>years later
>remember the fun and comfyness and sense of awe
>buy X3
>nothing that made me love the original game present in this one


Is it me that has changed or is it the game?

until star citizen comes out in 2027, at least

Because we'll just abandon the genre, right?

It's a failed port.

X2 > Everything else

>picking an X game over Evochron
fucking babies

modded exhaust trails
XRM mod
3rd person view
cockpits are still there

>Picking the significantly more in depth and complex game
>Babies
Sure thing m8

X4 may be the one, guys.
We'll see some gameplay trailers during Gamescom apparently:
EGOSOFT
July 25 at 6:36pm ยท
@EGOSOFT will showcase new developments for #X4Game and #XRVR at #Gamescom2017 and at our HQ. Write to [email protected] to meet us!

Also here's their statement for X4:
There is, however, also another project that we are working on and which is equally exciting to us: X4. It is still too early to talk about many details of this, and it doesn't even have a full name yet, but we are making good progress and I wanted to share a few words with you about what we have been doing in the last couple of years.

When we worked on X Rebirth we needed to make a lot of simplifications. We removed some features in order to be able to concentrate on others. But when X Rebirth was released, many fans expected it to be an "X4"; a game with most of the key features of the X3 games and then some. Since then, we have worked hard to make X Rebirth a better game, incorporating player feedback, continuing to develop the engine it is based on, and releasing many updates and expansions. However we also realise that there are still many unfulfilled wishes, some of which would require extensive changes that couldn't be implemented in the existing game. Many of these are things we would also like to see in a space game and these, along with the foundations laid by all the work and feedback that went into X Rebirth, have been the basis for the big project that we have been working on for the last few years: a real X4.

While I cannot say much about its features yet, what I can tell you about it so far is that it will allow you to fly many different ships, it will give you an all-new interface to manage large fleets, and it will give you full freedom when building stations from individual modules.

oh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

...

what other project is he talking about?

... X4.
>Also here's their statement for X4:
>There is, however, also another project that we are working on and which is equally exciting to us: X4.

shitty VR version for X Rebirth that no one wanted

Space-newbie here
Is it good to play these in chronological order? Also I heard the Home of Light did a lot of justice to the previously fucked Rebirth.

I mean the not X4 one

...

No, story is entirely optional for these games. Sure, there's a lot of lore behind the scenes, but you may as well read it online rather than play the older games.

But if you never played an X series game before, you may be overwhelmed at first and just say fuck it. Don't. The game really shines once you understand how basic stuff works.

>tfw jumping with the UFJD in a comfy deserted sector with your mining fleet
>radio silence, only you, asteroids and the stars
>Order your fleet around, watch the space ballet for a while, docking and launching
>see a metal reflection in the far distance
>curiously approach while your mining fleet keeps diggin'
>it's the motherfucking Aran

Would there be a right way of making it so you can land and explore ships and stations? As in not what Rebirth did? How would you do it?

>steal the Aran
>fill it with 30 Argon M7 Heavy Centaurs
>dock the Valhalla with 60 M3+ Fenrirs

shame about the 10/ms speed though

I played about 100 hours of Terran Conflict and really enjoyed it, how is Albion Prelude different?

Question is: Does it matter in the X series?
I think the most viable option would be to make specific rooms, such as an office, bedroom, etc. where you can walk freely and interact with your environment (fleet management, business management, etc. while on your own headquarters, for instance).

It's more like a mobile refueling/rearming dock than a spaceship, yeah.
but modding it makes it much more enjoyable

Nothing much, there's just a conflict between Argons/Terrans in which you can participate.
Few things about the UI i think too.

But if you really want X3.5, do yourself a favor and play Litcube's Universe.

What scripts do you guys run?

I mostly play Litcube's with my own modifications added to the game (X3 is fairly easy to mod).
I run some mods along, like Cockpits, UFJD random encounters, etc.

Will there be another giant mod like Litcube for X3 in the future?

This. mount and blade in space sounds neat

For X3?
Probably not, depending on X4's quality.
There are already many overhauls, Litcube's was the most extensive one, gameplay wise.

You start in a lone ship and the entire universe is open to you. You can start delivering cargo for a profit, hunt pirates, salvage ships (to sell or to keep, expanding your fleet), be a taxi, build stations... But that's just the beginning, once money starts flowing in, you start automating a lot of things, like getting a trading fleet, building a self sustaining station complex that'll produce whatever the fuck you want, ranging from space weed to atomic warheads. Then you get a huge ass fleet with carriers, destroyers, hundreds of fighters and lag the game to death with huge ass battles.

The series' main motto is Fight. Trade. Build. Think. for a reason.

What's the easiest way to start out then while I learn the game?

I love the split but all their capital ships just look the same

Depends on your playstyle, really.
I'd start with the easy start (one M4 ship and a TS), get used to the trading system going from station to station selling cargo with the TS (short for transport ship). Then when you got a feel of the commands and remote control, jump in the M4 and go hunt some pirates in relatively safe sectors.

That's true for pretty much all the races though.
Terran ships > Other ships

The starts have difficulties assigned to them. The difficulty is determined by how many factions will kill you on sight, how nice your starting ship(s) will be and its armament and cargo.

>When we worked on X Rebirth we needed to make a lot of simplifications. We removed some features in order to be able to concentrate on others. But when X Rebirth was released, many fans expected it to be an "X4"; a game with most of the key features of the X3 games and then some.
Fuck this euphemistic bullshit. Egosoft tried to turn X into a console game, got refused by MS because what they made was too shit, then sold the remains of that fuckup to their original fanbase.

No fucking shit the fans expected something other than a failed console game; FUCK this ubiquitous marketese twisting of words to make it sound like it's the costumer's expectations that are out of whack with what ought to be delivered.

Fuck off, mustard.

He's right about the failed attempt to touch the console market.
X series games do not belong on consoles. It's like trying to port Supreme Commander on PS4: absolutely retarded and a sure way to alienate your fans.

Fuck off babby.

And it's even worse than that. They went for the 360, pretty much right as that generation was set to be replaced.
On top of that, they went silent with the whole thing, knowing FULL WELL what kind of reaction they'd get.
It's not even about muh PC Master Race; if X could be made to work on consoles, why the hell not. Elite Dangerous manages it well enough.
But X became more than just a space fighter sim, it eventually became a full-on economy sim that tracked production and movement of goods and price fluctuations across hundreds of sectors in real time.
That is just far out of the scope of what consoles are made for, and cutting it out to try and squeeze X onto one is cutting out what "fans expect" from X.
And Egosoft knew that, which is why they never said or admitted that's what they were doing. It's that fundamental dishonesty that still gets me raging over XR.

Why the fuck are repairs so expensive?

>EVA and hit it with Repair Lasers
Problem solved

cool let me just spacewalk outside my kilometer long M2 Tyr at 50% hull capacity

If you're strapped for cash and have an M2, you deserve to keep your wounds

kek. TC was sitting in my steam library for a year before I finally tried it after moving on from Mount and Blade.

>Mount and Blade in space

Can I hoard space butter in this game?

Yes. You can build a monopoly around space butter. You can own ALL the space butter, and destroy your space butter rivals until everybody needs to come to you for their space butter needs. Until then, you can be a space trucker specialized in space butter.

Ignore this faggot mouse + keyboard is far superior.

What's the equivalent of space butter? Protein paste?

Elite is more about being a lone pilot doing your own little thing making little to no impact in the galaxy.

X is about starting off there, but eventually building your own massive station complexes, made up of dozens of stations that complete a product chain, from mining ore from asteroids, creating energy from solar stations, creating components in intermediate stations, then creating the end product, such as shield generators. All these stations are connected by tubes, and once you get a good complex going you can just sit back, relax, and watch the credits roll in without lifting a finger. Sounds a bit over powered, but believe me it takes a lot of work to get there, so its definitely worth it. Once you get bored of trading you can start building up your war fleet, which you can give commands via your own ship (you can pilot pretty much every ship in the game), kinda like a rudimentary RTS. Or you could just get a few freighters and tell them to follow you, mine asteroids to sell ore, or find salvage from battles, or just buy low sell high.

There is way more depth to X, when compared to Elite, but it's a fair bit uglier, a lot buggier, and the physical scale is a lot more contained (though that is a positive in my book, as getting from point A to point B in Elite is a fucking chore).

It comes down to personal taste desu, I prefer the autism of X, but Elite Dangerous does the privateer/freelancer type gameplay better -
unless you mod the shit out of X, which you can't do with Elite cus always online garbo.

>M&B in space

So X4 is never coming out?

Fuck, don't remind me of that always online bullshit.
Just imagine X3's gameplay on Elite's engine. I'd never leave my house again.

>always online
>despite this combat logging and solo play are still things

Frontier pls.
When are they going to introduce a ship killiery than the corvette as well? I want a fucking frigate

How loudly can we beg for an X4 that won't fuck things up and add ship cockpits as well?