X3: The reunion. Anybody play it?

[TevashSzat]

I played quite alot as well too before.

Some notes:

Universal Traders are the way to go. Once you level them up high, they basically become gold farmers. Alternatively, manually remote trading can do wonders too once you've found a few trade routes you like. It does get tedious though, but thats what I do while waiting for something in SETA

Once you get a half decent cash reserve, i think like 100 million or so, build a huge complex in the argon territory for space fuel/ space weed(I like Presidents End since there isn't much clutter) There is even silicon asteroids there so you can make your facility fully self functional. If you don't do so and just buy crystals, its still doable, but I find it a bit of a hassle to manually guide a ship everywhere to stock up on crystals. Enough pirate bases are nearby so that they're bought as soon as I produce them and provide a steady source of income just in case my UTs become extremely stupid and all end up getting killed.

The M7 ship you get from the bonus pack is HORRENDOUSLY overpowered. When outifitted with proper Pandora speed upgrades/tunings, you can have it have the speed/manuverability of a fighter, but with the firepower of a destroyer. You can easily clear out Xenon sectors with it. Plus, PSGs are mountable on it to kill the pesky swarming fighters around you.

Before I get the M7, I love the Split Mamba Raider. For a M3(I think thats right), it has great speed/manuverability/firepower at the cost of really poor shields (1 25MJ) That shouldn't matter since with some half decent strafing and the awesome firepower on it, you can take down those huge hauling cargo ships or M6s with escorts fine (Forgot their designation). Just remember to throw on one of those mass things that you have to buy ammo for on your turret for missle defence.

As Whacker says above, the game has a horrendously large learning curve simply because there are so much stuff to do. I played it for something like 200 hours and I still couldn't figure out how to get CAGs to work. If you keep going at it, after a few hours and you get some money or get a xenon invasion mission or two, the game becomes insanely addicting

[aimlesswanderer]

Yes, but have many of the same criticisms as above. The series is definitely not for everyone, but if you can muddle through and figure out what is going on it can become addictive. Having your own extensive industrial and trade empire is great, seeing all your ships and factories going about their business, and the credits rolling in.

Am now playing the next in the series, X3 Terran Conflict, and while there are some improvements the core of the game is very similar to X3:R. If you like X3R you will probably like X3 TC.

[Zenicetus]

There are so few combat/economy/exploration space sims out there now, it's hard not to recommend it, at that price. I guess everyone should try it, but it didn't grab me. I think I've posted before on this one, but to recap:

On the plus side, it's basically a big open-ended sandbox game, and I like those. It's an interesting take on how to combine some economic strategy and expansion with cockpit-level space battles. The external ship graphics are pretty, and I like some of the ship designs (especially the larger ships).

But it had a lot of negatives for me. The enemy pilot AI is very primitive. Space battles devolve into simplistic 2-dimensional turn-and-burn, tail chases. They're all like Kahn... don't know about the third dimension in space combat, apparently. As mentioned earlier, there are "capital ships" in the game but they fight just like oversized, lumbering fighters. No crew to manage, no orders to give, no flexible tactical solutions in a battle. Just turn-and-burn like all the other ships in a battle, big or small.

There is an arbitrary speed cap on every ship. Accelerate up to whatever your max speed is, and then you hit a brick wall. Granted, this is a game mechanic that many space games use, to keep combat within spitting distance and not confuse players with Newtonian physics. But the actual movement cap felt slower to me than many other space games, in terms of relative motion to other ships and objects. There have been a few nice exceptions like the Independence War games that show you can do space combat without a speed limit, and with Newtonian tricks like swivel firing. So that's a pet peeve of mine. But X3 just seemed especially poor at modeling the feeling of speed and motion in space flight, even compared to other games that use the same general approach (Tie Fighter, Freespace, etc.)

Because the movement speeds are slow, the game takes place over a series of linked, fairly small action areas near planets (mostly) where objectives are crammed fairly close together. As space games go, the "Universe" has a very cramped feeling.

There are several powerful factions in the game, but no real diplomacy interaction once you build up a commercial empire. At least in the original X3 game... I don't know what's been added in the most recent version.

I think I might have stuck with the game longer, if the space combat aspect had been more developed and more fun. In the end, that just killed it for me. The combat felt dumb. But maybe other players wouldn't mind it, or could get enough out of the sandbox economic game to have fun with it.