I just want to tell someone I got into stimulants and holy hell I am making money hand over fist.
Set up a station in the reach, scan the argon shipyard until you get a black market. You can scan other stations but the demand for stimulants in shipyards is like 600 units whereas other stations its only 50 or so so you're better off focusing on just shipping to shipyards.

Auxiliary ships felt bad just because docking with carriers is so painfully slow, I wish you could just setup trade for orders on medium traders for carriers. Obviously they don't want to allow that because then you'd ask WTF do auxiliary ships even exist, but I think that's a dumb approach. Aux ships should be M ships with like one S dock for repairing S ships and can repair L and XL ships like they can now, instead of shitty carriers that force them to make carrier logistics a pain in the ass to justify AUX ships existing.

I didn't think I'd like the balance changes very much since I loved my pulsars and they seem to have gotten really fucked this patch. I've been thinking about X4 battles as corollary to naval warfare, but it feels like a really good corollary to tank warfare right now. I'm sending in fighters ahead of my carrier fleet to absolutely wreck paranid's formation and then sending in my behemoths to melt the one by one. If I just send the behemoths at the odysseuses they get absolutely wrecked but once they're distracted by the fighters the paranid destroyers can't bring all their guns to pair. It feels really good.

Just wish I could use my pulsars as bombers. I'm using eclipses for bombers and barracudas for fighters, which were definitely better than pulsars even before the patch, but I preferred pulsars just because they looked cool. Now pulsars are just awful.

>>2370690
i think they should just bite the bullet and turn missiles/torpedoes into commodities rather than consumable wares. this entire debacle around aux ships is arguably caused by their insistence on keeping missiles as wares.

imagine if missiles/torps were commodities, or at least special commodity categories with separate cargo spaces:
>one aux ship that carries all the missiles
>2-3 medium freighters hauling missiles from aux ships to carriers
>carriers rearming fighters with munitions from its internal stores
>aux ships no longer have to align with carriers to transfer shit

or at the very least, if they STILL insist on keeping missiles as wares, they can just jack up the max missile count for aux ships and carriers and let them replenish docked fighters with their internal magazines. it might not make any sense lore-wise (admiral, why does our support vessel have deeper magazines than our battleships?) but the alternative is pissing away even more man-hours trying to make this fucking replenishment system work.

while we're at it, i wish they'd just fucking sidestep the aux ship alignment issue by letting them have repair beams and use said beams to repair ships. there are a lot more severe immersion-breakers in the game and magic repair beams won't even be in the top 10 offenders. i believe egosoft has the good intention but i don't think they have the manpower to keep jerking this around. at this rate aux ships will remain useless forever in X4. why not just make them usable?

>>2371309
>i wish they'd just fucking sidestep the aux ship alignment issue by letting them have repair beams and use said beams to repair ships
Its so bad. It takes half an hour to repair and rearm my colosus and three behemoths. If an NPC L trader decides to sell to me it locks up the resupply ship for half an hour with a [critical] wait for signal. Not just alignment, the whole mechanism of docking L ships at a resupply ship is just total shit. I think they could literally just remove resupply ships, let carriers have subordinates with a trade for commander role, and everything would be perfect. That only leads out-of-dock L ship repair and whatever. Repair drones exist. Do something with those. Let frigates with repair drones use their repair drones on nearby L and XL ships and its problem solved, or something like that.

>>2370690
>I just want to tell someone I got into stimulants
admitting you have a problem is the first step

>>2371313
>Repair drones exist. Do something with those.
yes, you're right. that's a much better idea than magic repair beams.

>I think they could literally just remove resupply ships
i don't think this would ever happen. i think egosoft likes the idea of having a fleet-local cache of supplies in aux ships and i personally think it's a natural fit for the fleet battle too. they just need to come up with a way to make the inter-ship supply transfer less of a mess.
at the risk of complicating the game further, for fleet resupply to actually work with aux ships, the game needs new behavior types and modifications to existing behaviors:
>"procure supply for fleet" -- freighters will fulfill buy orders placed by aux ships ONLY. distinct from the preexisting "trade for fleet" order or just fucking replace it. it's not like anyone uses that broken behavior anyway.
>"distribute supply to fleet" -- freighters will fulfill buy orders placed by the fleet's carriers and sell orders placed by aux ships. doesn't honor external buy/sell orders. replaces the preexisting and dysfunctional "resupply fleet" order
>"attach to fleet" -- follow the fleet but in a less stupid manner. keeps distance from the spear tip but not too far. will actively maneuver to avoid enemies. aux ships (and any other supporting ships) would be perfect fit for these. maybe modify "follow leader" to fit this behavior because that fucking sucks too.

>>2371679
and while we're at it, i wish they'd do away with one ship acting as the fleet lead at all times. it's just stupid. fleets should be abstract gropuings for ships to be assigned to.

>>2371679
See I like the idea of fleet-local cache of supplies as well; but there's no reason that can't just be an L freighter. I don't think they even need new behaviors to be honest. Trade for fleet should treat ships with cargo requests as having sell orders. Then trade for commander with an implicit trade restriction just works.

>>2371681
It seems to work well for me, though it is a bit confusing trying to figure out if a squad commander is actually a squad commander or a first among equals sort of thing. And shit definitely breaks when you have many layers deep nested squads.

But the problem is you end up with such a rabbit hole if you go "fine; here you go; I hope you know set theory; because you're going to need it to make sense of the well defined behavior of this fleet system"

>>2371862
Actually on second thought I guess it would be nice if you could assign an L ship some role that gives it access to the logistics panel that stations with storage have so you can set distinct buy/sell rules to act as a long term cache without any active buy orders.

>>2370562
so is this the patch that turns L ships into power fantasy?

is this game better than starsector?

I went to Pax East and visited the Egosoft booth, met one of the devs, got to try the game on HOSAS. When I got home I bought the game, all the dlc, and a pair of HOSAS. What are the chances I play for a week and never again? I have several hundred hours in Stellaris. I'm hoping for "single player Eve." The graphics are a little boof. Is there crafting? I know there's trading and mining and all that, but do you make stuff or buy stuff or both? What if I just want to own the universe's biggest restaurant franchise, space McDonald's?

>>2375852
>Is there crafting
Sort of. I mean there's inventory items you need to do certain things, like you can disable a station's shields or turrets by interacting with a terminal in the station, which requires an item in your inventory which you "craft" by walking to up to a crafting table and combining three other items that drop from destroyed ships or are sold by traders.

But when you talk about "owning the universe's biggest restaurant franchise" - the economic model is all centered around making ships and using them to blow shit up. There's food as a ware you can sell, just like ore, or ship bits, they just exist as a "500x food" that some stations need as inputs to run their factory. There's no restaurants.

I mean you can make a gambling den, which is a station module that increases the rate that your station gains personnel, which is just a stat a station has that provides a multiplier to output that your factories produce.
>>2375591
Yeah; I mean in the ways that they overlap I believe so. I think the only place that starsector really pulls ahead (though its substantially) is on player expression via ship loadout. You pick a ship, you pick which turrets and guns on it, you pick an engine, but you don't have stuff like hull mods that radically change how the ship "works".

>>2375496
Destroyers are really good now, yeah. Kind of a shame that they also gimped fighters, that felt sort of unnecessary.

>>2375899
We got vro'ed. Sucks that x4 went this route.

https://youtu.be/kMUZS45ccmo?t=946
>this is "fixed and improved" destroyer behavior
egosoft...