X:4 Foundations Egosoft's ship-building trade sim is one of the most intricate and rewarding management games I've ever played. X4 juggles an engaging and adaptive AI-managed galaxy with realtime strategy elements that makes for a tremendously engaging single player experience. A brief fore-word Just decided to put down the game after a 150hr save with a business worth around $6billion, which was my second (and much more successful) playthrough. Unlike a lot of other reviews I've seen on this game, I actually only played X: Rebirth, which was the previous game in the series. Rebirth is a little bit different from the other games in the X series from what I understand. It's more trade focused and places far less emphasis on actually piloting ships, and more emphasis on running the business. That's my experience and some bias going in to this review. This review is going to be some stuff I liked, some stuff I thought had room for improvement, and then whether or not I recommend it for you. This review is getting a thumbs up because I think X4: Foundations delivers exactly what it says on the tin, to the best of it's ability but whether or not that's actually for you... well hopefully my review will help. The Good Stuff X4: Foundations is probably the most intricate single player space trading simulator on the market at the moment. The galactic economy successfully walks the tightrope of being complicated enough to present a rich and satisfying economy that allows for endless back and forth with the AI players. The Sandbox I've seen come critique that Diplomacy in the game is very limited but I'm not sure that that's a fair description. The AI players are very economically free. They are pretty good at looking after their own economies (while leaving enough room for you to compete) but their foreign policy is almost completely static. The relations between factions at the start of the game will stay the same throughout if you don't complete the major quests. The quests allow for some really cool changes to the change in the galactic status quo and can radically change the state of play depending on your choices and when you complete the quests. Ship Combat Ship combat is really dang cool. The game has an amazing sense of scale and accomplishment. You can dock on stations you've built and on ships you've bough and there's a real sense of wonder and awe as you pilot truly enormous battleships or manage massive factory stations. I found progress to be tremendously satisfying. There's also a great sense of scale as you grow your business. Going from buying a single M sized ship early on to eventually buying whole fleets of L and XL ships is just very satisfying. Station Building Station building is pretty good. I think for a 3D module based building system the controls are alright and after getting over the learning curve of decision paralysis of where to start, I quite liked the puzzle of fitting together self-sufficient station factories. Menus The menu system isn't perfect but I think it does a really good job at showing you what you need to know. You can setup factories that are supplied by the AI, by yourself or a mix for individual parts in the chain. The factory and ship interfaces aren't perfect. There's lots of text and different features aren't always intuitive. Overall, I think you get plenty of tools to make your factories and ships operate in a way that is useful, once you learn to use the system. Room for Improvement Game pacing and the learning curve I played X4 almost entirely with a stationary ship making money by commanding other ships and trying to make my stations as profitable as possible. This made for a pretty painfully slow start but I used a lot of that time to build relations with different factions, explore the galaxy and find where in the galaxy I could begin to make some money. I've played a number of dense sandbox management games and I think it's safe to say X4 has one of the steepest learning curves, and many info-landmines which can make learning the game tremendously frustrating. Prior to playing, I had more than 100 hours in a previous X title, spent maybe 2 or 3 hours reading steam guides and played through the games tutorials. I still made mistakes which made my first 20-40 hours of play painful. I think fans would argue that "If I had just started in region X" or "If I had properly read popular guide Y" I'd have had a better time but I think realistically, a new player is going to make at least one mistake which will make their first game very hard or painfully slow. For example, I followed a guide on building a Terran Wharf and found that I was having to import far more energy cells than I expected. This was because I had failed to recognise that the guide built their wharf in a different region and that would mean that, because energy cell production efficiency is based on region (due to differences in sunlight for the solar panels) my station would not be self-sufficient. I learned this after spending more than 12 hours building the station. Another example: I built a number of profitable trade stations in split territory. I followed the major questline for the split, supporting the government in a civil war. I didn't know that this war would cause the neighboring stations to turn hostile, which destroyed many of my ships and effectively shut down a great deal of my trade. Mods are a must I think it's a weakpoint that the game is just straight up worse without mods. Galaxy exploration is mostly relegated to a chore, as is using satellites to stay up-to-date with available trades. Without mods, this will absorb hours and hours of your gameplay which would be better spent doing fun missions and reading through station information. Lockboxes are really awkward to break in to but doing so is vital for a lot of quests (including major plotlines) The ship AI behaves differently depending on whether it's fighting in the real sim (where you see the ships) or in the map (where they're largely just icons). Some ships are poor when piloted by even the best AI pilots in the sim because of their weapon placements and relative position to their enemies, so you may find that the battleship you spent your whole day grinding cash for got blown up because the AI can't handle the turret placement very well. Will you like it? If you like other X games, it's a strong recommend. If you like management games and don't mind 2 hours+ of pre-game research and tutorials and a slow start? I'd say it's a recommend too. The game is management first, battle sim second. If that's what you like, I can confidently recommend it. When starting the game... If I started my game again, there's a lot of information I could use to have a much quicker start but I found my first 2 playthrough to be quite a slog for large parts, and that's from a person who enjoys slow management games. Piracy is a massive source of cash that I just failed to exploit for most of my game. I'd also recommend finding a market for raw materials as they produce lots of cash with a minimal overhead. I would strongly encourage to play the tutorials and pick one of the pre-set starts for your first campaign. All the campaigns put you in the same galaxy, but differ in the amount of starting help you receive. I chose the Teladi start, which gives a factory but I think I would recommend a Terran start to get to grips with the game. I'd also strongly encourage getting some QoL mods, especially the cheat mods. Save yourself a massive chore and just instantly explore the galaxy and its stations. It'll give you a much better view of whats happening where and give you the tools you need to avoid being caught out by the fog of war.
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