Matrix Games Forums

X2 has been hot debate (or at least debate) in old Starshatter forum. Looks like few other in here like to tell about it too. So I decided open this topic for it.

ORIGINAL: moog

As for space sims they're few and far between these days. X2-The Threat does support multi monitors. I'm pretty sure it's the only one though. That's more of a trading/strategy game. I prefer the Starshatter approach.

With approach you mean gameplay, right? Few people have first thought Starshatter to be something like X2. My knowledge about X2 is limited to few reviews I have read and comments I have seen around Starshatter boards.

I remember 1 comment very well. I try translate it: "Why try to solve energy problem when is possible make it worse by destroying extra power stations." For those who don't know: in X2 most of the space stations and factories have great need for extra power from power stations. So most effective way to do business is to buy power cells from power stations and sell them to space stations which are in greatest need of them. When player has earned enough money, it is possible to construct/buy own power stations and Titan-class cruiser, then go destroy power stations which belong to other companies and thus price of power/energy increase. Sounds like easy money.

A long time ago I played Elite until I got military laser and 1 use galactic hyperdrive. Soon after that I quit playing it and I played Frontier: Elite II and Frontier: First Encounters a bit. Looks like X2 isn't too bad, and it is likely I'll buy that game when I get new PC first (this year I hope).

All X2 players: do you have any comments on behalf of the game or against? Are there any modern (better?) alternatives for Elite/X2 types of games?

X2 is very average, although that's purely a "IHMO" - I know many like it.


Pluses:

A decent enough trading game, with an excellent economic model.

Plenty of stuff to do, including building a trade empire with fleets of ships.

Lots of kit to try out and collect.

It looks pretty enough.


Minuses:

Poor combat, of which the major trick is avoiding AI vessels determined to collide with you long enough to shoot them.

Awful main plot, with the most boring cutscenes I've ever scene. Most players don't bother with it at all.

And by far the worst, no attempt at portraying a "real" universe. Everything takes place in "sectors" which have nothing much in them except space stations. Planets are only eye-candy - you can't land on them or even fly around them. I don't think there's any excuse for anything short of a fully rendered "astronomical" galaxy (or portion of one) in this sort of game - Elite: Frontier managed it - you could almost just play that game as a space tourist.


Starshatter is a space combat game (with a "real" physics option), with a lot more in common with Freespace 2 than Elite and X2.

ORIGINAL: Hertston

Pluses:

A decent enough trading game, with an excellent economic model.

Plenty of stuff to do, including building a trade empire with fleets of ships.

I would like to put comment in this. In BattleTech universe when rebellions against Terra ( = Earth) started, there was formed trade alliances across boundaries of the known space. Reason for these alliances were to increase trade, economy, security and armies. Reason for increased security and armies: to defend shipping lines against pirates and counteract against Terra forces if they shall attack (as later they did). Small alliances were unite to powerful states, known as Successor States. Strongest of the Successor States were enough powerful to go toe-to-toe against Terra controlled territories even without help from other Successor States.

What I have understood, something like that should be possible in X2. Trade empire and strong space navy at least. But in BattleTech universe it took hundreds of years before rebelling colonies were united and they could build anything near Titan-class cruiser of X2. Regardin reviews of X2 lonely player may get own Titan less than in month. Understandable, becouse if that would take years of real time, most players would be [>:]

Questions: when player have own shipping lines with armed escorts, is there anything else to do than wait incoming money in order to buy more stuff? How MP work? Is it possible to increase in-game time and how much? Does lowest time setting match with real time?

I'm one of the people that like X2

IMO it does what it sets out to do pretty well - which is create a world with a fully functional trading system and giving the player freedom to do a wide range of activities like building your own trade empire, roaming around in giant cruisers smashing everything and waging war on entire races.

It does have flaws, one of those (for me) is performance - the thing runs at 5fps on my machine even after I upgraded from a GeForce 2 MX to a GeForce FX 5900 (I got +1fps from that...) so it really requires a massively powerful rig in all aspects (to run the AI for the entire universe) and there are no options to reduce it to speed things up.

Another flaw is combat, it just feels wrong compared to anything else - ships turn on the spot (this is what causes the AI to play bumper-cars with you) and battles degenerate into whoever has the bigger ship or runs away first.
Capital ship combat isn't much better since you can't damage subsystems and the turrets are weak compared to the more powerful fighter based weapons.
Basically its very simplified, but too much IMO.

The last flaw are combat fleets - all you get are handfulls of friendly ships 'on patrol' (randomly flying around) and enemy ships flying in line formation to a destination (typically only if you blew them up where they were in the first place). Pirates float around but don't do much until you build factories and annoy them, then they proceed to annoy you back
I believe this could be fixed by a user-built mod however I lack the time to try it out :/

That said the parts the game is focussed around are done well - namely trading and empire construction. As a player you can setup a semi-automated fleet of trade ships darting from place to place to capitalise on profit oportunities.
Or you can setup your own factory empire - players have built anything from a couple of stations in nice spots to dozens intertwined in their own network. You can purchase fighters, transports and the aforementioned capital ships to stand guard over your belongings and ensure everything runs smoothly.

Finally it just looks great, even at 5fps on low detail the views you get as you fly around are quite pretty


Compared to starshatter?
Well starshatter is more focussed on military conflict, there's no trade to speak of.
It models combat very nicely to suit the tastes of individuals (newtonian fanatics or arcade fans), has a very cool dynamic campaign system, planetary flight and combat and decent large-scale battles.

It's not as pretty, you can't build an empire and you can't roam around the place at will (unless you take an extended mission trip) but that's not what the game is about



On multiplayer:
X2 doesn't have multiplayer, the devs are reserving that for X-Online (a MMOG basically), I'd also imagine it would be exceptionally difficult to find someone willing to play for days on end with you to make significant advancements within the game.

Starshatter has mission based multiplayer (I don't know if you can play the dynamic campaigns multi?) which is almost expected of games these days. 15-20 minutes of fun suits multiplayer games well although I haven't tried it yet.

ORIGINAL: Hertston
I don't think there's any excuse for anything short of a fully rendered "astronomical" galaxy (or portion of one) in this sort of game - Elite: Frontier managed it - you could almost just play that game as a space tourist.

I disagree, a game is entitled to build its own world with its own technology and resulting galactic layout. Frankly I would find it quite boring to have several thousand stars modelled but only ever have reason to visit a handful of them (as happened in Elite).

Same goes for planetary flight. Oh yes it's so enjoyable flying over randomly generated, low-detail terrain with nothing interesting around

If there is no reason to include a feature other than "It might be cool" then why bother spending the resources (time, money) on it when you could be polishing something more closely related to the core of the game?

- Deathifier

I'd like it better as a tycoon game, the travel times abstracted and the entire galaxy viewed down from above.

Exploration - The game models space as a series of 4x4 grids connected through the cardinal points with jump gates. It comes up looking like a periodic table. As for the individual sectors, they're invariably just a cluster of factories. Planets and suns are rare. Not a single asteriod field or anomoly. No derelics. There's isn't anything to discover, visualy, or materially.

Combat - They spent little time on this. Capturing ships and selling pilots into slavery is the one nice detail.

Trade - The point of the game. Its slow, often painful (losing your shipping fleet to alien attacks), but I suppose rewarding if you like the grind.

Art Direction - Textures are poorly executed, very low res with heavy compression artifacts. They're put in a central bank and reused as ship and station parts, which can work but here nothing looks properly skinned. The models are as bad. I really can't agree with anyone on this, technical merits its just ugly. To hit my exploration complaints, its not a well imagined version of space. None of Freespaces nebula storms, nor any Freelancer's ice fields.

I kind of like X-2 but I think it just doesnt take the concept far enough for me. There's not much sense of a 'living universe'. The combat is mediocre- some parts of good, some parts terrible.

However I actually do like the art direction, excepting the cutscenes and the capital ship explosions.

The textures don't look low res to me and I noticed no compression artifacts, I'm not sure what you're talking about Lemon. In addition there are nebula storms.

anyways... meh. "My Perfect Space Game" is something noone can agree on and hence never comes out.

ORIGINAL: TheDeadlyShoe there are nebula storms.

Where exactly?

ORIGINAL: Matti Kuokkanen

In BattleTech universe

Hmm, your BT history is a little off...

ORIGINAL: Thorgrim

Hmm, your BT history is a little off...

No it isn't!

BattleTech source book
House Steiner
Page 10

Amont those who left to seek their fortunes was Ian McQuiston, rich cocky Scotsman. The 30-year-old son of a merchant-ship company owner in Great Britain, McQuiston was among the many who had to leave Terra because his mind and his mouth were too closely linked. Not only had this made trouble for him with his father and his lover, but his aggressive business dealings had also alienated many people. McQuiston was determined that out there among the colonies he was going to do things his way. This Scotsman chose the distant colony on Skye because he had heard that only Skye had the moody rain, deep green valleys, and fog-wreathed hills of his beloved homeland
...
After gaining economic control over many of the worlds serviced by Skye Traders, McQuiston next entered into a series of negotiations with the planetary leaders to win their cooperation for his next ambtious step. In 2299, Ian McQuiston had enough power to announce that he was forming an interstellar government. It would be known as the Federation of Skye, and would guide the political destiny and provide military protection for the worlds controlled by his trading company.

I skipped less essential information. This text should prove I know what I am talking about. What comes to later history, Federation of Skye and 2 other alliances were united and new alliance is known as Lyran Commonwealth.

ORIGINAL: Deathifier

I disagree, a game is entitled to build its own world with its own technology and resulting galactic layout. Frankly I would find it quite boring to have several thousand stars modelled but only ever have reason to visit a handful of them (as happened in Elite).

Even if Frontier includes thousands of systems, that doesn't mean other games should have that amount of systems. If there is ever going to be X2 style game in BattleTech universe, I don't expect it would include all 2000+ systems of the Inner Sphere. Lyran Commonwealth and about 100 neighboring systems would be just right.

Same goes for planetary flight. Oh yes it's so enjoyable flying over randomly generated, low-detail terrain with nothing interesting around

It is a lot better than no planetary flight at all. Play First Encounters, that has some cool planetary terrain. And this time it isn't possible fly through of mountain

I would argue its more important to keep a standard of high quality than to throw in low quality features.

ORIGINAL: Matti Kuokkanen
No it isn't!

Ok, so what ship designs were you thinking here? Warships like the McKenna, Cameron, Leviathan, Mjolnir, ...?
Any jumpships?
Any dropships?
Any aerospace fighters?
Just curious.

I skipped less essential information. This text should prove I know what I am talking about. What comes to later history, Federation of Skye and 2 other alliances were united and new alliance is known as Lyran Commonwealth.

This doesn't prove you know what you're talking about. You read the text, that's all.
Successor States during TH era?!

The Terran Hedgemony was formed of the ashes of the Terran Aliance in 2314. The Free Worlds League was formed in 2270 and the Capellan Commonality (original name of the Capellan Confederation) was formed in 2310.

BattleTech Master Timeline

ORIGINAL: Deathifier

I disagree, a game is entitled to build its own world with its own technology and resulting galactic layout. Frankly I would find it quite boring to have several thousand stars modelled but only ever have reason to visit a handful of them (as happened in Elite).

Same goes for planetary flight. Oh yes it's so enjoyable flying over randomly generated, low-detail terrain with nothing interesting around

If there is no reason to include a feature other than "It might be cool" then why bother spending the resources (time, money) on it when you could be polishing something more closely related to the core of the game?

Depends what you want in the game I guess. I'd find a "planetarium" element included in the game an awful lot more fun than half of what is in there to be honest. And I would point out the game was pushed as a "space simulator" when it's nothing of the kind.


@ Matti

Are you in Europe mate ? If so, PM me with your snail-mail addy and I'll send you my copy, I won't be playing it again.

ORIGINAL: Deadmannumberone

The Terran Hedgemony was formed of the ashes of the Terran Aliance in 2314. The Free Worlds League was formed in 2270 and the Capellan Commonality (original name of the Capellan Confederation) was formed in 2310.

BattleTech Master Timeline

Well, like I was saying, anyone can read. But knowing what you're reading is an entirely different thing...

ORIGINAL: Hertston

@ Matti

Are you in Europe mate ? If so, PM me with your snail-mail addy and I'll send you my copy, I won't be playing it again.

Thanks for info, I live in Finland. I could give you few € for the game, but not right now. I still have way outdated K6-2 processor. Dad will sponsor me new PC... next autumn.

Oh... I didn't want money, as I said I won't be playing it again.

You do need that new rig, though [:(]