I've been playing the Star Wars: Interworlds mod and have been enjoying it a ton

X4 is a space empire simulation game that is the culmination of 20+ years of such games from Egosoft. So, this latest release includes many things to do in a sandbox environment, like space exploration, trading, mining, space ship combat, space station building/management, economy management, fleet management/combat, storyline questing, side questing, and diplomacy. The implementation of virtually all these features is average to poor, but as there are hardly any games out there with X4's size and scope, maybe you can forgive the fleet combat flaws because you want to build space stations and claim sectors. Maybe you can ignore the awful crew member graphics and largely deserted space station environs because you can pilot a ship and shoot enemies down while your crew help with repairs or board enemy ships. So, maybe X4 has enough to offer you, and in the right combination, when something like Stellaris, Elite Dangerous, or Civ VI won't quite fit.

The reason I'm not recommending this game is because my current game seems to have devolved into an endless fleet combat simulation in a single sector against waves and waves of unrelenting enemy AI fleets. I can't do any of the above activities because I'm spending all of my time just maintaining the status quo in this single sector. There are friendly and neutral AIs that should be fighting off enemy AIs, but they seem to be INTENTIONALLY HANDICAPPED, as the enemy AIs in practice seem to be 3x stronger, with ships that fly 3x faster (than even my own AI controlled fleets), and show up in endless waves, seemingly to match any fleets I bring to bear. Perhaps Egosoft did this to challenge players, and if so, I worked. It's challenging, I can gain no ground, and I haven't had fun the past week. Thumbs down.

At its core its the concept of this game is brilliant. Open and vast. That being said. The 2 biggest problems i have with this game are 1. The controls are clunky and make it very hard to anything more complex than just flying from point A to point B. And secondly the missions are bland. With the briefings being vague and the steps to your objectives being a bit contrived. Almost as if trying to "fluff out" the content. If i have to get into my space suit and climb out of my ship more than one time during a mission its too much and makes me want to shoot the mission giver in the face. All in all a decent game,

Update: Nope ♥♥♥♥ this game cant recommend it. This ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Torus Aeternal puzzle is stupid.

My economy is snowballing, my social life is crumbling.

This is an amazing sandbox.
If you want to play a tycoon game with fleet management, i.e. stellaris but with more precise control, then this is great. But I have to say that all the good the game has to offer gets sucked out into the vacuum of space when I look at the ships.

The aesthecis
Ships from the expansions look better, I have to give it that. But MOST ships simply look... silly. There is no sense of scale to the bigger ships. If you look at, e.g. X Rebirth's ships you could tell at a glance that an Arawn class ship was huuuuge. This is because it has many small visual clues that made it obvious. Now, Put an s-class, M-class and L-class ship side by side in X4. It does the opposite. (sure the cockpit size helps, but...) A simple example is hoses/cables. These look the same, i.e. simply scaled up on the bigger ships and the smaller ones. That's stupid. Same goes for the platings, And that isn't even starting on whether things look GOOD. The Argon ships are simply ugly. Teladi ships. mushrooms, do I need to say more? Split.. yea no. They did add newer versions of L-class and some XL class ships that slowly replaced the older ones. But that was after YEARS, too little (most ships are still very ugly) too late.

Performance
You need, yes NEED a fairly powerful CPU in order to run this game without it becoming a slideshow after 100 hours. Strange... X3 is running perfectly with lots more ships than this...

Weapons
disclaimer: there are mods to fix these, but it is still incomprehensible to me that the vanilla weapons feel so bad in X4.
Most of the weapons are straight up useless due to either low damage output (looking at you beam laser) or horrendous projectile speed (looking at almost all weapons)
Then there are turret weapons.
What do you expect in damage gains from a Mk1 (small ship) to Mk2 (medium) and Mk3 (larger)? Something significant? you got it. good
Now how strong would a Mk3 TURRET weapon of the same kind compare? a little weaker to balance the upside of being able to turn and fire on its own? yep you got it. Wait. it's weaker than the Mk1 fixed variant? Yea... this makes no f*ing sense. It becomes most apparent when you check out a carrier with 6 or 8 Mk3 Turret lasers shooting a small ship. It's a MASSIVE CARRIER with probably several nuclear reactors on board and it can't take down a small fighter quickly. It takes several seconds of focus fire. Now imagine a squadron attacking the carrier. Yep, the damage is spread out across targets and doesn't do jack.
The only weapon NOT affected by the damage drop from going fixed->turret is missile launchers. Hence it is the only viable option for turrets unless you have a very specific role for that ship (station destroyer using plasma turrets for example, but that can be done with missiles/torpedos too)

Ok.. In conclusion, you have to not think about the logic in the game, ignore the aesthetics and buy a powerful CPU. Nope I cannot recommend this. I love the X-series but... I honestly wish I could play X rebirth with the QoL stuff that X4 has brought...

Menu simulator 2K24. There is more depth in the UI than the universe.

The game itself is interesting but has a steep learning curve. The principles behind the game are fun but the UI is terrible.

The in-game performance and optimization leaves much to be desired and even with a Rx 7900 I still had constant fps drops.

Like if you like SKIBIDI TOILET BOP BOP YES YES

Where do I begin...?

I tried, I really, really f-ing tried with this game. I told myself when I bought this game that I'd give it 50 hours and see how things turn out. First let me get this out of the way. If you like to micromanage (MM) this game is your absolute wet dream. Seriously!

So first save and I find myself having to look up "how to" do whatever I am trying to do at that point and time in the game. This isn't just a once in awhile kinda thing, it's every time I try to do anything I haven't done yet. After about 12 hours I decided to start a new save because nothing was going right in save one.

Save two. I am moving around and finally figuring out how to buy ships and send them out to mine ore. I also tried to do the trading thing but, it was a lot of MM and I did not care for since I had still had so much to wrap my head around in this game. Again, things were not going well and someone suggested starting a new save because this is an RNG (Random Number Generated) game. Which means every time you load up a save, start a new game it's always going to be different. So, I in frustration started a new save.

Save three. This time I had some knowledge under my belt and the map was a bit more friendly to me. I was able to start learning the UI a bit more and navigate my way around all of the freaking menus. There is a lot to take in once you really start to get into the menus and how to navigate them. I found that the pause button a button in my 30+ years of pc gaming I had never used on my KB had become something I used a lot. I got around 91-92 hours into this save and things were going ok. I have 5 stations of my own and I was gaining rep with other factions and I was feeling like I started getting a grasp as to what I had to do. Then things went south.

Before I begin let me say this to all who may be reading this and considering buying this game. Most of the info out there that you will search for and you will be searching for it, is old. Some info is many years old and does not work in 7.10 now.

So, anyway, I built a station in one sector and the station was just a solar farm. You need energy cells for everything and the factions around the area needed them as well as for my station I was building one sector over. I could not build solar in the other sector because of the lack of light there so I thought I could just transport those E-cells over there with ease. That my friends sounds easy but, as it turns out it is not. I thought I could click on this ship>right click on the station>click on transfer wares and amount and confirm> than click on the ship again>right click on my second station and transfer wares confirm and repeat this process. That's not how it works in this frustrating game.
So, I then went on the steam board and asked how to do station to station transfer for myself and the amount of different responses was unreal. Apparently there are numerous way to do just this one and simple thing and I tried some of them to no avail. So again I began to research it and while doing so I found something interesting while watching a random video. This guy was flying around with multiple guns on his ship and I thought, WTF, how do he get those? Again, I go a research how to do this and what I found just... well it just pissed me off! Apparently you need to have a personal headquarters (PHQ) and I had no idea what the hell a PHQ was or did. The game does not tell you to do this to get that, and that you absolutely have a PHQ to do a lot of things in this game. It would be nice if the devs had told us this in game but whatever. So, now what?

Save four. It took me a few hours to get the PHQ and then I still didn't have it yet because I needed to get my fish guy friend there to help me. A lot of details on what happened there after the ship I was escorting just up and vanished and I had no idea what the f-ing do next so I did a mission or two. Later I see the PHQ flashing so I return and there is my fish friend. Hold on folks we are heading into the grand finale here. He tells me to access the research screen. I thought well I am in the lab so it's gotta be in here. Nope. Looked all around the PHQ (Just like looking for that interface unit at the beginning of the PHQ quest) and I could not find it so I did what I have gotten used to doing and I search how to access the screen. I spent probably 15 minutes walking around looking for the screen only to find out you just need to press "M" and look for the beaker up at the top of my screen. I'm done... The amount of time researching how to do anything, watching the old videos, reading the old info threads, done. I now get headaches just looking at the amount of info on my screen when accessing any menu. It's just too much. 124 hours in and many hours or reading and watching videos on "how to" and I am done.

One other note: They released a hotfix yesterday and it was something to do with the police being over zealous. Of all the issues this game has that's the hotfix they went with...? Meanwhile the pilots in this game are as dumb as a box of rocks but, hey they don't need a hotfix now do they?

"X4 allows you to fly all ships personally." Not the xenon ships you got damn frauds.

awesome game by the way you should buy this