X (video game)/YMMV

""Yes, thank you for that brilliant deduction, Betty.""
 * Achievements in Ignorance: Placed here because it's a Real Life example. The manual for the Terran Conflict Bonus Pack states that Commercial Agents have to be of a certain rank before they can bring cargo to and from player-owned docks. Forum member StarSword didn't read the manual and started freshly hired Apprentices working for an Equipment Dock, and discovered they worked just fine.
 * Broken Base: The EGOSOFT forums can be divided into two categories: People who love Steam, and people who think it is a demonic spawn from the fiery pits of hell, destined to steal all your money.
 * There's a third category, actually: people who don't mind Steam in principle, but don't have the bandwidth to make use of it.
 * Crowning Moment of Awesome: The Battle of from Terran Conflict,.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Full of it! The X3: Terran Conflict contains hours of awesome ambience, orchestral, vocal, and electronic music from all the previous games, in an easily accessible file.
 * The Terran Conflict menu theme. Orchestral music while in orbit around Saturn!
 * Kingdom End's theme. Considered one of the best songs in the game.
 * Home of Light's theme.
 * The HUB.
 * The Xenon theme is something quite remarkable to hear when commanding a fleet of capital ships against a half-dozen Xenon capitals, several frigates and corvettes, and an obscene amount of fighters.
 * Albion Prelude's Earth Orbit Battle theme definitely defines epic space battle.
 * Demonic Spiders: Xenon "M" interceptors. While they're poorly shielded, they come in huge swarms, and 90% of them will mount Pulsed Beam Emitters -- weapons which are impossible to dodge. A single M can strip down the shields of an M3 fighter very quickly on its own -- add in several dozen friends and you basically need a capital ship to kill them all without dying instantly in a hailstorm of (nearly) hitscan weapons.
 * Designated Hero: The Argons, as of Albion Prelude.
 * Designated Villain: As of Albion Prelude, we are clearly meant to consider the Terrans as the enemy, despite the fact that
 * Evil Is Cool: For some, the Split and Paranid empires have the best looking ships.
 * Terran ships, however, are close contenders.
 * Game Breaker:
 * SETA on 10x causes the game to prioritize where it uses system resources; in other words, it will run AI routines slower (making them more idiotic), meaning that if the player hides in say a station while SETA is on 10x, in a combat mission, all enemy ships will plow into the station and destroy themselves because their AI doesn't realize there's a station in their flight path. When your system is really being taxed, the AI will also stop firing (and in extreme cases, stop moving entirely) at you when SETA is on 10x.
 * The Springblossom corvette in X3: Terran Conflict. It's a corvette which has the firepower of a Prototype M6, can outrun most fighter craft, and has the cargo bay of a small transporter. The only disadvantage to it is its extreme (for a M6) price, the rarity of the weapons it uses, and the fact that the insane speed will mean you're probably going to end up ramming into enemies and dying, a lot. Its little brother, the Spitfyre interceptor, can outrun most scout ships, has the firepower of a prototype M3 (or potentially an M6, if you use Matter/Antimatter Launchers), and the shielding of a M3 Raider.
 * The speed of the Springblossom and Spitfyre is somewhat justified by fluff. Their native Aldrin has no jumpgates or trans-orbital accelerators to quickly get ships from one planet or system to another, so they put all their design efforts into getting as much power out of the engines as possible to reduce travel time. (The Spitfyre is basically a cockpit with big f***ing engines attached.) When you combine that with the typically strong shields and weapons of Terran ships, however, you get a Game Breaker.
 * It's even lampshaded on the X3 wiki. Once Aldrin was reunited with the X-Universe, the other races were amazed at how much the Spitfyre and Springblossom outperformed their own M3 and M6 designs.
 * M7Ms can wipe out an entire sector from a remote corner using a full cargo bay of missiles; the sheer volume of rockets will completely overwhelm any target who isn't using Plasma Burst Generators or Phased Shockwave Generators. Thankfully, the AI never uses M7Ms for this in vanilla X3TC.
 * The Hyperion M7 in Reunion. While it's by no means a God Ship, and easy to kill when piloted by the AI, it becomes a one-size-fits-all pocket destroyer when flown by the player. Its superior weaponry lets it kill any other ship of its size, and its speed makes it fairly easy to dodge fire from ships several times its size - all the while pumping laser blasts in their hull. Bigger ships are still useful for massive fleet actions, but in solo play once you get that it becomes redundant to get anything else at all.
 * The ATF M7M Skirnir. It takes Macross Missile Massacre Up to Eleven, crosses it with There Is No Kill Like Overkill, and adds a little More Dakka for seasoning.
 * An explanation is in order. The Skirnir (like all M7Ms) has eight missile tubes which can be fired simultaneously. Its primary weapon is the Shadow missile, which has eight warheads. Each warhead does 650 megajoules of damage. The toughest ship to appear in the vanilla game has 12 gigajoules of shielding. Do the math.
 * The "More Dakka" part comes in when you switch to Ghoul Missiles, an anti-fighter swarm missile that the Skirnir can easily spam the immediate vicinity with. Any fighter within reach will suffer a Critical Existence Failure a few seconds later.
 * Turns out this was a mistake in the data for the Shadow missile. Albion Prelude fixed it.
 * The Terran M1 Tokyo was formerly considered a mild Game Breaker by the standards of its class, because unlike most full-size carriers its weapons generator was powerful enough for it to fire its anti-capital guns indefinitely. This ability was removed in the 3.0 patch. However, the "center" of the ship that enemies will target is essentially floating in empty space ahead of the flying-saucer-bridge-thingy; this causes most weapons to miss the ship entirely unless manually aimed by the player, or when the weapons are fired at the Tokyo from the left or right sides.
 * The Split M7 Panther is sometimes considered one, because in addition to 32 fighter berths it has identical performance and power generation characteristics to its fighter-less sister design the Tiger.
 * It received a Nerf in Albion Prelude. It still has more fighter berths than some carriers, but its weapons have been weakened to compensate. Naturally this provoked outcry from Panther-lovers.
 * When Terran Conflict first came out, missions had very high payouts. A "Very Hard" patrol mission would net you about 20 million (enough for a TL or a fully decked out corvette). Said patrol missions could be stacked, leading to payouts of several hundred million, for about an hour's work -- several thousand times faster than any other method of money making, save possibly for Nividium mining.
 * Nividium mining in Terran Conflict and previous games. Nividium is an extremely valuable, rare mineral that can only be mined by breaking up asteroids and picking up the debris in ships. Normally, doing this will result in the Nividium being depleted. However, ordering your ships to pick up the debris when you are not in the same sector results in the game basically "faking" your ships picking up the debris -- they'll fly around in the debris fields, and the game will cheat in nividium into their cargo bay, in order to save processing power. The game does not get rid of the Nividium that the ship is pretending to pick up, meaning that doing this results in effectively infinite Nividium. Mine the debris for an hour, load it all into one ship, sell it for 30 to 50 million credits at a shipyard, rinse and repeat till you have billions of credits. The exploit was fixed in Albion Prelude.
 * Albion Prelude's Stock Market feature introduced a whole slew of ways to make absurd amounts of money in ridiculously short amounts of time. The Stock Market will determine the "Supply" and the amount of stock shares (2 stocks per item) of a good by how many of the goods are present in the Stock Market's domain - this includes inside cargo bays, such as on your ship. So if you warp into a sector with your cargo bay full of thousands of tons of Ore, the price drops off dramatically, and thousands of stock shares will suddenly become available. Buy up the stocks at rock bottom prices, drop off a Satellite (to deal with the stock market remotely), leave the sector, watch the price of of the stocks skyrocket, and then sell your thousands of stocks. Nividium is a prime candidate for this - while it's rare to find nividium rocks, the ware is also extremely valuable and typically the amount of nividium present in stations and non-player ships is measured in single digits. 700 units of nividium mined and placed in a cargo bay costs about 12 million credits to buy, but when you sell the stocks back, you get about 30 million credits back. Warping between Scale Plate Green and Nyana's Hideout, buying stocks in the current sector and selling it when you move to the next, allows you to make a hundred million credits (normally hours and hours of play time) in about two minutes. Filling a Mammoth's cargo bay with Nividium will net you a couple billion credits when you do just one stock run.
 * Goddamned Bats: Pirate and Xenon M5s. They do very little damage, but they come in groups of 3-10, and they'll just swarm around the player ship, slowly plinking it to death. These ships are moving around at ~300m/s, making conventional weapons useless against them, as the scouts are constantly adjusting their flight path. Mass Drivers, Impulse Ray Emitters, Pulsed Beam Emitters, and Phased Repeater Guns are usually the only weapons that can hit them effectively.
 * Well, those and Flak Artillery Arrays or Starburst Shockwave Cannons.
 * Good Bad Bugs: In TC, the aforementioned typo in the data for the Shadow missile that turned the Skirnir into a Game Breaker.
 * It's Easy, So It Sucks: When Terran Conflict came out, some veterans were annoyed because it no longer took as long to make your first million credits.
 * It's Hard, So It Sucks: Players new to the series sometimes have this reaction because it does take a while for the sandbox to turn a noticeable profit. X is a game to be played only if you're willing to stick it out for a while: the first million is always the hardest, but after that you can start building factories and your profitsss will multiply.
 * Then Terran Conflict got the opposite complaint from some veterans.
 * Memetic Mutation: The Egosoft forum has developed a few.
 * Profitsss.
 * Briefly, a photo of an Egosoft exec at his computer (posted during the announcement of X: Rebirth). The image on his screen started getting Photoshopped into all sorts of things, including an image of the Egosoft exec at his computer. It became a Discredited Meme after the forum basically ran out of ideas.
 * Most Annoying Sound:
 * "Attention, one of your ships is under attack, Xenon Sector 472... Attention, one of your ships is under attack, Xenon Sector 472..."
 * Particularly when you happen to be in Xenon Sector 472 and the ship being attacked is your wingman.


 * The sector Vestibule of Creation. For some bizarre reason, Betty (the ship's computer voice) switches to a different voice to speak the name of this sector.
 * The Teladi's obsession with the word "profits" means they say it at least 2-3 times when you talk to one of them. With a very pronounced emphasssisssss on the letter ssssss.
 * Attacking an enemy station will result in message spam with things like "You were warned. Pirate ships are now being launched" a several times a minute. And unless you're attacking with multiple capital ships, a station can take ten minutes to kill.
 * It's even more annoying when you're protecting the station and it got hit by friendly fire.
 * Most Wonderful Sound: "Ship computer control transferred." Translation: "Yay! New ship!" Good when it's a bigger ship than what you've got, or a transport ship when you're looking to get in on trading. Still good if it's smaller as you could always just sell it at the nearest shipyard.
 * Narm: Many of the enemy pilot death cries, but in particular a random Teladi comment about his ship being shot apart and his imminent horrific death: "Lost profitsssssss! Aaaargh!"
 * Most of the other death cries fit this quite well. "SPLIT CURSE YOU! Awreughrguhrgh." Or in the case of another Teladi, "Gruuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrghhhhh."
 * Nightmare Fuel: The Xenon, if you think about it. Imagine a robotic race that only has one desire: to completely rid the universe of all organic life. They do not breath. They do not eat, sleep or anything like that. They do not care about resources. They do not even think, they act purely on instinct. Their sole purpose is to kill, kill, and kill, until nothing remains...
 * Older Than They Think: The series is often though of as a singleplayer clone of EVE Online by the uninformed, but the first game came out four years before EVE.
 * Scrappy Weapon:
 * The Fragmentation Bomb Launcher sounds like a dangerous weapon. It's loud and produces a pretty explosion. But it burns weapons energy fast, and unless you manage to hit the target before it detonates and produces its Flechette Storm, you're not going to hit anything. Its only saving grace is its price tag: as Vendor Trash a salvaged or manufactured FBL will net you roughly a quarter of a million credits.
 * The Cluster Flak Array is the FBL scaled to frigate size. It does, however, have one further saving grace. Some players like to pair it in gun batteries with the Ion Disruptor, which can chain-lightning between the flak shards to reach further than it could normally.
 * Almost every unguided missile: they are inaccurate and do very little damage. The exception is the Tornado, which can be used to rig certain M3 fighters (chiefly the Falcon Hauler and Falcon Sentinel) as bombers for anticapital work.
 * Lasertowers fit this in X3: Terran Conflict because Out-Of-Sector combat mechanics render their chief advantage (range) worthless. Some players have had success using them in large quantities to support blockades, however. In X3: Albion Prelude they're much more useful thanks to a buff in firepower and shielding.
 * That One Achievement: "Reboot" in Terran Conflict. Reboot requires you to capture a Xenon "Q" frigate, which is the single hardest ship in the entire game to capture. It requires swarms of 5-star marines (which take hours to train, and the only way to increase their "fight" skill is to board other ships, which can result in causalities). Massive amounts of Save Scumming is required to get the achievement.
 * Also in TC, you get "Die-Hard" for completing all nine plots in Dead-Is-Dead mode. Problem with this is that, as mentioned on the main page, DiD doesn't distinguish between dying because your ship got shot up and dying because the Random Number God decided to drop an M2 on your head. Or because the auto-pillock crashed you into an asteroid.
 * That One Level:
 * X3: Reunion has a mission where you are taken away from your ship and given a fast, unarmed light fighter; you're then told to race two other people in fighters exactly the same as yours through a pointlessly long series of target markers. The whole thing is made very hard by the fact that the AI pilots seem very good at navigating the course, while you have to follow tiny blue arrows in the outermost part of your HUD just to visualize the targets. Of course, missing one target means you have to redo the whole thing, as the NPC pilots will leave you in the dust if you backtrack. Considering the course is way longer than necessary, this can very much cause your mouse/joystick to suddenly and violently take flight.
 * And if that isn't enough, this level was made even harder with one patch.
 * In Terran Conflict's Operation Final Fury plot, the last mission has you attack and destroy the last Kha'ak hive in known space. Well and good, except there's multiple Kha'ak capital ships and defense platforms, not to mention endlessly respawning fighters, which requires most players to fly an M2 destroyer to survive. And the sector's jump-in point is about 250 kilometers from the objective, and an M2 can't even top 100 meters per second. So after the initial fight with a defense platform at the jump point, you're left crawling laboriously across the sector with nothing breaking the monotony except occasional raids by fighters that can't even dent your shields and are promptly splattered by your flak mounts. Most players use this time to do admin work on their trade empire and/or grab a sandwich.
 * The Hub plot is a huge Guide Dang It: nobody In-Universe warns you that you'll have to build about fifty chip plants well in advance of the final stage and use multiple TL heavy transports as warehouses in order to complete the plot in less than several months real time. Fortunately this Scrappy Level has a reward that matches the effort: in addition to your newfound control over the game's Portal Network via the Hub itself, the factories you built for the plot will make stupid amounts of money afterwards.
 * That One Sidequest: Every Escort Mission except the one in X3: Terran Conflict's Terran Plot (which is the exception that proves the rule). See that page for the reasons why players avoid them like the plague.
 * "Follow Ship", because it takes forever since you can't just call up the quest giver and tell him the target's destination, even though it's prominently displayed in the target's infobox. "Retrieve Stolen Ship" because you have to make the pilot bail out, which requires you to Cherry Tapping the target until the Random Number God smiles on you.
 * They Changed It, Now It Sucks:
 * The reaction of some of the fan base to the fact that X: Rebirth will restrict the player to personally flying one roughly M6-size ship (as opposed to any manned, non-Kha'ak vessel in the universe for every other game except X:BtF ).
 * The Albion Skunk's Attack Drones have taken flak as well: though you can take control of them remotely, if the drone gets blown up you return to controlling the Albion instead of dying. This takes some of the danger out of being a fighter jock, for those who enjoy it.
 * Another thing much of the fan base is up in arms over is that X: Rebirth will be sold exclusively through Steam, whereas the other entries have been available without it.
 * Ditto Albion Prelude. The forum moderators have basically put a moratorium on pro/con Steam discussion for the time being because they're tired of dealing with flame wars.
 * Some hardcore players were up in arms about how easy it is to get money in Terran Conflict compared to previous games (read: no longer takes 50 hours of gameplay to get a capital ship) by doing the entirely optional randomly generated missions.
 * Flame wars ensued over a rumor that X: Rebirth was going to be an MMORPG. ("It'll be an EVE Online clone!" "No, it won't! It'll bring new players!" "No, it won't! It'll wreck the modding community!" ) By far the biggest worry was that it would open the noob-friendly X community to MMO Trolls who pwn noobs For the Evulz and brag about it online. Thankfully, the flames promptly dissipated when Egosoft stopped laughing and confirmed the rumor was false.
 * It should be noted that the idea of an optional multiplayer feature (such as an online arena) was generally fairly well thought of.
 * They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Subverted. The opening cinematic for Terran Conflict claims that races outside the Solar System are experimenting with AGI. The only guy in the game proper doing anything remotely like that is . Then Albion Prelude comes out and turns it into a Brick Joke with the Argon Federation's artificially intelligent warships.
 * Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Via mods. Not nearly as much as, say, Star Trek: Bridge Commander, but there's still a few out there. For example, the Xtra Ships mod adds the Longsword and Longsword Mk. II, which don't sound that interesting until you look at them
 * Uncanny Valley: The Argon race portraits frequently dip down into the valley, and the Terran portraits to a lesser extent.
 * Unfortunate Implications: These really start to crop up if you start to think about who each race represents. Boron are squid, Paranid vultures, Split are warlike humans, Teladi lizards, and Kha'ak are insects/birds. Heck, there's even an unseen, non-space-capable Whale race that's protected by the Boron.
 * You Keep Using That Word: Occasionally the forums are the scene of minor arguments over whether or not M2s should be called destroyers (as they are officially) or battleships, as some players insist on calling them. This thread is a great example. The gist of the argument is that as of X3, they fit the definition of World War I battleships better than they do destroyers, being slow, tough heavy hitters with no fighters or other such deployable craft. Others point to the Imperial Star Destroyer as a comparison.
 * Made even more confusing by the ATF Valhalla and Terran Kyoto, which are M2s that can carry M6 corvettes.
 * Add to it that the ATF Valhalla is canonically an M0 Battleship. X3 simply doesn't have an M0 classification in its files, thus limiting the Valhalla to being a very slow and deadly M2.