X (video game): Difference between revisions

*** The latter behavior is corrected in ''Albion Prelude'' to a rather frightening degree. As long as they can maintain their stores of ammunition, AI missile bombers and frigates will not hesitate to pour long-range ordnance into a sector until everything in it has been purged of life.

** Your trading ships and Universe Traders will [[Too Dumb to Live|blissfully fly through Xenon and Pirate sectors]] without any regard for their life. Universe Traders will ''sometimes'' jump away when they come under attack, but ''not'' when the enemy is coming towards them - the pilots don't seem to ever notice 3 kilometer long destroyers bearing down on them.

* [[Artistic License Economics]]: Taken [[Up to Eleven]]. Not only would the economy not work in [[Real Life]], ''it doesn't work [[In-Universe]] either''. The most infamous example is the Terrans, whose economy is perpetually stagnated, with goods sitting in factories unsold. Doesn't help that the Terran stations and sectors are ''massive'' and have a docking corridor that's the size of a Commonwealth station; anything that gets in the way will cause a docking trading ship to avert and restart its docking path. The game's GOD engine (regulates the economy, and what is spawned/removed) also likes to destroy Terran stations because they don't receive their necessary resources, which happens a lot since there will be 3-4 sectors between a technology factory and the ore or food that it needs to run. Terrans fail civil planning forever.

** This is an opportunity in disguise. The Terrans are merely waiting for someone (i.e. you) to revitalize their economy by placing in their sectors factories that produce what their stations lack; doing this properly can bring stupid amounts of money to entrepreneur-type players.

* [[Crazy Prepared]]: Among the functions of the popular MARS script is automatically switching guns in and out of a ship's gun batteries based on what the battery is targeting. You have to have the spare guns in your cargo bay, meaning you might end up carrying two or three entire loadouts (anti-fighter, anti-capital, and maybe anti-corvette).

* [[Crew of One]]: One man scout ships? Sure. Corvettes the size of a large yacht? No problem! Battleships that are 5 kilometers long? Piece of cake; I don't need a crew! The player never needs a crew on any of his ships (save for Sector and Universe traders, which still has just one pilot), though this is averted for the AI - if you open a comm channel with an AI corvette, frigate, destroyer, or carrier, you'll get a list of names, such as the Captain and navigation officer.

* [[Crippling Overspecialization]]: Boron missile frigates drop ''all'' point defenses for [[Macross Missile Massacre|more missile launchers]]. This essentially means they have no way to protect themselves from incoming missiles - save for spamming their ''own'' missiles at enemy missiles and hoping they hit.

** This was changed in ''Albion Prelude'', where ''all'' ships can mount Mosquito missiles, which coupled with a Bonus Pack script provide a workable missile shield. Missile frigates take this one step further and automatically provide this ability in vanilla Albion Prelude - except that they use all their launch tubes simultaneously, creating a Macross Missile Defense.

* [[Game Mod]]: ''And how!'' With the in-game script editor and external modding tools, players can do pretty much anything from simple tweaks and added functionality to new ships and full-blown conversions. Arguably most famous of these is X3's ''Xtended'' mod, which impressed Egosoft so much that several elements (and the modders that developed them) were integrated into ''Terran Conflict'', and Xtended is being remade for ''Terran Conflict''.

** It's worth mentioning that there are at least two mods that attempt to solve one of the game's worst problems: the '''extreme''' slowness of the ships, which is a source of all kinds of bad things. The result is completely different gameplay mechanics: waiting plays a much smaller part, fighting is ''much'' more dynamic and challenging and everything requires significantly less [[Willing Suspension of Disbelief]] to digest.

* [[Glass Cannon]]: arguably, some M5 scout ships. Most M5s do not count as they have fairly pitiful guns that restrict them to fighting at most M4 medium fighters if they hope to survive, but a few of them can mount fairly powerful medium missiles, and a [[Macross Missile Massacre|rapid-fire barrage]] of those can be troublesome even for heavy fighters. On the other hand, they blow up if their pilot sneezes too hard...

** The M7M missile frigates and M8 bombers introduced in ''Terran Conflict'' also fall into this category. Missile barrages from these ships can destroy virtually anything, but non-player-owned M7Ms and M8s are relatively easy to kill (at least from another warship's standpoint) because the AI by default does not use their [[Macross Missile Massacre|greatest advantage]] effectively. Also, [[Point Defenseless|they are very sparse in point-defense, and in some cases have none at all]].

** Played with ''a la'' ''[[Babylon 5]]'' in recent games. On certain fighters you can see brief puffs of propellant from maneuvering jets when you hit the rudder or whatever.

* [[Omnicidal Maniac]]: The Xenon.

** The Terrans have no named government, but their space operations are controlled by the United Space Command, and any operations dealing with [[A Is]] are run by the AGI Task Force

* [[One-Hit-Point Wonder]]: Any ship in ''X: Beyond the Frontier'' and ''X: Tension'', once stripped of its shields, will be blown away by its pilot sneezing.

* [[Planet Terra]]: In ''X3'', humans from the Sol System are referred to as "Terrans", but the planet is still called Earth.

* [[Player Headquarters]]: The... [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Player Headquarters]], first introduced in ''Reunion''. You gain the Headquarters by doing a sub-plot in each game. The HQ lets you reverse engineer ships (to gain their blueprints), scrap ships (for resources), build ships (from learned blueprints and resources), repair ships (using some resources), and adjust the hue and saturation values for non-Boron ships - allowing you to make pink Split ships, or make the flames on your Pirate Nova bright blue. The HQ has a ''massive'' storage bay for storing all your crap, 12 external docking ports for capital ships, 20 external docking ports for freighters and corvettes, and a [[Bigger on the Inside|infinitely large internal docking bay for fighters]], making it an excellent parking location for your unused ships.

* [[Portal Network]]: The only way to get around the universe is by using jumpgates or a jumpdrive (which teleports you to a jumpgate of your choice).

* [[Point Defenseless]]: Partially averted. Most ships (even some fighters) have at least one turret theoretically capable of shooting down incoming missiles. Some get through, some don't, depending on the loadout of the ship in question.

 

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