X (video game): Difference between revisions

* [[Abnormal Ammo]]: The Terran [[Wave Motion Gun|Point Singularity Projector]] shoots what are essentially black holes at enemy ships.

* [[Abusing the Kardashev Scale For Fun And Profit]]: The Outsiders in the backstory and Encyclopedia are full blown Type IVs, and the Ancients are borderline Type IVs. [[Dyson Sphere]] and Matroshka Brain civilizations are mentioned, and they fit into the borderline Type IIs. However, all the races the player actually interacts with are at best high-end Type Is.

* [[The Aesthetics of Technology]]: Terran ships, despite being the most advanced ships, [http://i.imgur.com/SyPVb.jpg don't look much more advanced than the modern Space Shuttle] - just a lot more clean and streamlined. The Paranid, the second most advanced race, use [http://i.imgur.com/VG130.jpg very high-tech looking ships] with lots of curves and shiny hulls. The Teladi, who buy or reverse engineer all their technology from the other races and use lower tech weaponry, have [http://i.imgur.com/Z17s7.jpg cobbled-together ships], though they are usually just as effective as the other race's ships. The Pirates on the other hand, use scavenged and spot-repaired ships, with their capital ships cobbled together from the hulks of old transporter ships, and it shows when you look at their stats - almost all the Pirate ships have terrible stats compared to the original race's ships. Boron ships ''look'' like they ought to be superior to everything else, but really only excel as transports.

* [[AI Is a Crapshoot]]: The modern-day Xenon are descended from the Terraformers, originally built by the Terrans to terraform worlds. After a badly-written ''software update'' they begin to 'terraform' people, cities, and stations. Eventually they {{spoiler|gained true sentience}}. This is why you bug-check your changes before you implement them, people.

** The [[Space Cold War|Terran Conflict]] turned into a hot war after Saya Kho blew up the Torus Aeternal in ''X3: Albion Prelude'', a Planetary Societal Disruption for Earth. A year later the [[Precursors]] shut down the gate system ([[Wild Mass Guessing|maybe to prevent the younger races from obliterating themselves]]), which likely caused Galactic Societal Collapse.

* [[Apocalypse Wow]]: The destruction of the Torus Aeternal in ''Albion Prelude'' is shown in [http://store.steampowered.com/video/201310?snr=1_5_9__400 the opening cinematic].

** The trailer for ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlAWC2HSOYM Nautilus]'', a fake film set in the ''X-Universe'' about Squiddy McSquid came out on April Fools' Day.

** 2012's April Fools' shows that ''X: Rebirth'' has a [http://www.egosoft.com/news/images/news_2012_03_29_001.jpg Dance Dance Revolution style method of bartering prices]

* [[Arbitrary Maximum Range]]: All weapons have a maximum range, the longest being 8 kilometers on a capital ship cannon. The effective range of most weapons is lower than the listed max range, because at long range the target will usually avoid the [[Painfully Slow Projectile|Painfully Slow Projectiles]].

* [[Area of Effect]]: Phased Shockwave Generators and Plasma Burst Generators.

* [[Artificial Brilliance]]: Rapid-response navy ships in ''Albion Prelude'' will jump around the universe to respond to threats to their installations and ships. They'll also jump away from combat if they start taking too much damage.

* [[Artificial Stupidity]]:

*** Only if you try to repair it with your spacesuit's repair laser. Just send the damn thing to a shipyard and be done with it. As for equipping it, by the time you have an Aran you're likely to have enough money to finance some shield generator factories.

** M2 destroyers as player ships, because they're too slow and can't carry a fighter for use as a captain's yacht (for docking at stations without capital ship docking clamps). Most players prefer high-end M6 corvettes (which don't ''need'' a captain's yacht), M7 frigates (versatile, not horrifically slow, and many can carry a small number of fighters), or the fastest of the M1 carriers (ditto).

* [[The Battlestar]]: The Split M7 Panther, which has a fighter bay rivaling a carrier and a decent number of frigate-sized guns. M1 Carriers also pack a good number of guns behind powerful shields, though they don't have the stamina of M7 or M2.

** The ATF M1 Woden is a variant on their primary M1, the Odin. It trades off fighter capacity for additional weapons power. [[Dummied Out|It doesn't spawn]] in vanilla ''X3TC'', but it did make it into ''Albion Prelude''.

* [[Big No]]: Terran and Argon pilots usually scream "NOOOOO!" when killed.

* [[Bigger On the Inside]]: Cargo bays, due to quantum compression. Ships not much larger than a modern F-16 jet can fit several dozen people in their cargo bays - which would be about the size of a refrigerator.

* [[Black Box]]: The jumpgates play with this trope. While operation is terribly easy -- push a spaceship in one gate, and it'll pop out the other gate in the pair a few seconds later, no matter how far away -- no one in the Commonwealth understands anything but the lies-to-children version of how they work. While there are a few scientists capable of repairing damaged gates, no one even thinks about trying replication or reconfiguration, and the irregular outages or changes in the system caused by meddling precursors is treated like mystery or even legend where it's not just a natural risk of the gates. The species that actually made the system in the first place not only consider it [[The World Is Not Ready|outside of the range of understanding of the normal races]], they think it's impossible for a species to understand without getting [[Abusing the Kardashev Scale For Fun And Profit|a few points higher on the Kardashev scale]]. Then the [[Humans Are Special|Terran humans get involved]], and not only get the theory down and create a new gate on their own, but also create a Jumpdrive that's a ''separate'' Black Box to everyone else in the setting.

* [[Blind Jump]]: The Unfocused Jumpdrive will randomly generate a sector, and warp the player to it; complete with radio hash and distant visible galaxies off in the distance. It's great for escaping your doom, but you better hope you brought energy cells for the return trip, [[Unwinnable|otherwise you'll be stranded forever]].

* [[Boss in Mook Clothing]]: Pirates armed with Plasma Burst Generators, and Xenon fighters armed with Pulsed Beam Emitters. Then there is the dreaded Phased Shockwave Generator in X3:R, which is a Plasma Burst Generator with a 90 degree sphere of doom ahead of the firing ship. Thankfully nerfed to capital ship-only in X3:TC.

** M8 Bombers in ''Albion Prelude''. In ''Terran Conflict'', they were largely free kills because they spawned with hardly any missiles. Between the games, they [[Took a Level In Badass]], and are now capable of killing at least some ships before running out.

* [[Casual Interstellar Travel]]: Space is pretty damn crowded with (damn annoying) civilian ships.

* [[Cherry Tapping]]: Pounding on a slower ship who cannot turn around to face you with a weak weapon. The bailing out mechanic actually encourages it: each hit on a ship with shields down has a chance of causing the pilot to abandon the ship, leaving it for you to claim it and use it or selling it. The Pulsed Beam Emitter, which does tremendous shield damage but almost no hull damage, is very popular because of its ability to force rival pilots out while leaving their ship relatively undamaged.

** The player risks being on the receiving end of this in Xenon and Kha'ak sectors. Such sectors will spawn enemies without end.

* [[Deflector Shields]]: Every single ship has these, you're dead without them. (Even Goners, the space monks, use them)

* [[Derelict Graveyard]]: the "President's End" sector, which is full of wrecked stations and ships from a Kha'ak attack. Some other sectors have smaller graveyards.

* [[The Don]]: Don Marani in ''Reunion''

*** {{spoiler|A solution to the must-do [[Escort Mission|Escort Missions]] lies in an exploit: since the game only begins spawning enemies for the mission once the player enters the freighters' sector, ''simply never be in the same sector as the freighters.''}}

* [[Even Evil Has Standards]]: In ''Albion Prelude'', the normally xenophobic and totalitarian Paranid are so disgusted by {{spoiler|the fall of the Torus}} that they ally with the Terrans.

** Many ship models have spinning components, just because. Some (like on the OTAS M2 Boreas) are justified by looking like sensor dishes, or by being an engine turbine in the case of the Boron Megalodon.

* [[Explosions in Space]]: Capital ships create a giant white fireball and a large shockwave when blown to bits. It has no discernible effect on any craft passing by.

** Some Split ships, by fluff, weren't even designed with shields in mind. The design team clean forgot about it and later had to be retrofitted. Starburst and Arrow, rather than being fighters, are supposed to be used for racing.

** "Raider" ship variants. Shield capacity has been reduced in exchange for more powerful engines and better weapon energy generators.

** Disabled because they would instant-kill any enemy (and the player too). Kyons were nerfed from X2 onwards for that reason.

** Kyons are laser beams in appearance only. Apparently the game engine can't handle actual beams, so the Kyon Emitters are in fact projectile-based weapons with beam graphics and very fast, invisible projectiles. This is sometimes noticeable when targeting fast ships, as the beam looks as if it hit, but the ship takes no damage as the projectile(s) missed.

* [[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]].

** Averted to an [[Egregious]] extent with Terran weapons in ''Terran Conflict'': stations can only stock ''two'' of each gun. This is thankfully fixed in ''Albion Prelude''.

* [[Infinite Supplies]]: All ships have infinite fuel for their engines and weapons, and infinite food. The only things that run out are Energy Cells (from using the Jump Drive) and ammunition for bullet based weapons. The description for the Teladi Geochen in ''Albion Prelude'' however, mentions that it has a spacious cargo bay for food supplies on long voyages.

* [[Informed Equipment]]: When you fit a gun to a slot on a ship, a cannon appears in a corresponding spot on the ship's model. It looks exactly the same no matter what gun you put there. Other equipment doesn't even do that much.

* [[Instant Awesome Just Add Dragons]]: The ''XTM'' mod for ''Reunion'' and the ''Xtended Terran Conflict'' mod for ''Terran Conflict'' adds the Shivan Dragon, which is a dragon that breathes in space, shoots lasers from its mouth, and attacks everything in sight.

* [[Invisible Wall]]: Sectors are spherical, and there is an invisible barrier at the edge (which is ~4,000 kilometers out). Most evident in the {{spoiler|Hub}} sector, where you can slip behind the gates, see out of the {{spoiler|Hub}}, and butt up against an Invisible Waist High Fence.

* [[ISO Standard Human Spaceship]]: Argon, Teladi, and Terran ships.

* [[Jack of All Stats]]: Interceptors amongst strike craft, as well as Argon ship designs as a whole. The Terran ships are the upscale version of the [[Jack of All Stats]]; they're very fast, very well shielded, have high cargo capacity, and very powerful. The only downside to Terran ships are their limited weapon selection, especially frustrating on fighters and frigates, and the scarcity of their weapons.

** "Hauler" ship variants straddle the line between this and [[Mighty Glacier]]. They trade off some gun power for a larger cargo bay and sometimes tougher shields. Particularly with the Falcon Hauler, said larger cargo bay often allows players to rig them as missile boats.

** The Gauss cannon is ''very'' popular for player-piloted Teladi M7 Shrikes, because it can be mounted to the flank turrets, enabling it to duplicate the Panther's feat of taking on multiple heavy capitals. In ''Albion Prelude'', Gauss Cannons got a major buff in that all ships have higher amounts of hull hitpoints - the Gauss Cannon has the highest damage per second against hull, whereas the other capital ship weapons have most of their damage devoted to killing shields - useful in previous games, not so much in ''Prelude''.

* [[The Kingdom]]: [[All There in the Manual|According to the X3TC manual]], the Boron Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy akin to Great Britain in [[Real Life]] (i.e. Queen Atreus is a figurehead, with the real power in the hands of elected officials). Otherwise it fits the trope pretty much perfectly: it is generally considered good-aligned, controls the fewest sectors (among the Commonwealth races, anyway), and is constantly under threat from [[The Empire|the Split]]. They're also the only people to develop ion weapons.

* [[Know When to Fold Em]]: Mostly averted. [[Suicidal Overconfidence|Usually the AI will continue fighting even if the battle is hopeless.]] But every once in a while, you'll encounter a foe that runs away from overwhelming force, such as the last M5 survivor of a pirate fighter squadron fleeing at top speed from an oncoming player-piloted frigate.

** Also averted in the case of the "Surrender" option in dialogue with other ships (as in telling the other guy to surrender). It appears to do exactly nothing.

** The M7 Panther's laser generators were weakened in ''Albion Prelude'' to compensate for it having by far the largest fighter capacity of any M7.

* [[NGO Superpower]]: Pirates and Yaki as of ''Terran Conflict'' have access to capital ships (and lots of them), despite having no government and no central organization. The corporations also have their own navies - OTAS in particular fields two to three of their [[Game Breaker|Boreas]] destroyers, several dozen transporter ships, swarms of fighters, and multiple frigates.

* [[Nintendo Hard]]: Dead-Is-Dead mode. If you die, the game will ''delete your save game''. This includes when the game is a bastard and [[Tele Frag|teleports a capital ship onto your tiny fighter]] when you come out a jumpgate.

* [[No Fair Cheating]]:

*** Not true: the cops aren't invincible, so you can actually destroy them. There's a way to do it that will avoid reputation hits; it requires a spare jumpdrive and a good supply of energy cells. You see, the [[Space Police]] will only spawn once. See the trick in [[Enemy Mine]] above, or failing that, jump it to one side of a Xenon sector, wait for the police to spawn, and jump it to the sector on the other side of the Xenon sector. The police will follow and be attacked by the Xenon. On the off chance they survive, jump the ship back to the first sector.

* [[No Endor Holocaust]]: Averted in ''Albion Prelude''. The game mentions that debris from the Torus killed millions.

* [[No Such Thing As Alien Pop Culture]]: ''In Terran Conflict'': A blink-and-you'll-miss-it aversion. Randomly-picked flavor text for some [[Fetch Quest|Fetch Quests]] and bits of junk carried by certain NPC ships point to alien sports and advertising, among other things. ''Reunion'' had the Bulletin Board System, you'd get bits of news and culture in it (along with missions).

* [[Nose Art]]: ''X2: The Threat'' allows you to import an image file from your computer that would be applied as nose art to all your ships and stations. It could be a pin-up, a coat of arms, whatever. ([[Game Spot]]'s reviewer used a character from ''[[The Simpsons]]''.)

* [[Nuclear Weapons Taboo]]: Partial: while nuclear ''weapons'' are fine, "large scale" nuclear ''reactors'' aren't, and stations and ships are forced to purchase energy cells produced at ''solar power plants'' in order to manufacture goods or use jumpdrives. "Large scale" apparently doesn't include battleship reactors with outputs capable of razing planet surfaces, strangely.

** It leads to a bit of [[Fridge Logic]] when the player wonders how exactly does a spaceship generate enough energy to run all of its systems, but needs separately provided energy cells for the jumpdrive.

* [[Obvious Beta]]: The games tend to ship with a plethora of bugs, from annoying to game breaking. ''Reunion'' suffered from this in its plot (which was often impossible to complete), and ''Terran Conflict'' was a massive system hog for several months after release.

* [[Old School Dogfighting]]: Played down to the letter. A character in the later parts of the game who flies into a Xenon sector to duke it out can bring in a few battleships and carriers, as well as combat drones, resulting in hundreds of ships battling, and dozens of dogfights going on at once.

* [[One Federation Limit]]: Argon Federation. Boron Kingdom. Split Dynasty. Paranid Empire. Teladi Space Company. And that's just the Commonwealth.

** 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 Product Planet|One Product System]]: Mostly averted, but some systems specialize in producing only one or two types of goods. Asteroid Belt in ''Terran Conflict'' mostly produces just different types of minerals, for example.

* [[One Nation Under Copyright]]: The Teladi Space Company. Their entire race is organized like one [[Mega Corp]]. The head honcho, the Chairman (his name is Ceo at the time of the games), and business and smaller companies are arranged like subsidies or divisions. However, they employ an actual police force and a proper military.

** The games also feature an energy example: their weapons and shields are much weaker than anything in a sci-fi setting has a right to be. Most transport ships and fighters as of ''Terran Conflict'' have no more than about 100 megajoules of shielding. Burning a gallon of gasoline releases about 130 MJ. There is, of course, a difference between releasing 130 MJ over the course of burning a gallon of gasoline, and releasing it all at once, but the point remains.

*** The most powerful weapon in the game, the nuclear-tipped Hammerhead missile, releases 1.2 gigajoules (enough to destroy fighter swarms and all but one M6). By contrast, Little Boy, the nuclear fission bomb that demolished Hiroshima in 1945, released somewhere between 54 and 75 ''tera''joules (at least 45,000 times more). The major powers of the X-Universe would lose to ''modern-day Earth''.

** [[Tropers/Star Sword|StarSword]] made it a goal to build an impenetrable blockade against all Xenon sectors, a strategy that involved devoting a considerable percentage of his [[Memetic Mutation|profitsss]] to the construction and equipment of Osaka destroyers.

** Spaceweed Adict wrote a thread chronicling a war he waged against the Terrans. He succeeded in taking and holding every sector save Earth, where [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard]].

** Never mind the Enhanced Nova. The Terran start in ''Albion Prelude'' starts you off in a Katana corvette.

* [[Shaggy Dog Story]]: Arguably the Terran Conflict. As the Argon start The Big Push into Sol, the Ancients shut down the whole gate network, leaving everyone in the known universe trapped where they are.

* [[Short Titles]]: A single character! As such, the series is usually called the ''[[X-Universe]]'', or the name of the latest numbered version (X3).

* [[Shout Out]]:

* [[We Buy Anything]] / [[We Sell Everything]]: Averted. Each station will only buy the resources for the products they manufacture, and will only sell these products (and that is if the owner allows trade for the station). Trade Stations are slightly more permisive, as they will buy and sell for the average price all wares in their stock list; the list varies greatly between host races and slightly between the stations of a given race.

* [[We Will Spend Credits in The Future]]: The Teladi backed the creation of the unified currency between the Commonwealth races. Prior to that each race used its own currency. The Terrans presumably changed to credits between the events of ''X3: Reunion'' and ''X3: Terran Conflict''.

{{quote| '''Computer announcer:''' Fighter ships from the Argon Federation are now being launched. They have orders to kill.}}

:: The station or ship will turn hostile and the sector police will attack. This becomes fairly annoying during station defense missions, where friendly fire to the station you're protecting is a constant hazard.

[[Category:Wide Open Sandbox]]

[[Category:X]]