X (video game): Difference between revisions

** 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]

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

* [[Armor-Piercing Attack]]: The Mass Driver main weapon will outright ignore ship mounted shields and damage the ship's (very expensive and frail) hull directly. It doesn't do that much damage, but since it's ammo based rather than energy based, it can keep firing until you run out of ammo (which on a large fighter, may be 10,000+ rounds).

*** [http://apricotmappingservice.com/autopillok.html Some believe the auto-pillock consists of a gerbil (or lemming) in a box, with a rough sketch of the sector map and a joystick.]

*** Fighter craft love to smash themselves into capital ships when attacking them. In [http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=295405 a series of tests] on the EGOSOFT forums, a player ordered swarms of fighters to attack a weaponless capital ship. Two waves, one of Busters and another of Mambas, suffered 50% losses because they were splatting themselves on the sides of their target.

** The player has a number of well-documented, non-exploit tricks available to him in combat that the AI is evidently not programmed to use, such as strafing and actually [[Macross Missile Massacre|launching missile barrages from M7M- and M8-class ships]], which are supposed to do that in the first place.

*** 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.

* [[Asteroid Miners]]: Ships can be outfitted with Ore Collectors. Blow up an asteroid with a big missile or a Mobile Drilling System, cut up the chunks into smaller pieces with your weapons, then pick it up. Players can sometimes see AI ships mining asteroids, but it's fairly rare.

* [[Asteroid Thicket]]: There can be upwards of 40 asteroids (each of which 1-2km in diameter) in a 60 kilometer radius. Most sectors have only a couple asteroids fairly spaced out, but sectors like Savage Spur have several dozen asteroids in a tiny area between the gates; the sector is a death trap for capital ships, more so if SETA is running on 10x.

* [[Attack Drone]]: Freighters ''love'' to drop these by the dozens to swarm attacking ships.

** ''Terran Conflict'' has two new types of enhanced drones, and a little squad of them (bought dirt-cheap) could easily kill the biggest ships in the game in less than a minute with almost no casualties.

** And that is why the random sector always has a crate of cells in it. It may be on the opposite side of a Kha'ak swarm, [[Oh Crap|or in a cloud of Xenon fighters,]] though.

* [[Boarding Party]]: You can recruit and train Marines/captured slaves to board enemy ships, murder the crew, and hack the central computer. When they board, they'll eject from your cargo bay and space walk to the enemy ship, or if you have Board Pods you load them into your missile tubes and fire it at the enemy ship. If the enemy ship has shields when your marines come into contact with it, it will fry them.

** Most of the race-neutral weapons like High Energy Plasma Throwers, Particle Accelerator Cannons, and Photon Pulse Cannons are all boring, but practical due to how common they are (There's over a dozen PPC factores in the game, but only 3-5 factories for Phased Shockwave Generators, for example).

** [[Attack Drone|Drone]] [[Spam Attack|Spam]] in X3. Beat the enemy by overloading your computer's processor.

* [[Enemy Mine]]: Advanced players who have befriended the [[Yakuza|Yaki]] often make use of their [[NGO Superpower]] status to steal ships from [http://x3wiki.com/index.php/Return_Ship "Return Ship"] missions, by docking the ship at the shipyard in Senator's Badlands. The [[Space Police]] sent to destroy the stolen ship will spawn and immediately come under attack by the Yaki, [[Curb Stomp Battle|who have an M2 Akuma at their disposal]]. [http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=3686774#3686774 This post is a great example.]

* [[Energy Ball]]: Several of the game's [[Energy Weapons]] fire spheroidal shots. The most obvious of these are the frigate-grade Incendiary Bomb Launcher and the destroyer-scale Photon Pulse Cannon.

* [[The Engineer]]: In ''Terran Conflict'', Mahi Ma of the Boron. {{spoiler|The guy manages to restore an ancient piece of [[Lost Technology]], the Hub, to full operation. All the player does is [[Fetch Quest|bring him supplies]].}}

* [[An Entrepreneur Is You]]: One of the main points of the game is building your own economic empire, with dozens of trading ships and hundreds of orbital factories.

* [[Fetch Quest]]: One category of side missions requires you to collect cargo from another station and deliver it to the client. Another requires you to obtain a crapload of cargo from wherever you can get it and deliver it to the client.

** The {{spoiler|Hub plot}} takes it [[Up to Eleven]]. It's an entire Fetch ''Plot''.

* [[Flavor Text]]: Just about every object in the entire game has its own little tale to tell.

* [[Flechette Storm]]: The Fragmentation Bomb Launcher use flechettes to damage targets.

** 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.

** The best defense is a good offense so in ''Albion Prelude'' missile frigates use... more missiles, firing swarms of countermissiles to intercept incoming missiles. While their ammo lasts.

* [[Global Currency]]: ''All'' races use [[We Will Spend Credits in The Future|Credits]], including the paranoid, isolationist Terrans who refuse to use ''any'' technology from the Commonwealth.

** The only thing that really seems to make either side good or evil is that the last time the two sides went to war, the Split and Paranid were the aggressors.

** Subverted by ''Albion Prelude''. The Argon open the war with the 30th-century equivalent of [[War On Terror|9/11]], and the Paranid join up with the Terrans.

== Tropes H-K ==

* [[Hemisphere Bias]]: Averted. The view of Earth from the Torus is centered on Ecuador rather than central Europe.

** In fact, one of the most effective dogfight tactics is to use missiles as a ''distraction'': you shoot a missile at the target and force him to evade or shoot it down, then make the kill with guns.

* [[Hit Scan]]: Beam weapons, originally a Khaak exclusive but since used by other races as well, are supposed to be this. It's only after you look at the technical data that it turns out to be a subversion: the game engine treats beam weapons as ''very'' fast projectile ones. This is normally transparent to the player because the projectiles are invisible, but occasionally -- typically while fighting very fast ships -- it can happen that the beam graphic crosses your target but the projectile isn't there yet, resulting in an irritatingly damage-free enemy.

* [[Infinity+1 Sword]]: The Springblossom corvette. It requires the completion of the Terran Conflict main plot, good Terran rank, ~20million credits for the corvette (more expensive than some of the station-transporting TL ships), and then hunting down the factories that produce the weapons for the ship (in a sector some 800 kilometers wide, with a huge asteroid blocking traffic through the center), then (usually) supplying the factories with the goods necessary to produce it because the sector has a pitiful amount of traders for its size. Once you've done all that, you've got what is effectively the best frigate, or best ship in the entire game. Crazy top speed (it outruns some scout ships!), crazy firepower, and a huge cargo bay equivalent to some transporter ships. The only time you'll ever need to use anything else is for some luxury taxi missions -- it has enough cargo space to carry enough ammo to kill destroyer class ships if you can wedge it into their blind spot.

* [[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 Death Radius]]: Phased Shockwave Generators on Paranid capital ships. Small range (about 1 kilometer), but they effectively instantly kill any fighter that gets inside the 1 kilometer bubble of doom.

* [[Intrepid Merchant]] / [[Proud Merchant Race]]: The Teladi, whose society is borderline-obsessively mercantile in nature. Also includes the player with dangerous travels for a handful of credits on the earlier stages and then vast trading empires to build on the endgame.

* [[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.

** Oh, and [[Everything's Better With Princesses|it has a princess, too]].

** 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.

 

* [[Lost Colony]]: The entire Argon race was created when a Terran fleet sealed itself in the X-universe gate system to protect Earth from the Xenon. The fleet's crews settled on Argon Prime, (named after their leader, Nathan R. Gunne) and slowly phased out all references to Earth, causing Earth's existance to become a fairy tale.

** The {{spoiler|Aldrin colony is one of Earth's original colonies, before the Xenon went crazy. It's separate from the X-universe gate system. The Terrans believed it was destroyed when the Xenon started attacking everything, though Aldrin is reunited with the Terrans at the end of the Terran plot in ''X3: Terran Conflict''.}}

** Also in this category are corporate missions that require you to make a delivery of missiles. In many cases, at least one will be a missile that does not appear in the game's market, and is only available as random drops from destroyed enemies.

* [[Macross Missile Massacre]]: ''Terran Conflict'' introduces the M7M missile frigate class. These ships can hold hundreds of missiles and use [[Macross Missile Massacre]] as their only form of attack. They can launch dozens of missiles in a matter of seconds, and the anti-fighter missiles each [[Recursive Ammo|split into 8 sub-missiles]]. They also [[Robotech]] in a spiral pattern. ''And'' they'll go after new targets if the original is destroyed while the missiles are en route.

"Humankind never forgot the lesson of AGI, never ventured to try out this concept once more, not in a thousand years, but then it was discovered that species from outside the solar system thought differently. The plague of AGI was being released on the universe once more. Again perhaps with the best of intentions and again however, with the deadliest of results. The government of Earth had to intervene, even if it meant [[Space Cold War|cold war]], even if it meant a cold war between brothers, and intervene Earth did.<br />

"This escalating conflict would be given a name by historians. [[Title Drop|Terran Conflict]]." }}

* [[Our Wormholes Are Different]]: All the races depend on the [[Lost Technology]] Jump Gates scattered around the universe to get around. {{spoiler|They occasionally ''disconnect'', separating colonies for hundreds of years, until they reconnect (if ever).}}

** According to the X-Superbox Encyclopedia, the wormholes are only different by using exotic matter to power the wormhole, and by using magnetic forces to flatten the wormhole to allow travel. if those factors didn't occur, it would be the exact same as [[Real Life]]'s theoretical wormholes.

== Tropes P-S ==

* [[Pacifist Run]]: Possible in all the games, if you skip the plot. Some players go for an all-out "Cannot kill any enemy, at all", others go with "My other ships can kill enemies", or "I will only kill enemies required by the plot lines". The goal for these is to keep your combat rank at "Harmless" -- getting one kill will bring the combat rank up, and it takes a long time for it to go back down to Harmless.

* [[Pass Through the Rings]]: the very first game, X-BtF, has you do that in the opening intro, to test your ship's systems. Also, several missions in X3R and X3TC have you racing against other <s>targets</s> ships; you do not technically fly through rings, but you do have to pass through arbitrarily placed checkpoints.

* [[Photoprotoneutron Torpedo]]: Several weapons in the series (particularly the later games) fit this. Ion Disruptor, Ion Pulse Generator, Ion Cannon, Ion Shard Railgun, and Photon Pulse Cannon. Oh, and the Kha'ak use kyon emitters, which fire a fictitious particle. The names are normally fairly justified by [[Flavor Text]]; for instance, the ISR "fires ionised 'shards' of super-heated plasma, which are then accelerated to high speeds using magnets."

* [[Reporting Names]]: A [[Justified Trope|justification]] for Earth-derived [[Arms and Armor Theme Naming]] of nonhuman-built ships. The Boron M1 Shark is unpronounceable in the original Boron, but the word used for it translates to "cartilaginous fish with lots of sharp teeth". Likewise, the Paranid M4 Pericles was probably named for a Paranid whose career paralleled that of the Athenian Pericles.

* [[Restart At Level One]]: The [[Player Character|Player Characters]] of ''X2: The Threat'' and ''X3: Reunion'' are the same guy (Julian Brennan).

** Played straight for building stations. They basically pop fully-formed out of your TL's cargo hold. Which enables the [[Colony Drop|station-bombing]] combat trick.

* [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge]]: The Terrans in ''Albion Prelude''. After the Torus Aeternal (a massive station wrapping around the Earth) is blown up by Saya Kho, they deploy their entire battlefleet to attack the Argon Federation.

*** OOS is also skewed in favor of weight of numbers, to the point where [http://x3wiki.com/index.php/Simulation_modeling a mob of M5 Jaguars can kill an M2 Python with about 20% casualties], something that [[Artificial Stupidity]] makes impossible IS.

** Even scripted plot missions follow no clear difficulty slope. A combat mission with a supporting NPC squad against a pack of heavy fighters and a frigate can be easily followed by a "patrol" mission on your lonesome against several heavy carriers. And then it's back to killing fighter squads again.

** Some of the slowest ships can actually be outrun by a basic passenger car, and that's ''before'' you account for air friction.

** Oh, and your ability to hail other ships and stations is cut off abruptly at 25 kilometers.

* [[Shiny-Looking Spaceships]]: The Paranid ships are basically flying mirrors, and the Terran ships are blindingly white, more so if you have Glow/Bloom enabled in the options.

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

** The ''Xtended Terran Conflict'' mod has tons of shout-outs in sector descriptions:

*** One Teladi sector mentions how the capital city on a planet is made largely of recycled ship hulls, and travel is done through [[Revelation Space|cable cars that use arms to swing between different cables.]] Another describes the ring around a planet in the background as being made up of thousands of small space stations, called the [[The Prefect|Rust Belt]].

* [[Sssssnaketalk]]: The Teladi, full stop.

* [[Stalking Mission]]: One of the optional, randomly generated missions that players can take in ''Terran Conflict''. A few pop up during the game plots, but they're usually mercifully short.

* [[Standard Time Units]]: Time is measured in Sezuras (1.7 seconds) Mizuras (96 Sezuras; 2 minutes and 43 seconds) Stazuras (96 Mizuras; 4 hours and 21 minutes) Tazuras (7 Stazuras; 1.27 days) Wozuras (7 Tazuras; 8.89 days) Mazuras (7 Wozuras; 62.23 days) and Jazuras (8 Mazuras; 1.36 years). Many players [[Internet Backdraft|did not like this]], so X3: ''Reunion'' has a ratio to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) units used in [[Real Life]].

** In ''Terran Conflict'', the "-zura" based system was [[Dummied Out]] in favor of Earth time units.