Well, this is an old topic... was looking in google for something to mess around with. Just played "Space Force:Rogue Universe" to get my space sim fix, and although the game runs smoothly, and the graphics are pretty good, the game itself lacks. Basically two days of wasted time, and mainly cause I was trying to find the time and cloaking device parts, which turns out, the publisher goofed and didn't have two pieces in the game. The story could have been much better, though I didn't like the linear-ness of it, nor the poor voice acting and mistranslation and stuff... they need an editor to read through the dialogues for proper English translation!
Anyhow, yeah -- X2 and X3 were really good games, to me. I absolutely LOVE the scripting engine, how you can buy ships and get the AI pilot to do its thing, station building and management... basically a very complex game, with a mostly usable interface that makes it pretty simple to manage. You start the game with a very 'set' plot, but you can opt out of it, and just go freelance, or there are points in the main plot where the story waits for you to complete an action before it continues, and you can then go about money making, bounty hunting, trading, station/empire building, and so on. It really is a good game, and I played X2 first, loved it other than a few annoying bugs and interface issues, which in turn got me to get X3, which expands on X2, ditches some of the annoyances, adds a few others, but overall an awesome game. Vanilla X3 is good, but I'd highly suggest once you play the story once, you should try X3: XTM (eXTended Mod). As well as a few scripts to help you out (I have a ton of trading scripts, and a few smarter turret AI scripts for my capital class ships [X2-AEGIS, X3-MARS or xOneTCS], or add much needed features.
One of the biggest things I like about the X series is the actual living universe, where you leave a sector, and it still is running. No 'magically appearing' crap (well, limited anyways). If you are in Argon Prime, every ship and station are still 'live' in paranid Prime, or Kingdoms End, as well as every other sector. Jump drive aside (I kinda wish VS has something kinda similar, but not *quite* the same), if the player wants to go from one station to another, you would leave, head to the jump gate, and keep trekking along till you get to the sector the destination station is in, fly to it, dock, and all that jazz. Thing that I like is that the AI does the same EXACT thing. No magically appearing resources, either. Station sends out a ship to buy some resource, and that ship dies, it has to send out another. If that happens too often, and the station doesn't have enough of the resources to build its product, the product doesn't get built. The game starts with a very broken economy as well. You kinda have to take a peek around at the stations and figure out what it will take to kick-start things. In X2, it was energy cells. Get a good SPP (Solar Power Plant) set of stations going, and you fix the economy... and make a damned nice profit doing so. (In X's defense, whoever said X's economy model was bad earlier must not have traded enough to find out where the economy was broken to fix it, or gotten any of the economy fixing mods, one of the few games I *don't* see [too many] goods magically appear in every station on its own)
There are a few things that can be annoying with X2/3 though. The 'sectors' and the universe are small. Too small.
And FLAT. The flight dynamic is not Newtonian at all, more like an atmospheric flight model. Granted, I don't want a 100% Newtonian model, but i think they went too far with taking the physics out. Oddly SF:RU wasn't too bad of a model, but still think VS has the best flight model so far. Anyhow, one other things that is a huge annoyance is the freaking power-hungry engine. Holy crap X2/3 can eat a computer alive... especially in capital-ship battles with all the bullets flying around. I understand that the game *is* processing OOS (out of sector) stuff for every ship, but the main hit is with the graphics. SF:RU looks really nice as far as the graphics, and doesn't get eaten alive for it, which is something that I hope the guys at egosoft can manage next time around. And in X2/3, ships *do* magically get spawned by a hard-coded "GOD" event system that tries to keep the empires running, something that infinitely annoys me cause I was trying for a while to make the empires and economy more "realistic", like they can't just magically have stations and ships appear in a sector that you'd basically taken over and start wiping you out (big problem in Xenon sectors, not quite so bad in X3 as it is in X2).
I can definitely say that X3 is enjoyable despite its annoyances though. I just hope that Vegastrike can get to a point where it can outclass the X:series. Hopefully without taking 30 years to do so
Now, I'm not un-realistically griping. I know that VS is a free program made with people's free time, and that the programmers and designers and various other people have to study, work, eat, sleep, spend time with family and friends, fornicate with the gf/bf... just sometimes it gets to me that VS shows so much promise, but moves at a snails' pace. Just wish I had a lick of coding experience to help out. I can script... but not code
Make me a scripting engine that can do any and everything, kinda like X, but better in that *nothing* is hard-coded. [Death to GOD!]
I'd love to see everything scriptable, from combat control, to trading, missions, everything. If someone can make the AI smarter, then they can script it in. If someone wants to come up with a better economy model, they can. I'd personally be all over economy and empire AI. Maybe even some of the flight/fight AI. We'd basically have a semi-static few systems, and then the rest generated at the beginning of a new game (which should be stored in it's own profile, not in the main game!!). So then, you'd have the main empire/faction sectors with set starting bases and goods, and enough resources for the beginning economy for each empire. Then the scripted AI could define rules on how they expand...
(I'm stopping this post cause I'm wandering now. Play X2&3 -- they're awesome games!!)
a la WoW which kinda sucks on my wallet if you know.
Next thing I have to do is to plant a recon satellite in a Kha'ak sector (tricky).