Knights of the Cardboard Castle

The X games are a series of space trading and combat games in the vein of David Braben’s Elite and well-known successors such as Wing Commander: Privateer and Freelancer. Made by a German developer, Egosoft, they have a reputation for being obtuse and tedious to play. Nevertheless, with three full games out so far plus various standalone expansions, they have managed to garner a devoted following. As a fan of the genre, I was willing to look past its faults and approached it as if it were a single-player version of Eve Online, which I admire greatly despite its reputation for being a boring spreadsheet game.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be a mistake. If anything, making any sort of progress in this game is even more tedious than Eve Online. At the same time, its interface is awkward, combat is uninspiring, the plot completely forgettable and did I mention how slow this game is?

The Good Stuff

• The game has nothing to be ashamed of in the graphics department. Planets look vibrant with life, even if you can’t land on them; space stations range in size from lonely outposts in a deserted expanse to colossal fortresses that will leave you awestruck, rendered with excruciating detail; ships come in a wide variety of designs and sizes etc. One thing I dislike is that the external camera view isn’t playable as there is no smart camera mode, so you don’t get to see your own ship in action most of the time.

• I love how the game handles docking with space stations. As in the original Elite, your ship actually does dock with them, whether by having clamps drop out of the station to lock onto your ship or having your ship maneuver into an internal docking bay. Then the station interaction menu pops up seamlessly on top of your cockpit view with no jarring cutscenes or screen changes at all. It’s a very slick and immersive experience.
• There are many different types of ships and as a general rule, if you can see it, you can fly it. This means everything from tiny recon fighters to massive capital ships. In the middle are corvettes, passenger liners and even heavy transports. Not everything is available for sale at shipyyards, but you can always hijack a ship and take it over.
• Naturally, larger ships come equipped with turrets in addition to the main, forward-facing guns. You can jump into any turret while giving control of the flying to the autopilot at any time or you can install software to control your turrets, so that they either aggressively attack all nearby enemies or try to protect the ship by knocking out incoming missiles and so forth. Different ships have different fittings restrictions of course, such as the number and type of shield generators it can support, the types of weapons that can be loaded into each bay, the laser recharge rate and even compatibility with missiles etc.

• The main draw of the X series however that sets it apart from all other games in the genre, is that you can control more than just your own ship at the same time. In fact, truly dedicated players will probably control multiple fleets, each of which are composed of several ships, spread throughout the universe at the same time. You can still only personally pilot one ship at a time of course, but all ships come with autopilots that will allow you to remotely give them simple commands. Buying and installing software packages for your ships will open access to more complex commands, including telling your ships to organize themselves into a wing to autonomously patrol an area for enemies, letting freighters automatically find and execute the best trades without any input from you or setting up supply runs to enable your combat ships to be automatically resupplied from your factories.
• Yes, not only can you build your own stations, which are factories that accept certain goods as inputs and processes them into the desired end product, you can even string them together to form a complex, so that the output of one factory automatically feeds into another factory that needs it. For example, a factory that makes missiles might take raw ore and warheads to make missiles. The ore itself will come from mining stations that need energy cells as its input and so forth.
• This means that given enough playing time, it is theoretically possible for players to build a vast empire consisting of factories that build everything you need and large roving fleets of ships to protect all your assets and expand your area of influence. Achieving this however will involve a truly stupendous number of game hours.

The Bad Stuff

• This game is slow. I mean it. It’s so slow that I wouldn’t play this game without a book or a magazine to read at the same time. Travel from one point to another takes a long time, especially if you’re flying a large, slow craft. And even that already takes into account the time compression which by default sets the game to run at six times normal speed. You can adjust this to run at up to ten times normal speed, but I’ve found that this causes strange things to happen, such as ships flying into stations and asteroids, so I’ve set it to eight times compression, which seems to work okay. If you try playing it without time compression, which is presented in the game as a device that must be purchased and installed on each ship, it might take an entire evening just to cross a single system in a slow freighter. It would be like watching grass grow.
• The slowness of travel is exacerbated by how much traveling you’re forced to do, at least until you manage to find where jump drives are sold and buy one for each of your ships. For one thing, your map of the universe starts out blank, so you need to manually travel to each sector to map them. Even within each sector, you need to fly around to discover which jumpgates and stations are present in them. Sometimes, as in the case of pirate bases, the stations are deliberately hidden out of the way of the main travel lanes, so you have to do some blind wandering to find them. This is why investing in upgraded sensors is a good idea. Jumpgates may not be immediately apparent too, and the manual even suggests trailing other ships to discover them.
• For another, not all goods are readily available everywhere. Jumpdrives are available only in a handful of stations throughout the entire universe so unless you do some Googling for spoilers, you’ll need to do a lot of exploring to find them. Similarly, when I first bought a ship that needed 25 Mj shields, I spent an entire day of playing time just running around trying to find a place that had them in stock. It’s extremely frustrating. Over time, you do learn which goods are available in which sectors, so for example, the all important Trading Software MK 3, which allows your freighters to become autonomous traders, are available only in Teladi space. But it takes a long time to build up that body of knowledge.

• Combined with the difficulty of earning money, especially early in the game, this makes any progress at all a terrible grind that rivals the worst MMO games. A decent combat ship for example, might cost 6 million credits, while a beginner mission might make you 25k, assuming that you get missions that are appropriate for your skill level and the type of ship that you have. Have fun grinding. This is why the Argon Trader is by far the easiest start as it gives you a decent sized trading vessel plus a small scout with which to explore the universe in. It is not unusual at all you spend a whole evening playing this game and find that you have made no progress at all because you couldn’t find any missions that are appropriate or because you spent all your time running around looking for a place to buy a piece of equipment you need.
• To add insult to injury, mission rewards don’t seem to be remotely balanced in the least. You might get a combat mission that pays 50k and one that pays 500k and find the difficulty for the two missions to be about the same. Or you might get a mission to kill someone that pays 100k, spend a lot of time flying between sectors to track him down, and finally not get paid at all because an NPC killed your target before you could finish him off. Personally, the most lucrative missions I’ve found were passenger delivery missions in Terran space. You just need a fast, reasonably-sized ship with life support systems for your cargo bay and you’re set. I can earn more than 900k for a single such mission with no risk at all and letting the autopilot do all the flying.
• Despite the variety of ship types and weapons, ship configuration turns out not to very deep at all. You always want to buy the best possible shields and engine upgrades for your ships. Software packages and weapons will depend on what role you want your ship to play and that’s it. Due to this, combat is sterile and frankly somewhat boring. I suppose it is realistic that victory to whoever brings the most guns, and in this game, you can win whatever challenge is thrown your way simply by bringing a larger fleet to help you out. But I’d have liked some actual tactical choices and the possibility of smart flying.

• There are a number of plotlines in the game which provide the story. The Terran plot which forms the backbone of this particular installment of the game offers some nice rewards for completion, but the missions are uniformly boring and you can barely tell what is going on most of the time. The briefings are also so stupid that it makes you feel like punching whoever wrote them. For example, one mission tells you to travel to a particular sector of space. When you arrive there, it then tells you to drop off a satellite there. But chances are unless you’re following a walkthrough, you didn’t bring one, so you need to backtrack to a station which sells them. Why didn’t the game tell me to bring a satellite there in the first place? At one point in the plot, the mission happily tells you to jump to another system. If you’ve been doing nothing but following the plot all along, you probably won’t even know what a jumpdrive is, let alone have one equipped on your ship.

I can’t say that playing X3: Terran Conflict was a complete waste of time since I did finish reading a book while playing it (actually it was an omnibus collection of three novels), but it says a lot that I think even Eve Online is more accessible and more forgiving than this game. I can imagine that it does have a certain appeal to that class of gamer who would actually be willing to put in hundreds of hours to build a space empire from scratch. This is the kind of people who spend weeks working on complicated Excel spreadsheets to find out the most profitable ways to link stations together. But the vast majority of gamers should stay far away. For my part, I came and saw to satisfy my curiosity, and I got scared enough to never come close to this series ever again.