Space combat sims, particularly open "world" ones, has been a topic I've followed often over the years. They were among my favorite genre of PC game in the early days and they fell out of popularity for a long time.
The X series has always been one of the more complex of the single player offerings in this genre. Later installments featured the ability to eventually own and pilot nearly every ship you could encounter in the game, up to and including capital ships. You could maintain entire fleets, buy space stations, and take part in a dynamic economy. Most of the games in the series were solid except for an ill conceived reboot called X: Rebirth that abandoned everything that people actually liked about X games.
X4: Foundations is a proper sequel in the series, bringing back much of what fans really wanted: epic scale and no restrictions.
I've been having a blast with this game since it came out. It's obtuse as hell, and they only recently posted an instruction manual as a wiki but the depth is pretty amazing. I started off with one ship, ran missions until I earned enough for upgrades, and eventually bought a dedicated mining ship with its own crew. I left it to run while I did more missions. Got a law enforcement license from a few of the factions, participated in fending off invasions, bought more mining ships, got my own station, etc. I leave the game running overnight so my ships can mine. I used the profits to buy even more ships and replace my main ship with a heavy fighter fitted to the teeth with shields and guns.
At one point, I flipped the mined material from silicon to nvidium, which took my trade runs from 50k a pop to 500k a pop per ship. This was great, for a couple hours at which point I stopped making money. I looked at all my trade ships and they were just sitting there with cargo bays full of ore. I thought the game was bugged so I took to the forums. Turns out, this new more valuable is only bought at trading stations and isn't consumed as a resource by factories/refineries. Since it doesn't get consumed, the trading stations fill up with it and eventually stop buying it. Such is the downside to a game that features a real in-game economy, so I took to exploring the universe in search of more trading stations that would buy it. The second I located one the AI captains of my ships mass exodused in my direction.
Anyone else playing this game?
-Byshop