Olvel played X3: Reunion

More X3 this weekend.

I'm kind of wishing I had kicked off a non-storyline game... Or that I felt like I had more time to wander around doing my own thing despite the storyline...

It really doesn't feel like the storyline is getting me anywhere.

I keep being asked to haul crystals around, or escort somebody, or rescue someone, or whatever... I'm flying from one end of the galaxy to the other... Blasting pirates left and right... And I just don't seem to be getting anywhere.

None of the storyline stuff seems to be paying me any money.

Killing pirates only gets me money in the systems where I've got a police license, and the payout for them is pretty crappy. I'll kill a ship and be awarded 500 credits or so... When a new gun or a few missiles is easily 4,000 credits or more.

I don't know if the storyline is actually timed or anything like that, but there's a constant sense that I really can't go too far off the rails for fear of screwing stuff up.

Any my one sector trader just isn't making much money... A few thousand here and there, but nothing amazing.

So, I finally broke down and installed some cheat scripts. Yeah, I know, horrible thing... But it's supposed to be fun, and I wasn't having a whole lot of fun.

I gave myself a couple million credits and bought a new ship. A Buster Vanguard. It's a slightly better version of the Buster that I'm flying now. And then I ran into the near-vertical learning curve again...

The ships listed at a shipyard come in three varieties - S, M, and L. With absolutely no indication of what the difference is between them. All the stats and everything look pretty much identical. I had to find an Excel spreadsheet to show me the differences between the ships...

Turns out the S/M/L designates the equipment that comes with the ship. The S, for example, comes with nothing. Just the ship hull. The M comes with a couple guns. The L comes fully-equipped.

I wound up buying a Buster Vanguard M, which came with a couple IREs. IREs, it turns out, are utter crap. They use almost no energy, which is cool; but they also do almost no damage, which is not so cool.

I tried to transfer all my gear from my old ship to the new one... Ran into issues with the cargohold... Thought maybe I had to actually be in the new ship to transfer stuff... So I swapped to the new ship, which put me in the new ship about 1 km away from the station. Which is when I realized that my old ship had actually been upgraded fairly substantially.

According to the Excel spreadsheet, the new ship was supposed to be better in almost every way. It was supposed to accelerate faster, turn quicker, and have a top speed of almost 200 km/s. Instead it turned like a whale and couldn't go any faster than about 100 km/s.

Turns out, you have to install several upgrades to make your ship work that good.

I had to install about 18 Engine Tunings, 17 Rudder Optimizations, and about 80 Cargohold Expansions. Finally it flew like it should.

And it really is a nice little upgrade to my old Buster. It's slightly quicker, slightly tougher, and does slightly more damage. It isn't the Nova that I'd like to be flying, but it's decent for now. I just wish someone had explained all the upgrades available, and how essential they were to making a ship work right. I might not have bought that new Vanguard if I'd known I would have to spend so much to get it working properly.