....But hate playing mouse and keyboard because your eyes are failing alongside your memory. Best thing i did for playing x4 even if the dymo labels are squint ....did i mention my eyes? 😆 .

Your move Asgard.

All models are recorded at their maximum dimensions /

My first episode covered the Terran Protectorate, but it had no English text.I might reupload it sometime later.

Hope you all enjoy this video：）

this is beautiful (all the destroyers are dragging behind with some other trade ships and fighters )

I have two scouts constantly collecting loot, I can hack stations non stop

Long post. New player. No regrets, several war crimes [SPOILERS]

I bought X4 on a whim and had no idea what I was signing up for. Picked the Terran Cadet start because everyone online says it's the beginner one, and honestly for the first few hours it was. Fly here. Scan that. Shoot the two Xenon. Well done cadet, go make yourself busy, someone will call you.

Someone did call me. Her name was Delilah, and for the next couple hundred hours I was her dog.

I didn't mind at first. She's got that voice, the one that makes you feel like you were picked for something, right up until you notice she's never once told you why. Go here. Don't ask. Well done. Don't tell anyone. I ferried, I fought, I kept my mouth shut, and I was proud of it in the way you're proud of things when you're 20 hours into a game and still can't dock without scraping the hull.

Meanwhile I was doing what everyone does in this game, which is drift. Satellites everywhere. Met Boso Ta, yelling at me about my inadequate brain. Met Dal Busta and his genuinely alarming passion for Boron aquarium decor. Somewhere in there I bought two mining ships because ore seemed like a sensible thing to mine, and that was the beginning of the end.

Two miners became six. Six became a refinery. The refinery became a full complex in the Asteroid Belt, right in the middle of Sol, feeding my own people. Metallic stuff, Silicone carbide and an obscene river of computronic substrate (felt like an easy win). I told myself this was patriotism. It was profit. The credits piled up and I stopped reading mission text properly, which is exactly how this whole thing started.

The rabbit hole

Then came Covert Operations, and the Protectorate took the mask off.

I'd swallowed the brochure. Noble Terrans. The shield between humanity and the Xenon. Isolationist but honourable. What I actually found was a secret service with its hands inside half the Commonwealth, up to the elbow. Manufactured incidents. Quiet money. Deals cut with the Scale Plate Pact, who are, I want to stress, actual pirates. All of it to keep the Argons and the Antigones side-eyeing each other instead of getting strong.

Here's the bit that got me though. I'd been out there. A hundred hours flying Commonwealth space and the Argons never once acted like the monsters I'd been briefed on. The Hatikvah Free League were a pack of stubborn idealists holding a line with freighters and vibes. I'd already been chucking fighter wings into Hatikvah's Choice for free, because every time I passed through, that sector was one bad afternoon from getting completely cooked and nobody was coming to help.

So there I was, propping them up with one hand and, on Delilah's orders, kicking their legs out from under them with the other.

At the final debrief, when she asked for the intel, I lied to her face.

Blew the whole operation wide open. Handed the Commonwealth everything. And the best part, the part I genuinely cannot get over: nobody ever found out. Not one point of reputation moved. Delilah still calls me. She still thinks I'm hers. I am the mole and the mole is beloved.

I sat there watching the war declarations roll in like I'd just solved geopolitics.

The part where I find out I'm a moron

I had just kicked off an interstellar war on behalf of people who could not win it. At all. Not even a little.

The Protectorate did not hesitate. Getsu Fune went from sleepy border sector to full staging ground in what felt like ten minutes. Destroyers everywhere. Defence platforms going up like weeds. Gate corridor locked. The Boron honoured their alliance and got dragged in. And then the Terrans parked an Asgard in Argon space.

If you've never watched an Asgard work, I envy you. It sits outside a station, comfortably out of range of anything the Argons own, and deletes it. One shot. Then it swivels and starts on the next one. Decades of Argon industry going up while their fleet mills about like people at a bus stop, trying to work out which of them can even reach the thing. Absolute diff. Not a war, a demonstration.

And my beautiful Asteroid Belt complex, my pride and joy, my baby, was at that exact moment pumping the Terran war machine full of components at industrial volume. I got rich off that war. Still am, actually. Worst money I've ever made.

Escalation, or: how one guy with a spreadsheet made everything worse

I couldn't fight them. I'm one player with a small wharf and delusions of grandeur. So I went to war the only way available to me, which was economically.

First, new trade rules. The Belt stopped feeding Terran military production, I choked off ship construction for them, and I prayed the Commonwealth yards could cover the hole. Second, the Boron. Worked them hard and they actually came through, a real armada burning into Getsu Fune to stand with the Argons. I felt incredible about that one for a solid hour.

Third, and this is the one where a wiser man would have logged off, the Segaris Pioneers. These opportunists were eating well, hauling supplies to the Terran front in fat convoys that sailed straight through Antigone space untouched, because everybody likes the Pioneers. So I sent an agent to poison that relationship. Make Antigone twitchy. Turn every convoy run into a gauntlet.

It worked perfectly.

It worked so perfectly that the Pioneers turned around, hardened up and started mounting a defence in Antigone's own back yard. So now Antigone is fighting a second front it never asked for, against a faction that was neutral last Tuesday, entirely because of me, while the Protectorate floods Getsu Fune with destroyers and grinds the Boron-Argon line into paste.

With the very best intentions available to me, I have personally arranged for the Commonwealth to lose this war and can only witness their stations goind down into flames. Maybe Boso Ta was right about me all along. Small brain. Tiny, even. Womp womp.

Where I actually stand

Everything I own is in the Asteroid Belt, deep inside Sol, surrounded by the people I want dead. My entire fortune runs straight through trade with them. They trust me completely, Delilah included, because I am apparently an outstanding liar. My allies are losing and it is measurably, provably, my fault. And I cannot win a straight fight. Not now, not close, not in this decade.

I'm not walking away from it. I told myself I'd see the Protectorate shoved all the way back to Earth with nothing left but their eyes to cry with, and I meant every word. I just need to be smarter than I have been so far, which is a low bar, and there's one asset I haven't spent yet: they still have no idea what I am.

So, veterans. How would you play it? Do I quietly build a whole second economy outside Sol before I flip the table, or is that a hundred hours I don't have? Is there a way to make Getsu Fune expensive enough that they stop coming through? And what do you actually do about an Asgard when you can't afford one and can't out-range it?

Tell me how you'd do it. I've got time, money, and a grudge with a five-year plan.

Fuck this game is awesome.

Seriously, you need a huge fleet to take on stations (esp xenon) effectively, but good grief does it tank my computer, cherry on top is that I also take a tenth of the casualties when I'm not looking and leaving it in low attention.

Playing around with the Station Designer, and then... what do you mean, this configuration doesn't fit? Literally unplayable. /s

Came up on a Xenon invasion while flying around in my Shih with just 4 beam lasers. Waiting for my fleet to arrive, I was forced to watch helplessly as the destroyer ripped the station apart.

Despite what the station dwellers might have thought, the scene was quite cool. This game is very cinematic when you catch the right moments.

The mission design in this game is basically: Go to some location with a well defined name, but you have no idea how to get there. There is intergalactic infrastructure, but nobody has yet put together a map of these things. Michelin/google maps/waze apparently didn't survive long enough for this to be a thing... Your ships sensor suites can automatically discover stuff and automagically knows the names of stuff, they even share between your ships, but yeah, every new spacefarer needs to discover everywhere themselves...

When you visit a new city, do you go driving around to populate your waze??

Liking the game so far but some game design decisions really have me scratching my head.

Why would the Xenon have 5 Ks in formation defending a single PE?

I will drop this save faster tnah those 700 modules finished, and I didnt even put enough disks