How do I get into x4? Do I just hop in? Is there some mandatory mods? Are the DLC necessary?

I'm planning a new game, and thinking about setting up advanced auto miners in civilian fleets (the mimicry mod one) and want to have full coverage of the map.

Using fleets should allow me to use the player restock subordinates mod so if any ships die, they get replaced without too much micromanagement. Going to use alligators, one set of ore miners and another for gas, probably 5 ships per fleet.

It will be a late stage plan, so I should be on good terms with all races, but I'm not sure about where to set the homebase of each group. I want good (full) coverage of the whole map, as well as plenty of trades with all races.

Plan for homebase sectors is argon prime, Jupiter, family zhin,18 billion, cardinals redress, pious mists IV, two grand, tharkas ravine xxiv and gain prophecy. Each will have a 5 jump range. There will be overlap using these

Has anyone tried anything similar? Any advice on better homebase sectors to use instead?

I'm doing a terran playthrough. I am very late game and have a shipyard in getsu fune which is supplied by a material factory in asteroid belt. The terran patrols in asteroid belt killed about 50 of my miners and started attacking my station. My reputation dropped from 30 to 28. When I go into the sector I see the terran patrols as red and hostile. I pulled out all of my ships and set global orders to show asteroid belt.

This obviously makes my station useless which leads to big problems at my shipyard. I also am cut off from the majority of terran space now since asteroid belt is a major middle sector to travel through.

What I think happened is one of my ships must have hit a terran patrol ship by accident and triggered the whole thing.

Kha AK had been attacking my miners in asteroid belt, so I sent in 20 takos, 8 katana, an Osaka and an asgard to defend my miners. The asgard was to find and destroy the khaak base, which I never found.

I may have had a flack turret on the katana as anti fighters. They may have damaged some local patrols.

My question is, how do I get the local patrols to stop being hostile? How do I avoid this from happening again?

I've had a long running terran playthrough, since CoH came out. I've built asgard and Tokyo centred fleets. The asgards can one hit kill a K and even take out an I with a few shots. The asgard also had the same volume of ship slots for interceptors as the Tokyo. The asgard has L turrets.

The Tokyo can launch more ships at once and looks pretty cool, but really that's it.

Am I missing something?

So, what are everyone's favorite mods then, if any?

I'll figure I should start first so I'll list the three that I refuse to play without.

More Ship Rooms - https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/609

This is just pure immersion, and it's amazing It gives all capital ships explorable interiors by mapping various in-game interior spaces into your L and XL class vessels. I literally can't play without this. Having a captain's quarters on your Raptor is a total game-changer.

Fire and Smoke - https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/433

More immersion. The vanilla explosions are somewhat (massively) lacking, which is strange considering that the previous title (the one we don't talk about), running on the same engine had fantastic explosions... This mod fixes it by (iirc) porting the explosion code from the previous title to the current one, or the code was already there anyway and they just switched it back on, can't remember which. Either way though, I've never noticed any issues with it hitting my CPU/GPU at all and it completely changes the feel of combat in the best way possible. Standing on the bridge of a capital ship and watching fire billowing out of the remains of turrets, smashing the engines of other capital class vessels, and watching them stream fire and smoke out into space... It's amazing and works flawlessly.

Faster Crew Levelling - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2050537227

Whoever the hell decided to wall off the AI in this game behind the goddamn crew levelling mechanic, whilst also making it basically impossible for the said crew to ever actually level up has a special place in hell imho. This mod fixes it. I looked at a few mods to address this bullshit, but most of them just remove crew levelling by making everyone five-star or whatever. I actually like the mechanic itself, but see no point in it taking 3000+ hours of in-game time to get your first 3-star pilot, because just no. This mod allows you to still have the mechanic in play, so personnel management is still a thing but brings down the training time to far more sane levels so that you actually can grow your workforce's skillset over time. Great mod. Considerably un-fucks a lot of the AI problems too since your entire company isn't filled with unskilled morons at all times.

Anyone else have any favorites that they can't do without?

#X4Foundations