Make sure to check out Part 3 for more info on how medium non-combat engines fit into practical use cases. And, as a general rule, always consider your personal use case before taking any X4 advice from anyone!
As far as that travel drive performing well in combat: smaller ship travel accel is good enough that if you're chasing something, then good travel performance will vastly outperform afterburner. Burner (in high attention) is only really good in short bursts, while travel allows strike craft to haul ass to a target at any distance. Good travel acceleration will get the ship up to "haul ass" much faster, shortening intercept times. Burner, meanwhile, is good for evasion.
Something to think over, though, is now that you can limit the ware type of a station ship, it may be worth getting Mk1 stuff to make it so cheap that only carries cheap stuff AND losing it all is therefore ignorable, and you put more expensive Mk3 stuff on ships settled to carry more expensive goods, so them being able to run away and save the entire load is eminently worth the extra expense. What we need is also some way to insist that we limit the cargo limits, so that you don't get a 10,000 cu carrier making a trip for 10 advanced chips and therefore nothing for your 1500cu Paranid courier to do, or a 7000 cu collecting energy cells but since there is a call for 20,000 ecells, your large hauler has to go further to get the remaining 13,000 e-cells if there's an offer that now meets the criterion in range. If station ships don't BOTHER if they can't fill at least a third or half of the cargo hold, they don't bother. That makes you fill up on S couriers and M traders and L freighters because for small loads the S courier will do, and if you only have 10 microchips to sell, because you only created 10 at the moment, then your M class freighter isn't tasked with almost empty selling while nothing is around to buy 5000 e cells required to stop production stalling until the trader gets back. And if the window to sell closes before it gets to that level, either get a smaller (possibly faster) ship to trade, manually MORT the sale to free up space, or just wait a bit and the sale option will match again.
Yeah, cargo utilization is a major limiting factor for station trader efficiency. That's one reason why I tend to go Vanguard over Sentinel; that extra 20% cargo capacity rarely gets used, but the extra speed is always helpful. It does make logistical sense to just use tons of S couriers instead of M/L traders, although that would make the late-game lag pretty atrocious.
@@CptSnuggles07 The sweet spot for merchants are the M class. Multiply cargo capacity times speed divided by cost. BY FAR the best. The Ls aren't worth it, they cost a lot more but go slower. They are only for hauling big loads, either as MORTing or just heaving lots of things, they also gain in survivability, but fail HARD against destroyers, too slow to run, too expensive to give up on. Meanwhile the S class couriers are not much, if any, cheaper, but carry a lot less but only slightly faster. The 6S3M dock is best, you need more M class docks, the S docks will only get used to release drones, mostly. Making it require a certain amount of cargo hold for it to be considered hauling is a way to spread the load about among the three classes. The Gullemot and Kestrel are worth looking at (as is the Nodan) because they are fairly fast (for the race they come from) but carry a fair old size too. IMO the Paranid designs should, other than the Carrier and Aux, be heavily nerfed to almost no capacity (except the 3 A-M cells needed for the quest), but I'd leave the three-gun Theseus with its cargo hold, but say half everything else's in the Paranid military fleet cargo hold: "not a pound for air to ground". Not nerfing the Theseus doesn't make it better, it is, at best, a side grade, but with 350 ish cargo hold it can make a decent player ship and you buy the Perseus for carrier duty or patrols where none of the cargo gets used. Those figures for cargo hold is a hold over from X3 where cargo storage defined how many missiles and guns and shields you could fit inside. Now the more sensible option of just having space for them, there's nothing for the cargo hold to DO. But it was the same cutnpaste job of old stuff over new models, and so we got an Oddy that can hold as much as an XL carrier, and 540 cargo capacity military fighters. The cost for S class traders arises from the massive cost of the S class stuff, notably Mk3 stuff, and several of them. Once you add the cost of those in, you are looking at the same cost as a mid-range M trader that gets you 2-3x as much cargo space.
Here I am, idly skimming my feed through videos featuring news on Ukraine, video essays on politics, science and philosophy, Tim Cain talking about game design etc, when what do I see? X4 Propulsion Lab Part 2 M/S type ships??! NOW THIS I NEED TO KNOW.
It used to be easy to just put a combat engine on my medium freighters. In 6.20 my Dolphins can pretty much always get away from the spawned raiders while my Vultures will sometimes get caught with no way for me to save them. I always put Combat engines in them because that way they can generally run away. But in 7.00 the raider seem to have better engines and can often catch even my Dolphins.
local miners spend about equal time slowboating and in travel drive. I vaguely remember seeing a spreadsheet regarding local mining efficiency and SPL combat was the runaway winner
I will have more beginner-friendly guides in the future, but I'm actually not an expert in early-game strategies. I spend so much time researching X4 that I don't have much time left over to start new games!
@@CptSnuggles07 Well, from your research we can also learn a lot about the game itself, especially how to leave the fleet to itself so that it doesn't die somewhere in the depths of the universe, and in my game there are a lot of sectors where I have to leave some ships to patrol the sector because there are a lot of these sectors to guard :D I have one question, but does playing these timelines unlock any ships in my main game that I have been playing since the beginning, or do I have to play them first? these timelines and then play again???
I assume disabling the highway gives an even larger advantage to the Argon Travel engines right? Since they stay in travel mode longer. Or would that go to Teladi with the higher max speed? Thanks for the video.
Yep, I would expect that to favor the Argon engines. Teladi actually have slightly lower speed but higher travel acceleration, so they benefit from shorter trips (they're most competitive on trips of 1-2 jumps).
Maybe I don't understand something, but when I was testing, sending two same ships with argon travel and terran travel, across the entire map - terran engine always was winning. I did that without docking because, I thought it could be inconsistent if dock, in particular station, is busy and one of the ships will have to wait.
Were you using S/M ships in vanilla X4 version 7? Older versions of the game had very different travel mechanics, and of course mods can break anything.
@@CptSnuggles07 I tested that before timelines update and after too, like week ago. Was using split's Boa traders, sending them from Tharka's ravine VIII sector to terrans Oort Cloud. Also there's idea. Does terran engines reach max travel speed in 6 sec no matter max speed number ? If yes, then I think engine upgrades for travel thrust are very beneficial for it. And level 1 upgrades are fairly cheap at that.
@@snowflake8658 Strange. All I can say for sure is that TER is best within 1 jump, TER and ARG are roughly equivalent at 1-2 jumps, and ARG is best at 3-5 jumps. Those results are consistent with other content creators. Not sure whether there's something strange going on in your game, if there's just something unique about that route, or if acceleration genuinely is more important than speed for 20-jump endurance races. Travel Attack is the time it takes to reach maximum travel *thrust*, not maximum travel *speed*. Acceleration is non-linear due to drag; the last ~10% of max travel speed takes quite awhile to reach for any engine. That said, increasing travel thrust should just increase top speed while keeping the total acceleration time roughly the same. I'm not sure whether that upgrade is more beneficial than reducing mass or drag.
Simplifying a bit: Argon Travel for small non-combat ships, Split Combat for small combat ships - might be a couple of % off ideal in some cases but should bear up otherwise!
Actually since travel drives only advantage is travel speed, but it takes 3 seconds of NOT GETTING HIT to do so, AND it accelerates a lot slower TO that higher speed (therefore not attaining it in most cases), throw those TR figures out. Split Combat for carrier ships, because their travel speed is TERRIBLE. Outside carrier use, either Paranid or Argon Combat. They still HAVE some travel speed. And if you care about travel speed, Argon All-Round every time. The Paranid do cruise speed better, Argon do Travel speed better, and that is pretty much the whole of it.
Note that Teladi CO engines do well, this may be because the better attack speed, so that full travel speed thrust advantage happens so much earlier that it overwhelms the poorer endpoint stats of top speed, either cruise or travel speeds.
So travel engines are not useless after all. Interesting. I'd love to have a video like that about VRO engines, but I understand if you want to stick to vanilla only.
Nah, travel drive engines are pants if you are concerned about any attacks. E.g. pirates or Xenon or Khaak. Absent that, however, and travel drives DO make a lot of sense. It's just that attacks are too common to ignore in X4 when actually playing the game rather than doing a "for science" test.
So seeing as in battlefield settings and combined setting the Split Combat mk2 Combat was always top except for small combined where is was just second, does that mean the Split Mk 4 Combat shoild always be used if budget is no issue? Also how does the Split Mk4 Combat perform against the Mk3 Travels and All Rounds in the transit tests?
Good job Can you make video with explaining how different commands working and where to apply them? Making fleets now either bugged or I just don't understand how it's works, attack with commander won't work, or ships flying around the target doing no damage Is it good to have multiple destroyer in 1 fleet or bad, I'm trying many combinations and it's just not pretty, 3 destroyer trying to kill the K in oos, and it's taking like good 10 minutes, simply because they just orbiting around, and k can't kill my destroyer either
Capital ships frequently do that weird orbit when fighting K's OOS. Coordinate Attack may work better than normal Attack, but I'm not sure. I will have a video on basic fleet setup sometime in the next month.
Question I'm using usually argon combat engines mk3 for all of my med, even miners and traders Traders and miners however usually not going further than 2 jump, rest is covered by L class Argon, because the just easy to get and pretty much no brainer Is it better to switch for travel engines? I thought combat is better because they are instantly going to travel mode And for combat I'm using split s/m mk4, usually with monitors or carriers, so not really worrying about that Thanks
I'm in the middle of the third part of this experiment, which is a practical trial of M engine profit margins vs survivability when exposed to actual enemies. Based on what I've seen thus far, Combat engines are a bad choice for miners and traders. You take a huge hit to profitability with very little increase in survivability. One big exception is single-sector autominers. Those do quite well with Combat engines. If you're using Mk3 equipment, I'd recommend using All-Round engines. Profit margins are better for Travel at the Mk2 level, but with Mk3 your ship replacement costs will be much higher, so you'll want the increased survivability of All-Round.
I just realized dolphins don't take non-boron equipment. In that case i'd also say Demeter Vanguards if you buy. However... Boas are better, Zyarth deliveries are frequent... and liberating them is basically free.
This is interesting information, but potentially dangerous. There's a very good reason why most people recommend you never use travel engines, and that's because of their obscenely long charge time. If your miners get jumped by Khaak, if you give them travel drives, they will never be able to escape. Same with traders getting attacked by pirates. Unless your space is incredibly well protected, using travel drives is a good way to get your ships destroyed.
As with everything in X4, you have to think about your use case. If you're sending S/M traders/miners into hot zones, you may want to pick from the Combined list instead of the Transit list.
@@CptSnuggles07 The problem is that X4 will have hot zones appear FOR you, there is no safe route there. That's why all I think is needed is to cut the spool time to 1 second. The 0 seconds for combat engines AND better cruise speed gives them a spot to play in. Their higher cost but much longer boost are also countering each other. Travel engines cost more than All-Round, but while All-Round and Travel get the same cruise speed, the All-Round will GET to their max speed in a sector while the Travel Engine is still behind actual speed in the second, making the top speed less useful. I think that these are better balanced, and enough to give them their own place to play. As it is, that 3 second rule makes ANY travel speed chancy, because it fails to pertain in any case where a single hit happens or travel drive is turned off at random (the AI does this: possibly for verisimilitude when travelling through an asteroid belt OOS, possibly as a troll to humans wondering WHY it dropped to cruise speed). In a straight test where travel is uninterrupted, travel drives are bettter to, uhm, travel, but that is so uncommon that you can't rely on it. A trader, especially an M class trader, if fitted with Travel Engines should be set to "comply" if attacked by pirates, because they won't survive an encounter by running. Xenon and Khaak don't care, they will just kill, and you lose the cargo and the ship. At least Combat engined traders might last long enough to route some fighters to get there. THAT is the case for using travel drives: set anything equipped with them to comply and use the higher profit elsewhere to offset the lost profit to pirate attacks. Possibly that is something to add to your pinned comment: travel drive traders should comply with pirate demands.
I'd agree, but insist that you forgot pirate activity, making your results rather meaningless for actual use, unless you state "give in" for pirate attacks, losing cargo but gaining the continued life of the ship, until the NEXT pirate attack. It is for this reason that I utterly fail to think ANY good of the travel engines, except Split Travel where the travel speed is not as badly nerfed as combat speed travel drive speeds are, but the cruise speed of split engines, even if travel engines, means it might actually be able to escape attack long enough to GET travel drive active. IMO three seconds entirely and utterly nerfs ALL travel drives, because it is VERY unlikely that a small craft won't get hit in 3 seconds, but almost, if not entirely, impossible to be missed in 3 seconds for an M class ship. And travel engines are more expensive. To un-nerf them, I'd put Travel drives as still only requiring a 1 second spool-up time, as All-Round does, because it is quite likely that a small craft won't get hit in 1 second, and there's at least some chance an M class will not be hit in 1 second. That they cost more AND have worse acceleration (and strafe speed) than All-Round is "sufficient" for opening up a gap between AR and TR engines with the latter having faster Travel speed. I'd also make Travel Drives for L and XL have shorter spool up times than "All-Round" drives, even if that then means the cruising speed gets nerfed a little harder, but I don't see much need to open up a large gap, that balance could be how much it gets a quicker spool-up to travel speeds, for example. As for Terran, because they don't HAVE a hyperlane, and moreover their sector sizes are MUCH larger, I'd probably leave the combat engines roughly where they are, but I'd reduce the cruise speed but amp up the travel speed for their engines, meaning if you don't forsee needing to be in combat, you'd specifically choose travel engines for terran ships because in terran space THOSE are far faster than combat engines. Meanwhile the combat engines are not good for travel drive speeds (indeed maybe even nerf them a bit more, but since they cost a LOT more, it may well be enough balanced from that alone) but since they are great at acceleration, they can use all that cruising speed, and use the carrier to do the travel drive stuff. Meanwhile, All-Round Terran would be patrol craft that have a long way to go, not being carrier based, so can't afford to have that hit to travel speeds either, but will see enough combat that they really DO need to be good at cruising too. Boron engines need to do better with top speed in cruise and travel, but they could be worse at strafe, underpowered for it, or poorly equipped for reverse thrust to come to a stop. After all, water. But unless travel drives STOP needing 3 seconds to spool up on smaller craft, I won't use them, or even deign to consider them as a blueprint, even for scouts, because they have a high top speed, but so slow an acceleration, they never get to those speeds in the smaller sectors of "base game". And for capital class travel drives, unless they cut the spool up time (or acceleration/attack time) notably, there is nothing to having travel drives on them too, you really only have AllRound as any coherent choice.
I'm actually planning on doing a third episode where I try out the top-ranked variants of each engine type in actual gameplay, so we'll get some quantitative data on survivability/profitability tradeoffs when hostile ships are involved.
@@CptSnuggles07 Mk3 Split Combat, though. The Mk4 is very fast but so very expensive it only gets fitted to player ships, or people who are just playing because big number goes brrrr.
Make sure to check out Part 3 for more info on how medium non-combat engines fit into practical use cases. And, as a general rule, always consider your personal use case before taking any X4 advice from anyone!
Appreciate your hard work cap'n snuggles! This is very informative indeed
I didn't expect Split balanced to perform better than the best non-split combat engine
Nice break down as usual thanks a lot for the testing
i love these videos. it feels like reading a books on science somehow XD
As far as that travel drive performing well in combat: smaller ship travel accel is good enough that if you're chasing something, then good travel performance will vastly outperform afterburner. Burner (in high attention) is only really good in short bursts, while travel allows strike craft to haul ass to a target at any distance. Good travel acceleration will get the ship up to "haul ass" much faster, shortening intercept times. Burner, meanwhile, is good for evasion.
Thanks for your hard work so that the rest of us can be lazy :D
Something to think over, though, is now that you can limit the ware type of a station ship, it may be worth getting Mk1 stuff to make it so cheap that only carries cheap stuff AND losing it all is therefore ignorable, and you put more expensive Mk3 stuff on ships settled to carry more expensive goods, so them being able to run away and save the entire load is eminently worth the extra expense.
What we need is also some way to insist that we limit the cargo limits, so that you don't get a 10,000 cu carrier making a trip for 10 advanced chips and therefore nothing for your 1500cu Paranid courier to do, or a 7000 cu collecting energy cells but since there is a call for 20,000 ecells, your large hauler has to go further to get the remaining 13,000 e-cells if there's an offer that now meets the criterion in range.
If station ships don't BOTHER if they can't fill at least a third or half of the cargo hold, they don't bother. That makes you fill up on S couriers and M traders and L freighters because for small loads the S courier will do, and if you only have 10 microchips to sell, because you only created 10 at the moment, then your M class freighter isn't tasked with almost empty selling while nothing is around to buy 5000 e cells required to stop production stalling until the trader gets back. And if the window to sell closes before it gets to that level, either get a smaller (possibly faster) ship to trade, manually MORT the sale to free up space, or just wait a bit and the sale option will match again.
Yeah, cargo utilization is a major limiting factor for station trader efficiency. That's one reason why I tend to go Vanguard over Sentinel; that extra 20% cargo capacity rarely gets used, but the extra speed is always helpful. It does make logistical sense to just use tons of S couriers instead of M/L traders, although that would make the late-game lag pretty atrocious.
@@CptSnuggles07 The sweet spot for merchants are the M class. Multiply cargo capacity times speed divided by cost. BY FAR the best. The Ls aren't worth it, they cost a lot more but go slower. They are only for hauling big loads, either as MORTing or just heaving lots of things, they also gain in survivability, but fail HARD against destroyers, too slow to run, too expensive to give up on. Meanwhile the S class couriers are not much, if any, cheaper, but carry a lot less but only slightly faster. The 6S3M dock is best, you need more M class docks, the S docks will only get used to release drones, mostly.
Making it require a certain amount of cargo hold for it to be considered hauling is a way to spread the load about among the three classes.
The Gullemot and Kestrel are worth looking at (as is the Nodan) because they are fairly fast (for the race they come from) but carry a fair old size too.
IMO the Paranid designs should, other than the Carrier and Aux, be heavily nerfed to almost no capacity (except the 3 A-M cells needed for the quest), but I'd leave the three-gun Theseus with its cargo hold, but say half everything else's in the Paranid military fleet cargo hold: "not a pound for air to ground". Not nerfing the Theseus doesn't make it better, it is, at best, a side grade, but with 350 ish cargo hold it can make a decent player ship and you buy the Perseus for carrier duty or patrols where none of the cargo gets used.
Those figures for cargo hold is a hold over from X3 where cargo storage defined how many missiles and guns and shields you could fit inside. Now the more sensible option of just having space for them, there's nothing for the cargo hold to DO. But it was the same cutnpaste job of old stuff over new models, and so we got an Oddy that can hold as much as an XL carrier, and 540 cargo capacity military fighters.
The cost for S class traders arises from the massive cost of the S class stuff, notably Mk3 stuff, and several of them. Once you add the cost of those in, you are looking at the same cost as a mid-range M trader that gets you 2-3x as much cargo space.
Here I am, idly skimming my feed through videos featuring news on Ukraine, video essays on politics, science and philosophy, Tim Cain talking about game design etc, when what do I see? X4 Propulsion Lab Part 2 M/S type ships??! NOW THIS I NEED TO KNOW.
Literally me pausing my Ukraine Kursk update search to watch this lol
It used to be easy to just put a combat engine on my medium freighters. In 6.20 my Dolphins can pretty much always get away from the spawned raiders while my Vultures will sometimes get caught with no way for me to save them. I always put Combat engines in them because that way they can generally run away. But in 7.00 the raider seem to have better engines and can often catch even my Dolphins.
I look forward to these like I used to look forward to Bill Nye videos. Good science.
Big plays, my guy. :)
Glad I kept pressing F5.
Smashing F5 for 2 weeks.
Chad energy.
Thank you Captain Snuggles!
local miners spend about equal time slowboating and in travel drive. I vaguely remember seeing a spreadsheet regarding local mining efficiency and SPL combat was the runaway winner
Yeah, for strictly single-system mining, I'd expect the Combined rankings to be more applicable than the Transit ones.
Very nice. Thanks for the sheet download
oh my favorite captain from x4 :D It would be nice if you could make a guide on how to start playing this game :D
I will have more beginner-friendly guides in the future, but I'm actually not an expert in early-game strategies. I spend so much time researching X4 that I don't have much time left over to start new games!
@@CptSnuggles07 Well, from your research we can also learn a lot about the game itself, especially how to leave the fleet to itself so that it doesn't die somewhere in the depths of the universe,
and in my game there are a lot of sectors where I have to leave some ships to patrol the sector because there are a lot of these sectors to guard :D I have one question, but does playing these timelines unlock any ships in my main game that I have been playing since the beginning, or do I have to play them first? these timelines and then play again???
@@tixarfuriaa Everything you unlock in Timelines is unlocked in all your ongoing campaigns.
I assume disabling the highway gives an even larger advantage to the Argon Travel engines right? Since they stay in travel mode longer.
Or would that go to Teladi with the higher max speed?
Thanks for the video.
Yep, I would expect that to favor the Argon engines. Teladi actually have slightly lower speed but higher travel acceleration, so they benefit from shorter trips (they're most competitive on trips of 1-2 jumps).
Maybe I don't understand something, but when I was testing, sending two same ships with argon travel and terran travel, across the entire map - terran engine always was winning.
I did that without docking because, I thought it could be inconsistent if dock, in particular station, is busy and one of the ships will have to wait.
Were you using S/M ships in vanilla X4 version 7? Older versions of the game had very different travel mechanics, and of course mods can break anything.
@@CptSnuggles07
I tested that before timelines update and after too, like week ago. Was using split's Boa traders, sending them from Tharka's ravine VIII sector to terrans Oort Cloud.
Also there's idea. Does terran engines reach max travel speed in 6 sec no matter max speed number ? If yes, then I think engine upgrades for travel thrust are very beneficial for it. And level 1 upgrades are fairly cheap at that.
@@snowflake8658 Strange. All I can say for sure is that TER is best within 1 jump, TER and ARG are roughly equivalent at 1-2 jumps, and ARG is best at 3-5 jumps. Those results are consistent with other content creators. Not sure whether there's something strange going on in your game, if there's just something unique about that route, or if acceleration genuinely is more important than speed for 20-jump endurance races.
Travel Attack is the time it takes to reach maximum travel *thrust*, not maximum travel *speed*. Acceleration is non-linear due to drag; the last ~10% of max travel speed takes quite awhile to reach for any engine. That said, increasing travel thrust should just increase top speed while keeping the total acceleration time roughly the same. I'm not sure whether that upgrade is more beneficial than reducing mass or drag.
Simplifying a bit: Argon Travel for small non-combat ships, Split Combat for small combat ships - might be a couple of % off ideal in some cases but should bear up otherwise!
Actually since travel drives only advantage is travel speed, but it takes 3 seconds of NOT GETTING HIT to do so, AND it accelerates a lot slower TO that higher speed (therefore not attaining it in most cases), throw those TR figures out.
Split Combat for carrier ships, because their travel speed is TERRIBLE. Outside carrier use, either Paranid or Argon Combat. They still HAVE some travel speed. And if you care about travel speed, Argon All-Round every time. The Paranid do cruise speed better, Argon do Travel speed better, and that is pretty much the whole of it.
Note that Teladi CO engines do well, this may be because the better attack speed, so that full travel speed thrust advantage happens so much earlier that it overwhelms the poorer endpoint stats of top speed, either cruise or travel speeds.
So travel engines are not useless after all. Interesting.
I'd love to have a video like that about VRO engines, but I understand if you want to stick to vanilla only.
I unfortunately know nothing about VRO. I did some modding in X3, but I mostly stick to vanilla in X4.
Nah, travel drive engines are pants if you are concerned about any attacks. E.g. pirates or Xenon or Khaak. Absent that, however, and travel drives DO make a lot of sense. It's just that attacks are too common to ignore in X4 when actually playing the game rather than doing a "for science" test.
So seeing as in battlefield settings and combined setting the Split Combat mk2 Combat was always top except for small combined where is was just second, does that mean the Split Mk 4 Combat shoild always be used if budget is no issue?
Also how does the Split Mk4 Combat perform against the Mk3 Travels and All Rounds in the transit tests?
Good job
Can you make video with explaining how different commands working and where to apply them?
Making fleets now either bugged or I just don't understand how it's works, attack with commander won't work, or ships flying around the target doing no damage
Is it good to have multiple destroyer in 1 fleet or bad, I'm trying many combinations and it's just not pretty, 3 destroyer trying to kill the K in oos, and it's taking like good 10 minutes, simply because they just orbiting around, and k can't kill my destroyer either
Capital ships frequently do that weird orbit when fighting K's OOS. Coordinate Attack may work better than normal Attack, but I'm not sure. I will have a video on basic fleet setup sometime in the next month.
@@CptSnuggles07 thanks! Can't wait
Question
I'm using usually argon combat engines mk3 for all of my med, even miners and traders
Traders and miners however usually not going further than 2 jump, rest is covered by L class
Argon, because the just easy to get and pretty much no brainer
Is it better to switch for travel engines? I thought combat is better because they are instantly going to travel mode
And for combat I'm using split s/m mk4, usually with monitors or carriers, so not really worrying about that
Thanks
I'm in the middle of the third part of this experiment, which is a practical trial of M engine profit margins vs survivability when exposed to actual enemies. Based on what I've seen thus far, Combat engines are a bad choice for miners and traders. You take a huge hit to profitability with very little increase in survivability. One big exception is single-sector autominers. Those do quite well with Combat engines.
If you're using Mk3 equipment, I'd recommend using All-Round engines. Profit margins are better for Travel at the Mk2 level, but with Mk3 your ship replacement costs will be much higher, so you'll want the increased survivability of All-Round.
@CptSnuggles07 thank you!
Love your work
So which m trader do i use and which engine do i put on it
ARG travel engines on Dolphins.
Depends on your use case, but the oversimplified answer is Demeter Vanguard with Argon Travel.
I just realized dolphins don't take non-boron equipment.
In that case i'd also say Demeter Vanguards if you buy.
However... Boas are better, Zyarth deliveries are frequent... and liberating them is basically free.
@@jemandanders6160 i thought u were being sarcastic mate😅🤣
No, just too much spacefuel and majadust
This is interesting information, but potentially dangerous. There's a very good reason why most people recommend you never use travel engines, and that's because of their obscenely long charge time. If your miners get jumped by Khaak, if you give them travel drives, they will never be able to escape. Same with traders getting attacked by pirates. Unless your space is incredibly well protected, using travel drives is a good way to get your ships destroyed.
As with everything in X4, you have to think about your use case. If you're sending S/M traders/miners into hot zones, you may want to pick from the Combined list instead of the Transit list.
@@CptSnuggles07 The problem is that X4 will have hot zones appear FOR you, there is no safe route there. That's why all I think is needed is to cut the spool time to 1 second. The 0 seconds for combat engines AND better cruise speed gives them a spot to play in. Their higher cost but much longer boost are also countering each other. Travel engines cost more than All-Round, but while All-Round and Travel get the same cruise speed, the All-Round will GET to their max speed in a sector while the Travel Engine is still behind actual speed in the second, making the top speed less useful. I think that these are better balanced, and enough to give them their own place to play.
As it is, that 3 second rule makes ANY travel speed chancy, because it fails to pertain in any case where a single hit happens or travel drive is turned off at random (the AI does this: possibly for verisimilitude when travelling through an asteroid belt OOS, possibly as a troll to humans wondering WHY it dropped to cruise speed). In a straight test where travel is uninterrupted, travel drives are bettter to, uhm, travel, but that is so uncommon that you can't rely on it.
A trader, especially an M class trader, if fitted with Travel Engines should be set to "comply" if attacked by pirates, because they won't survive an encounter by running. Xenon and Khaak don't care, they will just kill, and you lose the cargo and the ship. At least Combat engined traders might last long enough to route some fighters to get there.
THAT is the case for using travel drives: set anything equipped with them to comply and use the higher profit elsewhere to offset the lost profit to pirate attacks.
Possibly that is something to add to your pinned comment: travel drive traders should comply with pirate demands.
I'd agree, but insist that you forgot pirate activity, making your results rather meaningless for actual use, unless you state "give in" for pirate attacks, losing cargo but gaining the continued life of the ship, until the NEXT pirate attack.
It is for this reason that I utterly fail to think ANY good of the travel engines, except Split Travel where the travel speed is not as badly nerfed as combat speed travel drive speeds are, but the cruise speed of split engines, even if travel engines, means it might actually be able to escape attack long enough to GET travel drive active.
IMO three seconds entirely and utterly nerfs ALL travel drives, because it is VERY unlikely that a small craft won't get hit in 3 seconds, but almost, if not entirely, impossible to be missed in 3 seconds for an M class ship.
And travel engines are more expensive.
To un-nerf them, I'd put Travel drives as still only requiring a 1 second spool-up time, as All-Round does, because it is quite likely that a small craft won't get hit in 1 second, and there's at least some chance an M class will not be hit in 1 second. That they cost more AND have worse acceleration (and strafe speed) than All-Round is "sufficient" for opening up a gap between AR and TR engines with the latter having faster Travel speed.
I'd also make Travel Drives for L and XL have shorter spool up times than "All-Round" drives, even if that then means the cruising speed gets nerfed a little harder, but I don't see much need to open up a large gap, that balance could be how much it gets a quicker spool-up to travel speeds, for example.
As for Terran, because they don't HAVE a hyperlane, and moreover their sector sizes are MUCH larger, I'd probably leave the combat engines roughly where they are, but I'd reduce the cruise speed but amp up the travel speed for their engines, meaning if you don't forsee needing to be in combat, you'd specifically choose travel engines for terran ships because in terran space THOSE are far faster than combat engines. Meanwhile the combat engines are not good for travel drive speeds (indeed maybe even nerf them a bit more, but since they cost a LOT more, it may well be enough balanced from that alone) but since they are great at acceleration, they can use all that cruising speed, and use the carrier to do the travel drive stuff. Meanwhile, All-Round Terran would be patrol craft that have a long way to go, not being carrier based, so can't afford to have that hit to travel speeds either, but will see enough combat that they really DO need to be good at cruising too.
Boron engines need to do better with top speed in cruise and travel, but they could be worse at strafe, underpowered for it, or poorly equipped for reverse thrust to come to a stop. After all, water.
But unless travel drives STOP needing 3 seconds to spool up on smaller craft, I won't use them, or even deign to consider them as a blueprint, even for scouts, because they have a high top speed, but so slow an acceleration, they never get to those speeds in the smaller sectors of "base game".
And for capital class travel drives, unless they cut the spool up time (or acceleration/attack time) notably, there is nothing to having travel drives on them too, you really only have AllRound as any coherent choice.
I'm actually planning on doing a third episode where I try out the top-ranked variants of each engine type in actual gameplay, so we'll get some quantitative data on survivability/profitability tradeoffs when hostile ships are involved.
@@CptSnuggles07 Mk3 Split Combat, though. The Mk4 is very fast but so very expensive it only gets fitted to player ships, or people who are just playing because big number goes brrrr.