True, they are very vulnerable to blockades, but in my defense I did supply them with everything they needed to rebuild after my first campaign against them! That's what the Moon trading station is for. Made me a nice profit, and gave them a big armada to throw my fleets at.

@@CptSnuggles07 yea that moon trading station was a nice idea. Personally I always mod the game with the terrans in mind. Deadair fill and faction catchup are nice mods to make them more blockade resilliant. Also nice to give them some more map connections.

Thanks! I'm using a stock Omen 40L (i7-12700K CPU). The only thing I've upgraded so far is the RAM, 32GB, mainly for processing big videos like this. It's a pretty nice PC now that I've tricked it into not constantly installing HP bloatware.

You'd better be encircling those Boron so you can protect them! No Boron bashers allowed on my channel!

Congratulations! You have been pre-selected for the Earth Atmospheric Reentry Program! To opt out, please submit the names and contact information of at least five other Terran sympathizers. Snuggles' Scrap Syndicate thanks you in advance for your cooperation.

They rescue my pilots who have ejected from destroyed ships (a great new feature in 7.0). I don't have any automated orders set up, aside from setting their default behavior to return to a carrier or station when idle. Four of them travel with my main battle groups for campaigns like this, and I have three more stationed in major conflict zones elsewhere. When I lose ships, I find the nearest ambulance and order it to "rescue people in range" to pick up survivors. Then I periodically transfer all rescued crew to a "barracks" builder ship, and I pull from that ship's crew when I need skilled pilots or engineers.

Well I'm glad I made it entertaining at least!

@@CptSnuggles07 Sorry my comment might have come across as being a bit rude. You make nice videos, would be nice is all if you found a way to increase the bitrate :)

Glad you enjoy the spectacle! I haven't had any big issues with carrier-fighter collisions on anything except the Raptor and Tokyo. Those internal docking bays look sweet but get very janky very fast. That's one reason why I prefer the Shark; docking and undocking are very fast and just about flawless.

Yes, I did. In my game, they had three admin centers: wharf, shipyard, and orbital logistics outpost. So it's possible that they had multiple in your case as well. It's also possible that you had something weird going on with the Torus Aeternal Segment, which counts as a defense station but isn't actually owned by the Terran Protectorate, at least in the current patch.

@@CptSnuggles07 I see. Did not know that the orbital logistics outpost also act as sector "claimer", only knew about wharfs and shipyards. 🤔Need to check in game if it has an admin module in its structure.

Video Enhancement Goggles! They've been in previous games but were just added to X4 in v7.0.

Funny you should mention that! I'm releasing a new series of beginner's guides starting tomorrow. The first episode is more about lore than gameplay, but subsequent episodes will be much more practical. The in-game tutorials have improved recently as well.

@@CptSnuggles07 Thank you. What DLC should I buy please? There is several titles available on Steam and I have no idea where to start. Also is a joystick essential or an X-Box controller because I have neithe ATM. You also have now got a new subscriber!

@@colinizatt7323 Thanks for the sub! Egosoft have recently updated the base game to make sure that none of the DLCs are strictly essential. If you want to just play the base game, you can. That said, here's my list of DLCs in order of beginner friendliness, greatest to least: Timelines, Cradle of Humanity, Kingdom End, Tides of Avarice, Split Vendetta. Alternatively, you can check out tomorrow's video, get a brief glimpse of the lore and ship designs of each faction, and pick the DLC(s) of the one(s) that interest you the most. The game is designed to be played mainly with mouse and keyboard, so no worries there!

Oh yeah, armadas this size are wildly inefficient. A good player flying a good ship will always give you peak efficiency. I do think that smaller fleets like the "task forces" I use in this video have some solid use cases, like defending your empire or helping the player clear sectors faster. But big armadas are purely for fun.

@@CptSnuggles07 You're right, the fleets do have uses. I'd like to place a carrier and 1 or 2 destroyers next to jump gates to catch any frisky fleets coming through. And with my carriers being loaded 50/50 (intercept/bomber) planes i can really pound the enemy

with the new crisis added in 7.0 you might find it hard to be at multiple places at once, increasing the importance on larger fleets that can cover many sectors. I also highly recommend the ROR mod. (maybe with a few tweaks). Having ROR start an invasion while your only fleets are away on a campaign can be troubling.

I can agree for specific instances. Large fleets can help with less losses when well placed and placed MANUALLY before set to attack. It's a huge pain but if you don't it's a cluster fuck of ships smashing into eachother knocking ships that were set up out of range making dps and survival drop. But stations you can risk it better than fleets of ships. I'd suggest the attack all targets in range command ( as intercept and bombard seems to just derp out with large fleets. ) which then will spread out your fleet to handle enemy fleets. But can agree smaller fleets tend to work better. Hopefully 7.0 adds better fleet mechanisms like traveling together in formation and not making formation AFTER getting out of travel speed. Which is WHY some ships smash into eachother when entering a new system on exiting travel mode. Even under ai control it'll happen. If we could fix that and collision mechanics for your personal ships so I don't do an endless tailspin on my carrier because a ship is trying ( but failing) to dock. I LOVE this game otherwise.

Xenon F, new in v7.0. I have a showcase video on my channel if you want to check it out!

The F, a new obtainable Xenon heavy fighter. Its stats aren't that great, but its design is absolutely top-tier! I have a test flight posted on my channel if you're interested.

@@CptSnuggles07 Thanks! will check that out. Best design I have seem yet in x4. Is there any way to get blueprints for that ship?

@@NodmGatall Nope, it can only be acquired by capturing it. You can research its equipment though, which allows you to replace or upgrade its parts.

Nope, no mods, no funny business. The Terrans have a much larger fleet budget than other factions but are scripted to keep the vast majority of them at home, to defend the inner solar system. Because I had already conquered everything but Earth, most of that very large fleet budget was concentrated in their last remaining sector, Earth itself.

@@CptSnuggles07 how long did you leave the game running? This must be because of the new dlc

This is an old save, started on launch day of Tides of Avarice. The Terrans had a similar number of fleets when I fought them back then, but they were spread more evenly between Earth, Moon, Venus, and Mars (because they still owned all those sectors at that time). After I beat them in that campaign, I'd estimate it took them roughly 80 in-game hours to rebuild their navy to the level shown in this video.

I have a video coming out later this week on this exact topic, so stay tuned! The destroyer AI in the engagement at The Moon was actually a little more nuanced than it might have looked. I think the interaction around 23:25 is really interesting: > Phoenix destroys Osaka but moves into Syn's firing range in the process > Syn switches targets and engages Phoenix with main battery > Escort fighters engage Syn; Phoenix returns fire with turrets > Phoenix takes heavy damage and attempts to escape > Syn cannot pursue due to fighter harassment (incl. drive disruption) plus Phoenix speed advantage > Syn chooses a new target and moves to engage it > Phoenix stops taking damage and immediately turns around to re-engage I genuinely think that's some solid work by the AI. Not absolutely perfect, but solid and interesting. The one-sidedness of the engagement was mostly due to (1) my superior fighter screen, and (2) Terran crew inexperience, which greatly increases the time it takes them to re-evaluate available targets, locking them in to attacking whatever they encountered first (i.e., my fighters) for about 30 seconds, giving my destroyers time to get a devastating positional advantage. If you're looking for something to critique, look at 26:00. The Syn is unable to perceive the five Phoenix in its path as threats until it's actually actively engaged with them, at which point it's way too late for it to escape. Threat detection is still very poor for capital ships in fleets. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Hope you'll tune in for the 7.0 destroyer behavior video!

@@CptSnuggles07 That is a great interation! It seems there's a lot of misunderstanding about the captains level, a 1 star captain simple does worse than a 5 star. Can you do a video about this? To show the differences between pilot star levels, 1v1 and in fleets?

@@WhiteGreenBlackRed I'd love to look into that once 7.0 has been out for a little while. A lot of my knowledge about crew skill comes from a datamined Steam guide for 6.2, and I'm hoping that will be updated with another round of data mining for 7.0.