Omg. After 20h, I realized there's a "Behavior" Tab under the Object Information Menu, that lets you set many handy things like Auto-Mine, Auto-Trade, Auto-Explore, etc.
Here's an image.This also lets you see the order queue. Really cool screen.
This is what I get for not doing tutorials. I have a scout doing weird stuff for 8h+, because if you manually tell a ship to explore a sector, it behaves very weird. Setting it's Default Behavior as Explore seems to work, so finally that 7k+ Travel Drive will hopefully discover something on it's own.
Also, the Global Behavior Settings for your ships is under Player Information (Top Menu) > Empire (Left Menu) > On the list of various random things, there's Global Standing Orders. Here you can set whether ships should run from/attack pirates, comply/run from police, and even Claim or Mark abandoned ships on their own!
Today all my gameplay hours went into mostly experimenting with cheese tactics from X:R. They all fail...you can't (easily, without wasting hours retrying) capture a L freighter or destroyer with a M3+. Who would've thought..
-snip-
Still the same game. The map, RTS controls, UI overhaul and loadout system is good enough to bring anyone playing X3 into X4 IMO, unless using the bigger total conversion mods with more dynamic universe.
In X4 I feel the universe is too tame - there's a civil war + multilateral conflict + xenon war going on, with gates making enemies literally neighbors, and I've never really seen much fighting or incursions. I did see a few recent wrecks, that included deployed Lasertowers, so I know shit is going down sometimes. But overall, currently I feel there's not a whole lot going on, whereas in X3TC and even X3AP if you had a few satellites around you could see a lot of action.
There's also some stuff that were good in X:R that isn't present here for some reason. Like asking people where you can find a Shipyard, being able to comms with any NPCs inside a station, and being able to move crew via pods/taxi (whatever they were).
I'll stop wasting time doing weird things and test out further features. I still really want some Modifications and I can't seem to find or craft them yet.