Docking is much simpler now that I've figured out I was reading an indicator backwards. Having difficulty making progress, still getting regular crashes, one of which ate my save.
Hopefully you're doing like me and using all 10 save slots, rotating between them. I fully expect to lose one sooner or later.
Edit: After spending more time with the game I can still see this having the potential to be a great X game, but I wouldn't say it's better than X3 in every way anymore. Here are points where it currently falls short:
- Weapon variety is way down and nothing on offer is really geared towards capital ship use or feel special, it's only a few bland weapons, it's all basic fighter weaponry really. As far as I can see a gun is a gun, no size/class difference.
- The map is relatively small compared to even the first X3, which had 97 sectors if i'm not mistaken, X4 has 47. It doesn't help that the highway loop is extremely fast and everything is within 2 sectors of it, making it feel really small, nothing feels remote, it's like the xenons are living in your backyard. I think Egosoft leaned a little too far on the side of convenience here, they obviously haven't given up on X Rebirth's attempt to attract a more casual/mainstream crowd and it completely ruins the feeling of this being a big place that was present in X3.
- Different factions' ship equipment seem to have stat variations but you can't see any of the stats except the main one like shield hp.
- The encyclopedia lacks info for a lot of important stuff, a lot of entries are just blank.
- Missiles don't show up on the radar/map, can't be targeted, don't seem to run out of fuel and will chase you even if you switch to travel mode and eventually hit you if you don't leave the system, which is very annoying for small ships that can get 1-shotted and only hold one flare. Hopefully turrets can shoot them down but seeing how they have issues hitting a ship...
- The AI feels worse than in X3, it can't aim straight most of the time and is pretty terrible at managing distance/positioning. It's also way too enthusiastic about wasting all of its shields boosting away and then coming back to you before they've recharged.
- Auto traders are pretty bad at the moment, even losing you money at times instead of generating profit, definitely not worth investing in. This is likely to get patched, but for now the economic side of the game is pretty busted.
- You'll have to do all the exploration yourself or micromanage an AI ship since the exploration command is woefully inefficient and fails to get anything valuable done in a single sector in any sort of sane timeframe, even with the fastest ship.
- The player HQ is in the middle of Teladi space so if you want to play as a pirate you can forget about it unless you keep Teladi friendly.
- Haven't found or heard of any special or unique ships or variants yet so I'm pretty sure we're limited to only the 3 factions' designs.
- Can't match or control speed in travel mode which makes fleet formations iffy and interdicting traveling enemies annoying. Forget escorting anything in a sane fashion.
- Piracy is very limited not only due to the other issues I've mentioned, but also due to the absence of jump drives. If a ship drops its cargo(and I have yet to see any carry much value) you'll need a cargo ship to pick it up, but since you can't jump cargo ships in or out of the sector and they're slow, they're going to get intercepted by the sector's military.
- It might just be a bug some people have, but the radar makes no sense, you can't use it to line up targets, rolling the ship makes it rotate on two axis instead of one for some reason.
I'm still having fun and the UI is definitely so much better than X3's, but I definitely see just how much more work the game needs now that I've had time to get used to things. Hopefully extra content won't come as standalone expansions like they did with X3.