X³: Reunion

Overview

X: Reunion is a 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) space game developed by Egosoft which expands on the gameplay and story of the previous titles in the franchise.It features a main storyline mission in which the player plays as spacepilot Julian Brennan, but particular emphasis is placed on the more general single-player experience of exploring the numerous sectors of space, mixing with different races, building up your own fleet and your own space empire.The game has a high learning curve and a slow game pace which make it relatively inaccessible to many gamers, but it has a sizable and dedicated hardcore community who have created a large number of mods, scripts and other game aids in support of the game.X: Reunion is particularly notable for creating a highly realistic and believable universe.It achieves this through striking graphics, with beautiful nebulae and planets contrasting with the metallic sheen of the space stations and ships, but in a more tangible way through the dynamic nature of the economy and changing presence of stations and ships in each sector, all of which can be affected by the player.

Gameplay

(Basic Trading)Players will typically start the game with their own minor class ship and a limited number of credits.More credits can be gained by trading resources between different spacestations or factories such that you gain a profit by selling on goods at a higher price. Once you start progressing in the game you can buy freighters and then operate them remotely to trade large quantities of goods; buy software so that they can choose the most profitable good to trade automatically or hire a pilot to control your ship and make all the decisions for you, except if you decide to intervene.

(Missions)Credits can also be gained from taking on missions which will be listed at trading stations and factories on the bulletin board which is accessible once your ship has docked with the station.Missions can range from: delivering goods or person(s) within a certain time limit; escorting a ship; destroying a ship or number of ships for any number of reasons; and taking a number of passengers on a tour of different sectors, with more mission types available in user-created mods.

(Factories)Once players have amassed significant amounts of money they will look to purchase entire factories themselves so that they can manufacture complex goods from more basic goods and thereby make a profit when selling these products on, or to simply create supplies which the player needs themselves.When selecting a type of factory and its location it is worth the player seeing where there are high demands for a certain good so that they are able to set a higher price for it and be able to sell the good as fast as they can manufacture it.It is up to the player if they decide to buy freighters to supply the factory with resources and then transport the finished products away, or if they rely on competitive pricing to attract AI-controlled ships to do this for them.Factories can also be physically linked together to form complexes with the product of one factory being supplied directly to another factory which requires it as a resource.

(Capturing Ships)The other lucrative way to get ahead in the X universe is by capturing other ships and either adding them to your own fleet or selling them on for a profit.This is a skill in its own right since it is often far easier to simply destroy a ship, but if the AI pilot sees his hull damage at a critical level and continued attacking doesn’t give his shields time to replenish then he may decide to bail out rather than losing his own life, leaving the player with the opportunity of claiming this ship for themselves.

The entirety of normal Xgameplay is played from within the confines of your own cockpit from typically a first-person point of view, with the only exceptions to this being when capturing a ship, for which you need to approach the relevant ship in your space suit, and for some of the single-player missions as well.When docked at a space station a new interface is available for trading (compared to during normal spaceflight) allowing the player to view the bulletin board and talk to the people in charge of the station, but all of this is done while remaining in your ship.It should be noted that travel across space occurs in real-time and so will take a long time until you are able to upgrade your ship with SETA [Singularity Engine Time Accelerator] which allows you to speed up time while flying by up to 10 times, and particularly by the purchase of a jumpdrive which allows you to jump from one sector to another instantly.However, each new sector has to be travelled to from an adjacent sector first and explored before they can be jumped to or the contents of the sector are displayed on the in-game map.Normal travel between sectors takes place by traveling through jump gates which jump the player from one sector to an adjacent sector.

Races

There are 5 different main races present in the X universe which can be befriended, each of which occupy distinct groups of sectors and have their own styles of technology from which the player can purchase.The player has a rank with each race which indicates how favourably or unfavourably the player is viewed by each race and this rank can be improved by the player carrying out trade with a race and destroying ships of enemies to a race within its own territories.Attacking ships (or stations) belonging to citizens of a race will naturally lower the player’s standing with the respective race. Having a rank with a race will allow the player to purchase more advanced technology from them.The 5 main races that begin with a friendly disposition to the player are:

Argon

The Argons are humanoids and the race which you initially represent when playing the storyline mission; you start the storyline mission in Argon Prime, the centre of Argon Federation space.The Argon’s are a wealthy democratic race with strong interests in culture, science and learning.From a gameplay standpoint the Argon are useful for constructing the most balanced ships, their ships having a standard futuristic space aesthetic.

Boron

The Boron are an aquatic race that evolved to live underwater but now pursue space travel as well as living in the oceans of their settled planets.They have a strange appearance, which is almost squid-like in some respects.They are a wise race disposed towards a peaceful way of life but have had to learn to defend themselves, particularly against the Split with whom there is a history of shared antagonism.The Kingdom of Boron is run by an elected government, but they continue to have a monarchy that are revered and regarded as figureheads by their society.The Boron ships are designed to be able to travel both in space and underwater and therefore have very streamlined and aquatic aesthetic with a generally green sheen.They have the largest ships available among more advanced classes of ship and can be armed with most powerful shields, but they tend to be more cumbersome and have less firepower than ships from the other races in comparable classes.At the other end of the spectrum they have very fast and nimble scout ships and fighters but with little shielding or weapon space.

Teladi

The Teladi are the economic powerhouse of the X3 universe with a society driven by profit.They are small squat creatures that are perhaps slimy by look as by nature.They are always keen to engage in trade and to find new economic partners and consequently even have decent relations with pirates.They produce some of the most advanced software which the player can purchase for use in trade, such as the software which allows trading ships to become automated and look for the best deals available in nearby sectors.There ships are very practical and though slightly slow have large cargo bays and heavy shielding, as well as being able to be fitted with the broadest range of upgrades.

Paranid

This many-eyed race is appropriately named, being among the most paranoid in the universe particularly in relation to the Argon Federation who they allow trade with but have few other diplomatic relations with.They are a religious race, having many strange rituals that are incomprehensible to outsiders and they tend to look down on other species because of their perceived superiority to these other races.The Paranid construct excellent fighting ships though they may not always have the capacity for all types of weaponry to be used on them.They are also arguably the best looking ships of any race, having smooth contours and a metallic silver sheen to them.

Split

The Split are a naturally aggressive war-like race who have histories of antagonism with virtually all known races in the universe.Visually their people have a stony appearance which fits their characteristic way of dealing with outsiders.Their culture and governmental structure is built on the strength of a few very large families and they are therefore a very proud race for which there is a great deal of shame involved in failure.Their ships are certainly not pretty but are designed for military attack and are generally the fastest of all races.They sacrifice the defensive option of heavy shielding to be able to hold vast arrays of the most sophisticated weaponry available.They are the only race to allow space flies to be used legally for propulsion.

Other races/peoples

(Goner)

In addition to these main races there are the Goners who are a non-aggressive mission-orientated religious order spreading the word of Nathan R. Gunne.They are significant for being the main place from which jumpdrive technology can be bought and also insurance (effectively in-flight quick saves), this being at their temple in one of the Argon home sectors.

(Pirates)There are also a large number of pirates throughout space, who even control some entire sectors.They can be found looking to ambush unsuspecting ships, attacking factories or freighters in sectors from any of the different races and are generally likely to attack the player if they stray within range of their ships.It is possible to trade with the pirates at a number of stations which they own in their own home sectors and this trade can include goods that are illegal with some of the other races but will offer the player greater profit margins.

(Kha’ak) The Kha’ak seek to destroy the universe and are a hive race which exist only to serve the hive.They will often be encountered when seeing them suddenly jump into a random point of some sector in one of their Kha’ak clusters before eventually splitting into many smaller ships, each of which is lightly armed but which together form a formidable force which will try to take down any surrounding ships or stations.

(Xenon)The Xenon are the ultimate enemy that the player will face, particularly as part of the storyline mission.They originated from the Terran (the humans who originated from Earth) and were designed to be autonomous terraforming technology with the ability to self-replicate and prepare planets for colonisation by the Terran.However, this AI became self-aware and turned against the Terran before being tricked into jumping to the portion of space in which X takes place, before the jump gate that they passed through was destroyed in order to protect Earth.The Xenon are now threatening to destroy all races in the X universe and there is no way of dealing diplomatically with them.Much is unknown about them, such as if and where they may have a home planet.

Fighting and trading ranks

The player has a rank displaying their trading prowess and another for their fighting prowess.These ranks range from ‘Opportunist’ through 29 other levels to ‘X-TREME’ for trading and from ‘Harmless’ via 28 stages to ‘X-TREME’ for the fighting rank.The player can progress through these ranks by economic or combat accomplishments respectively, through the taking on of relevant missions or when playing outside of the mission framework.The progress required to get to each successive rank increases exponentially and so takes a longer amount of time once the player has reached a higher rank.By advancing through the different ranks, access is gained to higher-paying missions and also to being able to purchase better equipment and ships.

A dynamic and believable universe

What makes X special is the way in which the universe is constantly changing based on a large number of effects of which the player themselves can be one.The economy is the most obvious example: each of the ships and factories is individually modelled and they will make trade decisions based on how they think they can make the most profit.If there is suddenly a large increase in demand for a product then many different ships will start to converge on wherever the nearest station is which is manufacturing that product.Once the factory starts experiencing this high demand it will respond by raising its prices, which will in turn then lead to ships starting to look elsewhere to buy the relevant product.Aside from random fluctuations, events that may trigger changes in demand will often originate back to attacks from pirate, Kha’ak or Xenon ships.It may be as a consequence of a particular factory being attacked making it unreachable to freighters and other trade ships that the price of the product of that station will then increase in that local area and this will have many knock-on effects.Such attacks can even lead to an entire sector of space being decimated such that the stations themselves become destroyed and this sector will remain barren until AI entrepreneurs or the player themselves decides to invest in purchasing new factories to repopulate that sector.Conflict in nearby sectors will also have the effect of increasing demand for weapons which again will create a ripple effect of demand right down the supply chain.

Another reason for the X universe being so believable and immersive is how well it creates a sense of the proper scale of space.Very few games have managed to accurately present the relative dimensions of objects that would conceivably inhabit space, but in X the capitol classes of ships dwarf mere fighter classes and are literally thousands of times the size and will take a good deal of time to travel the length of.Inversely, the speed of these vast ships may be up to 20 times slower than the smallest craft and they take a long time to be able to adjust course.The spacestations themselves whether factories, solar power plants, shipyards or trading docks are even greater in size and are an impressive sight to behold.Their size allows ships to physically be able to dock as you might expect in either internal bays or external docking clamps, though in the case of capitol ships these ships are so enormous that they can only dock at shipyards, since they are the only structure large enough for them to do so with.

X: Reunion has an initial inaccessibility, steep learning curve and slow pace of gameplay which have made it difficult for many players to enjoy the experience. But what has lead to the game receiving such considerable and prolonged support from its fan base is the ability of the player to carve out their own path in the X universe while having a sense of place in it because of the depth of gameplay and the meaningful interactions which the player has with the gameworld and the gameworld has with them.

System Requirements

PC Minimum System Requirements

• Operating System: Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP/Vista
• Processor: Pentium 4 1.7GHz (or AMD equivalent)
• Memory: 512MB RAM
• Video Card: 128MB 3D DirectX 9 compatible card with Pixel Shader 1.3 support
• Other: 4GB Free Disk Space, Mouse Keyboard, Joystick or Gamepad, DVD ROM Drive, Soundcard

PC Recommended System Requirements

• Operating System: Windows XP/Vista
• Processor: Pentium 4 2.4GHz (or AMD equivalent)
• Memory: 1GB RAM
• Video Card: 256MB 3D DirectX 9 compatible card with Pixel Shader 2.0 support
• Other: 4GB Free Disk Space, Mouse Keyboard, Joystick or Gamepad, DVD ROM Drive, Soundcard

Mac Minimum System Requirements

• Operating System: 10.7 (Lion)
• Processor: Pentium 4 or AMD equivalent at 2.0 GHz
• Memory: 1GB RAM
• Video Card: 256MB OpenGL 2.0+ discrete NVIDIA/AMD card or Intel Core i7-2620M
• Other: 5GB Free Disk Space

Mac Recommended System Requirements

• Operating System: 10.8 (Mountain Lion)
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD equivalent at 2.0 GHz
• Memory: 2GB RAM
• Video Card: 512MB OpenGL 3.0+ discrete NVIDIA/AMD card
• Other: 5GB Free Disk Space

Linux Minimum System Requirements

• Operating System: Ubuntu 12.04 lts
• Processor: Pentium 4 or AMD equivalent at 2.0 GHz
• Memory: 1GB RAM
• Video Card: 256MB OpenGL 2.0+ discrete NVIDIA/AMD card (proprietary driver) or Intel Core i7-2620M with mesa 9.0
• Other: 10 GB Free Disk Space

Linux Recommended System Requirements

• Operating System: Ubuntu 12.04 lts
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD equivalent at 2.0 GHz
• Memory: 3GB RAM
• Video Card: 512MB OpenGL 3.0+ discrete NVIDIA/AMD card (proprietary driver)
• Other: 10 GB Free Disk Space