History VideoGame / X

[[JustForFun/IThoughtThatWas Not to be confused with]] ''Manga/{{X 1999}}'', ''X'' the Nintendo tank game, or the punk band Music/{{X}}, or ''VideoGame/MegaManX''.. Has nothing to do with ''VideoGame/{{X-COM}}''.

[[JustForFun?IThoughtThatWas Not to be confused with]] ''Manga/{{X 1999}}'', ''X'' the Nintendo tank game, or the punk band Music/{{X}}, or ''VideoGame/MegaManX''.. Has nothing to do with ''VideoGame/{{X-COM}}''.

[[JustForFun?IThoughtThatWas Not to be confused with]] ''VideoGame/MegaManX''.

Not to be confused with ''Manga/{{X 1999}}'', ''X'' the Nintendo tank game, or the punk band Music/{{X}}. Has nothing to do with ''VideoGame/{{X-COM}}''.

* ''X: Beyond The Frontier'', (1999)

* ''X: Beyond the Frontier'' through ''X3: Albion Prelude'':

* ''VideoGame/XRebirth''

The series from ''X-Tension'' and beyond allows the player to [[UniversalDriversLicense pilot almost anything they can see]], from tiny scout ships to [[MileLongShip five kilometer long destroyers and carriers]]. There are many classes of ships - fighters, carriers, corvettes, bombers, etc - and each race has their own ship set with their own unique advantages and disadvantages. [[PlayerMooks Player-owned ships]] can be commanded to perform tasks, such as patrolling, exploring, or trading.

Recently Egosoft announced a revamp of the series via the next main series game, ''VideoGame/XRebirth'', due out in 2013. To the fanbase's rather abrupt surprise, they then announced a new "expandalone" game using the ''X3: Terran Conflict'' engine, ''Albion Prelude'', mere days before its surprise release date. Named after the ship that is the focus of ''X: Rebirth'', ''Albion'' adds a Stock Exchange to the game, as well as progressing the story to the massive interstellar war that was brewing by the end of ''X3: Terran Conflict''.

A WideOpenSandbox [[FourX space combat/trading simulator]] series by German developer Egosoft.

All the planets discovered were totally [[AbsentAliens absent of intelligent life]] [[note]]due to the [[{{Precursors}} Ancients]] modifying the gate system to keep the Terrans isolated[[/note]]. Earth built a fleet of self-replicating and self-evolving {{Terraform}}er ships to make the worlds habitable for humanity. About a hundred years later, after the mission was complete, Earth sent out a command for the Terraformers to self-destruct. Not long after, the Terraformers showed up in the Solar System in force and began terraforming ''everything'' in sight. Nathan R.Gunne, a Terran commander, lured the Terraformers past Earth's jump gate into the X-Universe, then destroyed the jump gate behind him to isolate the Terraformers (now dubbed the Xenon) and to save Earth.

In the 30th century AD, a Xenon ship equipped with a prototype jumpdrive blundered into the Solar System and was captured by the Terrans. They reverse-engineered its jumpdrive and built the Xperimental Shuttle to try and reach Alpha Centauri. However, the jumpdrive locked onto the X-Universe and promptly breaks down, stranding the pilot (and protagonist) in the X-Universe and indebted to the Teladi, who helped repair his ship. The Earth pilot, Kyle Brennan, helped prevent the Xenon from blowing up a planet with their M0 Planet Killer in the first game, ''Beyond The Frontier''.

After the Kha'ak planet killer is destroyed, a {{Precursor}} shows up and begins secretly aiding the Paranid in building a jump gate. The Paranid activate their jump gate in Heretic's End -- which links to Earth, right as the Kha'ak are jumping into the sector to try and destroy the Paranid jump gate. The entire Terran Fleet, completely forgotten by the rest of the universe, streams out of the jump gate and [[CurbStompBattle curb stomps the Kha'ak]]. The Terrans establish tentative relations with the other races, but try to remain isolated -- hence the game being named ''Reunion''.

''Terran Conflict'' reunites the long lost [[spoiler: Aldrin]] colony with Earth, destroys the Kha'ak Hive Queen, and sees a [[SpaceColdWar rise in tensions between the Argon and the Terrans]].

In ''Albion Prelude'', the cold war [[RoaringRampageOfRevenge goes hot with the destruction]] of Earth's orbital defense station. ''Rebirth'' will take place after the collapse of the gate network during the Argon-Terran war.

** ''X: Tension'', (2000, expansion for ''X: BTF'')

* ''X3: Terran Conflict'' (2008)

The series from ''X: Tension'' and beyond allows the player to [[UniversalDriversLicense pilot almost anything they can see]], from tiny scout ships to [[MileLongShip five kilometer long destroyers and carriers]]. There are many classes of ships - fighters, carriers, corvettes, bombers, etc - and each race has their own ship set with their own unique advantages and disadvantages. [[PlayerMooks Player-owned ships]] can be commanded to perform tasks, such as patrolling, exploring, or trading.

* ''Videogame/XRebirth'' (2013); reboot of the series (not yet released)

The series from ''Xtension'' and beyond allows the player to [[UniversalDriversLicense pilot almost anything they can see]], from tiny scout ships to [[MileLongShip five kilometer long destroyers and carriers]]. There are many classes of ships - fighters, carriers, yachts, bombers, etc - and each race has their own ship set with their own unique advantages and disadvantages. [[PlayerMooks Player-owned ships]] can be commanded to perform tasks, such as patrolling, exploring, or trading.

You can just play through the plot, content to stay in your puny little fighter and not straying much farther than your starting sector, or you can create a universe-spanning trading empire, all but controlling the economy and with enough military power to squash all who dare oppose you. You can also do things that you're not really meant to do, such as almost completely wiping out a race from the universe. It takes a hell of a lot of military resources, and it'll probably break the economy unless you supply it with that race's goods yourself, but nobody's actively ''stopping'' you from doing it. The only reason you can't destroy ''everything'' is because the game engine tries to keep the economy balanced and will slowly recreate destroyed stations if need be.

[[quoteright:250:~~Windows/Macintosh FourX [[SimulationGame Space Simulator]]~~]]

Recently Egosoft announced a revamp of the series via the next main series game, ''VideoGame/XRebirth'', due out in 2012. To the fanbase's rather abrupt surprise, they then announced a new "expandalone" game using the ''X3: Terran Conflict'' engine, ''Albion Prelude'', mere days before its surprise release date. Named after the ship that is the focus of ''X: Rebirth'', ''Albion'' adds a Stock Exchange to the game, as well as progressing the story to the massive interstellar war that was brewing by the end of ''X3: Terran Conflict''.

Not to be confused with ''Manga/{{X 1999}}'', ''X'' the Nintendo tank game, or the punk band Music/{{X}}.

* ''[[Videogame/XRebirth X: Rebirth]]'' (2012); reboot of the series (not yet released)

* ''X: Rebirth'' (2012); reboot of the series (not yet released)

All the planets discovered were totally [[AbsentAliens absent of intelligent life]] [[note]]due to the [[{{Precursors}} Old Ones]] modifying the gate system to keep the Terrans isolated[[/note]]. Earth built a fleet of self-replicating and self-evolving {{Terraform}}er ships to make the worlds habitable for humanity. About a hundred years later, after the mission was complete, Earth sent out a command for the Terraformers to self-destruct. Not long after, the Terraformers showed up in the Solar System in force and began terraforming ''everything'' in sight. Nathan R.Gunne, a Terran commander, lured the Terraformers past Earth's jump gate into the X-Universe, then destroyed the jump gate behind him to isolate the Terraformers (now dubbed the Xenon) and to save Earth.

* ''X: Beyond the Frontier'' through ''X3: Albion Prelude'':
** XUniverse/{{Tropes 0 to F}}
** XUniverse/{{Tropes G to L}}
** XUniverse/{{Tropes M to R}}
** XUniverse/{{Tropes S to Z}}
* ''VideoGame/XRebirth''

** ''X3: Albion Prelude'' (2011); [[DownloadableContent expansion pack]] for ''Terran Conflict''

Long before the events of the games, Earth built the first jump gate and launched it towards Alpha Centauri. However, in a midflight test, the Earth jump gate locked onto a random gate not built by humans - they had discovered the ''X-Universe'' [[PortalNetwork gate system]]. All the planets discovered were totally [[AbsentAliens absent of intelligent life]] [[note]]due to the PreCursors modifying the gate system to keep the Terrans isolated[[/note]]. Earth built a fleet of self-replicating and self-evolving [[{{Terraform}} Terraformer]] ships to make the worlds habitable for humanity. About a hundred years later, after the mission was complete, Earth sent out a command for the Terraformers to self-destruct. Not long after, the Terraformers show up in force, and begin terraforming ''everything'' in sight. Nathan R.Gunne, a Terran commander, lured the Terraformers past Earth's jump gate into the X-Universe, then destroyed the jump gate behind him to isolate the Terraformers (now dubbed the Xenon) and to save Earth. Gunne crash lands his frigate on Sonra-4, an earth-like world, and begins restarting civilization with his crew. They name themselves the "Argon" after R. Gunne. [[FutureImperfect Earth has become a fairytale legend]]. The Argon begin exploring the X-Universe, and discover the peaceful [[FishPeople Boron]], the [[ScaryDogmaticAliens Paranid]], the [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy Split]], and the [[ProudMerchantRace Teladi]]. They also rediscover the [[AIIsACrapshoot Xenon]]. The Terrans, completely isolated from the X-Universe, build a ship with the first Jump Drive, to try and reach Alpha Centauri. However, the Jump Drive locks onto the X-Universe and promptly breaks down, stranding the pilot (and protagonist) in the X-Universe and indebted to the Teladi, who helped repair his ship. The Earth pilot, Kyle Brennan, helped prevent the Xenon from blowing up a planet with their M0 Planet Killer in the first game, ''Beyond The Frontier''. A few decades later in ''The Threat'', the [[HordeOfAlienLocusts Kha'ak]] show up and their first act in the universe is to destroy everything in the sector President's End and nearly destroying the planet in Omicron Lyrae. After the Kha'ak planet killer is destroyed, a {{Precursor}} shows up and begins secretly aiding the Paranid in building a jump gate. The Paranid activate their jump gate in Heretic's End -- which links to Earth, right as the Kha'ak are jumping into the sector to try and destroy the Paranid jump gate. The entire Terran Fleet, completely forgotten by the rest of the universe, streams out of the jump gate and [[CurbStompBattle curb stomps the Kha'ak]]. The Terrans establish tentative relations with the other races, but try to remain isolated -- hence the game being named ''Reunion''. ''Terran Conflict'' reunites the long lost [[spoiler: Aldrin]] colony with Earth, destroys the Kha'ak Hive Queen, and sees a [[SpaceColdWar rise in tensions between the Argon and the Terrans]]. In ''Albion Prelude'', the cold war [[RoaringRampageOfRevenge goes hot with the destruction]] of Earth's orbital defense station. ''Rebirth'' will take place after the collapse of the gate network during the Argon-Terran war.

Recently Egosoft announced a revamp of the series via the next main series game, ''X: Rebirth'', due out in 2012. To the fanbase's rather abrupt surprise, they then announced a new "expandalone" game using the ''X3: Terran Conflict'' engine, ''Albion Prelude'', mere days before its surprise release date. Named after the ship that is the focus of ''X: Rebirth'', ''Albion'' adds a Stock Exchange to the game, as well as progressing the story to the massive interstellar war that was brewing by the end of ''X3: Terran Conflict''.

!!The X-Universe contains examples of the following tropes:

[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder:Tropes 0-C]]
* {{Two-D Space}}:
** Played straight in the first two games -- most ships, planets, and stations are laid out on a two-d plane. Averted and repeatedly lampshaded in the third game.
** ''Terran Conflict'' actually falls right back into the trope a bit: while the core X-'verse sectors are certainly much more variable in their layouts compared to the earlier games, many Terran sectors are flat as a pancake with stations smack dab on the same horizontal plane. Likely due to the fact that Terran stations are ''massive'' compared to even the largest non-Terran station; you'd have trouble fitting a Terran Orbital Patrol base in a smaller Commonwealth sector.
*** In a possible case of [[TruthInTelevision Truth In Video Games]], this kind of makes sense as almost all Terran sectors are in the Solar System, and the planets are mostly on the same elliptical plane anyway. By extension, Lagrangian 'points' (stable 'places' which are suitable for constructing stations) tend to trace elliptical orbits on the same plane.
*** ''Albion Prelude'' adds varying station altitudes to the Sol System. The Asteroid Belt demonstrates why this trope can be an AcceptableBreakFromReality: they put the system's equipment dock way "below" the system ecliptic with the docking ports on the ''bottom''. And the station still has an autopilot docking corridor longer than a Commonwealth station, meaning it takes ''forever'' to dock.
** 3D maneuvering is very important in combat. Most capital ships have their guns arranged with the intended anticapital mounts on the forward and flank batteries and the flak mounts on the dorsal, ventral, and stern batteries. The ideal position for a capital ship is to be three or four kilometers "above" or "below" the target, oriented on a sideways diagonal to present a broadside and the forward guns. The AI isn't smart enough for this, however, which means battles typically consist of charging the target, maneuvering to avoid a crash, then turning around. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
* FourX: A rare example played through the first person perspective.
* AbnormalAmmo: The Terran [[WaveMotionGun Point Singularity Projector]] shoots what are essentially black holes at enemy ships.
* AbsentAliens: Subverted in the backstory. The only reason the Terrans didn't meet any aliens during their early explorations is that the Old Ones had modified the gate system to keep the Terrans isolated.
* AbusingTheKardashevScaleForFunAndProfit: The Outsiders in the backstory and Encyclopedia are full blown Type [=IVs=], and the Old Ones are borderline Type [=IVs=]. DysonSphere and Matrioshka Brain civilizations are mentioned, and they fit into the borderline Type [=IIs=]. However, all the races the player actually interacts with are at best high-end Type Is.
* AbusivePrecursors / BenevolentPrecursors : The Old Ones ''do'' have theoretically good goals, like doing something about that whole "Heat Death Of The Universe" ''thing'', and they consider the PortalNetwork they built and maintain a gift to the younger races. On the other hand, they've got a nasty habit of thinking about the younger races as one collective group, making them [[WellIntentionedExtremist frighteningly]] willing to toy with other species. Since their most direct method of manipulation involves switching gate pairs in the PortalNetwork, this means that they do things like start interplanetary wars seemingly ForTheLulz, [[YouCantGoHomeAgain separate colony ships from their home planets]], simply lock fleets in deep space with nowhere to go, or [[InferredHolocaust turn off the entire system of interstellar travel]]. On the gripping hand, that bit about shutting down the entire PortalNetwork also came in response to the [[AIIsACrapshoot Xenon terraformers, who have a bad habit of terraforming people out of existance]], [[OhCrap having control of a large portion of the galaxy]].
* AcePilot: The player. The highest combat rank, X-TREME, requires the player to slaughter tens of thousands of enemy starships.
* TheAestheticsOfTechnology: Terran ships, despite being the most advanced ships, [[http://i.imgur.com/SyPVb.jpg don't look much more advanced than the modern Space Shuttle]] -- just a lot more clean and streamlined. The Paranid, the second-most advanced race, use [[http://i.imgur.com/VG130.jpg very high-tech looking ships]] with lots of curves and shiny hulls. The Teladi, who buy or reverse engineer all their technology from the other races and use lower tech weaponry, have [[http://i.imgur.com/Z17s7.jpg cobbled-together ships]], though they are usually just as effective as the other race's ships. The Pirates on the other hand, use scavenged and spot-repaired ships, with their capital ships cobbled together from the hulks of old transporter ships, and it shows when you look at their stats - almost all the Pirate ships have terrible stats compared to the original race's ships. Boron ships ''look'' like they ought to be superior to everything else, but really only excel as transports.
* AIIsACrapshoot: The modern-day Xenon are descended from the Terraformers, originally built by the Terrans to terraform worlds. After a badly-written ''software update'' they begin to 'terraform' people, cities, and stations. Eventually they [[spoiler:gained true sentience]]. This is why you bug-check your changes before you implement them, people.
* AirJousting: The AI's idea of combat is to fly straight at the target while firing every weapon it can hit with, then banking away to avoid collisions ([[ArtificialStupidity and sometimes failing]]). This results in OldSchoolDogfighting when fighters do it, and {{Standard Starship Scuffle}}s when capital ships do it.
* AliensSpeakingEnglish: All species speak a version of Japanese. TranslationConvention makes them all speak in English (or whichever language your game is set to).
* TheAlliance: The Commonwealth, which includes the 5 main races: The Argon, Boron, Teladi, Paranid, and Split. It functions more like a United Nations, though.
* AllianceMeter: Each race has its own independent status. Argon and Boron are allied, and Split and Paranid are allied, but each side has neutral status to the Teladi and one of the races from each side. Argon hate the Paranid, and Split hate the Boron. Killing hated ships in sectors will give you a reputation bonus, while killing neutral or allied ships will give you a reputation hit to both the victim and the sector owner. Terrans are neutral to everyone in ''Terran Conflict'', but are at war with the Argon in ''Albion Prelude''. It ''is'' possible to ally to every side (besides the Xenon and Kha'ak), including the SpacePirates and Yaki, but you can't do combat missions if you wish to remain neutral or allied - race combat missions will usually feature Pirates or Yaki, and Pirate and Yaki combat missions feature race ships (like protecting a Pirate station from a Boron corvette).
* AllPlanetsAreEarthLike: Averted. A good number of planets in-game look Earth-ish (most likely due to the Terraformers, well, ''terraforming'' them) but plenty look and are described as fairly different -- the Boron homeworld being an aquatic planet with an ammonia-based atmosphere, for example.
** Actually, when the network was first explored by the Terrans, it was noted that there were an unusual amount of worlds that were similar to Earth. They only had small differences (geological differences, etc.), which is why Terraformers were required.
* AllThereInTheManual: The ''X-Encyclopedia'', a 200 page [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin encyclopedia]] on the background of the X-universe, its future (past the games' timeline), and how technology works. It loves to talk about stuff that isn't mentioned in the games at all, like the "Hatikvah Free League", a separate human government, or a species of sentient whales on a hidden Boron planet.
* AlternativeCalendar: The calendar starts at '0' in 2170, twenty-four years after a Terran colony and war fleet is separated from Earth as part of a mass deception to save Earth from the Xenon. They quickly form their own society (the modern-day Argon are their descendants).
** They also erase all mention of Earth from their histories, possibly to prevent anyone from accidentally leading the terraformers back to Earth. By the time of ''[=X:BtF=]'', [[FutureImperfect Earth is a fairy tale]].
* AlwaysChaoticEvil: The Xenon and the Kha'ak. Pirates and Yaki begin looking like that but it's possible to eventually get on good terms with them, and it's possible to befriend ''everyone'' at the same time if you avoid doing combat missions.
* {{Antimatter}}: Terran ships have Matter-Antimatter reactors, their corvettes can mount Matter-Antimatter launchers, and they also have Matter-Antimatter mines.
* ApocalypseHow: Apocalypses of various types are ''all over'' the games and lore.
** Let's start all the way back in the [=2140s=] A.D. The terraformers going nuts resulted in Galactic-level Societal Disruption for the Terrans. Earth came within a hairsbreadth of being rendered uninhabitable.
** The Kha'ak did a system-scale Physical Annihilation of President's End in ''X2: The Threat''. All that's left is rubble and the gates.
** The [[SpaceColdWar Terran Conflict]] turned into a hot war after Saya Kho blew up the Torus Aeternal in ''X3: Albion Prelude'', a Planetary Societal Disruption for Earth. A year later the {{Precursors}} shut down the gate system ([[WildMassGuessing maybe to prevent the younger races from obliterating themselves]]), which likely caused Galactic Societal Collapse.
* ApocalypseWow: The destruction of the Torus Aeternal in ''Albion Prelude'' is shown in [[http://store.steampowered.com/video/201310?snr=1_5_9__400 the opening cinematic]].
* AprilFoolsDay:
** The trailer for ''[[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlAWC2HSOYM Nautilus]]'', a fake film set in the ''X-Universe'' about Squiddy [=McSquid=] came out on April Fools' Day.
** 2012's April Fools' shows that ''X: Rebirth'' has a [[http://www.egosoft.com/news/images/news_2012_03_29_001.jpg Dance Dance Revolution style method of bartering prices]]
* ArbitraryMaximumRange: All weapons have a maximum range, the longest being 8 kilometers on a capital ship cannon. The effective range of most weapons is lower than the listed max range, because at long range the target will usually avoid the {{Painfully Slow Projectile}}s.
* AreaOfEffect: Phased Shockwave Generators and Plasma Burst Generators.
* ArmorPiercingAttack: The Mass Driver main weapon will outright ignore ship mounted shields and damage the ship's (very expensive and frail) hull directly. It doesn't do that much damage, but since it's ammo based rather than energy based, it can keep firing until you run out of ammo (which on a large fighter, may be 10,000+ rounds).
* ArtificialBrilliance: Rapid-response navy ships in ''Albion Prelude'' will jump around the universe to respond to threats to their installations and ships. They'll also jump away from combat if they start taking too much damage.
* ArtificialStupidity:
** Fatal collisions among NPC ships are commonplace. Fast NPC fighters tend to splat on the station they are attacking after a few minutes of fire. Unwanted self-destruction by launching a missile slower than their ship is also relatively common. Gets elevated to the power of itself if you activate time compression; the AI routines have trouble running 10x faster, and glitch out -- generally in more dramatic ways the faster the ship is. Expect to see fighters zig-zagging all over the place and capital ships ramming stations.
*** The player ship's autopilot appears to use the same lousy programming, leading many members of the community to jokingly dub it the "auto-pillock".
*** [[http://apricotmappingservice.com/autopillok.html Some believe the auto-pillock consists of a gerbil (or lemming) in a box, with a rough sketch of the sector map and a joystick.]]
*** Fighter craft love to smash themselves into capital ships when attacking them. In [[http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=295405 a series of tests]] on the EGOSOFT forums, a player ordered swarms of fighters to attack a weaponless capital ship. Two waves, one of Busters and another of Mambas, suffered 50% losses because they were splatting themselves on the sides of their target.
*** Oddly enough, the auto-pillock is the only thing that mitigates the Aldrin Spitfyre's status as a Game Breaker. This is an M3 heavy fighter [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale capable of topping 450 m/s, has 75 MJ of shielding]], and can mount and fire ''corvette''-grade weapons. The game self-balances by smashing it into things on attack runs.
** The player has a number of well-documented, non-exploit tricks available to him in combat that the AI is evidently not programmed to use, such as strafing and actually [[MacrossMissileMassacre launching missile barrages from [=M7M=]- and M8-class ships]], which are supposed to do that in the first place.
*** The latter behavior is corrected in ''Albion Prelude'' to a rather frightening degree. As long as they can maintain their stores of ammunition, AI missile bombers and frigates will not hesitate to pour long-range ordnance into a sector until everything in it has been purged of life.
** Your trading ships and Universe Traders will [[TooDumbToLive blissfully fly through Xenon and Pirate sectors]] without any regard for their life. Universe Traders will ''sometimes'' jump away when they come under attack, but ''not'' when the enemy is coming towards them - the pilots don't seem to ever notice 3 kilometer long destroyers bearing down on them.
** The targeting computer auto-aims for the center of every ship, and is smart enough to lead its targets. But the [[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?NTg4MDg1NDc Terran M1 Tokyo]] (and its base design, the [[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?ODk4MzExMTU TL Mobile Mining Base-Ship]]) have a long, narrow primary hull with an offset saucer section about a third of the way from the stern; the geographical center of the ship is in empty space forward of the saucer. This means that if you're attacking from above or below, auto-aimed shots will quite often miss cleanly.
* ArtisticLicenseEconomics:
** Taken UpToEleven. Not only would the economy not work in RealLife, ''it doesn't work InUniverse either''. The most infamous example is the Terrans, whose economy is perpetually stagnated, with goods sitting in factories unsold. Doesn't help that the Terran stations and sectors are ''massive'' and have a docking corridor that's the size of a Commonwealth station; anything that gets in the way will cause a docking trading ship to avert and restart its docking path. The game's GOD engine (regulates the economy, and what is spawned/removed) also likes to destroy Terran stations because they don't receive their necessary resources, which happens a lot since there will be 3-4 sectors between a technology factory and the ore or food that it needs to run. Terrans fail civil planning forever.
** This is an opportunity in disguise. The Terrans are merely waiting for someone (i.e. you) to revitalize their economy by placing in their sectors factories that produce what their stations lack; doing this properly can bring stupid amounts of money to entrepreneur-type players.
*** Even then, there's never enough weapons to go around unless the player builds his own.
** Less well-known is the fact that the Commonwealth will also crash without player intervention. The most common symptom is the removal of both TractorBeam factories in the game (no station buys them, so traders don't trade with them), which forces the player to build and feed an entire SpaceStation for something he only ever needs one of.
* AscendedGlitch:
** In ''X3: Reunion'', dropping your shields out from your cargo bay then picking them up again would instantly recharge them. Egosoft kept it in ''X3: Terran Conflict'' as it's useless in combat and nobody wants to wait half an hour for their destroyer's shields to recharge.
** Similarly with the spacesuit's repair beam: entering a ship and leaving it instantly recharges the repair beam's energy, cutting down {{scratch damage}} fixes by a large factor.
* AsteroidMiners: Ships can be outfitted with Ore Collectors. Blow up an asteroid with a big missile or a Mobile Drilling System, cut up the chunks into smaller pieces with your weapons, then pick it up. Players can sometimes see AI ships mining asteroids, but it's fairly rare.
* AsteroidThicket: There can be upwards of 40 asteroids (each of which 1-2km in diameter) in a 60 kilometer radius. Most sectors have only a couple asteroids fairly spaced out, but sectors like Savage Spur have several dozen asteroids in a tiny area between the gates; the sector is a death trap for capital ships, more so if SETA is running on 10x.
* AttackAttackAttack: Xenon and Kha'ak ships will ''never'' retreat from battle, and will blithely throw scout ships to try and kill your destroyers. Pirate and Commonwealth ships will occasionally try and retreat, but by the time they realize "oh god we're all going to die", there is usually only one scout ship left alive.
* AttackDrone: Freighters ''love'' to drop these by the dozens to swarm attacking ships.
** ''Terran Conflict'' has two new types of enhanced drones, and a little squad of them (bought dirt-cheap) could easily kill the biggest ships in the game in less than a minute with almost no casualties.
*** Mostly because it will overwhelm the game's AI, and cause the game to use more system resources. As more AIs are running, the game runs the AI less; i.e. AI destroyers will stop firing constantly, or may plow into an asteroid while shooting.
*** And because NPC capital ships are [[PointDefenseless rarely equipped with weapons capable of hitting them]].
** ''X: Rebirth's'' player ship is armed with drones that can be flown remotely. This is something of a bone of contention among the fans, for reasons explained on the [[YMMV/{{X}} YMMV tab]].
* AwesomeButImpractical:
** Missile frigates and bombers fall into this category in the early game. Fielding them requires the player to build up a strong supporting industry to manufacture munitions. Once said industry is built up, however, they jump to AwesomeYetPractical, fully capable of singlehandedly leveling sectors.
** The ATF Valhalla. 14 gigajoules of shielding, 32 [[WaveMotionGun Point Singularity Projectors]], 24 [[MoreDakka Starburst Shockwave Cannons]] ... and it's so wide that it can't fit through gates. Seriously, when it enters a sector, it ''bangs into the gate rim and loses its shields'', reducing the ATF's trump card to a sitting duck. There's a good reason it doesn't spawn in vanilla TC. The behavior is corrected in ''Albion Prelude'', where the Valhalla warps next to a jumpgate, not inside it.
*** It's also absurdly slow and hard to maneuver, and its size gives it some pretty big blind spots in its laser targeting.
** The Paranid M2 Odysseus and Boron M6+ Heavy Hydra are sometimes ''treated'' like this (notably on the wiki), though they're really only impractical for early and mid-game players: their price tags are quite a bit higher than the rest of their class.
** Through care or an exploit, ''Terran Conflict'' players can capture the carrier-class Terran #deca, and even reverse-engineer it. Effectively gate-maximum size and with enough hangar space for fifty heavy fighters, it's a massive and frightening machine that dwarfs most other ships. Outfitting it with any weaponry, however, requires farming Khaak destroyers, and the resulting equipped ship is extraordinarily capital-intensive compared to most of the other options.
** Likewise, the Goner Aran is a unique mothership class craft capable of docking ''another capital ship'', along with massive numbers of fighters and a huge cargo bay. Completely unarmed and terribly, terribly slow, though, its primary utility is to act as a supersized cargo bay or to jump into a system, undock fighters, and jump out. It's also found in extremely poor shape, and as a result, repairing and equipping it is an exercise in frustration.
*** Only if you try to repair it with your spacesuit's repair laser. Just send the damn thing to a shipyard and be done with it. As for equipping it, by the time you have an Aran you're likely to have enough money to finance some shield generator factories.
** M2 destroyers as player ships, because they're too slow and can't carry a fighter for use as a captain's yacht (for docking at stations without capital ship docking clamps). Most players prefer high-end M6 corvettes (which don't ''need'' a captain's yacht), M7 frigates (versatile, not horrifically slow, and many can carry a small number of fighters), or the fastest of the M1 carriers (ditto).
* BareYourMidriff / FormFittingWardrobe / MsFanservice / {{Stripperiffic}} (whew!): Saya Kho is frequently depicted as such. [[http://extreme.pcgameshardware.de/attachments/397450d1301531304-spieler-frauen-die-beliebtesten-frauen-charaktere-computerspielen-x3saya.jpg This image]] is on the back of ''X3: Gold Edition''.
* TheBattlestar:
** The Split M7 Panther, which has a fighter bay rivaling a carrier and a decent number of frigate-sized guns. M1 Carriers also pack a good number of guns behind powerful shields, though they don't have the stamina of M7 or M2.
** The ATF M1 Woden is a variant on their primary M1, the Odin. It trades off fighter capacity for additional weapons power. [[DummiedOut It doesn't spawn]] in vanilla ''[=X3TC=]'', but it did make it into ''Albion Prelude''.
* BeamSpam: Kha'ak capital ships.
* BigBadassBattleSequence:
** Most of the War missions in ''Albion Prelude'' involve dozens of capital ships duking it out with at least a hundred fighters zipping around taking potshots at corvettes.
** The Aldrin Expansion in ''Terran Conflict'', during which the player leads an ATF task force in pushing the Xenon out of the Terrans' former colonies in the Aldrin region.
* BigDumbObject:
** [[spoiler: The HUB. It's a giant sphere 30 billion kilometers in diameter, it's orbiting a ''massive'' red giant star, it's drawing power straight from the star itself, it can modify the PortalNetwork, and it's unknown who built it.]]
** The [[http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/305/8/c/the_torus_aeternal_by_firedragon20-d31xyz7.jpg Torus Aeternal]], a ''massive'' station that wraps entirely around Earth's equator. It houses millions of people, builds most of the Terrans' enormous fleet, and has weapons capable of annihilating ''anything'' that dares to get too close.
* BiggerIsBetter: The Terran Kyoto and [=ATF=] Valhalla, the ultra-destroyers introduced in ''Albion Prelude''. They are by far the largest ships in the game, and have huge amounts of weaponry.
** As mentioned in AwesomeButImpractical, the Valhalla is a subversion in ''Terran Conflict'': it's so wide it clips the gate when it enters a sector, stripping it of its shields and rendering it a sitting duck for other capital ships. ''Albion Prelude'' fixed it so it warps next to the gate rather than through it.
* BigNo: Terran and Argon pilots usually scream "NOOOOO!" when killed.
* BiggerOnTheInside: Cargo bays, due to quantum compression. Ships not much larger than a modern F-16 jet can fit several dozen people in their cargo bays - which would be about the size of a refrigerator.
* BlackAndGrayMorality: ''Albion Prelude''. After the Terrans begin moving fleets around because of rumors of the Argon developing AGI ships, Saya Kho blows up Earth's Torus Aeternal, killing potentially ''millions'' of people on the Torus alone, with even more from wreckage [[ColonyDrop falling back down onto Earth]]. The Terrans then go on a RoaringRampageOfRevenge against the Argon Federation, who deploy [[TooDumbToLive artificially intelligent ships reverse engineered from the Xenon]]. Some of the Paranid, who normally despise other races, were horrified by this and sided with the Terrans. The year after the Argon butcher millions of Terrans, the [[NiceJobBreakingItHero entire gate system shuts down.]].
* BlackBox: The jumpgates play with this trope. While operation is terribly easy -- push a spaceship in one gate, and it'll pop out the other gate in the pair a few seconds later, no matter how far away -- no one in the Commonwealth understands anything but the lies-to-children version of how they work. While there are a few scientists capable of repairing damaged gates, no one even thinks about trying replication or reconfiguration, and the irregular outages or changes in the system caused by meddling precursors is treated like mystery or even legend where it's not just a natural risk of the gates. The species that actually made the system in the first place not only consider it [[TheWorldIsNotReady outside of the range of understanding of the normal races]], they think it's impossible for a species to understand without getting [[AbusingTheKardashevScaleForFunAndProfit a few points higher on the Kardashev scale]]. Then the [[HumansAreSpecial Terran humans get involved]], and not only get the theory down and create a new gate on their own, but also create a Jumpdrive that's a ''separate'' Black Box to everyone else in the setting.
* BlindJump: The Unfocused Jumpdrive will randomly generate a sector, and warp the player to it; complete with radio hash and distant visible galaxies off in the distance. It's great for escaping your doom, but you better hope you brought energy cells for the return trip, [[{{Unwinnable}} otherwise you'll be stranded forever]].
** And that is why the random sector always has a crate of cells in it. It may be on the opposite side of a Kha'ak swarm, [[OhCrap or in a cloud of Xenon fighters,]] though.
* BlueAndOrangeMorality: The Old Ones' goals and motivations are basically incomprehensible to the young races. Since they've been around longer than Earth has been Earthlike (over 3.2 billion years), they've had the chance to become Type IV on the Kardashev scale, and their main plan is intended to prevent the heat death of the universe. But because they've been united for so long, they seem to have forgotten that other groups might not be so unified. Like the young races, for instance. Also, for some bizarre reason they told the Commonwealth not to finish off the Xenon after the Second Xenon Conflict, [[FridgeLogic even though it was the Xenon that derailed their long-term plans in the first place]].
* BoardingParty: You can recruit and train Marines/captured slaves to board enemy ships, murder the crew, and hack the central computer. When they board, they'll eject from your cargo bay and space walk to the enemy ship, or if you have Board Pods you load them into your missile tubes and fire it at the enemy ship. If the enemy ship has shields when your marines come into contact with it, it will fry them.
* BoringButPractical:
** Rapid fire, low damage per shot weapons. Capital ships would be better off if [[MoreDakka all their turrets are filled to the brim with anti-fighter weaponry]], rather than using the biggest WaveMotionGun they can carry, even when facing enemies of equal or surpassing size. The only real advantage of capital class weaponry is range, not firepower. Unfortunately, it's next to impossible to hit even a massive, slow-moving target at ranges reserved for these weapons due to their {{Painfully Slow Projectile}}s.
** Most of the race-neutral weapons like High Energy Plasma Throwers, Particle Accelerator Cannons, and Photon Pulse Cannons are all boring, but practical due to how common they are (There's over a dozen PPC factores in the game, but only 3-5 factories for Phased Shockwave Generators, for example).
** [[AttackDrone Drone]] [[SpamAttack Spam]] in X3. Beat the enemy by overloading your computer's processor.
* BossInMookClothing: Pirates armed with Plasma Burst Generators, and Xenon fighters armed with Pulsed Beam Emitters. Then there is the dreaded Phased Shockwave Generator in X3:R, which is a Plasma Burst Generator with a 90 degree sphere of doom ahead of the firing ship. Thankfully nerfed to capital ship-only in X3:TC.
** M8 Bombers in ''Albion Prelude''. In ''Terran Conflict'', they were largely free kills because they spawned with hardly any missiles. Between the games, they TookALevelInBadass, and are now capable of killing at least some ships before running out.
* ButWhatAboutTheAstronauts: The Argon backstory consists of this.
* CasualInterstellarTravel: Space is pretty damn crowded with (damn annoying) civilian ships.
* CherryTapping: Pounding on a slower ship who cannot turn around to face you with a weak weapon. The bailing out mechanic actually encourages it: each hit on a ship with shields down has a chance of causing the pilot to abandon the ship, leaving it for you to claim it and use it or selling it. The Pulsed Beam Emitter, which does tremendous shield damage but almost no hull damage, is very popular because of its ability to force rival pilots out while leaving their ship relatively undamaged.
* CityGuards: The system police like to buzz around and scan ships for illegal goods, and have destroyers to back them up. Due to how GOD works, the police fighter craft tend to be pathetically armed; most of them only have a couple Impulse Ray Emitters, which are the weakest guns in the game, excluding support equipment and Ion Disruptors.
* ClownCarBase: The player's headquarters and a few of the trading stations have room for a ''potentially unlimited'' amount of fighters. And thanks to how the out-of-sector battle simulation works, a couple hundred scout ships bought with (end-game level) pocket change can keep the station safe from heavy invaders with little attrition costs.
* ColonyDrop:
** The Terraformers/Xenon bombarded Earth cities from orbit with asteroids and comets when "terraforming" it.
** A variation is used as an actual combat technique by some players, wherein the player builds a SpaceStation ''directly on top of an enemy ship.'' The tactic has earned the moniker "station-bombing."
** The destruction of the Torus Aeternal caused millions (if not billions) of tons of deorbiting debris to rain down on Earth.
* CommonplaceRare:
** Microchips in ''Terran Conflict''. They're everywhere -- weapons, ships, components of all kinds. And yet, good luck finding some in the universe -- there's so much demand, and the production process involves such a convoluted chain of supply, that most chip factories are permanently empty -- the few chips they produce are instantly snatched up by NPC traders. And if you do manage to be faster than the traders, expect to pay ludicrous prices for them.
*** Oh, and [[spoiler:you need 75,000 of them for the Hub plot.]]
** Some critical weapons are also exceptionally rare. Incendiary Bomb Launchers (the "primary" frigate weapon) and Plasma Burst Generator have only a couple factories in the universe, and they are all Pirate or Yaki owned -- meaning you need to befriend the Pirates and the Yaki in order to buy them. Since Pirates shoot ''anything'' that enters their sectors, the stations are also typically nearly empty of resources, meaning that you'll probably need to stock them up yourself, then wait for the wares to be produced, then buy them. When ''Albion Prelude'' came out, preexisting Flak Artillery Array production stations were completely non-existent, meaning the only way to get Flak arrays was to buy and build your own (very expensive) Flak forge, then stock it up, or farm enemy capital ships and hope they drop standard flak weapons.
* TheComputerIsACheatingBastard: A lot of the time it goes the other way (see ArtificialStupidity above), but...
** Boarding operations against Xenon capital ships automatically fail if you have less than (eighteen?) marines remaining when they reach the computer core.
** See the second entry under DeathOfAThousandCuts, below.
** If you stray very far from the allowed approach vector in Earth sector in ''Terran Conflict'', you'll be warned your ship will be destroyed. Continue, and you'll be the subject of a scripted insta-gib, regardless of how much shielding you have. You can't try to destroy the Torus defenses, either: they're invincible.
* TheComputerIsALyingBastard: With one exception, every time ''X3: Terran Conflict'' tells you you need to board a ship with marines during a plot mission, it's lying. The first boarding target will be given to you for free if you wait a while, the second one will get boarded by {{NPC}}s if you wait a while and the third time you can just eject in your spacesuit and claim the target like an abandoned ship. This is significant, as training marines to the point where they could actually capture anything is a very expensive and time-consuming process, far beyond the scope of anything in the campaign missions.
** The one exception is [[spoiler:the Orca you have to capture during the HQ plot]]. That one actually ''does'' require you to board it.
* ComputerVoice: [[FanNickname Betty]], the ship's computer and autopilot, uses a monotone female voice.
* ContinueYourMissionDammit:
** In all Taxi missions, the passenger will begin to nag you as your deadline approaches. The Boron will complain about their tentacles drying out, but due to the voice filters they have, it comes out sounding more like "My testicles are drying out!"
** Plot missions do this, too. The second mission of the Terran plot in ''Terran Conflict'' will have your commanding officer repeatedly calling you and telling you to head to X system to [[StalkingMission tail a ship to its destination]]. And of course in ''Albion Prelude'' you'll get constant calls from the military your gamestart is affiliated with to help them invade (or repel invasion of) a sector. Thankfully shutting them up is as easy as disabling mission guidance in the first case, and turning off war reports in preferences in the second.
* CoolGate: Ordinary jumpgates look pretty nifty. Then compare them to the Terran-designed Neptune gate in TC.
* CoolStarship: Hundreds of them!
** [[spoiler: [[http://i.imgur.com/fFoMj.jpg #DECA]] M1, a massive cylindrical Terraformer CPU ship. The nose of the ship is a massive gaping hole, leading to a glowing red interior.]]
** [[http://i.imgur.com/GTkAR.jpg OTAS Boreas M2]], a destroyer looking like something from ''{{Babylon 5}}'', and can outgun basically every ship in the game.
** Argon Elite M4+, an advanced interceptor which is a throwback to the original Argon Elite M3 from ''X: Beyond the Frontier'' and ''X: Tension''.
** [[http://i.imgur.com/wHsBw.jpg Springblossom]] M6, the single most overpowered corvette in the game, which has ridiculously insane stats for a M6. It's effectively a cockpit with some wings and a giant engine strapped onto the back.
** [=X3R=] has the [[http://i.imgur.com/lrXiu.jpg Hyperion]] M7, a one-of-a-kind, class-creating (M7s didn't exist before it) ship that is given to you after you complete a fairly hard mission. Described as a space yacht, it's in reality a very capable crossover between the M6 corvette and large M2 destroyers. As it's very fast and quite well armed, it's capable of swatting standard frigates out of space with little trouble, and can kill destroyers in a one-on-one fight by evading most of their fire. It also looks ''wicked''.
*** The Hyperion returns in X3:TC, and while it had been downgraded to an M6 corvette it is easily the best M6 in the game and is a fan favorite playership. It flies like an M3+ heavy fighter, practically turning on a dime, has top of the line firepower and shields for an M6, has an absolutely gigantic cargo bay (3333 m^3) and is the only M6 in the game that can dock fighter craft. And if you pick a specific game-start you can even get an overtuned Hyperion that flies far faster than you can normally tune a Hyperion to fly; reports of getting overtuned Hyperions with top speeds over 300 m/s are quite common.
** The [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAQ7x8K6Yjg&t=1m5s Boron Megalodon]]. Originally in the Xtended Terran Conflict mod, but now part of ''Albion Prelude''
* CorruptCorporateExecutive: ''Prelude'''s adding Stock Markets allows the player to easily become this -- obliterating rival corporate ships in order to reduce the value of their company, to get stocks for cut-rate prices.
* CrazyPrepared: Among the functions of the popular MARS script is automatically switching guns in and out of a ship's gun batteries based on what the battery is targeting. You have to have the spare guns in your cargo bay, meaning you might end up carrying two or three entire loadouts (anti-fighter, anti-capital, and maybe anti-corvette).
* CrewOfOne: One man scout ships? Sure. Corvettes the size of a large yacht? No problem! Battleships that are 5 kilometers long? Piece of cake; I don't need a crew! The player never needs a crew on any of his ships (save for Sector and Universe traders, which still has just one pilot), though this is averted for the AI - if you open a comm channel with an AI corvette, frigate, destroyer, or carrier, you'll get a list of names, such as the Captain and navigation officer.
** [[http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=299025 There's some discussion about this in the forums.]] The fandom's consensus is that the ships ''do'' have crews; they're just invisible PlayerMooks.
* CripplingOverspecialization: Boron missile frigates drop ''all'' point defenses for [[MacrossMissileMassacre more missile launchers]]. This essentially means they have no way to protect themselves from incoming missiles - save for spamming their ''own'' missiles at enemy missiles and hoping they hit.
** This was changed in ''Albion Prelude'', where ''all'' ships can mount Mosquito missiles, which coupled with a Bonus Pack script provide a workable missile shield. Missile frigates take this one step further and automatically provide this ability in vanilla Albion Prelude - except that they use all their launch tubes simultaneously, creating a Macross Missile Defense.
* CriticalExistenceFailure: Averted in ''X2: The Threat'' and later games. Once the shields go down, the ship starts taking damage to the hull. When hull integrity goes below ~85%, the ship starts to lose speed, and upgrades and weapons randomly break.
* CyberPunkIsTechno: Much of the soundtrack has this feel, and the setting has some of the elements of CyberPunk.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tropes D-G]]
* DarkerAndEdgier: ''Albion Prelude''. The opening cutscene has one of the main characters from ''Reunion'' blowing themselves and the Torus Aeternal up, killing millions instantly (and then millions more [[ColonyDrop when the wreckage falls back to Earth]]). A full-on near-genocidal interstellar war kicks out between the Terrans' United Space Command / AGI Task Force and the Argon Federation.
* DeathOfAThousandCuts:
** The only way for a lone fighter to win against a capital ship (without MacrossMissileMassacre, at least) is to hide in a blind spot and shoot its comparatively weak weapons until the target dies. A couple hours later.
** The player risks being on the receiving end of this in Xenon and Kha'ak sectors. Such sectors will spawn enemies without end.
* DeathWorld: Quite a lot of planets with their crust blasted off, leaving behind molten red hellholes.
** Albion in ''Albion Prelude'' takes it to another level, with massive fissures actually penetrating deep into the mantle of the planet.
* DeflectorShields: Every single ship has these, you're dead without them. (Even Goners, the space monks, use them)
** This was quite literal in the games before ''X2''; ships had no hull strength meters in those, so if your shields were gone [[OneHitPointWonder a pea going too fast would kill you instantly]], even if you were in a superheavy transporter.
* DerelictGraveyard: the "President's End" sector, which is full of wrecked stations and ships from a Kha'ak attack. Some other sectors have smaller graveyards.
* DescriptivelyNamedSpecies: "Paranid" seems to be a pun on "para''noid''".
* DestroyableItems: In ''X2'' and later, you have a random chance to have outfits destroyed when you take hull damage. The more damaged your hull, the higher the chance.
* TheDon: Don Marani in ''Reunion''
* DownerBeginning: ''Albion Prelude'' starts with the destruction of the Torus Aeternal, the jewel of the Solar System and the home of millions.
* DownloadableContent: Normally incorporated into major patches.
** Each game has an add-on bonus pack that adds a number of useful scripts, ranging from smarter AI trading (Commercial Agent, Commodity Logistics Software) to a near-impenetrable missile defense program for Commonwealth vessels (Mosquito Missile Defense).
** ''X3: Reunion'': "The Bala Gi Missions" (part of a patch).
** ''X3: Terran Conflict'':
*** "A New Home": New plot. Added in patch.
*** "Aldrin Expansion": New plot. Added in patch.
*** "HQ plot": New plot. Added in patch.
*** "Balance of Power": New plot. Added in 3.0 patch.
*** "A Place of Sunshine": New sector distributed over {{Steam}}.
*** ''X3: Albion Prelude''. $9.99 (or free for people who own the X-Superbox), requires ''Terran Conflict'' to be installed. Adds in a stock market, improves the UI, and adds some ships from the ''Xtended Terran Conflict'' mod.
* {{Dronejam}}: Civilian ships are famous for docking at your stations and just sitting there, doing absolutely nothing for several minutes before undocking. This can prevent your own ships from docking, including when the ship is under attack and trying to dock for protection.
** This got so bad that a mod was made whose only purpose is the forced undocking of all ships currently docked to a station.
* DummiedOut: [[http://x3wiki.com/index.php/Non-Vanilla_Ships A couple dozen ships]] don't spawn in vanilla ''Terran Conflict'', though most were never actually finished and use other ships as placeholders. The Valhalla and Woden, on the other hand...
* DysonSphere: [[spoiler::The HUB]]. Follows the Dyson Swarm model, though. [[spoiler::Each is a hollow sphere about 60 kilometers, orbiting a massive red giant star]]
* TheEmpire: Split Dynasty. The Paranid have an actual empire and come pretty close, though.
* EarlyGameHell: ''Reunion'' and previous games were famous from dropping the player into the universe in a crappy ship with next to no credits, upgrades, or weapons. Combat missions are ''painful''.
* EarnYourFun:
** In ''Reunion'' and previous games, you start with [[WithThisHerring one of the cheapest ships in the game]] and enough cash to make a half decent trading run ''if you're lucky''. You're going to be spending a while grinding for credits and reputation before you can afford anything really cool.
** There's several starts in ''X3: Terran Conflict'' which give you a much better fighter, or trading ship. ''X3: Reunion'' players are stuck with the Buster, [[spoiler: the Kha'ak start]] a couple M5 starts, or a couple of trading starts. The Xtended Terran Conflict mod has a start where you start in a 35 million credit frigate, and another with a 250 million credit station and a 20 million credit large transporter.
** This is easily subverted when the player realizes that the trader start is the best for a fighter character. It gives you a light freighter you're supposed to trade with and a light fighter to defend yourself, but if you sell the freighter you'll get enough money to kit out the fighter and arm it to the teeth. Then you start looking for medium pirate fighters to capture and resell, and before you know it you're sitting in an M3+ superheavy fighter.
** The difficulty dropped ''a lot'' in ''Albion Prelude''. The Argon start puts you at the controls of an M3 Enhanced Nova, and grants you an M6 Centaur within the plot's first hour. The Terran start skips the M3 stage entirely; you get an M6 Katana.
* EarthShatteringKaboom: [[spoiler:Supposedly the fate suffered by the Kha'ak homeworld, whose fragments form the Nividium asteroids scattered about.]]
** The plot of ''X:BTF'' revolves around the Second Xenon Conflict, the campaign to prevent the Xenon from using their M0 planet killer. ''X2'' has this happen to President's End at the hands of the Kha'ak; the plot's objective is preventing an encore performance.
* EasterEgg: While flying around in ''Terran Conflict'' you may come across a ship called Unknown Object. It's a small M3 fighter in the shape of a UFO. According to the wiki, it's a remnant of a "Xenon Unknown Object" from ''Reunion''.
* EasyLogistics:
** Hyper-averted. Your ships ''will'' run out of ammunition, ''will'' run out of jumpdrive fuel, and they ''will'' run out of missiles.
** Played straight with actual spaceship fuel. No one ever needs to refuel, though the ships clearly don't have any ReactionlessDrive and leave behind an exhaust trail.
** The actual commodity known as "space fuel", is, in fact, an illegal alcoholic drink. A new player may easily be stalked by the police for accidentally salvaging it from a destroyed pirate ship without knowing.
* EliteMooks:
** The Terran [=AGI=] Task Force. They used their own unique, [[LightningBruiser very powerful]] ships. Once you piss them off, they will ''never'' forgive the player.
** The Pirate Blastclaw, their only homebuilt fighter, is far superior to the outdated production models the pirates usually use.
* EnemyChatter: Ships will broadcast for help when they're taking damage, yell that their shields are down to their allies, and taunt you - even if they're about to die.
* EnemyMine: Advanced players who have befriended the [[{{Yakuza}} Yaki]] often make use of their NGOSuperpower status to steal ships from [[http://x3wiki.com/index.php/Return_Ship "Return Ship"]] missions, by docking the ship at the shipyard in Senator's Badlands. The SpacePolice sent to destroy the stolen ship will spawn and immediately come under attack by the Yaki, [[CurbstompBattle who have an M2 Akuma at their disposal]]. [[http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=3686774#3686774 This post is a great example.]]
* EnergyBall: Several of the game's EnergyWeapons fire spheroidal shots. The most obvious of these are the frigate-grade Incendiary Bomb Launcher and the destroyer-scale Photon Pulse Cannon.
* EnergyEconomy: Energy cells are the basis of the economy, though not its currency.
* EnergyWeapons: The vast majority of them, from the short-range, rapid-fire, very weak Impulse Ray Emitter up to the battleship-shredding, {{Painfully Slow Projectile}}s of the Photon Pulse Cannon.
* TheEngineer: In ''Terran Conflict'', Mahi Ma of the Boron. [[spoiler:The guy manages to restore an ancient piece of LostTechnology, the Hub, to full operation. All the player does is [[FetchQuest bring him supplies]].]]
* AnEntrepreneurIsYou: One of the main points of the game is building your own economic empire, with dozens of trading ships and hundreds of orbital factories.
* {{Epigraph}}: Every gamestart of every game has a quote from a famous scientist, author or politician somewhat related to the game.
* EscortMission:
** From HELL. The amount of opponents that spawn during missions varies with your combat ratings but the escortees remain painfully slow and barely shielded cargo freighters which go down to any interceptor and fighter in a matter of seconds. The attackers seem to appear indefinitely in fixed time intervals, so it's easy to end up having to fight a swarm of 10-15 fighters every 20 kilometers -- if you're lucky, as the AI certainly seems to take its time to pass through gates and dock to stations. To add insult to injury, [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption sometimes the freighters break formation and fly in separate directions.]] Once you have a high combat rank, the AI will start spawning in ''battleships'' at regular intervals to try and kill the freighters.
** After the first couple of such missions, most players learn not to accept them unless there is no other choice, [[spoiler:as with the hiring missions for some of the corporations and one of the plots.]]
*** [[spoiler:A solution to the must-do {{Escort Mission}}s lies in an exploit: since the game only begins spawning enemies for the mission once the player enters the freighters' sector, ''simply never be in the same sector as the freighters.'']]
** The one plot-relevant escort mission that you can complete without the above exploit is the exception that proves the rule. When [[spoiler:the Terrans tell you to babysit a ship carrying Terraformer debris on a trip from Heretic's End to Venus]], the enemies involved spawn once at a scripted location, you have additional naval forces for backup, and the escortee is a personnel transport instead of a freighter so it's much faster and somewhat tougher than usual.
* EvenEvilHasStandards: In ''Albion Prelude'', the normally xenophobic and totalitarian Paranid are so disgusted by [[spoiler:the fall of the Torus]] that they ally with the Terrans.
* EverythingsBetterWithSpinning:
** One forum member discovered that corkscrewing, or flying in a spiral by putting his joystick to the stops on all three axes, was a pretty effective evasive maneuver in a fighter. He was even able to survive a mob of Kha'ak fighters in a Split Mamba Vanguard.
** Many ship models have spinning components, just because. Some (like on the OTAS M2 Boreas) are justified by looking like sensor dishes, or by being an engine turbine in the case of the Boron Megalodon.
** Back in the days of the first game, both the Terran capital ship you start from and the planet-killer you have to destroy in the endgame have unreasonably ''huge'' spinning parts for no observable reason.
* ExplosionsInSpace:
** Capital ships create a giant white fireball and a large shockwave when blown to bits. It has no discernible effect on any craft passing by.
** While lacking the large shockwave effect, stations also produce massive explosions when destroyed; particularly big or important ones, such as Xenon Shipyards, produce fireballs ''several times'' as massive, easily topping fifteen to twenty kilometers in size. Most also leave debris behind, which disappears after a couple game-days.
* {{Expy}}: The Terran News Network in ''Xtended Terran Conflict'' is essentially Fox News [-IN SPACE!-]
* FactionCalculus: The ships have a lot of stats which can be roughly condensed into: speed, shielding, armament and cargo capacity. CripplingOverspecialization is largely avoided, making ships largely defined by what they ''don't'' have rather than what they excel at.
** Argon ships are balanced (making them a case of HumansAreAverage), providing a nice baseline for the Faction Calculus. Argon vessels make solid, well-rounded performers, but some will stress that there are generally better options depending on your flying style.
** OTAS ships, being the experimental private contractor offshoot of Argon tech, are generally more efficient than stock ships and have just as much versatility. The offset is their excessive price.
** Boron ships are fast and well-shielded, but generally badly armed with undersized weapon generators. Possibly Fridge Brilliance when you consider that the Boron are pacifist, and only maintain a military for self-defense (read as "because of the Split"). Considering missiles are standardized, their larger cargo bays makes them great at MacrossMissileMassacre.
** Paranid ships are balanced, but reduce cargo space to increase close-range firepower. They also tend to be more expensive than Argon vessels.
** Pirate ships have poor stats (worse in every regard to the race ships they're based on), but their ships typically offer a huge variety in compatible weapons and often can use fairly large weapons. {{Justified}} by fluff: pirate fighters (except the [[EliteMook Blastclaw]]) are obsolete production models modified and updated to be competitive with current ships. Their capital ships and space stations are kitbashed hulks and derelicts.
** Split ships are {{Fragile Speedster}}s, fast with increased firepower at the expense of shielding. Note that their frigates do not follow this pattern and are arguably the most dependable well-rounded performers in their class.
** [[{{Yakuza}} Yaki]] ships generally imitate Paranid ships in handling and looks, but some (notably the Tenjin) follow the Split example.
** Teladi ships are {{Mighty Glacier}}s, slow but durable with respectable firepower. They have increased cargo space for greater [[MemeticMutation profitsss]].
** Terran and ATF ships trade some firepower (limited weapon selection and somewhat lower damage output) for [[LightningBruiser speed and shielding]]. But they definitely aren't slouches on any leg of the armor triangle, which causes some to regard them as {{Game Breaker}}s.
** Finally, [[AIIsACrapshoot Xenon]] and [[HordeOfAlienLocusts Kha'ak]] ships are The Horde, being hive-minded races. They're subpar in most respects, but Xenon ships can be replicated quickly and cheaply with the PlayerHeadquarters, making them popular among late-game players. Kha'ak ships aren't much used, since they require unique weapons that need to be farmed - although the almost-HitScan ability of said weapons can entice some players.
* FanNickname: The "auto-pillock" is ArtificialStupidity in ship guidance. "Betty" is the ship's computer voice.
* FantasticDrug: Spaceweed is a Teladi plant that is smoked or ingested and amounts to marijuana [-[[RecycledInSpace IN SPACE!]]-] Space fuel, on the other hand, is a street name or euphemism for Argon whiskey. Both are illegal in the Commonwealth[[note]]spaceweed is legal in Teladi space, however[[/note]], and both are highly prized by players for use as trade goods to pacify the SpacePirate population.
* FantasticSlurs: "Squids" for the Boron (though they don't seem to mind), and "four-eyes" for the Paranid.
* FeaturelessProtagonist: ''Terran Conflict'' only ever addresses the player as "pilot" or "captain". You have the option to rename your pilot, but it never has any effect on gameplay.
* TheFederation:
** Argon Federation and Boron Kingdom.
*** The Argon are also sort of UnitedSpaceOfAmerica, with a president and senate. Every space station and planet in the Federation gets a senator.
** The Terrans may also qualify, but their xenophobia might also make them a subversion.
* FetchQuest:
** One category of side missions requires you to collect cargo from another station and deliver it to the client. Another requires you to obtain a crapload of cargo from wherever you can get it and deliver it to the client.
** The [[spoiler:Hub plot]] takes it UpToEleven. It's an entire Fetch ''Plot''.
* FireBreathingWeapon: The Plasma Burst Generator fusion powered flamethrower.
* FixedForwardFacingWeapon: All fighters and corvettes and every frigate except the Panther has these, usually putting their [[WaveMotionGun most powerful weapons]] there. Averted in [=M1s=] and [=M2s=].
* FlavorText: Just about every object in the entire game has its own little tale to tell.
* FlechetteStorm: The Fragmentation Bomb Launcher use flechettes to damage targets.
** [[CoolButInefficient It tries to, anyway.]] The flechettes rarely actually hit anything. Ditto the Cluster Flak Array, which is the FBL writ large.
* FluffyTheTerrible: The OTAS Venti sounds like something you'd get at Starbucks. In actuality, it's an extremely deadly M3 fighter.
* FlyingSaucer: Players can sometimes see the stereotypical flying saucer [=UFO=] (labeled "Unknown Object") zipping quickly between sectors, as an EasterEgg. The flying saucer is very useful for exploring the universe -- order one of your scout ships to follow it as the saucer makes its rounds through the gate system, and they'll quickly uncover most of the universe.
** Including Xenon sectors...the caveat to this being that [[spoiler: the UFO is neutral to all races.]] You, however, are not. Sending an M5 into Xenon sectors is a great way for it to suffer CriticalExistenceFailure shortly thereafter.
* ForcedTutorial: Sort of. You're required to complete the tutorial to get one of the achievements in ''Terran Conflict'' and ''Albion Prelude''.
* FragileSpeedster:
** Scout craft, which while anywhere from two to several times faster than any other ship will explode with so much as a sneer from heavier fighters. Split ships as a whole also fit the type, as they concentrate on speed and firepower rather than heavy shielding. Boron ships also have weakened shields and higher speed, but not as extreme as the Split ships.
** The two fastest ships in the game, Starburst and Arrow, aren't even ''meant'' to fight -- they are completely unarmed. They have shields, but they might as well not -- good luck hitting something this tiny going at 1000+ meters per second.
** Some Split ships, by fluff, weren't even designed with shields in mind. The design team clean forgot about it and later had to be retrofitted. Starburst and Arrow, rather than being fighters, are supposed to be used for racing.
** "Raider" ship variants. Shield capacity has been reduced in exchange for more powerful engines and better weapon energy generators.
* FrickinLaserBeams: Kyon Emitters, as well as the developer-disabled Phased Array Laser/Plasma Beam/Tri-Beam Laser/Fusion Beam Cannons.
** Disabled because they would instant-kill any enemy (and the player too). Kyons were nerfed from ''X2'' onwards for that reason.
** Kyons are laser beams in appearance only. Apparently the game engine can't handle actual beams, so the Kyon Emitters are in fact projectile-based weapons with beam graphics and very fast, invisible projectiles. This is sometimes noticeable when targeting fast ships, as the beam looks as if it hit, but the ship takes no damage as the projectile(s) missed.
* FrictionlessReentry: Averted, surprisingly enough. Planets in the games aren't just backdrops, but physical objects with atmospheres and all, and you can actually reach them in a ship if they're not on the other side of the InvisibleWall.[[note]]Though it takes a while; see SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale below.[[/note]] However, ships in the X-Universe are not meant for atmospheric flight, and will burn up. The planet in Split Fire has gotten some notoriety for this, as the atmosphere starts about 1 kilometer behind one of the jumpgates.
* FutureFoodIsArtificial: The main Boron foodstuff is [=BoFu=], a tofu-like substance created in part from plankton. The squids love it and can live on a nugget of it for a week, but the other races can't even choke it down. For their part, Terran foodstuffs include [=MREs=], carbo cake, and vita kai[[note]]a block of concentrated vitamins[[/note]].
* FutureImperfect: For around six hundred years most Argon believed Earth to be a myth perpetrated by the Goners, due to their progenitors having deleted all mention of Earth from their history to prevent anyone from leading the terraformers back there. [[PlayerCharacter Kyle Brennan]]'s [[{{Understatement}} little mishap]] in ''X: Beyond the Frontier'' proved the Goners were right.
* GameMod:
** ''And how!'' With the in-game script editor and external modding tools, players can do pretty much anything from simple tweaks and added functionality to new ships and full-blown conversions. Arguably most famous of these is X3's ''Xtended'' mod, which impressed Egosoft so much that several elements (and the modders that developed them) were integrated into ''Terran Conflict'', and Xtended is being remade for ''Terran Conflict''.
** It's worth mentioning that there are at least two mods that attempt to solve one of the game's worst problems: the '''extreme''' slowness of the ships, which is a source of all kinds of bad things. The result is completely different gameplay mechanics: waiting plays a much smaller part, fighting is ''much'' more dynamic and challenging and everything requires significantly less WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief to digest.
** Another very popular mod is the "X3 Rebalance Mod", which, aside from doing what it says on the tin, adds new ships, new items, new sectors, and much more. The only downside is that, due to compatability issues, you can't play it and ''Albion Prelude's'' main campaign at the same time.
* GatlingGood: The [[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?Njk1MTU0NTE OTAS M3 Venti]]. Don't let the fact that it sounds like a coffee fool you: it has dual wing-mounted gatling lasers. [[EverythingsBetterWithSpinning And they even rotate when you fire.]]
* GlassCannon:
** Arguably, some M5 scout ships. Most M5s do not count as they have fairly pitiful guns that restrict them to fighting at most M4 medium fighters if they hope to survive, but a few of them can mount fairly powerful medium missiles, and a [[MacrossMissileMassacre rapid-fire barrage]] of those can be troublesome even for heavy fighters. A couple of others have access to M4- or M3-grade guns, and one (the Kestrel) even has a rear turret. On the other hand, they blow up if their pilot sneezes too hard...
** The [=M7M=] missile frigates and M8 bombers introduced in ''Terran Conflict'' also fall into this category. Missile barrages from these ships can destroy virtually anything, but non-player-owned [=M7Ms=] and M8s are relatively easy to kill (at least from another warship's standpoint) because the AI by default does not use their [[MacrossMissileMassacre greatest advantage]] effectively. Also, [[PointDefenseless they are very sparse in point-defense, and in some cases have none at all]].
** The best defense is a good offense so in ''Albion Prelude'' missile frigates use... more missiles, firing swarms of countermissiles to intercept incoming missiles. While their ammo lasts.
* GlobalCurrency: ''All'' races use [[WeWillSpendCreditsInTheFuture Credits]], including the paranoid, isolationist Terrans who refuse to use ''any'' technology from the Commonwealth.
* GoodColorsEvilColors: The factions that are generally [[GreyAndGrayMorality treated as good and evil]] tend to follow this trope. The Argon Federation uses gunmetal gray, and the Kingdom of Boron use bright green. The Split Dynasty uses rusty red, and the Paranid Empire uses bluish purple. The neutral Teladi Space Company leaves their ships mostly unpainted, which translates to dark gray and tan. Meanwhile, the unaligned Terrans paint their ships white with black trim, pirates add NoseArt of red flames and paint the ship red, Xenon ships are black, and Kha'ak ships are purple.
* GoodRepublicEvilEmpire: The Argon Federation and the Boron Kingdom are generally considered the good guys, and the Split Dynasty and Paranid Empire are generally considered the bad guys. But there's a lot of gray involved, so this may be a subversion.
** The only thing that really seems to make either side good or evil is that the last time the two sides went to war, the Split and Paranid were the aggressors.
** Subverted by ''Albion Prelude''. The Argon open the war with the 30th-century equivalent of [[WarOnTerror 9/11]], and the Paranid join up with the Terrans.
* GratuitousJapanese: The Argon and Terrans, as Japanese apparently became the primary language of Earth before the series' start according to fluff. The [[spoiler: Aldrin colony]] representatives you meet in the plot sometimes speak phrases in Japanese.
* GreatOffscreenWar: The backstory includes the [[RobotWar Terraformer War]] in the 2140s AD (some of which is shown in the ''Terran Conflict'' opening cinematic), during which [[AIIsACrapshoot insane terraforming robots]] wiped out all of Earth's extrasolar colonies and nearly destroyed Earth, too. A Terran warfleet managed to lure them through a jumpgate, which was then destroyed behind them; this fleet became the Argon race. About 200 years later, we had the [[http://x3wiki.com/index.php/Xenon_Conflict First Xenon Conflict]], where the terraformers reappeared, followed by the [[http://x3wiki.com/index.php/Boron_Campaign Boron Campaign]], a more conventional interstellar war between the various superpowers.
* GreyAndGrayMorality: ''Albion Prelude'''s war. The [[DesignatedVillain Terrans]] are paranoid jerkasses that give a big middle finger to the other races, while the [[DesignatedHero Argon]] use weapons of mass destruction and effectively commit genocide every time they destroy a Terran station.
* GuideDangIt:
** The manual and "flight school" tutorials are nearly useless for anything but the most basic gameplay.
** There's about two dozen derelict ships floating around in ''Terran Conflict''. You ''might'' find them by pure luck (one or two are within Triplex Scanner range of a jumpgate), but finding them all pretty much requires a web search.
** [[spoiler:The Hub plot in ''Terran Conflict''. Nobody InUniverse warns you that you'll need to prepare your trade empire ahead of time in order to finish the Fetch Plot in a reasonable amount of time.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tropes H-K]]
* HemisphereBias: Averted. The view of Earth from the Torus is centered on Ecuador rather than central Europe.
* HigherTechSpecies: The Terrans (Sol System humans) have far superior technology compared to the other races. The Paranid come in as a close second.
* HighSpeedMissileDodge: Happens regularly, since fighters are often faster and more maneuverable than the missiles chasing them.
** In fact, one of the most effective dogfight tactics is to use missiles as a ''distraction'': you shoot a missile at the target and force him to evade or shoot it down, then make the kill with guns.
* HitScan: Beam weapons, originally a Kha'ak exclusive but since used by other races as well, are supposed to be this. It's only after you look at the technical data that it turns out to be a subversion: the game engine treats beam weapons as ''very'' fast projectile ones. This is normally transparent to the player because the projectiles are invisible, but occasionally -- typically while fighting very fast ships -- it can happen that the beam graphic crosses your target but the projectile isn't there yet, resulting in an irritatingly damage-free enemy.
* HordeOfAlienLocusts: Xenon Terraformers and the Kha'ak hive.
* HolierThanThou: The Paranid, whose society is ''dominated'' by religion, and who invoke the trope in many of their communications with the player.
* HubLevel: The aptly-named Gate Hub in ''Terran Conflict'' and ''Albion Prelude''. Unlocked by doing a painfully long FetchQuest in ''Terran Conflict'' (''Albion Prelude'' has a short FetchQuest), the Hub lets you modify the gate network - it has 3 pairs of gates which you can link to systems. This allows you to link opposite edges of the universe together, making it so that you need just one jump to reach a race's homeworld to their furthest colony.
* HumansAdvanceSwiftly: The Terrans have by far the most advanced technology, the capacity to build jump gates on their own (something only the Precursors could do), yet they've been doing the whole space-flight thing for less time than some of the other races.
* HumansAreAverage: The Argon ship design philosophy can be reasonably described as "jack of all trades, master of none". If you buy an Argon ship, you get a solid, well-rounded performer. The other Commonwealth races tend to focus on one leg of the speed-defense-offense design triangle.
* HumansAreBastards: The Terrans. They're radically isolationist, dislike or outright hate almost all the other races (including their lost colony, the Argon Federation), and they will invade other race's sectors without a worry as they can simply curb stomp the defending navy's ships using their superior technology. The [[DesignatedHero Argon Federation]] is shown to be even ''worse'' than the Terrans in ''Albion Prelude'''s war. An Argon suicide bomber blows up the Torus Aeternal, killing millions instantly, then [[ColonyDrop millions more as the debris rains down on Earth]]. The Terrans retaliate, then the Argon deploy reverse engineered Von Neumann ships (Xenon) against the Solar System. Every Terran station houses ''at least'' tens of thousands of people, so the Argon are committing atrocities with ''every station'' they blow up.
* HumansAreSpecial:
** The Terrans were the first and only race (excluding the Old Ones) to make their own jumpgates [[spoiler: without help]], have the most powerful ships, the most high-tech weapons, and the largest fleet. Which is quite something when you realize that they weren't even a part of the game universe for much of its history, and just basically barged in and started pwning everyone when the Xenon chased them there.
** Humans in general were recognized by the Old Ones as being so intelligent as to pose a threat to their long-term plans. The Old Ones reacted by rearranging the gates near Sol to trap the Terrans in a closed loop of systems with no native intelligent life. [[spoiler:The modern Aldrin region is part of this loop.]] Oddly, it ended up being Earth's accidental creation of the Xenon that derailed their plans. The Old Ones created a second closed loop to contain the Xenon, inadvertently enclosing the Argon, Boron, Paranid, Split, and Teladi as well. So humanity is indirectly responsible for the very ''creation'' of the X-Universe.
* HumansAreWarriors: The Argon are better at it than the ''Split'', the actual {{proud warrior race guy}}s of the setting. Possibly this is precisely ''because'' they don't view warfare as a quest for glory.
* HumansAreWhite: There's exactly two non-Caucasian Argon NPC portraits in ''X3'', both of which are AmbiguouslyBrown.
* HumansByAnyOtherName: The Argon, being a LostColony of the Terrans.
* HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace: Because of the [[AbusivePrecursors Old Ones' meddling]], which jumpgate goes where has a way of changing seemingly at random (though not during gameplay, thankfully). This occasionally causes (for instance) a Boron fringe sector to become separated from friendly territory and end up hooked to Split space.
* HyperspaceLanes: ''Rebirth'' has "highways", which function similar to the trade lanes in ''VideoGame/{{Freelancer}}'', allowing you to get between close locations in a system, while Jump Gates are used to get between systems.
* HyperspeedAmbush: Late-game players often fortify jumpgates leading to enemy territory (typically Xenon) so they can colonize the sector in relative peace. There's not much that can get through a trio of Osaka destroyers acting in tandem. If the destroyers are accompanied by a gaggle of cheap fighters or lasertowers (as ArtificialStupidity-abusing decoys), the sector is impenetrable.
* HyperspeedEscape:
** Played straight, at least for the player. The jumpdrive is very useful for this. Also potentially subverted: there is a ten-second delay while the jumpdrive charges, not including the time it takes you to pick a destination. That's ten-plus seconds for the enemy to kill you anyway. And then there's the potential for TeleFrag as you exit a gate at the end of the jump.
** The Unfocused Jumpdrive plays it straight ''and'' subverts it simultaneously. On the one hand, the UFJD is faster to bug out ([[BlindJump no need to pick a destination]]). On the other hand, when you "return to the known universe", you'll be right back in the same position you left from, and any enemies will still be in the sector. Though it does give you an opportunity to recharge your shields.
* InferredHolocaust: After the events of ''[[VideoGame/{{X}} X3: Albion Prelude]]''. The {{Precursors}} shut down the entire PortalNetwork to contain the [[AIIsACrapshoot incredibly aggressive Xenon terraformer AI]]. Doing so on a small scale in the past has actually been a good solution to bad problems, but this means not only will the [[FiveRaces younger species]] be incapable of traveling or communicating with each other or their own colony planets, they won't even know where the other sectors ''actually are'' to ''try'' and contact each other for years. Many sectors have nothing but manned manufacturing plants, most of which aren't self-sustaining, and even many planetary sectors rely heavily on trade.
** The shutdown is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you have the above. On the other hand, it also had the byproduct of stopping the Argon/Terran war in its tracks, which at this rate was going to end in one of the two sides being completely wiped out. Speaking of which, the faction that comes off best would be the Terrans. A, over two thirds of their sectors are in the Solar System, and they've got non-jumpgate technology for intrasystem travel. B, they ''do'' know where their other main sector is in space, and can reach it using jumpdrives. As for the other factions, [[{{Planetville}} planets are not villages]]. Aldrin survived 800 years with no contact with the outside world whatsoever, and it's just an airless rock. The [[OneProductPlanet One Product Sectors]] are screwed, but the ones with inhabited planets should be all right.
* InfiniteStockForSale:
** Averted. All stations have a limit to how much of a given ware they can stock. For instance, a station may be able to stock tens of thousands of units of energy cells, but only sixteen particle accelerator cannons.
** Averted to an {{egregious}} extent with Terran weapons in ''Terran Conflict'': stations can only stock ''two'' of each gun. This is thankfully fixed in ''Albion Prelude''.
* InfiniteSupplies: All ships have infinite fuel for their engines and weapons, and infinite food. The only things that run out are Energy Cells (from using the Jump Drive) and ammunition for bullet based weapons. The description for the Teladi Geochen in ''Albion Prelude'' however, mentions that it has a spacious cargo bay for food supplies on long voyages.
* InfinityPlusOneSword: The Springblossom corvette. It requires the completion of the Terran Conflict main plot, good Terran rank, ~20million credits for the corvette (more expensive than some of the station-transporting [=TL=] ships), and then hunting down the factories that produce the weapons for the ship (in a sector some 800 kilometers wide, with a huge asteroid blocking traffic through the center), then (usually) supplying the factories with the goods necessary to produce it because the sector has a pitiful amount of traders for its size. Once you've done all that, you've got what is effectively the best frigate, or best ship in the entire game. Crazy top speed (it outruns some scout ships!), crazy firepower, and a huge cargo bay equivalent to some transporter ships. The only time you'll ever need to use anything else is for some luxury taxi missions -- it has enough cargo space to carry enough ammo to kill destroyer class ships if you can wedge it into their blind spot.
* InformedEquipment: When you fit a gun to a slot on a ship, a cannon appears in a corresponding spot on the ship's model. It looks exactly the same no matter what gun you put there. Other equipment doesn't even do that much.
* InherentlyFunnyWords: ''{{X-Play}}'' had oh so much fun with "Kha'ak".
* InsignificantLittleBluePlanet: The only people who really care about Earth are the Terrans. It's not much use for player characters either, since A) it's so deep in Sol that it takes forever to get there from a jumpgate, and B) the Torus defenses destroy anything you try to build there. Though the Torus is useful for putting jumpdrives on ships bought from the shipyard orbiting the Moon.
* InSpaceEveryoneCanSeeYourFace: Averted. Spacesuits have opaque, reflective visors.
* InstantAwesomeJustAddDragons: The ''XTM'' mod for ''Reunion'' and the ''Xtended Terran Conflict'' mod for ''Terran Conflict'' adds the Shivan Dragon, which is a dragon that breathes in space, shoots lasers from its mouth, and attacks everything in sight.
* InstantDeathRadius: Phased Shockwave Generators on Paranid capital ships. Small range (about 1 kilometer), but they effectively instantly kill any fighter that gets inside the 1 kilometer bubble of doom.
* IntrepidMerchant / ProudMerchantRace: The Teladi, whose society is borderline-obsessively mercantile in nature. Also includes the player with dangerous travels for a handful of credits on the earlier stages and then vast trading empires to build on the endgame.
* InvisibleWall: Sectors are spherical, and there is an invisible barrier at the edge (which is ~4,000 kilometers out). Most evident in the [[spoiler:Hub]] sector, where you can slip behind the gates, see out of the [[spoiler:Hub]], and butt up against an Invisible Waist High Fence.
* ISOStandardHumanSpaceship: Argon, Teladi, and Terran ships.
* ItsUpToYou: The player is effectively the only thing preventing the Terran economy and the tiny Pirate and Yaki economies from collapsing.
* IWantMyJetpack: [[http://www.argonopedia.org/wiki/Timeline According to the backstory]], by 2011 quantum computers dominate the computing market, and nanotechnology is nearing practical use. Check back in 2022 to see whether [[JapanTakesOverTheWorld Japanese becomes the favored language of science]], and whether or not a grad student in Tokyo blundered into the principles behind building jumpgates.
* JackOfAllStats:
** Interceptors amongst strike craft, as well as Argon ship designs as a whole. The Terran ships are the upscale version of the JackOfAllStats; they're very fast, very well shielded, have high cargo capacity, and very powerful. The only downside to Terran ships are their limited weapon selection, especially frustrating on fighters and frigates, and the scarcity of their weapons.
** "Hauler" ship variants straddle the line between this and MightyGlacier. They trade off some gun power for a larger cargo bay and sometimes tougher shields. Particularly with the Falcon Hauler, said larger cargo bay often allows players to rig them as missile boats.
* JapanTakesOverTheWorld: Its language did, at least.
* JokeCharacter: The OTAS Sirokos in ''Terran Conflict'' and ''Albion Prelude''. It's a 20+ million credit [=M7M=] with two guns and the ability to ''only'' fire Mosquito missiles and Boarding Pods.
** It's a victim of CripplingOverspecialization. It's purpose-built for boarding enemy ships and can carry ten more marines than the other [=M7Ms=]. Works fine for capturing TL-class ships, but since it has no offensive weaponry it can't really do anything else.
* JustifiedTutorial:
** ''X: Beyond the Frontier'' integrates the tutorial into Kyle Brennan's assignment to put the Xperimental Shuttle through its paces. Then the jumpdrive goes haywire and starts the plot.
** ''Terran Conflict'' averts it with the flight school tutorial, but plays it straight with the initial Terran plot, which is effectively one long tutorial.
* KilledOffForReal:
** If you play Dead-Is-Dead mode, the ''player'' gets KilledOffForReal if he dies. (The game deletes your save.)
** Jesan Nadina, an Argon mercenary in ''Terran Conflict'' who recruits the PlayerCharacter for Operation Final Fury. He is then KIA offstage two missions into said plot.
* KillItWithFire:
** The Plasma Burst Generator, a rare pirate-only weapon that can be fit on nearly every M3 and M6 in the game. Does AOE Damage, meaning that it will hit every area of space in a cone in front of it -- and almost always, the target ship will be big enough to count as being in several "spaces" at once, meaning they're going to take [[GameBreaker obscene]] amounts of damage -- especially if they're one of the bigger (carrier, battleship) size ships. The only weapon to get a unique achievement -- "Turn up the Heat."
** The Pirates also have the rare Incendiary Bomb Launcher, a frigate / capital ship weapon. It functions like the other capital ship weapons, except the projectiles are on fire (in space).
* KillSat:
** Lasertowers. In ''Terran Conflict'' they're next to useless against anything bigger than fighters, especially in Out-Of-Sector combat, but they got a massive buff in ''Albion Prelude'' making them very effective defenses against larger ships.
** Orbital Defense Platforms, which are stationary "ships" armed with a ton of capital-ship weapons and a huge payload of missiles to spam at anything outside gun range.
** The Torus Aeternal in ''Terran Conflict'' may qualify (it's technically a SpaceStation), as its defensive weapons can one-shot an M2.
* KineticWeaponsAreJustBetter:
** Sort of. Though the vast majority of weapons in the X-Universe are either energy- or explosive-based, the few kinetic weapons in the games usually have a feature that offsets having to stock ammunition. The strictly fighter-scale Mass Driver goes through shields, for instance.
** Their chief advantage is that they don't drain the ship's energy reserves when fired. This grants ammo-using ships greater staying power in combat ... at least until their ammo runs out.
** The Gauss cannon is ''very'' popular for player-piloted Teladi M7 Shrikes because it can be mounted to the flank turrets, enabling it to duplicate the Panther's feat of taking on multiple heavy capitals. In ''Albion Prelude'', Gauss Cannons got a major buff in that all ships have higher amounts of hull hitpoints -- the Gauss Cannon has the highest damage per second against hull, whereas the other capital ship weapons have most of their damage devoted to killing shields -- useful in previous games, not so much in ''Prelude''.
* TheKingdom: [[AllThereInTheManual According to the X3TC manual]], the Boron Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy akin to Great Britain in RealLife (i.e. Queen Atreus is a figurehead, with the real power in the hands of elected officials). Otherwise it fits the trope pretty much perfectly: it is generally considered good-aligned, controls the fewest sectors (among the Commonwealth races, anyway), and is constantly under threat from [[TheEmpire the Split]]. They're also the only people to develop ion weapons.
** Oh, and [[EverythingsBetterWithPrincesses it has a princess, too]].
* KnowWhenToFoldEm:
** Mostly averted. [[SuicidalOverconfidence Usually the AI will continue fighting even if the battle is hopeless.]] But every once in a while, you'll encounter a foe that runs away from overwhelming force, such as the last M5 survivor of a pirate fighter squadron fleeing at top speed from an oncoming player-piloted frigate.
** Also averted in the case of the "Surrender" option in dialogue with other ships (as in telling the other guy to surrender). It appears to do exactly nothing.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tropes L-O]]
* LadyNotAppearingInThisGame: [[http://extreme.pcgameshardware.de/attachments/397450d1301531304-spieler-frauen-die-beliebtesten-frauen-charaktere-computerspielen-x3saya.jpg This image of Saya Kho]] is on the back of the ''X3: Gold Edition'' box. She appears from the neck up in ''Reunion'' and not at all in ''Terran Conflict''.
* LampshadeHanging: ''Albion Prelude'' lampshades the ''Terran Conflict's'' HUB plot and its insane requirements -- the scientists you transport to the HUB note that Mahi Ma filled the cargo hold with thousands upon thousands of microchips -- from the [[spoiler: 75000 microchip requirement]] in ''TC'''s plot. Afterwards, several crates of microchips are left floating around the HUB.
* LaserSight: Some ship mounted weapons have tiny laser sights mounted on them - however, unlike most videogame laser sights, they do ''not'' project a laser onto the target, and they fade out within a meter of the gun.
* LightningBruiser:
** Terran ships, [=OTAS=] ships, and certain Split ships.
*** [=AGI=] Task Force ships, which are even more powerful than standard Terran ships.
** "Vanguard" ship variants. They offer higher speed, weapon generators, and sometimes higher shields than "standard" ships, at the cost of some cargo space and being more expensive.
* LightningGun: The Ion Disruptor.
* LimitedSpecialCollectorsUltimateEdition: The ''X-Superbox''. It contains very high-quality versions of the game's soundtrack, 3 fan-made soundtracks, the [[AllThereInTheManual X-Encyclopedia]], and every ''X-Universe'' game made - when ''Albion Prelude'' came out, owners of the Superbox got the normally $9.99 expansion pack for free.
* LivingShip: Boron ships look the part with their wrinkled hulls and ribs which resemble gills, but it's never stated one way or another whether they're grown, built, or some combination of the above.
** They're grown around an artificial skeleton. (Flavor text for Royal Boron Shipyards.)
* LizardFolk: The Teladi.
* LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading: Sectors with loads of player assets (Large factory complexes, and fleets) tend to cause loading times to be 2 to 5 times longer than a regular sector (which is generally around 5 seconds to a minute, depending on your PC).
* [[LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters Loads And Loads Of Ships]]: There's well over one hundred ships, and that's before you get into the individual variants for each ship.
* LostColony:
** The entire Argon race was created when a Terran fleet sealed itself in the X-universe gate system to protect Earth from the Xenon. The fleet's crews settled on Argon Prime, (named after their leader, Nathan R. Gunne) and slowly phased out all references to Earth, causing Earth's existance to become a fairy tale.
** The [[spoiler: Aldrin colony is one of Earth's original colonies, before the Xenon went crazy. It's separate from the X-universe gate system. The Terrans believed it was destroyed when the Xenon started attacking everything, though Aldrin is reunited with the Terrans at the end of the Terran plot in ''X3: Terran Conflict''.]]
* LuckBasedMission:
** "Return Stolen Ship" involves an NPC asking the player to capture a ship stolen by a third party. Sheer probability dictates that the ship in question will be one that must be captured by making the pilot bail out (as opposed to one that can be boarded and captured) ... which is a completely random (and fairly rare) event.
** Also in this category are corporate missions that require you to make a delivery of missiles. In many cases, at least one will be a missile that does not appear in the game's market, and is only available as random drops from destroyed enemies.
* MacrossMissileMassacre:
** ''Terran Conflict'' introduces the [=M7M=] missile frigate class. These ships can hold hundreds of missiles and use MacrossMissileMassacre as their only form of attack. They can launch dozens of missiles in a matter of seconds, and the anti-fighter missiles each [[RecursiveAmmo split into 8 sub-missiles]]. They also {{Robotech}} in a spiral pattern. ''And'' they'll go after new targets if the original is destroyed while the missiles are en route.
** The deadliest [=M7M=] of them all is the [=ATF=] Skirnir, which uses the Shadow missile (650k damage per warhead on an ''[[RecursiveAmmo 8-warhead missile]]''). Think MacrossMissileMassacre taken UpToEleven.
*** This typo in the missile data was fixed in ''Albion Prelude'' so the Skirnir actually has to earn its salary.
** ''Terran Conflict'' also introduces the M8 bomber, which is essentially the [=M7M=] lite.
** Since the advent of missile spamming [=M7Ms=] and M8s, the Mosquito Missile Defense script (available in the free Bonus Pack) has become a whole lot more useful. What does it do? Spams even ''more'' missiles at the enemy missiles!
** ''Albion Prelude'' gave the AI the ability to properly use [=M7M=] and M8 ships. This now means that invaders typically jump into a system and immediately get 50 "ALERT: INCOMING MISSILE" warnings. This includes the player. Be very afraid.
** In ''Albion Prelude'' missile frigates got serious with the whole missile thing. Not only can (and will) they MacrossMissileMassacre their enemies before they even get in visual range, they also fire swarms of countermissiles in a Macross Missile Defense to protect themselves and their allies against similiar attacks.
** Even outside of [=M7Ms and M8s=], triple-M is a pretty good tactic. One common use of the Falcon Hauler as a carrier-based fighter is to stuff its cavernous cargo bay with [[RecursiveAmmo Tornado missiles]] and use it as a bomber against capital ships.
* MadLibsDialogue: Hits generic information dialogue hard.
** "The place which you seek is somewhere far behind the NORTH GATE. Good profit!"
** "Attention, today there is a sale in the TOOL SHOP on level THREE. Don't miss the special offers :)"
*** The latter example is possibly justified by it being an actual computer. Betty (the ship's computer) has the same problem.
* MagneticWeapons:
** The Mass Driver, a fighter-class weapon which can bypass shields and damage the ship directly. You will learn to [[GameBreaker fear this weapon]].
** Also in this category is the Gauss Cannon, a Teladi capital ship weapon that fires metal slugs instead of the usual energy disco-balls of doom that other capital ship weapons fire.
** A number of the game's energy weapons use magnets to fire bolts of plasma. The Ion Shard Railgun is a good example.
* ManualMisprint: ''X3: Reunion's'' manual was wrong in almost every way. ''X3: Terran Conflict's'' manual is more accurate, but some images are wrong (Boron ships with an Argon ship for the picture) and it talks about weapons that don't normally exist in the game.
* MasterOfNone: Boron fighters. Pathetic energy reserves, shielding equal to [[FragileSpeedster Split]] ships but with less speed, and very limited weapon selection - ironically, despite their tiny energy reserves, all their race-specific weapons require huge amounts of energy to fire (such as the Ion Disruptor).
** Their size also makes them very good targets for fighter-jock-type players.
* MechanicalEvolution: As the opening cinematic for ''Terran Conflict'' explains, terraformers are examples of a technology called artificial general intelligence, "mechanical minds capable of making themselves more intelligent, and again, and again, recursively forever." The intent was presumably to make the robots capable of adapting to unexpected events during the terraforming process, but somebody fouled up a software patch and they went haywire, turning into the Xenon.
* MechanicalLifeforms: The Xenon [[spoiler:and the tame terraformers of Aldrin]] have become sapient due to the aforementioned MechanicalEvolution. Predating them by 500 million years are the Sohnen, a mechanical species used by the Old Ones as an intermediary to the young races.
* TheMetricSystemIsHereToStay: Played straight for everything except time, which until TC used Teladi time units.
* MightyGlacier:
** Fighters amongst strike craft and Destroyers amongst capital ships, as well as some of their weapons (some capital ship guns fire projectiles that can be ''outrun by scouts'').
** This is also the design motif for the Teladi spaceships, which are horribly slow for their class, but (for the most part) have very strong shields, hulls, and cargo capacity.
*** There is an exception to this rule, though: the Teladi M5 Kestrel is the fastest ship in the game, and likely the most powerful member of the M5 class because of it (mostly on Out of Sector battles, where [[ArtificialStupidity asteroid and ship collisions are disabled]]).
** The Teladi M2 Phoenix gets outran by almost every ship in the game, but soaks up damage like a sponge and carries a massive weapons loadout.
** "Sentinel" ship variants, which mount weaker engines in exchange for massive shield capacity. Taken to the extreme by Teladi Falcon Sentinel M3 fighter, which has the shielding of a corvette and a top speed barely higher than some ''carriers''.
** The M2+ battleships introduced in ''Albion Prelude'' are even slower and more powerful than standard M2 destroyers.
* MobileFactory: ''Xtended Terran Conflict'' has T0 mobile production ships, which can produce a huge variety of wares. There are variants for energy, food, technology (microchips, crystals, etc), ore processing, and military technology (weapons, shields, missiles).
* MookMaker: Drone Frigates in the ''Xtended Terran Conflict'' mod. They produce their own advanced combat drones on the spot, and manage them like a carrier would manage their fighter wings.
* MoreCriminalsThanTargets: Oddly averted. While there are a ''lot'' of Pirates and Yaki, they are far outnumbered by just the civilian traders of a single race. However, Pirates are usually heavily concentrated in a couple sectors that they own, so in those sectors, they usually outnumber traders 5 to 1 or even higher (like 100:1), in the case of the Pirate home area, Mercenaries' Rift.
* MoreDakka: Certain M6 and many M7 can mount a ridiculous number of flak weapons. One of the most popular loadouts for the otherwise underwhelming Terran Yokohama and ATF Aegir[[note]]Underwhelming because the small Terran weapon selection limits their In-Sector tactics to either [[MacrossMissileMassacre missile spam]] or [[DeathOfAThousandCuts pecking you to death]] with corvette-grade guns.[[/note]] is to put Starburst Shockwave Cannons everywhere possible. OOS, this lets them tear other frigates to shreds in seconds.
* MundaneUtility: The Split Iguana from X2. This TP-class ship (think space bus) can compete with dedicated heavy fighters, in terms of shielding, speed and firepower.
* MyRulesAreNotYourRules: Non-player owned ships have access to what is essentially a point-to-point jumpdrive. Ships in the plot will jump into empty space, and escort missions have swarms of enemy ships warping in scant kilometers away from the ship you're escorting. Player ships are limited to jumping to Jump Gates.
** According to WordOfGod, this is GameplayAndStorySegregation: they decided to use the jumpdrive "flash" for enemies spawning. The official line is that only the Kha'ak have point-to-point jumpdrives, though the Xenon have jump beacons they can use if they know precise coordinates to send it to. The scene during the Terran plot [[spoiler:where the fleet jumps to Aldrin]] involved a reverse-engineered jump beacon, so that technically doesn't count.
* NamedAfterTheirPlanet: Mostly averted. The Boron homeworld is Nishala, and the Teladi homeworld is Ianamus Zura. The Argon capital is Argon Prime, but that's a case of the planet being named after the faction rather than the other way around: the Argon renamed Sonra-4 after their then-leader Nathan R. Gunne. The Terran homeworld is Earth, [[CaptainObvious obviously]]. The Paranid play the trope straight: their homeworld is Paranid Prime. Nobody knows the name of the Kha'ak homeworld, and the Xenon homeworld is technically Earth since they're an entire race of insane terraforming drones first built by the Terrans back in the 22nd century. %% This troper does not have information on the Split.
* {{Nerf}}:
** The Split M2 Raptor was among the best destroyers in ''X3: Reunion''. In ''Terran Conflict'', its ability to mount flak weapons was removed, reducing it to using comparatively ineffective corvette guns for fighter defense.
** The ''Terran Conflict'' 3.0 patch reduced the laser generator capacity of the Terran M1 Tokyo, a carrier that could previously fire its anticapital guns indefinitely.
** The M7 Panther's laser generators were weakened in ''Albion Prelude'' to compensate for it having by far the largest fighter capacity of any M7.
* NGOSuperpower: Pirates and Yaki as of ''Terran Conflict'' have access to capital ships (and lots of them), despite having no government and no central organization. The corporations also have their own navies - OTAS in particular fields two to three of their [[GameBreaker Boreas]] destroyers, several dozen transporter ships, swarms of fighters, and multiple frigates.
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: When the Argon Federation is closing in on Sol System with their swarms of reverse engineered Xenon fighters, about to subjugate the Terrans, the jump gate system ''completely'' shuts down, isolating every system.
* NintendoHard / NoDamageRun: Dead-Is-Dead mode. If you die, the game will ''delete your save game''. This includes when the game is a bastard and [[TeleFrag teleports a capital ship onto your tiny fighter]] when you come out a jumpgate. It's hard enough that ''Terran Conflict'' and ''Albion Prelude'' each offer an achievement for completing all the storylines in [=DiD=] mode.
* NoFairCheating:
** Using any kind of mods or scripts brands your save with an unremovable ***modified*** tag to keep you informed of this circumstance. Given the amount of bugs in the games (and the fact that a lot of the mods are plain cool), players tend not to care about it.
** If you fail to complete a "Retrieve derelict ship" mission in [=X3TC=] and you still have the ship in your possesion, a squad of police heavy fighters or pirates will warp in, blow the ship to bits and then warp out. It's thus impossible to make any use of the ship except for selling it first.
*** Not true: the cops aren't invincible, so you can actually destroy them. There's a way to do it that will avoid reputation hits; it requires a spare jumpdrive and a good supply of energy cells. You see, the SpacePolice will only spawn once. See the trick in EnemyMine above, or failing that, jump it to one side of a Xenon sector, wait for the police to spawn, and jump it to the sector on the other side of the Xenon sector. The police will follow and be attacked by the Xenon. On the off chance they survive, jump the ship back to the first sector.
* NoEndorHolocaust: Averted in ''Albion Prelude''. The game mentions that debris from the Torus killed millions.
* NoPlotNoProblem: Though there is an over-arching narrative to the games, a lot of the replay value comes from the sandbox mode where you pick your starting circumstances and are dropped into the universe to run amok.
* NoSuchThingAsAlienPopCulture: ''In Terran Conflict'': A blink-and-you'll-miss-it aversion. Randomly-picked flavor text for some {{Fetch Quest}}s and bits of junk carried by certain NPC ships point to alien sports and advertising, among other things. ''Reunion'' had the Bulletin Board System, you'd get bits of news and culture in it (along with missions).
* NoseArt: ''X2: The Threat'' allows you to import an image file from your computer that would be applied as nose art to all your ships and stations. It could be a pin-up, a coat of arms, whatever. (GameSpot's reviewer used a character from ''TheSimpsons''.)
* NuclearWeaponsTaboo: Partial: while nuclear ''weapons'' are fine, "large scale" nuclear ''reactors'' aren't, and stations and ships are forced to purchase energy cells produced at ''solar power plants'' in order to manufacture goods or use jumpdrives. "Large scale" apparently doesn't include battleship reactors with outputs capable of razing planet surfaces, strangely.
** It leads to a bit of FridgeLogic when the player wonders how exactly does a spaceship generate enough energy to run all of its systems, but needs separately provided energy cells for the jumpdrive.
* NukeEm: Terran "Hammerhead" missiles are nuclear-tipped according to flavor text. A single Hammerhead can kill an entire wing of small ships in loose formation, and will one-shot any M6 except the ATF Vali. Several of the other heavy missiles are also nuclear.
* ObviousBeta: The games tend to ship with a plethora of bugs, from annoying to game breaking. ''Reunion'' suffered from this in its plot (which was often impossible to complete), and ''Terran Conflict'' was a massive system hog for several months after release.
* OldSchoolDogfighting:
** Played down to the letter. A character in the later parts of the game who flies into a Xenon sector to duke it out can bring in a few battleships and carriers, as well as combat drones, resulting in hundreds of ships battling, and dozens of dogfights going on at once.
** Crazy furballs happen when the player is flying a slow ship and going against a faster one. For some reason, attacking ships seem to only fly at their maximum speed; as weapons are forward-firing, they tend do come at you guns blazing, then overshoot, turn back and repeat as long as necessary -- god forbid they'd slow down and try to get on your tail. Flying a faster ship, or going against slower ones, makes dogfighting a lot more interesting.
** Played with ''a la'' ''{{Babylon 5}}'' in recent games. On certain fighters you can see brief puffs of propellant from maneuvering jets when you hit the rudder or whatever.
* OmnicidalManiac: The Xenon.
* OneFederationLimit:
** Argon Federation. Boron Kingdom. Split Dynasty. Paranid Empire. Teladi Space Company. And that's just the Commonwealth.
** The Terrans have no named government, but their space operations are controlled by the United Space Command, and any operations dealing with AIs are run by the AGI Task Force.
* OneHitPointWonder: Any ship in ''X: Beyond the Frontier'' and ''X: Tension'', once stripped of its shields, will be blown away by its pilot sneezing.
* [[OneProductPlanet One Product System]]: Mostly averted, but some systems specialize in producing only one or two types of goods. Asteroid Belt in ''Terran Conflict'' mostly produces just different types of minerals, for example.
* OneNationUnderCopyright: The Teladi Space Company. Their entire race is organized like one MegaCorp. The head honcho, the Chairman (his name is Ceo at the time of the games), and business and smaller companies are arranged like subsidies or divisions. However, they employ an actual police force and a proper military.
* OneStatToRuleThemAll: Battles you partake in are varied, frantic and involve quite a bit of tactics. However, Out-Of-Sector battles, which happen in sectors you are not in, are simulated under a different set of rules, and they usually boil down to shield capacity in first place and (large) numbers in second.
* TheOneTrueSequence / SequenceBreaking: In ''Terran Conflict'', the intended order to complete the plotlines is "Terran Plot" → "Operation Final Fury" → "Goner Plot" → "Hub Plot" → "HQ Plot" → "Aldrin Expansion" → "Treasure Hunt" → "New Home Plot" → "Balance of Power". Though none of the individual plots allow for internal sequence breaking (i.e. you can't skip missions), it is very easy to complete certain plots out of order. Players have reported finishing the Goner Plot before the Terran Plot, and the Aldrin Expansion only requires you to have completed the first half of the Hub plot.
* OneWorldOrder: Present in the games (aside from the Terrans and Argon; same race, but they had a couple hundred years separation), but the ''X-Encyclopedia'' describes how there are other factions, like the human Hatikvah Free League.
* OnlySixFaces: {{NPC}}s' faces are picked at random from a list of about five possibilities per faction.
* OpeningNarration: ''Terran Conflict's'' [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d6KzJhKVLo opening cinematic]]:
--> "Almost a millennium has passed since the last great plague of humankind had been wiped out from the solar system and its precious blue pearl planet Earth.\\
"It was a plague so dangerous, a threat so grave, that it spread throughout the infinity of space and eternity of time almost effortlessly to infest the stars. It spread its pestilence to civilizations unknown, devastated the galaxy as if it was just an ordinary body made of flesh and bone falling prey to a mindless virus.\\
"And in a sense it was really a virus, a virus created by humankind. One made with the best of intentions, but a virus nevertheless.\\
"[[GreyGoo Von Neumann probes]], self-replicating machines, Terraformers, Xenon, even the Enemy of God. But at its core, it was really only one thing.\\
"[[AIIsACrapshoot Artificial general intelligence]], or AGI. Mechanical minds capable of making themselves even more intelligent, and then again, and again. Recursively forever. The greatest threat to biological life that ever existed throughout the whole universe. The Terraformers were cast out of the solar system by sheer luck, just barely, with billions upon billions dead in their wake. The Earth Jumpgate was dismantled, legislation was put in place never to allow AGI to be created again, ever.\\
"Humankind never forgot the lesson of AGI, never ventured to try out this concept once more, not in a thousand years, but then it was discovered that species from outside the solar system thought differently. The plague of AGI was being released on the universe once more. Again perhaps with the best of intentions and again however, with the deadliest of results. The government of Earth had to intervene, even if it meant [[SpaceColdWar cold war]], even if it meant a cold war between brothers, and intervene Earth did.\\
"This escalating conflict would be given a name by historians. [[TitleDrop Terran Conflict]]."
* OrangeBlueContrast: The cover for ''X3: Reunion''.
* OurWormholesAreDifferent: All the races depend on the LostTechnology Jump Gates scattered around the universe to get around. [[spoiler: They occasionally ''disconnect'', separating colonies for hundreds of years, until they reconnect (if ever).]]
** According to the X-Superbox Encyclopedia, the wormholes are only different by using exotic matter to power the wormhole, and by using magnetic forces to flatten the wormhole to allow travel. if those factors didn't occur, it would be the exact same as RealLife's theoretical wormholes.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tropes P-S]]
* PacifistRun: Possible in all the games, if you skip the plot. Some players go for an all-out "Cannot kill any enemy, at all", others go with "My other ships can kill enemies", or "I will only kill enemies required by the plot lines". The goal for these is to keep your combat rank at "Harmless" -- getting one kill will bring the combat rank up, and it takes a long time for it to go back down to Harmless.
* PainfullySlowProjectile: Capital ship weapons. Special mention goes out to the Terrans' Point Singularity Projector, which is incredibly easy to avoid in almost any ship.
* PassThroughTheRings: the very first game, [=X-BtF=], has you do that in the opening intro, to test your ship's systems. Also, several missions in [=X3R=] and [=X3TC=] have you racing against other [[strike:targets]] ships; you do not technically fly through rings, but you do have to pass through arbitrarily placed checkpoints.
* PerfectPacifistPeople: Subverted with the Goners. They're normally {{Actual Pacifist}}s espousing peaceful coexistence, and their ships don't have any weapons mounts at all, in contrast to every other ship in the game apart from cargo drones. If pressed hard enough as a society, however, they ''will'' fight back with lethal force: the climax of the Goner plot in ''TC'' consists of [[spoiler:smuggling a bomb onto a SpacePirate station whose denizens have been beating the crap out of the supply lines to the new Goner Temple]].
* PhotoprotoneutronTorpedo: Several weapons in the series (particularly the later games) fit this. Ion Disruptor, Ion Pulse Generator, Ion Cannon, Ion Shard Railgun, and Photon Pulse Cannon. Oh, and the Kha'ak use kyon emitters, which fire a fictitious particle. The names are normally fairly justified by FlavorText; for instance, the ISR "fires ionised 'shards' of super-heated plasma, which are then accelerated to high speeds using magnets."
* PlanarShockwave: Some of the larger explosion graphics use this.
* PlanetOfHats: One of the series' major criticisms is its poor job of fleshing out characters and races.
** Boron: Peace-loving space hippies
** Teladi: [[ProudMerchantRace Profit-crazed]] {{lizard folk}}
** Paranid: HolierThanThou [[ScaryDogmaticAliens religious extremists]]
** Split: ProudWarriorRace
** Terran: Xenophobic paranoid isolationists
** Goner: Jehovah's Witnesses [-[[RecycledInSpace IN SPACE!]]-]
** Yaki: {{Yakuza}} [-[[RecycledInSpace IN SPACE!]]-]
*** BilingualBonus: The faction name actually means "many yakuza" in Japanese.
** Xenon: [[AIIsACrapshoot Insane robots]]
** Kha'ak: Trying to kill anything that isn't Kha'ak?[[note]]Nobody's ever managed to talk to them. Or if they did, they didn't live to tell about it. All we know is that they seem to be a hive mind and that they have an affinity for nividium.[[/note]]
* PlanetTerra: In ''X3'', humans from the Sol System are referred to as "Terrans", but the planet is still called Earth.
* PlayerHeadquarters: The... [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Player Headquarters]], first introduced in ''Reunion''. You gain the Headquarters by doing a sub-plot in each game. The HQ lets you reverse engineer ships (to gain their blueprints), scrap ships (for resources), build ships (from learned blueprints and resources), repair ships (using some resources), and adjust the hue and saturation values for non-Boron ships - allowing you to make pink Split ships, or make the flames on your Pirate Nova bright blue. The HQ has a ''massive'' storage bay for storing all your crap, 12 external docking ports for capital ships, 20 external docking ports for freighters and corvettes, and a [[BiggerOnTheInside infinitely large internal docking bay for fighters]], making it an excellent parking location for your unused ships.
* PlayerMooks: Any player-owned ship other than the one physically piloted by the player. You can give them named pilots by activating certain scripts (whereupon a name is generated based on the owner of the sector the ship is in), but you never interact with them at any deeper level than the command console.
* PortalNetwork: The only way to get around the universe is by using jumpgates or a jumpdrive (which teleports you to a jumpgate of your choice).
* PointDefenseless:
** Partially averted. Most ships (even some fighters) have at least one turret theoretically capable of shooting down incoming missiles. Some get through, some don't, depending on the loadout of the ship in question.
** With the bonus pack scripts in X3, it may be almost completely averted ... for player-owned ships. One of the scripts in question is "Mosquito Missile Defense," which uses the fast, accurate, very weak Mosquito Missile to automatically intercept incoming missiles and [[AttackDrone fighter drones]]. It doesn't work on ships that can't equip Mosquito Missiles, however, making it annoyingly useless to the Terrans in ''Terran Conflict'' - in ''Albion Prelude'', ''every'' ship in the game can fire Mosquito Missiles.
** The Split M2 Python, one of the best destroyers in ''Reunion'', became this in ''Terran Conflict'' because its ability to mount Flak Artillery Arrays was removed. It now has to rely on comparatively ineffective corvette weapons for fighter defense.
* PoliceAreUseless: They and the Border Control ships seem to exist mainly to attack the player after friendly fire incidents, or when the player keeps a ship he's supposed to return as part of a mission.
* PrivateMilitaryContractors: The Split Strong Arms. All the corporations maintain warships, but the Strong Arms are the only ones for whom they're not just for protecting their own supply chains.
* {{Privateer}}: The governments of the Commonwealth offer "police licenses", which act like letters of marque. You're paid a preset bounty for destroying {{space pirate}}s, [[AIIsACrapshoot Xenon]], and [[HordeOfAlienLocusts Kha'ak]], and destroying neutrals or allies costs you the license.
* ProductPlacement: Nividium; aside from being extremely valuable, it's also a considerable plot point for X2 and X3.
** This gets brought up a lot, and Egosoft has always said no. Cynics just say they're trying not to alienate ATI fans.
* PromotedFanboy: The developers of the X3 ''Xtended'' mod, who were later hired on by Egosoft for ''Terran Conflict''.
* ProperlyParanoid: The Terrans are deathly afraid of artificially intelligent ships, because their own Terraformer ships were [[ColonyDrop throwing asteroids at Earth because of a programming error.]]
* ProudWarriorRaceGuy: The Split race is basically a clone of the Klingons.
* QuicksandBox: ''X: Beyond the Frontier'' through ''X3: Reunion'' hit this hit pretty hard. ''X3: Terran Conflict'' is a bit better at giving the player a goal.
* RammingAlwaysWorks:
** Ramming is the fastest way to kill enemies; just make sure you have more shields than they do. (Though you REALLY shouldn't do it at full speed, unless the target ship is a lot smaller than your ship.)
** Actually, as long as you don't try to ram anything ''too'' big, the faster you're going, the less damage you take. In X2, a kitted out Split heavy transport could crush a Paranid battleship without taking a scratch.
** Ramming has also the pleasant side effect of not angering the local sector police (unless you take too long to kill the target), a must if you need to eliminate a "friendly" ship without nuking the entire sector.
** Inverted in the case of M5 scouts, wherein it is the fastest way to kill ''yourself''. In particular, ''never'' fly a fully upgraded Kestrel on autopilot, as the ship is actually too fast for the AI. The "auto-pillock" is all but guaranteed to splatter you all over the vicinity.
* RandomNumberGod: Worshiping it is a RunningGag on the forums.
* RandomlyGeneratedLevels: The Unfocused Jumpdrive warps the player into a randomly generated sector, which typically includes asteroids, a random background, random sun(s) color/brightness, and a few squads of Xenon or Kha'ak enemies. The player may also find a critically damaged Aran TL.
* RealTrailerFakeMovie: ''[[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlAWC2HSOYM Nautilus]]''.
* RecursiveAmmo: A wide variety of missiles, from the strictly fighter-to-fighter Wasp on up to the sector-obliterating Shadow, have multiple warheads. There's even a few ''unguided'' multiple-warhead missiles, although only one is actually of any use.
* RedAlert: The game is pretty decent about it. Once hostile ships come within about ten kilometers, you get a single beep, then the background music switches to the battle soundtrack.
* RedAndBlackAndEvilAllOver: Split ships use rust red armor panels with gray/black backgrounds. Xenon ships are pitch black and gray with glowing red internals.
* RegeneratingShieldStaticHealth: Shields are held in the cargo bay and will regenerate constantly. Hull is non-regenerating, and once the hull reaches zero hitpoints, the ship will be destroyed.
* ReportingNames: A [[JustifiedTrope justification]] for Earth-derived ArmsAndArmorThemeNaming of nonhuman-built ships. The Boron M1 Shark is unpronounceable in the original Boron, but the word used for it translates to "cartilaginous fish with lots of sharp teeth". Likewise, the Paranid M4 Pericles was probably named for a Paranid whose career paralleled that of the Athenian Pericles.
* RestartAtLevelOne: The {{Player Character}}s of ''X2: The Threat'' and ''X3: Reunion'' are the same guy (Julian Brennan).
* RidiculouslyFastConstruction:
** '''HYPER''' averted. If you decided to build a ship at the PlayerHeadquarters instead of buying it, you have to wait as your headquarters puts it together. Capital ships like the Argon Colossus can take ''twenty hours'' in ''real time'' to build.
** Played straight for building stations. They basically pop fully-formed out of your TL's cargo hold. Which enables the [[ColonyDrop station-bombing]] combat trick.
* RingWorldPlanet: The Torus. Also, one forum member built a space station complex around the Aldrin planetoid for fun.
* RoaringRampageOfRevenge: The Terrans in ''Albion Prelude''. After the Torus Aeternal (a massive station wrapping around the Earth) is blown up by Saya Kho, they deploy their entire battlefleet to attack the Argon Federation.
* RobotWar: The Terraformer War, the First and Second Xenon Conflicts, and the constant low-level warfare against the Xenon. The Argon/Terran war probably takes the cake, though.
* {{Roboteching}}: Missiles are launched towards the bow from ventrally-mounted tubes (or flank-mounted tubes in the case of [=M7Ms=]) and immediately curve off after their target. This leads to spectacular visuals of swirling streams of fire when using swarm missiles.
* RubberForeheadAliens: The Split. In the games, they have red skin, tall and narrow heads, and large eyes that are very close together, but otherwise they are fairly human-like. [[http://www.egosoft.com/x/xnews/gfx/22_concept_split_male.jpg Concept]] [[http://www.egosoft.com/x/xnews/gfx/22_concept_split_female.jpg art]] makes them look like space elves.
* SapientCetaceans: The ''X-Encyclopedia'' mentions a sapient whale race on one of the Boron planets.
* SapientShip: Terraformer CPU ships.
* SaveGameLimits: Until you buy Salvage Insurance, you can only save when docked at stations. Salvage Insurance lets you save anywhere, but each time you save, you use up one Salvage Insurance. The player is also limited to ten save slots (and 3 autosave slots, which are made when you dock at stations).
* SaveScumming: Almost a requirement when attempting to board enemy capital ships. Especially Xenon ships, where TheComputerIsACheatingBastard -- to the point where there is an achievement for capturing a Xenon frigate, something that people spend ''hours'' training their marines for.
* ScavengerWorld: A released ''X:Rebirth'' [[http://www.egosoft.com/games/x_rebirth/screenshots/x_rebirth_screen_027.jpg screenshot]] shows a Split Python from ''Reunion'' gutted out for supplies, with power lines leading from the ship to a nearby installation - the collapse of the gate networks may have set off a dark age for small colony worlds.
* SceneryPorn: Massive planets, huge stations, sleek spaceships... let's face it: the latest installments are ''Crysis'' [[RecycledInSpace IN SPACE]]. Taken UpToEleven in ''X: Rebirth''.
* SchizophrenicDifficulty:
** The "Difficulty" shown on mission menus is based on your combat rank, and often seems completely random. At higher level combat ranks, an {{escort mission}} with a difficulty of "Easy" might end up spawning dozens of enemy frigates to kill a single freighter. Said freighter will outrun your own capital ships, forcing you into corvettes or fast frigates instead of a proper destroyer needed to deal with the swarms of enemies.
*** Yet another reason why players avoid {{escort mission}}s like the plague.
** In-Sector versus Out-Of-Sector combat. To save on processing power, OOS reduces combat to ships taking turns firing a single, point-blank[[note]]650 meters or thereabouts[[/note]] volley from all guns at once at a single target. All other variables (area-of-effect, weapons recharge, and so on) are taken out of the equation. This skews combat in favor of {{Wave Motion Gun}}s to the point where recommended loadouts are often drastically different for IS and OOS.
*** OOS is also skewed in favor of weight of numbers, to the point where [[http://x3wiki.com/index.php/Simulation_modeling a mob of M5 Jaguars can kill an M2 Python with about 20% casualties]], something that ArtificialStupidity makes impossible IS.
** Even scripted plot missions follow no clear difficulty slope. A combat mission with a supporting NPC squad against a pack of heavy fighters and a frigate can be easily followed by a "patrol" mission on your lonesome against several heavy carriers. And then it's back to killing fighter squads again.
* SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale:
** [[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfDistance Distance/Velocity]]: In all the games, maps are at most hundreds of kilometers across (I'm looking at ''you'', Sol System). But the ships are so slow that they actually require a TimeDilation device to cross them in a reasonable amount of time. Unless the kilometer was redefined at some point, this suggests spaceships in the game are far, far slower than they have any right to be -- [[FridgeLogic raising the interesting question of how any of the spacefaring races actually managed to become spacefaring races when they don't seem to have any ships that come anywhere near escape velocity for a planet with a mass similar to Earth.]]
*** Some of the slowest ships can actually be outrun by a basic passenger car, and that's ''before'' you account for air friction, making you wonder why do the races in the setting even bother with spaceships for gate travel - they could set up a cable/rail/something public transit network, or tow the gates closer together and build a single space station around them.
*** Oh, and your ability to hail other ships and stations is cut off abruptly at 25 kilometers.
** [[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfEnergy Energy]]: Shipboard weapons and shields are much weaker than anything in a sci-fi setting has a right to be. Most transport ships and fighters as of ''Terran Conflict'' have no more than about 100 megajoules of shielding. Burning a gallon of gasoline releases about 130 MJ. There is, of course, a difference between releasing 130 MJ over the course of burning a gallon of gasoline, and releasing it all at once, but the point remains.
*** The most powerful weapon in the game, the nuclear-tipped Hammerhead missile, releases 1.2 gigajoules (enough to destroy fighter swarms and all but one M6). By contrast, Little Boy, the nuclear fission bomb that demolished Hiroshima in 1945, released somewhere between 54 and 75 ''tera''joules (at least 45,000 times more). The major powers of the X-Universe would lose to ''modern-day Earth''.
* ScrewTheRulesIHaveConnections: High reputation with a race lets you get away with an absurd amount of murders. You can capture their flagship, murder the crew, then sell the fighter pilots into slavery, and you'll often take only a minor reputation hit unless you started slaughtering everything ''else'' in the sector.
* ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney: Some user-made scripts allow you to bribe enemy ships to make them neutral
* SelfImposedChallenge:
** Experienced players often set these for themselves. They range from "I'm only allowed to use one faction's ships" to {{Pacifist Run}}s to going to war with a faction to wipe them out.
** Nuklear-Slug wrote a thread about the exploits of Squiddy [=McSquid=], a Boron playthrough whose SelfImposedChallenge was to fly his starting ship deep into Terran space, then set the self-destruct and eject. He then floated his way to a shipyard to buy himself a new ship and started from there.
** [[Tropers/StarSword StarSword]] made it a goal to build an impenetrable blockade against all Xenon sectors, a strategy that involved devoting a considerable percentage of his [[MemeticMutation profitsss]] to the construction and equipment of Osaka destroyers.
** Spaceweed Adict wrote a thread chronicling a war he waged against the Terrans. He succeeded in taking and holding every sector save Earth, where {{the computer is a cheating bastard}}.
* SequelDifficultyDrop:
** The "main" game start in each game has gotten progressively easier (or less EarnYourFun, depending on who you talk to). ''Beyond the Frontier'' starts you off in a painfully slow ship with no weapons or shields, ''The Threat'' starts you off in an upgraded Argon Discoverer scout ship, ''Reunion'' starts you off in a somewhat upgraded Argon Buster interceptor ship, ''Terran Conflict'' starts you off in either a Terran Sabre interceptor or an Argon Elite advanced interceptor. ''Albion Prelude'' starts you off in an Argon Enhanced Nova, and gives you a free 16 million credit corvette within the first hour of the plot.
** Never mind the Enhanced Nova. The Terran start in ''Albion Prelude'' starts you off in a Katana corvette.
* ShaggyDogStory: Arguably the Terran Conflict. As the Argon start The Big Push into Sol, the Old Ones shut down the whole gate network to corral the Xenon, leaving everyone in the known universe trapped where they are.
* ShinyLookingSpaceships: The Paranid ships are basically flying mirrors, and the Terran ships are blindingly white, more so if you have Glow/Bloom enabled in the options.
* ShortTitles: A single character! As such, the series is usually called the ''{{X-Universe}}'', or the name of the latest numbered version (X3).
* ShoutOut:
** The ''Xtended Terran Conflict'' mod has tons of shout-outs in sector descriptions:
*** One Teladi sector mentions how the capital city on a planet is made largely of recycled ship hulls, and travel is done through [[RevelationSpace cable cars that use arms to swing between different cables.]] Another describes the ring around a planet in the background as being made up of thousands of small space stations, called the [[ThePrefect Rust Belt]].
** Almost all of the Aldrin sectors are named after the Apollo program astronauts - (Buzz) Aldrin, (Neil) Armstrong, (Pete) Conrad, (Dick) Gordon, (Alan) Bean.
** The ''X3: Albion Prelude'' achievement for forcing another pilot to eject is [[SpaceIsCold "It's Cold Outside"]]. This may be a ''Series/RedDwarf'' reference.
* SinkTheLifeboats: The AI will shoot at the player if he ejected from his ship, and tries to spacewalk to safety. In ''Xtended Terran Conflict'', the player can shoot down the escape pods that flee from destroyed capital ships and corvettes, though you don't accomplish much [[ForTheEvulz of value by doing it.]]
* SnipeHunt: New players are often recommended to find the elusive UFO base, the source of the [=UFOs=] that players sometimes see flying around at high speeds. The UFO base allegedly sells every ware in the game (and especially the ones ''not'' in the game) and all ships at dirt cheap prices.
* SpaceBattle: ''Ohh, maaan.'' Despite frequent cases of ArtificialStupidity, the games feature some spectacular fights. Special mention to the Battle of Aldrin (end of the Terran plot), Operation Final Fury, and the Aldrin Expansion in TC.
* SpaceClouds: ''Very'' dense nebulae show up in many sectors - in some sectors, visibility is less than 10 kilometers. ''Albion Prelude'' gets rid of most of the visibility restrictions on nebulae, instead making it an atmospheric effect that doesn't limit your vision. The nebulae have no effect on your ship's sensors.
* SpaceColdWar: ''Terran Conflict''. The Terrans distrust the [[LostColony Argon]], and the Argon fear the Terrans' extremely advanced technology. [[RoaringRampageOfRevenge Goes hot]] when the Argon blow up the jewel of the Solar System, Earth's [[BigDumbObject Torus Aeternal]] in ''Albion Prelude''.
* SpaceElves: The Goners are an odd version of Type II, being biologically human but otherwise largely fitting the trope. In particular, they insist that the Argon are not originally from the planet in the sector Brennan's Triumph, or from their current capital Argon Prime. They're mainly viewed as nutty, but harmless (the official Argon line is that Earth is a myth) ... until the events of ''X: Beyond the Frontier'', when a test pilot from Earth becomes stranded in the X-Universe.
* SpaceFlecks: In X3, which also features a variation in which star flecks are accompanied by region-themed clumps of other stuff, such as red nebula gas.
* SpaceFighter: All the races have their own set of Space Fighters. They have good speed, decent cargo bay, and can operate autonomously without the need for refueling or pilot rest. Most of the game starts have you start out in a fighter of some sort. Space Fighters come in several flavors:
** M3+ Heavy Fighter: Like the M3, but slower with more guns and shields.
** M3 Fighters: The most well rounded and arguably the most useful. They have good cargo capacity, mediocre speed, good firepower, and good protection, with the ability to mount jumpdrives.
** M4+ Heavy Interceptors: Like M4s, but with a bit more firepower at the cost of speed. Bridges the gap between the M3 and M4
** M4 Interceptors: Midway point between M3s and M5s. They don't have much firepower, but they have good speed and can mount jumpdrives.
** M5 Scouts: Pathetic firepower and shielding, but ridiculously fast top speeds. Only a few are capable of mounting jumpdrives.
* SpaceFriction: The universe has the viscosity of maple syrup.
** Most Boron sectors also have the visibility of maple syrup.
* SpaceIsAnOcean: Normally avoided apart from SpaceFriction and SpaceClouds, but there is the odd quirk that the majority of capital ships have their anticapital guns on the forward and flank batteries, with the flak guns above, below, and astern. Certain forum members also have a tendency to use nautical terms like port and starboard.
* SpaceIsCold: ''Albion Prelude'' has a {{Steam}} achievement titled "It's Cold Outside" for forcing another pilot to eject.
* SpaceIsNoisy: Weapons and explosions make noise (and a lot of it, too).
** In a minor case of GameplayAndStorySegregation, {{averted}} in the opening cinematic for ''Terran Conflict''.
* SpaceMadness: Flavor text for the Oort Cloud in ''Terran Conflict'' mentions that those who work there sometimes fall victim to "Oort's Curse", a madness with no known cause or cure.
* SpaceMines: In several flavors. [=SQUASH=] mines are your standard explosive mines, Ion mines deal damage only to shields, Tracker Mines... [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin track stuff]], and Matter/Antimatter mines are like SQUASH mines but with more boom. Except that in the game there is no difference between all of them beyond the name. None. One of the most effective tactics with mines is to get a huge swarm of enemies chasing you, drop all the mines, and order one of the mines to self-destruct. Big bada boom.
* SpacePolice: All the main races have Border Patrol and Police ships. They buzz about, scanning ships for contraband, and they harass pirates (and loose terribly, because they have peashooter weapons.)
* SpacePirates: Swarms of them, and they have ''space flamethrowers.'' The Pirates paint up their ships with spiffy flame paint jobs and graffiti, then start slapping on all sorts of weapons on them, such as the aforementioned flamethrower. Some of their communication portraits even have the stereotypical eye-patch. Composed of all the races (except for Terran).
* SpaceStation: Loads and loads of them. There's mines, factories, solar power plants, military bases, shipyards, and warehouses, to name a few. And the player can build and own most of them.
** They're the only thing in any of the games that the player can actually land at. Which sort of justifies the fact that none of the ships can reach escape velocity (as mentioned above).
* SpaceWhale:
** Well, space ''flies'', actually. Think golden insectoid EnergyBeings which communicate through ''[[SpaceIsNoisy birdsong]].''
** ''Xtended Terran Conflict'' adds several new life forms; a Space Dragon, a space rock-eating beetle thing, and space jellyfish that feed on energy cells.
* SpamAttack: [[AttackDrone Fighter drone]] swarms. The player gathers hundreds or thousands of fighter drones into a freighter, flies into a enemy sector, drops every one of them into space and orders ''all'' of them to attack enemy capital ships. For the enemy, this counts as an almost-instant game over.
* SpareBodyParts: Paranid have from 1 to 4 eyes (this even determines status and rank in their culture). Many of the Paranid the player talks to have 4 eyes in the communications video, however.
* SpecialEffectBranding: Every faction that builds ships does it differently.
** Argon fighters look vaguely like diesel punk fighter jets ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?MzM1MjI3NQ M3 Nova]]), while the capital ships are gray and boxy ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?MjgwMzIwMw M1 Colossus]]).
** Boron ships are bright green and organic-looking, resembling fanciful sea creatures ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?MzY1NzExMzE M7 Thresher]]).
** Paranid ships are grayish purple with lots of sweeping curves ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?MjI4NDQzMzE M1 Zeus]]).
** Split ships are rusty red with lots of sharp edges and flat panels ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?ODEzMjA0OTk M7 Panther]]).
** Teladi fighters are basically bluish slabs of metal with wings ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?NDA5NjM3MDc M3 Falcon Hauler]]), while the capitals are frequently likened to [[UsedFuture "flying junkyards"]] ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?NDAxNDAwOTk M1 Condor]]).
** Terran fighters resemble space shuttles ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?NTk2MzIxNTU M3+ Cutlass]]), while the capital ships are big, white, boxy contraptions ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?NTkwODMwODM M2 Osaka]]).
** ATF ships tend to be spiky and angular, with lots of silvery gray ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?NTQ5NjUwNDM M1 Odin]]).
** Kha'ak fighters are purple and pyramid-shaped ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?NjcwNDQ2Mjc M4 Interceptor]]), while the capitals resemble giant insects ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?NjYyMjEwMTk M1 Carrier]]).
** Xenon ships are gray and boxy with SpikesOfVillainy ([[http://eng.x3tc.ru/screenshot/ship.php?NDY0NTQ0Mjc M1 K]]).
* SpikesOfVillainy: Xenon capital ships typically have dozens of spike-like antennas scattered across the surface of the black and red hull. Split capital ships also have a large mass of spike-like antenna mounted on the nose of the ship.
* SpiritualSuccessor: The series has been described as one to ''VideoGame/{{Elite}}'' and ''VideoGame/{{Privateer}}''.
* SplashDamageAbuse: AreaOfEffect weapons deal damage based on how many of their damage "squares" touch enemy ships. In other words, larger ships take exponentially more damage than a small ship. As such, capital ships take [[GameBreaker absurd amounts of damage]] from Phased Shockwave Generators. The good news is, [=PSG=] are strictly short-range weapons (as well as capital-only from ''Terran Conflict'' on), so unless the player is at the controls of the PSG-armed ship, a ship with dedicated anticapital guns ([=PSPs or PPCs=] can keep them at arm's length long enough for this trope not to matter.
* [[FishPeople Squid People]]: The Boron.
* SquishyWizard: M8 Bombers and [=M7M=] Missile Frigates. Both have mediocre/bad amounts of shielding (for their size), mediocre speed, and pathetic point defenses (Boron [=M7M=]s don't have ''any'' point defenses). However, both have the amazing ability to put out hundreds (or in the case of the frigate, ''thousands'') of missiles which can easily wipe out sectors.
* SssssnakeTalk: The Teladi, full stop.
* StalkingMission: One of the optional, randomly generated missions that players can take in ''Terran Conflict''. A few pop up during the game plots, but they're usually mercifully short.
* StandardSciFiFleet: Scouts, Interceptors, Fighters, Corvettes, Frigates, Bombers, Destroyers, Carriers, and 4 different types of freighters (SpaceTrucker, Space Yacht, giant freighter that can carry entire stations, and freighters with most of the cargo bay ripped out fighter docking ports).
* StandardTimeUnits: Time is measured in Sezuras (1.7 seconds) Mizuras (96 Sezuras; 2 minutes and 43 seconds) Stazuras (96 Mizuras; 4 hours and 21 minutes) Tazuras (7 Stazuras; 1.27 days) Wozuras (7 Tazuras; 8.89 days) Mazuras (7 Wozuras; 62.23 days) and Jazuras (8 Mazuras; 1.36 years). Many players [[InternetBackdraft did not like this]], so X3: ''Reunion'' has a ratio to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) units used in RealLife.
** In ''Terran Conflict'', the "-zura" based system was dropped in favor of Earth time units.
*** The XTC Mod (Xtended for Terran Conflict) brought it back again.
* StarfishAliens:
** The [[http://www.egosoft.com/x/xnews/gfx/22_concept_boron.jpg Boron]]. They're aquatic, squid-like aliens whose home planet has an atmosphere of ammonia.
** The [[http://www.egosoft.com/x/xnews/gfx/22_concept_paranid_01.jpg Paranid]]. They have three eyes, have a crazy religion based on three-dimensionality, have multiple genders, and have four arms.
* StupidSacrifice:
** Your wingman at the end of ''X2: The Threat'', who rams the Kha'ak doomsday weapon to destroy it. All well and good, except that his kamikaze run doesn't seem quite as noble when you've got three capital ships, laden with multiple {{Wave Motion Gun}}s and entire squadrons of fighters, sitting in firing range.
*** Or, y'know, if it wasn't actually possible to remotely control any ship you own even while extra-vehicular. Sure, by all means send your ship to its destruction, but there's nothing in the rules that states you have to be ''in'' the damn thing, y'know.
** Saya Kho's destruction of the Torus - the colossal ring station around the entirety of Earth - in Albion Prelude intro may arguably fall into this category from a political standpoint. The Argon and Terrans are locked into a cold war with localized conflicts. The Torus was a hybrid military and civilian installation, providing defence for Earth, but it did not threaten Argon interests directly. Blowing it up constitutes something between Hiroshima bombing and 9/11 in space, as it had a staggeringly high casualty rate among both military and civilian personnel, not to mention those killed by debris falling to Earth. Naturally, this incident became the spark for a full scale war. Saya Kho is previously portrayed in the series as a reasonable person and is said to show remorse for the deed (she could evacuate the Torus in time but chose not to), but no justification is provided for her deed.
* SubspaceOrHyperspace: Many ships make use of "subspace compression" to store vast amounts of stuff in relatively tiny spaces. Special life-support units can make it possible to store living creatures in this manner (otherwise the compression is instantly fatal), but it's nevertheless quite unpleasant.
* SuicidalOverconfidence: any ship will attack you if you shoot it, even if you're in a superheavy prototype fighter and they're a tiny scout craft whose weapons caress your armor more than they hurt it. This can scale up to hilarious levels, with light fighters attacking your ''capital ship''.
* SuperPrototype: "Prototype" ships in ''Terran Conflict'' and ''Albion Prelude'' are superior in almost every way to the standard production models. They can only be gained by capturing them, or by doing plots (such as the Corporation missions). Their rarity and power are usually handwaved as being too costly for mass production.
* SuperweaponSurprise:
** The [[http://x3wiki.com/index.php/Boron_Campaign Boron Campaign]], the first time the Commonwealth governments had a full-scale war. The Split invaded Boron space and pushed the squids all the way back to their homeworld Kingdom End. Then the Argon, needing a new ally after having a falling-out with the Paranid, came to the aid of the Boron, throwing most of their fleet at the Split and driving them back.
** By the time of the games, the Boron have become respectably badass by necessity. It's not uncommon to see a Split strike force enter a Boron sector and promptly get shredded.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tropes T-W]]
* TechnologyMarchesOn: RealLife example for ''X3''. During the first half of the 2000s, CPU processing power (the main limitation on the game engine) was jumping upwards rapidly, and apart from graphics the ''X3'' engine had barely been updated since its original incarnation in ''X: Beyond the Frontier''. If the trend of increasing processing power within a single core had continued, we'd have no problems with more player assets slowing games. Then the industry standard changed to increasing computer speed by way of multiple cores in a single CPU, cores that were often slower individually than the single cores the ''X3'' engine worked best on. To make matters worse, the engine is 32-bit, meaning it can't take advantage of more than about 3 GB of RAM. These two factors make the restart point for an all-plots-finished ''Terran Conflict'' player not "whenever I get bored", but "whenever my installation becomes nearly unplayable".
** The latter point in time even happens occasionally ''before'' the player finishes all the plots.
** The change in industry trend has prompted Egosoft to build a new game engine from the ground up for ''X: Rebirth'', one that is multicore- and 64-bit-compatible. This also gave them an excuse to advance the timeline by a thousand years.
* TeleFrag: Ships travel between different sectors of space through jumpgates. Jumpgates are two-way, meaning that ships both enter and leave sectors from them. Meaning, you can use your jumpdrive to jump to a distant sector for a mission... right as a five-kilometer-long vessel is entering the jumpgate's event horizon (where you are). The Terran sectors in ''X3: Terran Conflict'' are notorious for this, as they have very active military patrols which fly between the smaller Terran gates very often.
** The solution to this problem is using the autopilot to fly through gates whenever feasible (obviously this is not a good idea when under attack). The game features a "traffic light" system at each gate pair, and only the player has the ability to run a red, so to speak. The autopilot always waits for the light to turn green.
* TeleportersAndTransporters: A couple different varieties. The PortalNetwork allows interstellar travel. Meanwhile, ships can be equipped with a Transporter Device that allows you to transfer people and cargo from one ship to another (provided they're no more than five kilometers apart) without needing to dock both ships at a station.
* TeleportSpam: Possible in the ''Xtended Terran Conflict'' mod for... Terran Conflict. Battleships / Motherships (M2+) mount Point-To-Point jumpdrives, which lets them jump anywhere in a sector after 10 seconds of charging. This allows players with enough energy cells to jump in circles around enemy ships, whittling them down while taking almost no damage.
* ThemeNaming: Some ships in ''X3'' have names of swords. Others use names from Earth mythology, biology, or geography. The full list of naming conventions is as follows:
** USC (Terran): [[ArmsAndArmorThemeNaming Swords for fighters]], [[LocationThemeNaming Japanese cities for capital ships]] e.g. Cutlass, Tokyo
** ATF (Terran): [[ReligiousAndMythologicalThemeNaming Norse mythology]] e.g. Thor, Odin
** Argon (Other humans): Fighters appear unthemed; [[ReligiousAndMythologicalThemeNaming Greek mythology]] for capitals (but not those used by Paranid) e.g. Colossus, Minotaur; {{Stellar Name}}s for some ships (e.g. Eclipse, Magnetar)
** Boron: [[AnimalThemeNaming Aquatic organisms]] e.g. Barracuda, Shark
** OTAS: [[ReligiousAndMythologicalThemeNaming Greek wind gods and regional winds]] e.g. Boreas, Venti, Mistral
** Paranid: [[ReligiousAndMythologicalThemeNaming Greek gods, demigods and heroes]] e.g. Perseus, Zeus
** Split: [[AnimalThemeNaming Predators]] e.g. Python, Tiger
** Teladi: [[AnimalThemeNaming Birds]] e.g. Condor, Falcon
** Terraformers: [[NumericalThemeNaming Hexadecimal numbers]] e.g. #deca (57,034 in base 10), #cefa (52,986)
** Xenon: Letters e.g. J, L
* TheTheocracy: The Paranid Empire is ruled by one Priest-Emperor Xaar, with each Paranid settlement having its own priest-duke.
* TimeDilation: Every ship can mount a "Singularity Engine Time Accelerator" which can speed up the flow of time up to 10x, depending on the game settings. Activating the device at high settings is heavy on the CPU and tends to cause ArtificialStupidity.
** In in-game lore, malfunctioning SETA drives can supposedly crank up the effect to several ''thousand'' times normal speed: back in the days of X2 and X3 when stations had bulletin boards that featured news articles, one story covered a pilot who lost a ''year's'' worth of time when his SETA device went haywire and took several hours for him to shut down.
* TookALevelInBadass: Each race's military in ''Albion Prelude''. In previous games, they'd sort of ignore the player unless he got very close to them. In ''Albion'', they'll jump around the universe to respond to threats to their space. If you jump into a Split system and start blasting civilian ships and the stations, they'll send ships to kill you. The more damage you cause, the more likely they'll send something big to kill you, like a destroyer, or in the Terrans' case, the [=ATF=] Valhalla or [=USC=] Kyoto.
* TooDumbToLive: Ships generally take the shortest route to their destination. Even if said route lies directly through a Xenon sector and they don't have a jumpdrive to hop over it with.
* TractorBeam: In ''X3: Reunion'' and later games, tractor beams are a player-usable weapon, used mainly for towing ships and moving stations around. In a symptom of those games' [[ArtisticLicenseEconomics broken economy]], the factories that create them sometimes disappear before the player can buy one, forcing one to build a factory for an item the player only ever needs one of.
** Interestingly, tractor beams are programmed to be incapable of locking onto non-player-owned objects. This is mainly to prevent the obvious exploit where the player drags enemy vessels into stationary objects like asteroids. This restriction can be [[GameMod modded out]].
* TranslationConvention: All the races speak in a version of Japanese (it's backwards), but the player hears them as English (or whatever language they have selected).
* TryAndFollow: A decent pilot with a small enough ship can invoke this trope. Simply fly through tight gaps in space stations (the bigger the station, the better), or (if the opportunity presents itself) make like Han Solo in ''TheEmpireStrikesBack'' and fly through an AsteroidThicket. The AI's collision avoidance software will force your pursuers to give the obstacles a wider berth, while you open the gap.
* TwentyBearAsses: One category of missions for the corporations randomly picks up to three types of missiles for you to deliver to them. About half the possible missiles are only available as random drops from destroyed ships.
* UnexpectedGameplayChange: The starship race course in ''X3: Reunion's'' plot, which in early versions was extremely buggy and difficult.
* {{Unobtainium}}:
** Nividium is a valuable mineral mined from certain asteroids (rumored to be fragments of the Kha'ak homeworld). What the {{NPC}}s use it for is unclear.
** Teladianium is a ceramic used mainly in structural components.
* UsedFuture: Many of the Teladi and Pirate capital ships ships as well as some Pirate stations are crude and worn-down in appearance, and some look like random bits and bobs and ship hulls were duct-taped together. (In the case of most pirate ships and stations, they actually ''are''.) Argon fighters use this to a lesser extent, as most of them have rust spots ([[ArtisticLicenseChemistry in space]]) and scorch marks from welding, despite being bought brand-new from a shipyard...
* VertebrateWithExtraLimbs: The Paranid have two sets of arms.
* VideogameCrueltyPotential:
** {{Lampshaded}} by Mahi Ma at the end of the [[spoiler:Hub plot. Said BigDumbObject lets players link up to three gate pairs at their discretion, which lets them shorten the voyage between major regions of their trade empire. It also lets them give four Xenon sectors free passage to a populated area.]]
** If another pilot ejects from his ship (whether because you bought it from him, or because a he offered his ship in exchange for you not finishing him off), they'll start floating towards the nearest {{space station}} in their spacesuits. You have the choice of leaving them alone, using them for target practice, or scooping them into your cargo bay and enslaving them at pirate bases.
** A [[http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=319635 work-in-progress script]] allows you to utilize slaves for a variety of useful tasks, like ship repair. When they repair the ship, you eject the suited-up slaves into space, and they start repairing your ship with repair lasers - sometimes they'll break away and try to escape, and you can just slaughter them or kill them. You can extort slaves for money in exchange for their freedom - or you can just extort them, promising them freedom, [[ILied then keep them anyways]]
* VideogameFlamethrowersSuck: Very, very averted. The Plasma Burst Generator is a strictly short-range weapon, but range is everything that separates your target from a quick, crispy death.
** Or as one forum member rather succinctly put it, "OMGWTFBBQ."
* VideoGameLongRunners: Counting the currently unreleased ''X: Rebirth'', seven games spanning fourteen years.
* TheWarOfEarthlyAggression: Averted or inverted. The Terran Conflict starts as a SpaceColdWar between the Terrans and the Commonwealth. Then the Argon blow up the Torus, making it actually a War of ''Argon'' Aggression.
* WarWasBeginning: ''Terran Conflict's'' opening cinematic tells the roots of the titular SpaceColdWar. ''Albion Prelude's'' cinematic tells how the cold war turned hot.
* WeBuyAnything / WeSellEverything: Averted. Each station will only buy the resources for the products they manufacture, and will only sell these products (and that is if the owner allows trade for the station). Trade Stations are slightly more permisive, as they will buy and sell for the average price all wares in their stock list; the list varies greatly between host races and slightly between the stations of a given race.
* WeWillSpendCreditsInTheFuture: The Teladi backed the creation of the unified currency between the Commonwealth races. Prior to that each race used its own currency. The Terrans presumably changed to credits between the events of ''X3: Reunion'' and ''X3: Terran Conflict''.
* WhatTheHellPlayer: Hit non-hostile ships or stations enough times (whether accidentally or on purpose) and the sector police will warn you that if you keep it up, they'll attack. Continue, and you may get a message that sounds something like this:
--> '''Computer announcer:''' Fighter ships from the Argon Federation are now being launched. They have orders to kill.
:: The station or ship will turn hostile and the sector police will attack. This becomes fairly annoying during station defense missions, where friendly fire to the station you're protecting is a constant hazard.
** And then you can usually prevent an encounter with the police by opening a comm channel with them and [[EasilyForgiven blaming the weapons' targetting system]]. Thankfully, stations gone hostile from friendly fire while you are protecting them become friendly after completing the mission.
* WideOpenSandbox: ''Very'' wide open. So much so that the devs included options to disable the plot altogether, so the players can have their fun merely by interacting with the open universe. The ''X'' series is practically the very definition of this trope.
* WordSaladTitle: ''X3: Albion Prelude''. "Albion" refers to the player ship of ''X: Rebirth'', the ''Albion Skunk'', while ''Prelude'' is ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin: a prelude to the gate system shutdown that gave the dev team an excuse to do a major timeskip.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tropes X-Z]]
* XMeetsY: Gameplay is typically described as "''{{Freelancer}}'' [[note]]You actually pilot your ship, emphasis on side missions, silly physics[[/note]] meets ''EVEOnline'' [[note]]being able to pilot any ship in the game, emphasis on the economy, SceneryPorn[[/note]] meets ''VideoGame/{{Elite}}''[[note]]WideOpenSandbox trading and combat.[[/note]]" -- though the ''X-Universe'' series predates both ''{{Freelancer}}'' and ''EVEOnline''.
* XtremeKoolLetterz:
** The 'X' stands for "Xperimental Shuttle," which was the name of your ship in the first game.
** Many human names are recognizably modified from present-day names. One example from ''Terran Conflict'' is Jesan Nadina, whose first name appears derived from "Jason".
** Torus '''''Ae'''''ternal. 'Nuff said.
* YouCantGoHomeAgain:
** Played straight for Terran test pilot Kyle Brennan (the PlayerCharacter) in ''X: Beyond the Frontier''. He is stranded in the X-Universe after the prototype gateless jumpdrive on the [[XtremeKoolLetterz Xperimental Shuttle]] goes haywire.
*** In ''X3: Reunion'', three games and several dozen years later, the Solar System is reconnected to the X-Universe's PortalNetwork at the end of the main plot. By this time, Kyle Brennan has a grown son in the X-Universe, is a war hero, and is the head of a multibillion-[[WeWillSpendCreditsInTheFuture credit]] company ([=TerraCorp=]). At best, he'd likely be a StrangerInAFamiliarLand.
*** At worst, He Still Can't Go Home Again, because Earth's government consists of xenophobic paranoids, and almost immediately enters a SpaceColdWar with the rest of the X-Universe. And then in ''Albion Prelude'', his associate Saya Kho blows up the Torus Aeternal, putting another nail in the coffin.
** The ''Xtended Terran Conflict'' mod takes place in an entirely new gate system -- the only preexisting sector is Aldrin. The Terrans allow races to send their ships into the gate system, but they refuse to let them go ''back'' to the original gate network. As such, every ship in the new gate system can't go home again.
* YouRequireMoreVespeneGas: Wares can be broadly defined into Energy, Minerals, Bio, Food, Tech, Military (weapons, shields). There is also Secondary factories. Each race has their own unique Bio, Food, and Secondary wares, which are used by their own stations. Some Tech and Military factories are race-exclusive.
** Energy is made by Solar Power Plants, which have no ware requirements to build Energy Cells (Except for player power plants, which need Crystals). All stations require energy cells.
** Minerals (Ore, Silicon) are mined by breaking up asteroids and picking up the debris, or by placing a mining station on them. They only require Energy to work. Ice and Nividium asteroids are also present, but Ice is only used by the Terrans, and neither type has mining stations available to the player.
** Bio (Meat, wheat, etc) are used only by Food and Secondary factories. They only require Energy to work.
** Secondary factories (Warheads, food spices, etc) are usually not essential to the economy except for a few Tech factories. They need Energy and Bio to work.
** Food (Space burgers, [=MREs=], etc) requires Energy and Bio.
** Tech (microchips, crystals, etc) requires Energy, Food, and Minerals. Some require a Secondary resource in place of Food.
** Military (lasers, missiles, food) requires Energy, Food, and Minerals. Military equipment is bought by Equipment Docks or installed on ships.
* ZergRush: Common Xenon and Kha'ak tactic. The Khaak Cluster is a self-contained ZergRush; upon approaching it breaks into about a dozen scout ships and a heavy fighter.
[[/folder]]

* FantasticSlur: "Squids" for the Boron (though they don't seem to mind), and "four-eyes" for the Paranid.

* AbusingTheKardashevScaleForFunAndProfit: The Outsiders in the backstory and Encyclopedia are full blown Type [=IVs=], and the Old Ones are borderline Type [=IVs=]. DysonSphere and Matroshka Brain civilizations are mentioned, and they fit into the borderline Type [=IIs=]. However, all the races the player actually interacts with are at best high-end Type Is.

* BlueAndOrangeMorality: The Old Ones' goals and motivations are basically incomprehensible to the young races. Since they've been around longer than Earth has been Earthlike (over 3.2 billion years), they've had the chance to become Type IV on the Kardashev scale, and their main plan is intended to prevent the heat death of the universe. But because they've been united for so long, they seem to have forgotten that other groups might not be so unified. Like the young races, for instance. Also, for some bizarre reason they told the Commonwealth not to finish off the Xenon after the Second Xenon Conflict, [[FridgeLogic even though it was the Xenon that derailed their long-term plans in the first place]].

Long before the events of the games, Earth built the first jump gate and launched it towards Alpha Centauri. However, in a midflight test, the Earth jump gate locked onto a random gate not built by humans - they had discovered the ''X-Universe'' [[PortalNetwork gate system]]. All the planets discovered were totally [[AbsentAliens absent of intelligent life]] [[note]]due to the PreCursors modifying the gate system to keep the Terrans isolated[[/note]]. Earth built a fleet of self-replicating and self-evolving [[{{Terraform}} Terraformer]] ships to make the worlds habitable for humanity. About a hundred years later, after the mission was complete, Earth sent out a command for the Terraformers to self-destruct. Not long after, the Terraformers show up in force, and begin terraforming ''everything'' in sight. Nathan R.Gunne, a Terran commander, lured the Terraformers past Earth's jump gate into the X-Universe, then destroyed the jump gate behind him to isolate the Terraformers (now dubbed the Xenon) and to save Earth. Gunne crash lands his frigate on Sonra-4, an earth-like world, and begins restarting civilization with his crew. They name themselves the "Argon" after R. Gunne. [[FutureImperfect Earth has become a fairytale legend]]. The Argon begin exploring the X-Universe, and discover the peaceful [[FishPeople Boron]], the [[ScaryDogmaticAliens Paranid]], the [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy Split]], and the [[ProudMerchantRace Teladi]]. They also rediscover the [[AIIsACrapshoot Xenon]]. The Terrans, completely isolated from the X-Universe, build a ship with the first Jump Drive, to try and reach Alpha Centauri. However, the Jump Drive locks onto the X-Universe and promptly breaks down, stranding the pilot (and protagonist) in the X-Universe and indebted to the Teladi, who helped repair his ship. The Earth pilot, Kyle Brennan, helped prevent the Xenon from blowing up a planet with their M0 Planet Killer in the first game, ''Beyond The Frontier''. A few decades later in ''The Threat'', the [[HordeOfAlienLocusts Kha'ak]] show up and their first act in the universe is to destroy everything in the sector President's End and nearly destroying the planet in Omicron Lyrae. After the Kha'ak planet killer is destroyed, a {{Precursor}} shows up and begins secretly aiding the Paranid in building a jump gate. The Paranid activate their jump gate in Heretic's End -- which links to Earth, right as the Kha'ak are jumping into the sector to try and destroy the Paranid jump gate. The entire Terran Fleet, completely forgotten by the rest of the universe, streams out of the jump gate and [[CurbStompBattle curb stomps the Kha'ak]]. The Terrans establish tentative relations with the other races, but try to remain isolated -- hence the game being named ''Reunion''. ''Terran Conflict'' reunites the long lost [[spoiler: Aldrin]] colony with Earth, destroys the Kha'ak Hive Queen, and sees a [[SpaceColdWar rise in tensions between the Argon and the Terrans]]. In ''Albion Prelude'', the cold war [[RoaringRampageOfRevenge goes hot with the destruction]] of Earth's orbital defense station.