Argon Boron Teladi Split Paranid Goner (limited ships) ATF (very limited) (i hope they come back, godly ship design) Pirate variants Xenon Khaak

So ignore my point entirely, I guess?

• - Argon, Teladi, and Paranid all have representatives in this game.
• - Boron and Split are soon^tm .
• -There were 6 Xenon ships in Reunion (assuming you just count the LX as basically the L), and there are 5 I've seen so far in X4. Maybe that's it, but so be it.
• The Yaki had two different ships of their own; the Pirates had 5 different ships, all variants of racial ships (specifically the Buster, Buzzard, Falcon, Harrier, and Nova).
• I've only seen two Kha'ak ships so far in my encyclopedia, so I might grant you that. I'll also use the defense I've seen before and say, well, the entire narrative of X3R was wiping them out.
• Using the Teladi as my examples once again (mainly because I've seen most of their ships in-game so feel like I've pretty much got it covered), I've seen 6 combat ships. There's only two subvariants now (Vanguard and Sentinel), which I'd argue is actually probably for the best from the ridiculous abundance of suffixes from before. So that's 12 different combat ships, between 6 hulls. Actually, 7, just realized the Guillemot is a Teladi ship as I checked a wharf (must be their "special" ship, looks to be a heavy scout/M5+-type deal)

It is true that comparing X3AP to Rebirth is unfair but comparing it to X3TC should certainly be done.

I'm not sure whether you're tracking what I'm saying? I'm comparing X3 Reunion (abbreviated X3R) to X4 Foundations (X4). The FIRST of THREE different X3 games, each a standalone expansion, and as my OP pointed out, each rapidly increasing the amount of content.

Also, they took too away too much stuff. I personally found the old classification amazing. Now, there are few ship types

But they're still there, they just got rid of the numbers (which got silly since they went up from M5-M3, then M6 was bigger than M3s, then M2s, then M1s (except sometimes M1s were bigger than M2?), then there were M3+s and M7Ms and M7Cs, and don't forget the M8s which are between M6s and M3s in size but are a specialty ship with a designated bomber role, of and also M6+s...

Yeah, frankly, I appreciate what X4 has done to just get rid of the Ms and use ship classifications. Consider the Argon ships I've seen so far (arranged in rough order from X3-and-prior classification and new, X4-given classes):

• Discoverer (Scout in X4) -- An M5. Just... called a Scout now.
• Elite (Interceptor) -- An M4.
• Nova (Fighter) -- An M3.
• Eclipse (Heavy Fighter) -- so they brought back M3+s, it seems? More on that in a bit
• Minotaur (Bomber) -- M8.
• Cerberus (Frigate) -- M7. Maybe more like an M6+, like it was in AP? Is there a Centaur (M6) Argon ship in this game? Again, more on this later.
• Gorgon (Frigate) -- Definitely an M7, as it's about 130% the mass of the Cerberus.
• Behemoth (Destroyer) -- M2.
• I'm going to guess/hope there's an M1, because so far I haven't seen any Argon capital ships other than the Behemoth. There has to be at least one carrier... right?

Funny thing... even if I'm wrong in assuming there's an Argon carrier, that's 8 unique classes. How many unique Argon combatant ships did X3R have? Drumroll..... 7. Buster, Centaur, Colossus, Discoverer, Eclipse, Nova, and Titan.

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So what I was saying before about the sub-classes -- yeah, there's stuff like a M5+? Or heavy scout? For the Teladi (the Guillemot as I mentioned earlier), and they have no designated Interceptor (both the Falcon and Buzzard are considered Fighters, and both have about the same mass, although the Falcon is faster and weighs 1T less so it's probably closer to an M4 I guess.) Only the Paranid, so far as I've seen, have "corvette" (M6) identified (the ol' Nemesis).

My point here, with this wall of text, is... They just identified ships on a basic classification system, not added in all these M numbers that would have been somewhat unifying, except there were exceptions everywhere. It just got silly towards the end of AP.

and the weapon /shield system is so boring—and so not favouring capital ships.

I'll grant you the turrets are idiots in terms of aiming in this game, and not being able to program certain turrets to do certain things is annoying (I miss being able to program a certain turret with a certain weapon to target X ships, while other turrets with bigger weapons targeted Y ships). Capitals definitely need some love.