https://store.steampowered.com/app/392160/X4_Foundations/
Features:
Freedom to personally fly all ships:
X4 will allow you to fly all ships personally. From small scouts over a wide range of ship classes up to the biggest carrier, everything can be piloted from the cockpit or an external view.
A big focus in the development of X4 has been to achieve a seamless and immersive experience when moving between ships. You can leave a ship, climb down a ladder, walk over the dock of a large space station into another ship you may have parked there and replace the pilot that was working for you just by clicking on his chair.
Modular stations and ship upgrades:
Building space stations and factories has always been a foundation of the X games. After gaining enough money through fighting or trading, most players want to establish their own economy and start influencing the universe on a larger scale. In X4, it is now possible to be completely free and creative. Stations can be constructed from a variety of modules, be it production modules, living sections, docks or many other types of parts. The powerful new map system allows you to drag and connect modules using a connection system to design your own unique creations.
Ships also offer a variety of upgrades. Engines, weapons and other equipment can be added in a graphical editor and actually seen on the ship.
Most dynamic X universe ever:
X4 will be the first X game to allow our races and factions to freely build and expand their empires; the same flexibility the player enjoys in creatively designing space stations from modular building blocks is also available to them. Races expand their empire based on supply and demand, which leads to an extremely dynamic universe where every action the player makes can influence the course of the entire universe.
Managing your empire with a powerful map:
Once you have more ships and many NPCs working for you as pilots, crew or station managers, the map will be your preferred method of managing it all. Ships can be ordered with simple clicks and through drag-and-drop operations to set their future path and commands.
Graphically plan your trade routes, coordinate attacks with your entire fleet, manage the hierarchy or send ships on remote exploration missions.
Most detailed X economy ever:
One of the key selling points of X games has always been the realistic, simulated economy. Wares produced by hundreds of stations and transported by thousands of ships are actually traded by NPCs and prices develop based on this simulated economy. This is the foundation of our living and breathing universe. Now with X4, we have taken another, massive step. For the first time in any X game, all parts of the NPC economy are manufactured from resources. Ships, weapons, upgrades, ammo and even stations. You name it. Everything comes out of the simulated economy.
Research and Teleportation:
The seamless change from ship to ship and from NPCs controlling your empire for you continues on a higher level. Once you own a larger fleet, you will be very interested in researching a technology from your HQ: Teleportation. Once you've unlocked teleportation, you can jump from ship to ship a lot quicker and experience all the critical situations your NPCs encounter first hand.
Every order you have given to a ship before turns into a mission objective when you pilot the ship yourself. The moment you leave again, your pilot takes the helm and continues with their previous orders.
Get into the game:
In X4, you can start your journey from a number of different gamestarts and as a number of different characters, each with their own role, set of relationships and different ships and technologies to start with. No matter how you start, you are always free to develop in any other direction. Focus on exploration, make money with illegal trading and theft, command large battle fleets or become the greatest entrepreneur ever. It's all up to you to decide.
Some screenshots from their "Screenshot of the Day" thread
I am a big fan of the X series and been playing them since the first entry in 1999, X: Beyond the Frontier. They're niche space games since they've generally had a steep learning curve relative to other space games and games in general. Rebirth that was released a few years ago was a disappointment as most people wanted a sequel to X3: Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude in terms of game design, and not a game akin to the design of the first, since most fans found that the series had its best features and design in X3, so Rebirth taking you back to owning only a single ship, with limited fleet and corporate/organisation building mechanics was a big departure.
However with X4, it's a game that is seemingly the return of what made X3 great, and what most people find as the quintessential aspects of the X series.
It's really difficult to explain the game because it's kind of like trying to explain Dwarf Fortress or EVE Online. You can try reading the sections on wikipedia or my summary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3:_Terran_Conflict
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3:_Albion_Prelude
As a general summary of the series, they are games that allow you to play from a smaller scale of flying small single ships, to building factories producing goods for the economy, trading, to amassing large fleets that you are in command of. The games have its own empires and their relations, but also other threats like the Kh'aak and Xenon. The games have had more complex economies than most, meaning that factories in systems, and ones you own, only produce goods if they are supplied with intermediaries, if there is a shortage of the supply, the final products are short of supply as well (products include things like ship equipment), whether that is the result of pirates blowing up trading NPCs on a path to a factory, or intermediary factories being destroyed, etc - this allows the game to have a more realistic supply-demand system, although it wasn't perfect, they've said that X4 has vastly improved on the economy.
The game has many ship classes from small fighters, military transport vessels (for marines, useful for commandeering or attack capitals), trading/freight ships, to long-range missile ships, anti-missile ships, to massive capital ships. In X3 there were hundreds of ships you could fly/own personally or in your fleet(s). How you play is up to you, if you build a corporate empire, you'd need to defend your assets across space, so it means you need to fund a fleet that you'd have patrolling sectors with your assets in, as well as building our own factories to produce the equipment to outfit your fleet - it would not be good if there's a shortage of capital weapons in the market and you've lost 2-3 of your capital ships. As such, the X games tend to play out like strategy games but in a different perspective. In the end they're sandboxes, I'd say that there is no other space game to compare it to, the closest is if EVE Online were a singleplayer game. There are also tons of mods for these games, very big ones like Litcube's Universe which are basically new games.
