Improved Travel Drives (8.00 and Envoy)

Improved Travel Drives

After the Flight Model update, travel drives felt disappointing. Even on some of the fastest ships, I had to begin braking 80 km from my target just to avoid overshooting, and sometimes ships never reached max speed before crossing an entire sector. I ended up relying on autopilot way too much because the AI could pull off maneuvers that were just impossible in manual flight. While the developers made things more realistic, I believe it lost the fun factor. The aim of this mod is to make Travel Drives responsive and exciting again.

Changes:

• Attack Time Reduced (time from TD activating to max speed:

- Small engines: 2 seconds

- Medium engines: 2. 5 seconds

- Large/XL engines: 4 seconds

• Deceleration Curve: Stopping power increased by 8x of the engine's original value.

• Charge Time Normalization: For balance purposes, any engine with a travel drive charge time below 3 seconds gets increased to 3 seconds. This allows a small window of attack to prevent the enemy escaping while still allowing factions with extremely low charge on time on their engines to receive a benefit.

What It Doesn’t Do:

• Change regular or boosted flight characteristics to avoid conflicts with the targetting changes made in 7. 50.

• Modify thrust or ship handling during travel mode or regular flight.

Side Effects:

• Slightly faster trade routes (mainly benefiting the Xenon, though that’s fine since they need the boost).

• Improved capital ship AI during station assaults, larger ships now maneuver better and sometimes use Travel Drive instead of just slowly boosting past defenses.

• Better fleet cohesion in Travel Mode: with increased acceleration, ships are able to better manage their speed to maintain formation better.

• If you hit the brakes while drifting, sometimes the side thrusters will take over deceleration instead of the modded forward thrusters. Try decelerate in the direction you are facing to avoid this.

Compatibility:

• Not compatible with VRO or mods that tweak the engine “attack” or "decelerationcurve" parameters.

• Safe to add or remove from your save without issues.

Credits:

Huge thanks to z1p on the Egosoft Discord for the help!

Installation:

Extract the ZIP into your SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/X4 Foundations/extensions folder (not in Documents/egosoft).

For more details or to adjust settings yourself, check out this guide.

Enjoy the new, more responsive travel drive experience!