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X4 would be a perfect game for me if not for the horrendous ally AI. Put maybe 100 hours and uninstalled once I got a capital and sent it in to stop the alien scourge, only for it to wade around like a lost duck as it got blasted to pieces by the enemy.
Enemy NPCs have fine AI, why should player ones be so neutered? Should have listened to the reviews.
I somewhat disagree, the galaxy feels like it's 3 meters wide compared to the lore overload that is the universe before the gate shutdown and there are, like, 2 ships for each race.
I do love the more "personal" aspect of you walking around in a fuckoff huge ship during an intense battle, and... uh, half of the NPC models, but my single playthough's "endgame" felt more of a grind than its beginning somehow ("endgame" in quotes because I kinda dropped it).
The size felt just right for me. Didn't explore every area before I stopped though. Ship variety felt ok, just wish there had been some more variety in aesthetics. Many are straight up ugly, and the haulers are near identical to each other's variants.
I only got as far as amassing enough cash to be a small-time player in the market and was building out my station to manufacture something always in high demand but when I got the capital to help defend that one system that always gets overrun, it went down the toilet. Broke my spirit. I was so looking forward to the RTS parts of the game.
Ideally you build at least one shipyard with multiple complexes in nearby sectors, so that you can build an entire bunch of Asgards and just roll over Xenon sectors - of course you need to find a hole in the NPC economy to exploit for that.
I do agree that X4 AI is stupid, every now and then one of my Asgards decides that their fuckin' death star laser isn't enough to destroy a station and gets up close to hit 'em with their sword (which did cause me to give up and stop playing indefinitely).
X3 is not that much better with ship AI, but at least stations don't fight back and the sheer number of existing sectors makes it ok to have a few overrun ones.