1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Graphically plan your trade routes, coordinate attacks with your entire fleet, manage the hierarchy or send ships on remote exploration missions.
7. The seamless change from ship to ship and from NPCs controlling your empire for you continues on a higher level.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. Stations can be constructed from a variety of modules, be it production modules, living sections, docks or many other types of parts.