The account is the only way to access ventures.

Ventures do not provide access to anything unique, except a few paint jobs. There are mods which add all paint jobs, including some that Egosoft only handed out keys for at their booth at Cons, to NPC vendors.

They are not the only reliable way to level up crew, nor would they be efficient at it since you cannot scale them.

EgoCredits were removed nearly as soon as they were introduced.

Can you explain it in human language to someone who has NEVER played X4 games? What are ventures & is it a yes or no for playing the game?

It's a completely superfluous feature so that they can say the game is "multiplayer" but there's no actual multiplayer.

You can send one of your ships into another person's game world and they'll fly around for several hours and maybe come back and, if they come back, you might get something. Also, you'll occasionally see other people's ships in your own game world.

They in no way affect actual gameplay or balance and the only items unique to them are purely cosmetic.

I'm not basileus, but I'll try anyways. :)

Basically, Ventures is EgoSoft's attempt to introduce "multiplayer" in the purely singleplayer game (X4).
It works (presumably: as I can not stand any multiplayer, I did not try it myself and only seen it on YouTube) as fallows:
1) a player builds special "Ventures" module on her/his station. Said module is unique, there is only one such module can be built (as to whether one can disassemble the module and re-build it somewhere else I don't know);
2) the player accesses this module and chooses one of his/her ships to "send" into other players' "worlds";
3) the chosen ship vanishes from the game for arbitrary amount of time and appears in one of the other players' games;
4) after said amount of time the ship "returns" and some random additional goodies are added into owning player "ventures inventory" (and can be manually claimed via the "Ventures" module interface), or the player gets the message that the ship was destroyed (because, presumably, this can happen while the ship is uploaded into other player's game).

The amount of time the ship spends "venturing" is substantial (several days, I believe) and one can send only a single ship, so (as was said earlier), the "Ventures" system does not scale and becomes irrelevant in the late-game.


Naturally, the Internet connection is required in order for EgoSoft's server to upload the ship in the player's game. Also, by opting-in the player automatically agrees to receive other players' venturing ships in her/his game, so one will see other players' ships spawning even if he/she does not send her/his "venturing". These ships can be attacked/destroyed by NPC factions or the player him/her-self, but I do not have any information about correlation between ship's destruction in one's game and actual success/failure outcome in other's game (this can be pure RNG-based regardless of ship's survival).

As was said, the rewards for "Ventures" are marginal and the only real exclusive content are ships' skins/paintjobs, that can be added via mods. Additionally, installing any mod or tampering with your savefile automatically adds the orange "*modded*" tag to the game and blocks participation in the "Ventures". Needless to say, the mods' benefits in this singleplayer game are outweighing all rewards of "Ventures".

The only real downside of modding the game is that you are less likely to be heard after reporting an issue with the game on the forums (modded saves are considered "tainted" and it is by default assumed that any glitches/bugs are induced by incompatible mods).

P.S. The developers are fully aware of the crew training problem and are trying to devise a way of improving it right now (not that they are very successful with it, but still!), implementing training "seminars" and finding/patching-out errors in the game's training logic (wrong formulas for leveling-up probabilities resulting in "next-to-zero" chances) and balancing out mission rewards.

Thank you but in short is creating an account required? And having an online connection?

For "Ventures"? Yes.
For playing the game? No.

I can think of two much better ways to implement multi-player in the game: Co-op (like in Cossacks) and a battle training arena, like the one in X3:Reunion but with a possibility to fight others in there and there only, in the arena. Playing against others in the game proper would never work in a game like this.

Im literally on the fence of buying this because of the inshort embedded DRM component that in effect makes the game not 100% DRM free.

Trying to rationalize if its okay to support a game whos develpment team embeds DRM as mentioned prior which gates you from using ingame content.

Anyone have insight on if i'd find it worth my time to reward this kinda behavior?

I've have not opted into this "multiplayer" and I've not suffered for it. I think the game is fully playable without it. You can play by yourself without any sort of trouble.