Patch basis: 9.00, the “Empire Update”, released 10 June 2026. Written 2026-09-01.
Egosoft describes 9.00 as a full rebalancing of “more than 200 weapons and turrets, over 90 shields, and many of the more than 200 ships.” That single sentence is the reason every ship recommendation on the internet older than June 2026 is now of unknown validity — including recommendations that are still perfectly correct. The problem is not that the old guides are wrong. The problem is that you cannot tell which ones are.
This page is the ledger for that problem. It does not reprint a table of hull HP numbers, because a trustworthy per-ship before-and-after table does not exist in public form and we are not going to invent one. What it does instead is tell you exactly which axes moved, which direction, what Egosoft actually stated versus what players inferred, and how to produce the delta for the specific ship your old guide told you to buy — in about ten minutes, from your own install, which is the only source that is correct for your build.
If you came here from a weapon question rather than a hull question, the companion piece is X4 9.0 weapon stats: time to kill compared. That one covers the gun axis; this one covers the platform the gun is bolted to.
The honesty line, stated up front
Here is what we could and could not verify while writing this.
Verified from official sources: that a rebalance of ships, shields, weapons and turrets happened in 9.00; the stated design goals; the structural change to how S and M ships mount engines and shields; that capital ship movement was reworked and turret accuracy raised; that prices were re-tied to quality tier.
Not verified, and therefore not printed here as numbers: any specific old-value → new-value pair for any named ship. Egosoft’s public changelog summarises the rebalance by intent, not line by line per ship, and no complete community diff of the ship macro files has surfaced that we could confirm. Anyone publishing a tidy “Nemesis: 34,000 → 41,000 hull” table right now is either reading undocumented files without saying so, or making it up. We are not going to add a sixth such table to the pile.
So the dataset below has two halves: a confirmed axis ledger (what moved, with the official statement behind it) and a worksheet (how you fill in the numbers that only your install can give you).
Half one: the axis ledger
Read this as “which of my old assumptions are now suspect”. The right-hand column is the important one — an axis Egosoft did not touch is an axis where your old guide is still good.
| Axis | Status in 9.00 | What Egosoft stated | What this does to an old guide |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hull HP | Changed, per ship, magnitude unpublished | Ships rebalanced so that “heavily armoured and shielded ships are a more viable option” | Any tanking claim (“this M survives a K”) must be retested. Direction implied: armoured hulls up in relative value |
| Shields | Changed — over 90 shield items rebalanced | Full rebalance of shields alongside weapons | Effective HP claims are stale even where hull was untouched |
| Shield/engine mounting (S and M) | Structurally changed | Engines and shields “integrated into S and M ship models”, increasing module variety | Loadout guides for S/M ships are the most invalidated category of all — the slot logic itself changed |
| Turret accuracy | Changed, improved | Turrets are “more accurate” | Raises the real DPS of every turreted platform without any turret slot count changing. Old “turrets are useless, use fighters” advice is the most suspect claim on the internet right now |
| Capital ship movement | Reworked | Capital ship movement reworked | Kiting and disengage tactics written pre-9.00 are unreliable |
| Small-weapon damage vs L/XL hulls | Changed | “Large ships are not as vulnerable to small weaponry” | Fighter-swarm-kills-everything strategies are the second most suspect claim |
| AI pilot behaviour | Changed | Pilots behave “more organically” | Affects fleet-comp advice more than stat advice |
| Prices | Changed | Prices “better reflect the quality level of ships and equipment” | Cost-efficiency rankings (credits per effective HP) are fully stale, even for ships whose stats did not move |
| Cargo capacity | No official statement found | — | Treat as unverified rather than unchanged. Read your own Encyclopedia before trusting a hauler recommendation |
| Crew capacity | No official statement found | — | Same. Not mentioned in the summary we could verify |
| Turret/weapon slot counts | No official statement found | — | The summary describes accuracy and module variety, not slot count changes. Verify per ship before assuming |
Note the three “no official statement found” rows. They are the point of this table. A guide that recommended a ship for its cargo hold is much more likely to still be correct than a guide that recommended it for surviving fighters, because the second claim sits on an axis Egosoft explicitly moved and the first sits on an axis nobody has said anything about. That is a usable triage rule, and it is the thing the confident-sounding AI answers get wrong: they will happily restate a pre-9.00 combat ranking as current fact.
Half two: the worksheet
To turn “suspect” into “actually fine” or “actually replace it”, you need the two numbers. Copy this block per ship, and note the two-column comparison is the whole point — a single current value tells you nothing about whether your guide expired.
| Stat | Value in old guide (with its date) | Your Encyclopedia now | Delta | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hull HP | ||||
| Shield (fitted, total) | ||||
| Travel speed | ||||
| Acceleration | ||||
| Turret slots (by size) | ||||
| Weapon slots (by size) | ||||
| Cargo capacity + type | ||||
| Crew capacity | ||||
| Price, fully fitted |
Filling it:
- The “now” column comes from the in-game Encyclopedia, ship entry, with the ship configured the way you would actually buy it. Not the bare hull — a bare hull comparison will mislead you badly in 9.00 specifically, because the S/M engine and shield integration changed what a “bare” ship even means.
- The “old guide” column comes from the guide itself, and you must write down its date. A guide with no date is not evidence; discard it rather than transcribe it.
- Delta as a percentage, not an absolute. Absolutes across a rebalance of this size are unreadable.
- Verdict is one of three words: unchanged (guide stands), moved (retest the claim), unknown (the guide never stated a number, only a vibe — which is most of them).
That third verdict is more common than people expect, and it is worth being blunt about: a large fraction of pre-9.00 ship advice contained no numbers at all. “The Nemesis is the best M fighter” is not a claim you can diff. If your old guide had no numbers in it, 9.00 did not invalidate it — nothing could, because it never said anything falsifiable. Replace it on those grounds alone.
Getting a real before-value if the guide has none
If you want an actual pre-9.00 figure rather than a guide’s recollection of one, there are two honest routes and one dishonest one.
- Honest, reliable: an old save or an old install. If you have a pre-9.00 backup of the game directory, the ship definitions are in the game’s own data files, and the Encyclopedia of that build will read them. This is the only route that gives you a number you can defend.
- Honest, partial: archived copies of stat sites, dated before 2026-06-10. Usable if and only if the archive timestamp is visible. Treat as approximate — those sites had errors before the patch too.
- Not honest: asking a chatbot for the old value. It will give you one. It will sound specific. It has no way to distinguish 8.x data from 9.00 data in its training, and this is precisely the failure mode that makes a patch of this size dangerous for anyone researching by asking rather than by reading.
What to actually re-decide
Three decisions are worth revisiting first, ordered by how much the ledger above disturbs them:
- Anything relying on fighter swarms against capitals. Egosoft explicitly reduced large ships’ vulnerability to small weaponry. This is the single most load-bearing change for fleet composition, and it interacts with the Xenon defence maths in X4 Xenon station fleet size — a fleet sized under the old assumption is sized wrong.
- Anything relying on turrets being bad. Accuracy went up. Turreted defence platforms and escort destroyers are the likeliest beneficiaries, and “don’t bother with turrets” was received wisdom for years.
- Anything relying on credits-per-effective-HP. Prices were re-tied to quality, so even a ship whose stats are untouched may have moved in value ranking. Logistics fleets are less affected on the combat axis but not on the price axis — see X4 logistics setup decision for the shape of that trade-off.
Everything else — mining throughput, cargo runs, station supply — sits on axes with no confirmed change, and those guides can be provisionally trusted while you verify the numbers at your leisure. If a station build is the thing you’re actually re-planning, none of that math moved with 9.00 — the production chain planner is still current for module counts and coefficients.
The one-line rule
If a pre-June-2026 guide made a combat survivability, turret, or price claim, assume it is expired until your Encyclopedia says otherwise. If it made a cargo, crew, or throughput claim, assume it holds until your Encyclopedia says otherwise. That asymmetry is the entire practical content of the 9.00 rebalance for someone holding an old bookmark, and it is derivable only from knowing which axes were officially touched — which is what the ledger above is for.
Sources
- Update 9.00 — X4: Foundations Wiki — release date and rebalance scope
- X4: Foundations 9.00 “Empire Update” is Out Now! — SteamDB patch notes — official announcement of the 9.00 release
- Egosoft releases Public Beta for the “Empire” Update (v9.00) — beta announcement, counts of rebalanced weapons, turrets, shields and ships
- X4 Foundations 9.00 “Empire Update” Public Beta is Now Live — stated rebalance goals, S/M engine and shield integration
- Patch 9.0 — X4: Foundations General Discussions — player discussion of post-patch ship behaviour
- Steam Community announcements — X4: Foundations — official announcement index
Unverified in this article, and marked as such above: per-ship hull HP values, per-ship shield values, per-ship speed and acceleration values, per-ship turret and weapon slot counts, cargo capacity changes, and crew capacity changes. No public source we could reach publishes a per-ship before-and-after table for 9.00. Where this page states a direction of change, that direction comes from Egosoft’s own stated design goals, not from a measured value.
