Patch basis: 9.00, the “Empire Update”, released 10 June 2026. Written 2026-08-23. Class structure below is base game; individual hull availability varies by expansion.
Short answer: S, M, L and XL are not tiers. They are four different jobs. An XL ship is not a better version of an L ship any more than a crane is a better car. A player who buys upward through the classes ends up with an expensive ship that cannot do the thing they wanted, which is the single most common expensive mistake on a first save.
The useful mental model: size class tells you what the ship’s constraint is. Small ships are constrained by survivability, large ships by access and cost. Pick the class that matches the constraint you can live with.
The class table
| Class | Typical roles inside it | Its real constraint | What it is genuinely good at | Check this in the Encyclopedia before buying |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | Fighters, interceptors, scouts, couriers | Fragility. It dies to things you did not see | Scouting, escort screens, cheap disposable numbers, and being the ship you fly early | Cargo capacity (usually tiny) and whether it fits the equipment you actually own |
| M | Heavy fighters, corvettes, freighters, small miners, boarding transports | Being neither — outgunned by L, outmanoeuvred by S | The workhorse band. Most first automated income ships are M | Cargo type and volume; a “freighter” with the wrong cargo class cannot carry your ware |
| L | Destroyers, frigates, large miners, large freighters, builders | Access and turn rate. It cannot go everywhere and cannot chase anything | Sustained firepower, bulk hauling, station construction | Turret count and turret classes — an L hull is mostly its turret loadout |
| XL | Carriers, auxiliary/support ships, the largest haulers | Cost, crew, and being a single point of failure | Force projection, repair and resupply in the field, launching and recovering fighters | Docking capacity and what it can service, not its own weapons |
Two consequences fall straight out of that table:
- Your first “real” purchase is almost always M. It is the cheapest class that can run an automated loop without dying constantly.
- An XL carrier is a logistics asset, not a gun. Players buy one expecting a battleship and are disappointed by its direct combat output.
Cargo class matters more than cargo volume
This catches nearly everyone once. Ships have a cargo type — the general categories are container, solid, liquid, and specialised holds — and a hauler with an enormous hold of the wrong type simply cannot pick up your ware. A miner set up for solids will not collect a gas. Before any hauler or miner purchase, check the cargo type field, then the volume. In that order.
What 9.00 changed about equipping ships
The Empire Update touched the fitting side of ships in ways that make older loadout guides partially wrong for S and M hulls specifically. From Egosoft’s 9.00 changelog:
- Engines and shields are now integrated into S and M ship models, which Egosoft says increases the variety of modules those ships can equip.
- Most equipment is now interchangeable between S/M ships of all Commonwealth races. Boron and Commonwealth ships can equip each other’s modules, and they can equip smaller weapons and turrets.
- Dedicated missile launcher slots were added on some S/M ships.
- Hardpoint locations on S and M ships were revised, widening loadout options.
- Heat generation and shield modifiers were added to certain ship hulls — meaning two hulls with the same listed weapon can behave differently in sustained fire.
- The Encyclopedia gained a Boost Acceleration Multiplier field on engine entries, and ware pages now link to production module info.
That last pair is the practical takeaway: the in-game Encyclopedia got better at 9.00, and it is now the correct place to compare hulls. External stat sites are the wrong place, because the rebalance invalidated a large amount of what they hold.
How to actually compare two hulls
Do this in the Encyclopedia rather than reading a tier list.
- Decide the job first: scout, hauler, miner, escort, line combatant, builder, carrier. If you cannot name the job, you are not ready to buy.
- Filter to the class that owns that job from the table above.
- Compare on the one field that decides that job — cargo type for haulers, turret count for L combat hulls, docking capacity for XL, speed for scouts. Not on a general “power” impression.
- Then check whether you can afford to lose it. If losing the ship ends your save’s momentum, buy the cheaper hull and two escorts instead.
- Only after all of that, compare weapons — and compare them by time to kill against the target you actually fight, not by listed DPS. The 9.0 weapon time-to-kill calculator takes the Encyclopedia numbers from your own install and turns them into that.
What I could not verify, and therefore left out
No hull speeds, hull hit points, cargo volumes, turret counts, crew capacities or prices appear above. The 9.00 rebalance changed values across hundreds of ships and Egosoft has not published a per-ship delta table, so any specific number sourced from memory or from a pre-June-2026 stat site would be a guess wearing a decimal point. Read them from your own game. Likewise, I have not verified which specific hulls gained dedicated missile slots or hull heat modifiers — the changelog says “certain” and “some” ships, and does not enumerate them.
Where class choice bites later
Fleet composition is where the class model pays off, and where getting it wrong is expensive: an assault fleet’s answer is an exchange rate between your fleet’s damage output and the target’s return fire, not a ship count — see how big a fleet to kill a Xenon station. And if a ship of any class stops doing its job with no error message, that is a configuration problem before it is a hull problem: idle ship triage.
Sources
- X4: Foundations 9.00 “Empire Update” is Out Now! — Egosoft via Steam, 10 June 2026. Source for integrated S/M engines and shields, cross-race equipment interchangeability, dedicated missile launcher slots, hardpoint revisions, hull heat and shield modifiers, and the Encyclopedia additions.
- X4: Foundations on Steam — base game scope and release date, 30 November 2018.
