Post
by Wraith_Magus » Sat, 17. Apr 21, 07:09
I think the best solution for now, besides modding, is the player deliberately starting wars, like between Terrans and Argon. (Enh, Terrans like fighting Argon more than the Xenon, anyways!) That said, if you want to have Xenon win some fights, you need to guide them to victory with more than just some nav beacons.
I think that part of the reason Xenon are getting so hammered now is that their sectors are typically pretty mineral-poor, in spite of the mining nerf supposedly hitting the "safe" sectors hardest. Methane and ice in particular and helium to a lesser extent are nearly totally absent in Xenon sectors, although I doubt Xenon need ice at all. The few areas that have resources are cut off from other Xenon sectors, so they can't pool resources like other factions. Savage Spur is basically the only Xenon sector that has all the resources (besides ice).
Likewise, the Xenon seem to send out more S mining ships than raiding parties at times. There'd be no reason to do that unless they were running out of resources in their own sectors, right? (I mean, other than the AI being stupid... In my game, mining ships from Nopileos' Fortune pass by the extremely dense asteroid field in that sector to get to the exhausted asteroids in Pious Mists IV where they'd get constantly being attacked by Kha'ak until I stationed a task force there to keep the Kha'ak down...)
I also absolutely notice the Xenon are much more concerned with me as a player ship than anything else going on in their sectors. HOP has half a dozen stations in Faulty Logic I, and ANT is colonizing Savage Spur I with a dozen factories while I can fly by three behemoths and a nomad attacking one of the few remaining Xenon stations... but when I flew into Atiya's Misfortune for some missions, I had FOUR Ks and about 90 smaller ships chase after me. Exclusively me, even though there were non-Xenon stations there. I even wound up getting the Ks to stop following me by simply flying past some HOP stations in Faulty Logic, and getting the Ks tangled up fighting those stations. (Three Ks attacked a defense station and won, but the last K attacked a microchip factory and lost after about an hour of trying.) In a later mission (which was absolutely NOT worth the 1.2 million they offered me to take it), I had to destroy station 30 turrets (but NOT any station modules - that failed the mission for me when my turrets and backup blew up a module) on a Xenon station, and as soon as I go in there, there's over 80 small Xenon ships immediately on me, with 80 more Ps and smaller coming in later (even Ss started to attack me) and I had to deal with five Ks in succession using my two destroyers and seven corvettes I had at the time. (I lost three corvettes. I didn't take smalls at all because I knew the losses would be too great. I also dumped about 100 laser towers in the area to just be distractions to the Xenon, especially the defense drones. The turrets that weren't glued to my destroyer's special gravity oddly seemed to do nothing, however.)
Hence, it seems like the best way to help the Xenon is to deliberately trigger this player-centric aggression and then wipe the Xenon off on other factions, because the Xenon don't care when other factions build factories, much less defense stations, in their sectors and then patrol it with tons of ships, but it's like kicking the hornet nest as soon as you go in. Take something fast like a Katana, and just travel mode in big loops, maybe spitting a couple shots out at stations until you have half a dozen Ks and 100 smaller ships chasing you, then fly through the gate, and you've got yourself a proper Xenon invasion.