Make Xenons great again

[gorman2040]

I think they are fine as they are tbh, in my 4.1+ game currently they conquered all the Zyarth space and would have taken argon and hat sectors if not for me blockading herectics end and hat choice.

What should happen is the custom gamestarts both budgeted and unbudgeted should have options for xenon and khaak etc in terms of their difficulty.

Lucky you!

How long is your game so far?
Are you playing unmodified?

I play unmodified, current game is custom start, I only have the PHQ with an attached fully self sustained ship production.
Current play time is 31 days and 13 hours (only 3 days 16 hours in control of a ship )
I am now at around 10 traders and 10 miners, all L sized.

I started with ~5 L miners/traders and tried to build my reputation to +27 for all factions.
I am thinking that helped factions in the begging to establish a good foothold but that's just my theory.

I wonder if you did a lot of trading as well.

[SirConnery]

Even with mods though, before 4.20 the Xenos did absolutely nothing. I think 4.2 really did change something for the betterment of Xenos. If you want an unmodded game maybe a custom start with enabling the Terran Argon plot from the start. That's gonna change the dynamic quite a bit.

[Ragnos28]

The Xenon are great again in 4.2
The overwhelmed ZYA sectors provide me with many many hours of combat fun, with "war expeditions" that I can take again and again, I'm beyond ecstatic with this change

[gorman2040]

Even with mods though, before 4.20 the Xenos did absolutely nothing. I think 4.2 really did change something for the betterment of Xenos. If you want an unmodded game maybe a custom start with enabling the Terran Argon plot from the start. That's gonna change the dynamic quite a bit.

When you say "enabling the Terran Argon plot from the start" you mean making sure the outcome of the covert operation is Terran were caught meddling with ANT/ARG politics?
I chose this result thinking that any other outcomes would not help the Xenon. I am seeing some skirmishes between Terrans and ANT/ARG.
Other than that, I have not helped resolving any conflict in the universe so far except helping the Yaki which I think probably weaken other factions a bit because of pirate activity.

[SirConnery]

When you say "enabling the Terran Argon plot from the start" you mean making sure the outcome of the covert operation is Terran were caught meddling with ANT/ARG politics?

Yes, that is what I meant. It's gonna help the Xenon indirectly since both Argon and Terran are using resources fighting each other.

[Nebesky]

I have a question,

When the xenons get more system do they produce more ships? I manually deleted the Zyarth faction in all of there Systems (Split) and let the xenon take them over, but i cant see any increasing production of xenon ships? Shouldnt they make more energy Factorys and stuff?

Unfortunately my game has a bug where the argon/terran story is stuck. (One of the mission files is empty which means i cant make anymore progress and Egosoft hasn't solved this bug yet)

[jlehtone]

I have a question,

When the xenons get more system do they produce more ships?

Yes and no. Each faction has predetermined jobs.
Each job contains one or more ships, where numbers, types, and loadouts have some randomness. A job runs some command (e.g. patrol, raid, defend, trade high tech, mine).
There are also limits, "quota", of how many copies of a job can exists at the same time. For example, how many "Food Trader" jobs faction has.

Some jobs are limited by "Galaxy quota", how many jobs the entire galaxy has. For example, TER seems to have at most one "Intervention Asgard" fleet and one "Intervention Tokyo" fleet no matter how many sectors they do own.

Some jobs are limited by "Sector quota", how many such jobs can be in one sector. With more sectors the faction can add more of those jobs.
Some jobs probably have a mix: in small empire the sector quota hits first, but if faction spreads well, then the galaxy quota starts to limit.

So, yes, Xenon can have more of some fleet types, but not all.

[Nebesky]

Then why even bother about fighting the xenon? When they take over too many sectors their fleet will thin out. It kinda ruins the way a strategic game is played when the enemys just stops producing at some point. It would be interesting to know how many destroyers are the maximum in a game. I see a few in my game.

Mhmmm this would be nice to evaluate how all this stuff is determined but I guess Egosoft won't tell. I guess you can use mods to avoid the lag of production?

[SirConnery]

I think it's a good decision they made the game like this. Otherwise you would have random snowballs of Xenon taking over everything in people's first game and they can do nothing to stop it. The fleets naturally thinning out is good for the vanilla game.

Though I would really appreciate a custom game option to adjust Xenon difficulty.

[jlehtone]

Mhmmm this would be nice to evaluate how all this stuff is determined but I guess Egosoft won't tell.

Somebody in the S&M will probably know. I did search for "quota" in there and did find for example:
viewtopic.php?f=181&t=441935

[Caedes91]

In my game (vanilla), they don't rebuild wharfs and shipyards. I let them reconquer the sector that had them and even after 80 hours, only a defence and solar power station popped up. Is this normal?
Therefore the Xenon in my game nothing more than an annoyance. I even had to cheese the terran shipyards, by permantly docking and therefore occupy their building modules. This stops their invasion Asgards.

Otherwise I would submit this issue to the bug forum.
So if you want to keep the Xenon alive, you should NEVER EVER let their shipyards and wharfs getting destroyed!

[dougeye]

I think they are fine as they are tbh, in my 4.1+ game currently they conquered all the Zyarth space and would have taken argon and hat sectors if not for me blockading herectics end and hat choice.

What should happen is the custom gamestarts both budgeted and unbudgeted should have options for xenon and khaak etc in terms of their difficulty.

Lucky you!

How long is your game so far?
Are you playing unmodified?

I play unmodified, current game is custom start, I only have the PHQ with an attached fully self sustained ship production.
Current play time is 31 days and 13 hours (only 3 days 16 hours in control of a ship )
I am now at around 10 traders and 10 miners, all L sized.

I started with ~5 L miners/traders and tried to build my reputation to +27 for all factions.
I am thinking that helped factions in the begging to establish a good foothold but that's just my theory.

I wonder if you did a lot of trading as well.

forget exact stats but at the time i was defending against xenon id say 150 hours in on this playthrough.

Unmodified custom gamestart, first custom budgeted start so only had a small budget to play with. Went for a mining ship with seta components in inventory and a basic scout. So the 150 hours includes seta time.

Im quite an experienced palyer so i usually only set up say a max of 20 M miners and then start building stations. Silicon in this playthrough around argon and ant was a good shout, then food and medicine etc..... but it all depends on what the economy needs really, that can change every playthrough.

I didnt run any autotraders early on, in fact i only got autotraders going after i had a carrier full of fighters guarding against xenon which upped their pilot ratings to allow them to autotrade.

So vanilla with DLC's basically, my main fleet now is 5 asgards , 10 osaka , 3 tokyo (full of gladius) lol Ive basically wiped out all xenon now around the entire map. lol

Gets a bit boring at this stage but currently completing a couple of outstanding plots and building a mega shipyard. Only thing i havnt tried yet is terraforming missions.

[dougeye]

In my game (vanilla), they don't rebuild wharfs and shipyards. I let them reconquer the sector that had them and even after 80 hours, only a defence and solar power station popped up. Is this normal?
Therefore the Xenon in my game nothing more than an annoyance. I even had to cheese the terran shipyards, by permantly docking and therefore occupy their building modules. This stops their invasion Asgards.

Otherwise I would submit this issue to the bug forum.
So if you want to keep the Xenon alive, you should NEVER EVER let their shipyards and wharfs getting destroyed!

im playing vanilla and they do try to rebuild but not in the same positions/sectors. If you have all but wiped them out in a particular area rebuilding will depend on thier S type ships physically being able to reach the location, eg not getting shot down travelling across other races sectors.

[SirConnery]

In my game (vanilla), they don't rebuild wharfs and shipyards. I let them reconquer the sector that had them and even after 80 hours, only a defence and solar power station popped up. Is this normal?

Are you actually scouting the sectors again? Xenon stations don't show up on the map like other factions. You need to actually see them once they're built. They might also be rebuilding in other sectors.

[Caedes91]

In my game (vanilla), they don't rebuild wharfs and shipyards. I let them reconquer the sector that had them and even after 80 hours, only a defence and solar power station popped up. Is this normal?

Are you actually scouting the sectors again? Xenon stations don't show up on the map like other factions. You need to actually see them once they're built. They might also be rebuilding in other sectors.

That is what I first thought, so I scouted the Xenon sectors and covered them in advanced sattelites. I also thought they were built elsewhere, but there don't seem to be any new shipyards and wharfs.

[gorman2040]

forget exact stats but at the time i was defending against xenon id say 150 hours in on this playthrough.

Unmodified custom gamestart, first custom budgeted start so only had a small budget to play with. Went for a mining ship with seta components in inventory and a basic scout. So the 150 hours includes seta time.

Im quite an experienced palyer so i usually only set up say a max of 20 M miners and then start building stations. Silicon in this playthrough around argon and ant was a good shout, then food and medicine etc..... but it all depends on what the economy needs really, that can change every playthrough.

I didnt run any autotraders early on, in fact i only got autotraders going after i had a carrier full of fighters guarding against xenon which upped their pilot ratings to allow them to autotrade.

So vanilla with DLC's basically, my main fleet now is 5 asgards , 10 osaka , 3 tokyo (full of gladius) lol Ive basically wiped out all xenon now around the entire map. lol

Gets a bit boring at this stage but currently completing a couple of outstanding plots and building a mega shipyard. Only thing i havnt tried yet is terraforming missions.

Thanks for sharing, I guess it's definitely quite different for each game

I also have a sizeable military fleet but I am still waiting for Xenon to take over a few more sectors before I mobilize them.

Glad to hear you still have some stuff to try, same here.

[LandogarX4]

Honestly, it kind of depresses me. Here's the endgame where there's literally nothing that can possibly stand up to you. Here's my Asgard that wins the game for me. And 12 other Asgards with nothing to do. Absolute power is sort of an empty existence. Why did I work this hard to get here?

I love how you can do that in factorio, just crank up the biters to extreme levels either by letting them breed out of control while evolving due to pollution, installing mods like rampant, or mods like SE and then landing on a new planet that is overrun by max lvl bites from the start. Really lets you go all out and use everything at your disposal for some genocidin' when you're out of targets. Really wish X games had sth like that in the late game, an endgame crisis you can trigger or sth.

https://www.reddit.com/r/X4Foundations/ ... dium=web3x

This has been requested for many years, and still nothing...

[Nanook]

Your post added nothing to this more than a year old thread. Please don't necro dead threads.