A talk about Kha'ak spawns and request for all Kha'ak Installations in the game

[Karmaticdamage]

Theirs three hives at any given time. Two are destroyed as soon as the game starts because of where they spawn. They are attracted by the number of miners in a sector so don't put all your mining stations in the same system. Good L miners like the wyvern with M plasma turrets can simply kill the khaak in OOS combat while they mine. Miners tend to congregate in the same spots, so putting a destroyer on protect position in that spot will keep the bugs away.

Huh, perhaps I should try plasma, currently I'm using Hokkaidos with Pulses.

Plasma's bad accuracy and projectile speed doesn't apply in OOS combat. Even L plasma will hit fighters and decimate them in OOS combat. Plasma on all stations and every ship you are not going to have with you personally.

[Malchar]

Kha ak are not unmanageable, it require to change habits and adapt to the situation. At least Op tried it, with more or less success.

Like some suggested, L miner are a good solution in middle and end game.

At early I use only Teladi s mano M miners. It is sturdy ships with two shields + I use offensive turrets instead of mining turrets with behaviour fire at will on any ennemy. I complete that with medium military ships to protect area where mining ships operate. I tend to use peregrine for zone protection, simply because it seems the cheaper option. IWe are not very rich at early game. Later trasfert veterans crews to L miner ships and scrap the medium ones could be see as a solution.

My main gripe with Kha ak is they make the game a bit poorer due to lack of diversity. I earlier version my mining ships fleets was a patchworked. I early game I bough ships depending of availabilty (because of frequent hull parts shortage in faction shipyards mostly).

Now the mano tend to be the standard. Small mining ships have been completly banned. Add to that the the ressource nerf was not made equaly. Most sectors have been completly ruined, and a handful untouched. Clearly, my starting locations choice have been drastically reduced. Of course we had probably all some prefrences for some sectors and / or some ships, but what was a tendencie at v3.3 became a quasi constrain at V4.00. It leads to a poorer replayability, but I presume a new dlc with new sectors was far than enough to hide it.

[Treycore]

Current playtime on this save 10d 17h. All my stations are in Family Nhuut, 17 in total including my shipyards and wharfs. All my station mining operations are done in Family Nhuut, Zhin and Kritt since these 3 sectors have everything I need. I've never had issues with kha'ak spawns in either of these 3 sectors despite there being over 100 total miners doing their thing. But that changed about an hour ago when all hell broke loose in Family Zhin and kha'ak started spawning 2-3 different groups at a time all throughout the sector. I thought no problem, just gonna send some cobra fleets to deal with them. Within 30 seconds to 2 minutes of a kha'ak group being killed, another jumps on top of a random miner in the sector.

I simply couldn't keep up since I had to manually order each fleet of cobras to attack the kha'ak spawns (more on why I was doing this below). I had to blacklist Family Zhin and within a few minutes all my miners cleared out. About 30 miners moved to Matrix #598 (the Xenon in here and Rhy's Defiance were cleared, sectors now owned by ZYA) and again the same problem. Not 5 minutes into their arrival and mining of the sector, I'm getting kha'ak spawns in Matrix #598 at the exact same rate. 2-3 groups of kha'ak spawning within 30 seconds to 2 minutes of the previous group being killed. It's not the first time this has happened, had to deal with this problem in a bunch of other sectors where my unassigned miners where doing thing. But this was the last straw mainly because I was forced to relocate over 100 god damn miners at once, and 5 minutes later I had to relocate them again.

Finally getting to the point, I need a list of all Kha'ak Installation locations in the game so I can start committing genocide and put an end to this absolutely dumb unmanageable game mechanic. I tried looking for a list but couldn't find anything.
I've already found some installations in the following sectors: Antigone Memorial (destroyed), Heretic's End (destroyed), Silent Witness XII (being destroyed as we speak), Lasting Vengeance (HOP destroyed it) and I think Yanamus Zura VII or some other Teladi sector in that area had one but it's been destroyed. Need the locations of the remaining installations.

I know some of you are going to defend this mechanic and/or present solutions other than genocide so allow me to refute your replies beforehand.

1) Use patrols.

Completely useless function. It does nothing. Any ships assigned to Patrol will just casually move around the sector and do absolutely nothing else. If ships in the sector get attacked, they respond NEVER. If ships nearby get attacked, they continue going about their nothing business. In my 524 hours played in X4 I've literally not once seen a ship/fleet assigned to Patrol actually attack anything of their own free will outside of enemy ships randomly flying close enough to be in their weapon range, or the patrol itself gets attacked. Why in the name of the sacred geometry do ships assigned to Patrol not move to engage when another ship in the sector gets attacked is beyond me.

2) Use escorts for your miners.

Sound strategy, and maybe just maybe a nice solution if you have 2, 3, 5, hell even 10 miners. But it is NOT a solution when you have over 200 station and free miners. Anyone who suggests that is probably high on enough drugs to wipe out humanity 20 times over if they think building / buying / assigning another 400-600 combat ships (2-3 escorts per miner) is a sensible solution.

3) Use a bunch of Protect Position orders to cover the whole sector, or at least the parts of the sector that your miners operate.

A fleet of 2-3 ships assigned to Protect Position area of 40km. The number of ships, clicks and patience needed to do this for A SINGLE SECTOR is just beyond insane. See above as to why presenting this as a solution is just no.


Not a single one of these "solutions" work, so that's why I started manually babysitting combat fleets to order them to attack the kha'ak spawns. And all this made worse by the AI of ships which are fleeing, who only do so for a bit before literally turning 180 degrees right back into the face of the thing they were running from, because that is where they were originally mining before they were attacked. They don't even try to mine in another spot. The only real solution to when kha'ak start infinitely spawning in a sector is to just evacuate it completely which again sounds fine on paper when you're early in the game and it's easy to relocate 2,3, 5 or 10 miners. But not when you have hundreds of miners with anywhere between 30-50 in a single sector.

So all I got left is Kha'ak genocide and I'll god damn do it with a smile on my face considering how dumb and unmanageable their spawns are. Looking forward to that list of soon to be aliven't kha'ak.

There are two kind of Khaak bases that your looking for... Hives are the big problem and when a hive starts, they can jump up to 3 sectors away and spawn “outposts” as well, once destroyed a hive can take up to several days to respawn, something like a 56 hour cool down they have?

So if your getting khaak, you need to find the hive in a sector that’s up to 3 jumps away and eliminate it and that will solve your khaak problem for like the next 56+ hours

[Shovey365]

Theirs three hives at any given time. Two are destroyed as soon as the game starts because of where they spawn. They are attracted by the number of miners in a sector so don't put all your mining stations in the same system. Good L miners like the wyvern with M plasma turrets can simply kill the khaak in OOS combat while they mine. Miners tend to congregate in the same spots, so putting a destroyer on protect position in that spot will keep the bugs away.

Are M plasmas really that good in OOS? I've been running M flaks and they do a good enough job. Also i'm currently in the process of getting rid of all my M size station miners and switching them out for L's. Kind of a pain in the ass since I have over 100 of them but I'm hoping it'll be worth it.

[Raptor34]

Theirs three hives at any given time. Two are destroyed as soon as the game starts because of where they spawn. They are attracted by the number of miners in a sector so don't put all your mining stations in the same system. Good L miners like the wyvern with M plasma turrets can simply kill the khaak in OOS combat while they mine. Miners tend to congregate in the same spots, so putting a destroyer on protect position in that spot will keep the bugs away.

Are M plasmas really that good in OOS? I've been running M flaks and they do a good enough job. Also i'm currently in the process of getting rid of all my M size station miners and switching them out for L's. Kind of a pain in the ass since I have over 100 of them but I'm hoping it'll be worth it.

Only with good pilots.
I'm taking M Alligators in addition with full crew and all mining gear.
Losses are minimal, though the L miners taking all the attention along with Katana patrols are helping thin the ranks too.
That and I've mined PIO space so much all the Khaak are gathering there, somehow leaving my newly started Family Zhin mining operation completely unmolested. Which is why I think it might actually be a good idea to not constantly hunt them late game, then you locate where they are and there switch to mostly L miners, then you have free reign over the rest of the map.

[Wraith_Magus]

Kha'ak stations are in places where you notice a lot of Kha'ak attacks. There's no comprehensive list because they are different from game to game. I just destroy the stations in places my miners love to go, like Pious Mists IV. If it means they respawn elsewhere, it's respawning someplace that probably isn't crawling with a few dozen miners.

I'll have to try out the repeat order attack all in area. I'd just gone with posting a few corvettes in key stations.

Also, what really, REALLY annoys me is that the default "Use Judgement" response to enemy attacks means that miners think they should attack a swarm of a half-dozen queen's guards and hive guards. I lost most of my miners finding out that they were charging the enemy instead of running.

[Midnitewolf]

I don't get the hubbub about the Kha'ak. At most they have been a nuisance for me. I mean I lose a M miner or M transport here and there to them but I lose a M miner or M transport to Pirates and Xenon here and there as well, actually a hell of a lot more to pirates and Xenon if I have to be honest.

[truditu]

I actually made a mod for this since i couldn't take it anymore: https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/688
You'll still have to find the hives and destroy them, but they won't be coming back.

[Wraith_Magus]

I don't get the hubbub about the Kha'ak. At most they have been a nuisance for me. I mean I lose a M miner or M transport here and there to them but I lose a M miner or M transport to Pirates and Xenon here and there as well, actually a hell of a lot more to pirates and Xenon if I have to be honest.

Funny, I don't think I've lost anything to pirates. (Having the option to just set my ships to auto-flee before they can go hostile and the fact that they scan and declare they are pirates from too far away to shoot my units makes this easy.) Meanwhile, nearly all my miner losses are to Kha'ak.

I think it depends upon the place they spawn, however. Again, they're different every game, and for some stupid reason, my managers all want to send all my mining ships from my major Nopileos and PHQ stations to Pious Mists IV when there's perfectly good resources in their own sectors. I wound up just hunting down that station in Pious Mists IV, but otherwise, I just could not find a way to keep the kha'ak at bay in that sector. There were other sectors I just stopped letting my units auto-mine, as it kept getting them destroyed, and I wasn't going to bother when I could just move miners to other sectors that were less covered in kha'ak.

[Warnoise]

Police should be reworked imo.

Policing squads should chase any enemy in sector that was detected (whether detected by them or by friendly entity like for example friendly ships or satellites).