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

[Shovey365]

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.

[gevers]

Sorry to curb your enthusiasm but I don't think you can end the khaak threat, their bases respawn in other sectors... Not like the xenon... Wonder who's the real threat for egosoft...

[Raevyan]

I did say that in the past and I will repeat it again: Please remove khaak from the game entirely, until you come up with a real implementation. Khaak spawning on top of miners and their instant respawn once killed is just bad. And this mechanic can be completely ignored by using L miners because khaak are so weak that they don’t even scratch shields even if 10 of them attacking a L miner.

[Shovey365]

Sorry to curb your enthusiasm but I don't think you can end the khaak threat, their bases respawn in other sectors... Not like the xenon... Wonder who's the real threat for egosoft...

No .... Please tell me you're joking. Please. I beg of you. There is no way that is legit. I refuse to believe that this is the implementation they went with. What the hell were they thinking? How does that even work? Do the installations just spawn in a completely different random sector? Or the same sector but in another spot? How the F ?

[Rei Ayanami]

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.

2) Use escorts for your miners.

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

How about option 4 : Use L-sized miners
L-sized miners have strong enough shields and enough turrets to easily defend themselves against any Khaak attack.

[Gregorovitch]

1) Use patrols.

2) Use escorts for your miners.

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.

Agreed that all these three are completely useless for dealing with Kha'ak attrition however you are missing:

4) Repeat Orders

Many are reporting significant success using this technique because it enbles ships to be programmed to execute a series of area attack orders at pre-programmed locations on a loop.

I am experimenting with this as we speak. There are issues with it, the biggest one being that you cannot easily do this with a fleet and there seem to be issues with giving Repeat Orders to a group of selected un-assigned ships. I'm trying to figure out the best way to do it at the moment..

[Raptor34]

I'm using a mix of L miners and M alligators to great success. Losses are down so far.
And for particularly annoying sectors I have a Tokyo on Patrol and 30 Katanas with mimic. And 40 intercept fighters.
Considering I have close to probably 2-300 M miners now losses are really light, like 1 M every couple hours.
I don't bother hunting Khaak clusters. Frankly its just a particularly annoying form of upkeep. If my stations can self-replenish miners then there would be no problems.

[plynak]

Yeah, the Patrol command is totaly useless. In the worst sector, I have 6 corvettes and 3 fighters mimicking leader with patrol. But that is not cost effective at all. A one corvette with patrol would be enough if Egosoft bothered to fix the game instead of adding new things that do not work.
What is also buffling is when in Asteroid belt Khaaks are harasing miners left and right, yet those two Tokios with all their fighter escort just sit there and do absolutely nothing.
And as a cherry on top is my miners being stopped by police while under attack from Khaaks.
Like seriously Egosoft? Do you even play your game? Who had this idea to make Khaaks this way, when you must know there is no working way for players to deal with them next to manualy select own ships and send them to attack or invest insane amounts to have qadrilion of ships when one would be enough. We all know there simply is no AI in this game. None at all, yet somehow you failed to notice...

[Clownmug]

The protect position method seems to work fine for me. Don't know why you'd try covering the whole sector, just position the fleets in hotspots where miners congregate. Should only need 1 or 2 fleets of a few fighters doing it this way.

[KextV8]

What I've heard is that a Khaak installation spawns near miners and then just periodically jumps some attackers to their location.

This does not happen in Sol, or if it does its very limited. My various Sol system miners haven't been harassed a single time during my current playthrough while my Commonwealth ones have been getting periodically destroyed from day one. Oh well, cost of business. Their cost is only like 500k each and they usually generate a million or two before they die.

If you want to avoid it, switch to L miners. L miners can pretty much ignore/kill the Khaak attacking them.

You can also go hunt down their installations. They'll respawn elsewhere but you'll get a decent peace period between.

[Fenris321]

What I've heard is that a Khaak installation spawns near miners and then just periodically jumps some attackers to their location.

This does not happen in Sol, or if it does its very limited. My various Sol system miners haven't been harassed a single time during my current playthrough while my Commonwealth ones have been getting periodically destroyed from day one. Oh well, cost of business. Their cost is only like 500k each and they usually generate a million or two before they die.

If you want to avoid it, switch to L miners. L miners can pretty much ignore/kill the Khaak attacking them.

You can also go hunt down their installations. They'll respawn elsewhere but you'll get a decent peace period between.

It does happen in Asteroid Belt, but like you said L Miners just shrug them off. And Alligator Miners just outrun them. That is, if the the dozens of Terran Military that frequent Asteroid Belt don't get to them first.

I did kill off one of their installations just to see what it was like. Was fun the first time but can imagine it'd get repetitive to waste time trying to track down every one when some Khaak pop up in a system. I usually just ignore them now unless I just happen to stumble across one while in a combat ship.

[Shovey365]

I discovered the source of my troubles. I thought it was weird how kha'ak were only spawning in Family Zhin and Matrix #598, but not in Rhy's Defiance or Family Kritt. Just a few minutes ago I had finally taken Fires of Defeat off the travel blacklist sectors because I could finally have the gates to Matrix #9 and Matrix #451 gate from Family Tkr guarded, which means I can now safely deal / mine in FRF space. Just by sheer luck I was panning the camera over Open Market and I saw a giant blob of some 40+ kha'ak ships descending upon the sector from the top right side, most converging on the gate leading to Zyarth's Dominion IV.

Went in to have a look and saw the god damn giant ass kha'ak installation just sticking out like a sore thumb over the backdrop of the blue gas giant in the background. Motherfffff.....father. Perfectly in range of the two sectors I suddenly started having kha'ak trouble in. Considering the pain this dumb thing has caused me I'm about to descend upon it with the god damn fury of Odin. I don't care if it takes me an hour to relocate and get in position but I'm calling in all 30 rattlesnakes, 1 syn and 100 something mix of cobras and katanas.

Is it necesary? No. Is it Exterminatus levels of overkill? Very much. Will it be satisfying? Abso-f**king-lutely.

[Raptor34]

Is there a limit to how many stations they can have? Could you in theory lure them to a region and then just mine somewhere else?

[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.

[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.

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

[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.