Xenon unable to repurpose S to recover from stalled economy

[Koizuki]

Hey everyone,

I am curious of there's any way to help the Xenon recover from a stalled economy, or rather why the Xenon AI can't seem to do so.

In my game, I have currently isolated the Xenon into a couple dead-end sectors so I can farm them. One of these is Emperor's Pride VI, which has a problem with the Xenon within there stalled and unable to do anything.
I have a defense fleet parked in Emperor's Pride IV to farm anything that comes out, but I noticed after a while that the area became completely passive.

I scouted the Emperor's Pride VI sector and checked the Xenon assets still in there, and it looked like they still had everything they needed -- a Wharf, a Shipyard, a Solar Power Plant, and plenty of "S" floating around.
Upon closer inspection, it seems the problem is that all of their remaining S's in that sector are Mining S ships, and they have no more Power Distribution S ships, meaning they can no longer build any new S's to take on that role.
However, the S is supposed to have a cargo bay that can handle all types of transport. Unfortunately, the AI seems incapable of switching some of their remaining Mining S ships to deliver Energy Cells instead, so the entire sector becomes stalled, and there's a dozen Mining S ships floating around being useless.

The next nearest Xenon sector has been isolated into Matrix #598, which appears to be too far for it to send reinforcements over to; or at least I haven't seen it attempt to do so. I have an alert set for any S that appears in Rhy's Defiance, so that I can swiftly retreat my defense forces there and disarm all my defense stations to allow it to pass, but only a single S has come through, and was only trying to build something in Rhy's Defiance instead of trying to reinforce Emperor's Pride VI.

Thus, I have two questions:
First, at least in v6.20, are there any options to help the Xenon recover here? Can I just drop some Energy Cells next to their Wharf or something?
Second, is the AI unable to repurpose these all-purpose transports as the economy demands it? If not, is this possible to do/add in 7.0?

Thanks.

[alt3rn1ty]

Its a problem we have all experienced.

You try to fence them in to farm them for modding resources.
But no matter how well you do that, there will be another faction gets its big stompy boots on and wipes out your fenced in Xenon.
From that point on you are looking at the Xenon allocating plots for Station, but none get rebuilt.

I am currently play testing 7 Beta 2, the new sectors have a few more Xenon stations plots .. But none of them can rebuild.
Usually happens mid-end game when you are established well enough to have forces to contain the Xenon.

I have seen a couple of people with more patience than me seemed to be successful, but I think it also depends upon the random seed setup of the game and how aggressive Xenon versus factions is. The balance overall doesn't seem to be in the Xenon's favour to survive a long term play through.

I kind of like that they are not insurmountable, but I wish there was somewhere they could fall back to which was safe from them being completely wiped out.

[Koizuki]

Oh, yeah I've read about similar things happening to others. I had already blocked the TER shipyards to disable their Intervention Asgards, but it seems ARG is still trying every once in a while.
The other two sectors I've penned the Xenon into for farming are working well, though; It's only this one sector that's stuck because of the lack of Power Distribution S. The others are quite active and they have like 12 K's and 2-3 I's in them making it virtually impossible for any other faction to take them out now.

I actually quite like the idea behind being able to disable their economy if the player chooses to do so by hunting down all of their S ships. The problem I have is the surprise behind the fact that they seemingly cannot repurpose the S to handle the other duty once those have been wiped out.

I'm okay with their economy being disabled once all of their S are wiped out, but if they still have some, I feel they should be able to reallocate them as needed to continue being able to cover their losses. Their cargo holds are able to carry every cargo type (aside from condensate, I guess?) so it seems silly that they just have 12 Mining S floating around waiting for the nonexistent Power Distributors to come back, instead of just doing it themselves.

I do hope that this dynamic re-allocation of existing units can be added eventually, because it sounds like it isn't a thing in the game currently.

[Irushian]

Maybe their shipyards should come with a small solar array attached so given enough time they'll eventually have enough power to build a ship. The solar panels could even be part of the base model if Ego fancied going that route.

[Koizuki]

Hmm.. I quite like that idea, honestly.

It's probably the absolute easiest way to implement something like this -- just force the Xenon Wharves to include one solar panel as part of its build, and maybe that'd end up causing existing ones to add one, then they have a fallback to continue pushing out S's as a failsafe.
This also shouldn't change the ability for players who choose to shut them down economically from doing so. You can still end up killing every S that gets produced until it runs out of ore/silicon reserves instead.

On the other hand, you may end up with the sort of 'opposite' problem eventually; The Xenon run out of ore/silicon at the wharf with no more miners, but there may be Power Distribution S floating around refusing to switch roles. The best way is simply to make the S ships do both roles at once, and just let the AI pick which thing it does after each drop off based on resource demand.

[naisha]

This can be fixed by making a mod. Im pretty sure this isnt hard to do. I was looking into doing something similar for SWI mod, wanted to change some AI shipyards that didnt have enough L storages and thus not enough resources to build the bigger ships but another guy beat me to it.

I might look into this one of these days (i have very little time IRL for such things but we will see).

Adding just a single solar array to their shipyards would be enough i think and avoid such deadlocks

[Koizuki]

True, I'm sure a mod can easily add a piece to Xenon build plans, although it'd be better if any changes were adapted into the base game so that anyone playing vanilla would be able to benefit as well.
Even so, it'd be a bandaid fix at best, because again, they can run out of miners instead despite having 'free' energy cells, and there isn't any Xenon build piece that can supply them with a trickle of ore/silicon passively.

We really just need a way for the Xenon to redistribute their S's periodically; I imagine part of the issue is that they're not both "transport" types as mining is, well, a mining activity. Otherwise one could theoretically look into how the autotraders and such would be able to switch between the three "goods" depending on what the wharf is critically low on, adapting it for the S's logic. I'd even suggest that the Wharf, being the one that can manufacture additional S's, should get priority over their shipyards, and if there is a shortfall, they should transport necessary goods from the Shipyard over to their Wharves to try and get their economy back on track.

Poking at some of the 7.0 Beta 2 threads in the Beta forum, it seems like this would be helpful to have simply because it sounds like with the buffs to the AI, the factions can actually competently shut down the Xenon now, and it's the Xenon that could probably use some help staying relevant and resilient at this point.

[Harpya]

I have the same problem in my vanilla save. I posted the problem in the support forums a while back.

Xenon are contained to nine sectors, I even let them go out, by clearing adjacent sectors, just to see if they regrow. But all they produce are military ships, almost no traders/miners.

Station plots are put in place, but nothing gets built up. It seems like something that could be fixed with a few adapted scripts by Egosoft, but I might be wrong.

For me, this more or less ruins the endgame.

[Koizuki]

It sounds like your scenario is more that the Xenon have trouble expanding, which I've seen too, but if they are still producing military ships, then they still at least have a working economy in your game.
The Xenon do tend to get weaker as they control more sectors, I think, since they'd be spread thinner and thinner, but you can try to check if their S are being intercepted anywhere.

My issue is more when they truly become stagnated even in their own sector because of a complete lack of one type of S (and then they cannot produce anything anymore, not even M's and N's.)

[Karmaticdamage]

I've found emperor's pride to be the best xenon zoo. As other xenon sectors fall, they will build an additional wharf and shipyard there and have the resources to keep them stocked and producing. The god realm are usually too busy fighting the holy order or duke's tempest "if you chose that route" to push the xenon out. You might want to keep a defense force on the emperor's pride gate in litany of fury as once they double up on wharfs and shipyards they will try to push out with twice their usual ferocity.

[Koizuki]

In my game, what happened was that the Xenon from Emperor's Pride did actually invade PAR's Litany of Fury, and took control of Litany of Fury IX. From there, they started aggressively hitting Litany of Fury XII and Wretched Skies X, which threatened my traders operating around Heretic's End and Wretched Skies V Family Phi.

At that point, I decided that I wanted to protect that section of PAR and ZYA sectors, so I pushed my fleet in to secure Litany of Fury IX, taking it for myself with a defense station to plug the Xenon back into Emperor's Pride.

However, I decided afterward to go a bit further (which may have been a mistake, considering how it's currently turned out for me) and pushed into Emperor's Pride IV, kicking them out of there and taking control of that sector as well. I did this because at some point I believe I read that the Xenon were coded to basically get weaker the more they expanded because their fleets would be spread too thin, and I wanted them to be resilient against attacks by the main factions, so I was trying to compress the Xenon into a handful of sectors I could use to farm them for mod parts. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any information on the precise number of sectors they should have to maximize this, so I just went ahead and pushed them down to the absolute minimum so that I could control the surrounding sectors and reduce the AI's desire to "attack adjacent hostile sectors."

This meant of the original Xenon clusters, I took Emperor's Pride IV, Rhy's Defiance, and Matrix #451 to push them into a single sector in each area of the map. Those also ended up being the sectors with resources in them to ensure the Xenon still had the ability to mine safely. I had also wanted to push the Xenon in the south into Atiya's Misfortune III, but HOP unexpectedly managed to take both Faulty Logic sectors themselves somehow, and the Xenon were unable to take them back. Additionally, they started invading Atiya's Misfortune III, and ANT was actually able to fully defend and control Frontier Edge and were simultaneously invading Atiya's Misfortune I. This made me panic a bit because I wanted to control at least one of those sectors, so I was forced to eradicate them entirely from that area just to control those sectors myself before HOP/ANT could beat me to the punch.

In any case, now I've limited them to three sectors, and two of those are working very well (they are super stacked up inside them) but Emperor's Pride unfortunately has basically died because they sent all their Power Distribution S to their deaths trying to reclaim Emperor's Pride IV from me, and got stalled with only Mining S left in Emperor's Pride XII. And since my last post here, a couple TER Katanas flew in and managed to destroy all but two of the S before the nearby K's could take them out, but that sector feels all but lost at this point. They only have 3 K's, 2 S and 2 T's left in that area and are completely unable to replenish even their fighters. I realy wish I could help them out there, but unfortunately it doesn't look like there's any way to do so.

[Koizuki]

Holy heck, I managed to revive the Xenon in Emperor's Pride!

The alert I set for any S's appearing in Rhy's Defiance went off last night so I immediately paused the game and called off the fleet stationed there and disabled all the defense station turrets, and it happened to be a Power Distribution S with no Xenon plot anywhere in that sector for it to build.
Unfortunately, my fleet got a couple hits off on it before I paused, so it triggered the S's Flee behavior despite only doing about 30% shield damage to it, but I hopped into a Moreya to follow it. Once it fled into Family Kritt, its order updated to docking with a Solar Power Plant somewhere and kept going South; Once it reached Family Zhin, it turned West toward Wretched Skies IV Family Valka, so I was confident it was actually trying to go all the way to Emperor's Pride at that point, and began trying to escort it over.

The main thing here is that it does appear that the Xenon can reinforce sectors that are beyond 5 sectors away from each other, which I wasn't aware of. Emperor's Pride is a whole eight sectors away from Matrix #598.

It took an entire night of reloading constantly, playing around with switching its route between IS and OOS flight/combat mechanics, and pissing off (temporarily) a couple AI patrol groups to sneak the S over successfully, but I managed it somehow. Getting through Litany of Fury IX proved to be the most difficult despite it being a sector I controlled, because for some reason TEL, ARG, PAR and ZYA all sent groups over there to patrol for me and there were two PAR Bounty Hunters and a small TEL fighter group in its way. The Bounty Hunters were a tad too slow to hit an S in travel mode, but the Fighters proved to be a problem, particularly because I had a defense platform at the Emperor's Pride gate that they would attack if they went hostile temporarily, so I ended up luring them in non-travel speed all the way to the edge of the map (thankfully the S needed to traverse Emperor's Pride IV in OOS to make it, as it would stop to turn, and get blown apart by the ARG patrol camping the Super Accelerator in IS mode, while in OOS it would just curve right into it at travel speeds.) By the time the TEL fighters flew back to my defense station they had stopped being hostile, so job done.

Emperor's Pride VI is recovering now, as after the first load of Energy Cells the wharf started producing more S's, though it worried me by making a whole bunch of miners first, but it eventually made two more Power Distribution units, and it's now pumping P's and M's to harrass my defense fleet stationed outside again.

While that was fun, I still believe this shouldn't really have been necessary in the first place if the Xenon can simply redistribute its existing S's based on resource shortfalls (and/or if it knows there are no more of one kind of S in the sector.)