[Final Fury Khaak 931 Assault] Ships don't stop spawning

General discussions about the games by Egosoft including X-BTF, XT, X², X³: Reunion, X³: Terran Conflict and X³: Albion Prelude.

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Triaxx2
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Post by Triaxx2 » Mon, 9. Jul 18, 14:43

Three options: Get a missile ship. A Split Cobra, or Argon Minotaur are excellent options. Equip them with Flail Swarm missiles, and use the barrage command in the special menu to fire a single barrage into a swarm of Kha'ak ships. Any over kill missiles will pick new targets until they explode, or run out of fuel. Repeat as necessary. Commodity Logistics System from the bonus pack can be used to continually refresh your missile supply.

Option 2: Bring a carrier, either the Argon Colossus, or Split Raptor. Fill them with many cheap M4 fighters, and then fly through formations of Kha'ak. As long as the fighters are homebased to the carrier, they'll automatically launch once the carrier comes under attack.

Option 3: The Teladi Albatross, with Flak Artillery Array's in all it's slots, plus a cargobay full of drones. It will evaporate anything smaller than a corvette that gets close, and anything corvette or larger can be swarmed under by fighter drones. You'll lose them by the horde, but that's what they exist for. MkII's are more effective, but far more expensive.
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Honved
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Post by Honved » Tue, 10. Jul 18, 22:44

A Cerberus makes a decent anti-fighter vessel, but is rather lack-luster against any capital ship, including the multiple Kha'ak Corvettes that you'll face.

A Paranid capital ship with Phased Shockwave Generators in all turrets acts like a giant "Pink Pet" eraser, and leaves a trail of absolutely nothing behind it: no ships, no stations, no salvage, no ejected survivors, no problem. Taking it into the middle of a Kha'ak fighter swarm just vaporizes everything. It's also very effective against capital ships, since overlapping forward PSGs will each hit multiple hit boxes simultaneously, doing massive damage as you close and then ram whatever little still remains (at least in TC, AP has much higher hull point values). You've got the shields to absorb it, theirs will be long gone by that point.

I did most the later FF missions with a Diemos, and the final mission was pretty much a cakewalk with it, although my fight rank was nowhere near extreme. At one point, I had to fly THROUGH one capital ship to get to the second sitting directly behind it, and rammed both in turn, leaving me with still over half shields. Individual ships after that were simply no match, and I was actually regaining shield strength throughout the rest of the mission.

You'll probably need an M2 at the higher Fight rank. As far as I know, the guide may be obsolete, and going in with a bigger ship may no longer affect the mission difficulty with the later game patches, while Fight Rank definitely still does. Too many players were cheesing missions by going in with a light fighter, then jumping their capital ships in after the minimal opposition spawned.

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Imgran
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Post by Imgran » Wed, 11. Jul 18, 21:11

I like to use the Deimos against fighter based threats too, but I hate putting PSG's in turrets because you have rather little control of when and where you turn on the blender.

And of course, using a Deimos in the blender configuration is a reputation nightmare. The answer to the question "will it blend?" is definitely "yes, unless it's a full sized asteroid" but the lack of control comes back to bite you unless you're quite careful. Frankly they're not really safe to fly around in that configuration, one little bump at the wrong time and you can wind up blenderizing an entire sector and losing several levels of reputation.

It's a stupendously powerful setup, but I prefer quite a bit more control over exactly what gets blended.

When flying a Deimos, I'll use front mounted PSGs and just put FAA's in the turrets. That still puts tons of fighters out of commission very quickly, with nowhere near the collateral damage. If I see a lot of fighters in a group, I'll release a controlled PSG burst to take it out. Otherwise my PSG is saved for stripping the shields of capitals and getting ready to ramp up shields and football tackle them for the win.
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Post by Honved » Thu, 12. Jul 18, 16:29

That's a fair assessment of the down sides of PSGs. I NEVER (let me repeat: NEVER) use PSGs in the turrets while in Terran or Commonwealth sectors, ONLY while in Xenon or Kha'ak space. The potential for collateral damage and "friendly fire" accidents is close to a guarantee. Still, when you need that kind of blatantly exaggerated mass-destruction capability for certain missions, it's only available on a few Paranid capital ships.

I will cheerfully place 2-4 PSGs in forward mounts (assigned to their own firing group), and use those against things like Kha'ak clusters or pirate swarms, as long as I'm aware of my surroundings and when I can and can't fire them. Kiling a Q with a Diemos is as simple as holding down the fire button and ramming, as the Q will have its shields stripped away by impact, and the Diemos has considerably more shield points than the Q has hull (in TC, not AP). Putting those same PSGs in a turret takes away any semblance of control or restraint, and "accidents" are all but inevitable.

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Post by jacex3tc » Thu, 19. Jul 18, 10:26

Tried again. Same crap. It never stops. I can get it to one ship and it will always just magic a new one. Just now I got it to a single Khaak fighter and I sent a corvette after it and I watched it take down my corvette (ok bro) and then 3 ships spawned.

What a joke that they bone your achievements in a game like this. Look at Skyrim. That can be buggy. I've needed to use cheats there to fix broken shit at times. It doesn't screw your save if you do.

I hope that they don't go overboard with X4 because they'll jankify that game too. It was a mistake to have Rebirth only have one ship to fly. It would have been better if it were at least a few different ships. One freighter, one fighter, and one corvette (which would probably be the skunk). With so few, each would have to be its own ship somehow. So something like in the fighter's case, it would be a one of a kind stolen from the Argon and completed by a famous pirate on his secret base or something. The freighter belonging to a legendary smuggler etc.

Point is, from what I've seen of X4 it seems like they want to make X Rebirth + X3. I can't see it.

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Post by TTD » Thu, 19. Jul 18, 10:37

Point is, from what I've seen of X4 it seems like they want to make X Rebirth + X3. I can't see it.
I get that impression too.

Think X-Rebirth graphics with X3 game play.
Could work if done properly.

X4 could be make or break for the X-series.

I hope it works and is probably why the game is so long in developement...making sure they don't fudge it this time

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Post by birdtable » Thu, 19. Jul 18, 12:03

I cannot see it being a true X4,,, A greatly improved Rebirth.. yes. Which to be honest would not be a bad thing. There were many elements of Rebirth that had great promise, a well developed Foundations would be a great restart to the series... but it won't be X4 in the truest sense....one only has to go back and play X3 to see no continuation other than superficial references to races and sectors.... regretfully X3 was the pinnacle in my opinion.... but then I have not played Foundations yet... :)

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Post by Alan Phipps » Thu, 19. Jul 18, 19:57

X4 and Rebirth have nothing to do with this X3TC Final Fury topic. Let's get back onto thread topic and leave X4 and Rebirth discussion for their respective forums thanks.
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Triaxx2
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Post by Triaxx2 » Thu, 19. Jul 18, 21:23

That's how the mission is supposed to go. Until you kill enough ships, the game keeps sending in more.

So? Turn the trick around on them. Call in more ships, bring in carriers full of fighters, or TL's full of drones. This is X3, Trade, Fight, Build, Think. The emphasis is on that last one. So one ship can't do it easily? Bring more. Not enough firepower, bring more.
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Post by DrSuperEvil » Fri, 20. Jul 18, 00:31

If in doubt send in more M2s.

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Post by jacex3tc » Fri, 20. Jul 18, 01:57

So I tried with some cheats and it showed just over 200 ships in the sector. I destroyed them all with the destroy command and scrotus showed up and started saying something, so I know it can be beaten. Now that I know it's 200 and not something ridiculous like 1000+ or more, I probably will do what I said earlier and put together a few M1s or maybe M2s and send them after each ship. One problem is that as I play this and destroy hundreds of adds, I keep gaining fighting rank and it starts spawning M6s. (I'm probably also making later missions and other campaigns' spawns more ridiculous as I do that)

It's possible I might not be able to beat this mission without something around 500-750m credits or more in that sector. That's pretty unreasonable. Not everyone plays this game the same way and honestly I had no real desire to pursue a large space navy or some crap like that. That's also clearly not what this narrative is presented as, at least not at the moment. I mean why does a coalition of all major militaries need me to supply the major backbone of their fleet?

I was playing it just now and it marked a ship at 250k from center. 250k! So clearly whatever they did in the script just doesn't work and the whole mission's steady operation hinged on you killing everything in your way in the previous recon mission. I'm currently assuming only adds that spawn on top of you are the ones that spawn. I'm still not quite clear on what you were talking about SirNukes, but if it ends up that there are just static ambients that respawn, and they do it anywhere in the sector, then I might just not be able to finish this without cheats. Could be the numbers screwed something up the in the movement script too but whatever. I hope Egosoft pays attention to this for X4. The constant add script was reckless and while it was fun at the time in the recon mission, I kept worrying that it might crash the game or screw something up, and sure enough it has screwed up this mission.

@ triaxx

It's not that I haven't killed enough ships. In fact, everyone seems to assume that it's killing a certain number, but that's wrong. You have to kill everything. I killed over 800 the first time I played this. This mission pretty much single-handedly unlocked Defender of the Universe achievement for me. You basically have to wipe the sector of all current hostiles with the exception of the station (which I also destroyed the first time).

In any event I understand enough of what's going on here to be able to get it done, at least with cheats if nothing else. Thanks everybody and particularly thanks to SirNukes for his insights into what's going on under the hood here.

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Post by SirNukes » Fri, 20. Jul 18, 04:30

I feel bad, because clearly I don't really understand what is going on. 250k! Eesh.

But ya, the way the scripts are written leaves some (or a lot of) room for criticism. Both the scripting style and the lack of documentation make the mission scripts difficult to maintain and prone to bugs.

One other option that I forgot about, if you want to avoid mods to keep achievements: abandon the mission. That plot line spends a while feeding you a random selection from 4 possible missions until you build up enough rank, so failing a mission should just set you back a bit. 15-25 minutes later it will make the next random selection (before sending you the message to dock at the station). There is some opportunity to save scum if you want to avoid this mission showing up again.

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Post by Honved » Fri, 20. Jul 18, 16:22

I'm wondering if the problem isn't due to your low fight rank. The question is, does the mission spawn x-number of ships which need to be destroyed, or does it require x-amount of ship size points? Does it count 3-5 M5s as equivalent to an M4?

Basically, instead of killing 200+ light fighters, will the mission end if you blow up 10-20 capital ships? While I probably killed close to 100 total ships in the mission, most of those were light Scouts that died in droves from the PSGs. There were probably 10-20 Corvettes, but all except for a single group of 3 near the beginning were widely scattered and easily engaged one at a time as they approached.

Personally, I found the attack on the Argon military sector to be a harder fight.

Triaxx2
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Post by Triaxx2 » Fri, 20. Jul 18, 23:17

This feels like a bad install, because it shouldn't be behaving like that.

Alternately, if you're not interested in a huge space navy, why are you playing this particular plot? Which is entirely focused on combat.
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