Ego soft needs to fix mining and khaak fast.

[Imuniser]

Well, I am playing a purely vanilla, TER game now; new start.

I have successfully built 3 stations so far. Here it is what I have noticed.

1. Forget the way money making process and universe domination was happening prior to 4.0. The new game and tweaks will make it more difficult.

2. Silicon mining takes longer so you will have to relay on buying some from the other factions. You do have the option to fit your M ore miners with more mining turrets or some defensive ones (TER Wharf provides a wider range of turrets than the PIO one). I have opted for more mining turrets and they seem to be able to cope with providing enough silicon for a production cicle of Advanced Electronics in the commonwealth space (4 M TER miners) as well as 3 Silicon Carbide modules in TER space (4 M TER miners). All ships mine within less dangerous sectors for now, such as Asteroid Belt or Grand Exchange I. No protection fleet yet (though I am guessing 2-3 fighters per miner set to protect would suffice - I'd set them as protect behavior rather than defend option within a fleet; they seem more reactive within the protect behavior range rather than acting only when their protected ship is threatened).

3. For a terran start you will have to accept that you will be building "no profit" stations such as Energy Cells, as well; I use one in Venus (yes, just 190% sunlight but it is enough and it compensates with being right in between Asteroid Belt and Mars) just to supply the player owned Silicon Carbide and Computronics factory, using repeat orders. The latter are the money making machines; Advanced Electronics also work well for me in Grand Exchange I.

4. Forget about making fast and huge amounts of credis from Wharfs and Shipyards. While I don't have them yet, having the ship prices dropped by 70%, I will only build one of each and use them to build my own fleets. I will not relay on them for profit. Profit comes from intermediary and finite goods.

5. Regardless of whether the devs said that the resource probes are ignored if better mining spots exist, if we combine the fact that the probes ARE taken in consideration with the fact that miners DO NOT EXPORE anymore (they do not fly for mining in undiscovered sectors - except the L ones but this is a bug and will be fixed ) the resource probes are QUITE USEFUL. I am successfuly using them; yes, it takes time to either fly or micro manage a ship and deploy, pick them up, deploy again from the map but the results outweigh the time spent. On top of it, this game is meant to be played for months. I am sure that most of us would eventually want to play a completely unmodded game just for the challenge, as I do.

6. Forget about crystals hunting/mining for a fortune. Giving enough time (hours) you can probably pay for an engine upgrade. I have also noticed that you get a blue/yellow one per sector; once you get it, all the others are just low grade purple (or I couldn't find a second blue, green, yellow, white one after hours enjoying flying between asteroids in many sectors; as a hint, some Xenon sectors have more crystals than the average).

7. Use the storyline side missions to get TER more agressive toward other factions than Xenon as well. It will nudge the economy.

In truth, I enjoy the game, the way it is now, a lot more. In the past I was able to become dominant very fast then I got bored. I now have a challenge and a new game lasts a lot longer whilst offering several possibilities for future new game starts as well. Even though this is a single player game, this is Eve Offline. It is not a shooter to spend 40-60 hours and forget about it. Once you come to terms with this and dose your progress expectations, you will be fine.

Yes, the player police and/or the patrol function must be amended so that designated ships can act and respond faster but there are workarounds; don't be afraid to try and discover.

P.S. Equipping TER mining ships with a MK2 travel engine will boost their travel speed to 3400+m/s which is darn faster than a Kestrel fighter.
P.S.S. PIO space has a good way of getting a constant income by running repeat orders on some dodgy goods I have built my first station (Silicon Carbide) with the income from such "lucrative opportunities".

[spankahontis]

Ye, repeat orders is for when you do identical shippings. Cant have that with mining.

It's the only way to ship Methane and Helium from one Storage Facility to the next in order to supply my mega-complex in Nopilious Fortune. It just doesn't receive enough of the basic resources, it's very hungry for Ore, Silicon and Gases.

Tell me about it. For ware transfer mimick might just work when using identical ships.

I tried with Identical, didn't work, sadly.

[aquatica]

This has something to do with the economy as a whole.

My first start began in 2.x or so, long time ago. Currently it's almost broken: miners are dealing with immense demands from everyone - everywhere. Except for TER/PIO, ofc.

FRF, TEL and PAR are losing to Xenon due to material shortages (I have been able to help them out, but it's slow work).
HOP and ANT are wasting resources fighting each other - and both losing to XEN.
ARG? Well, seems like SCA and HAT are taking over.
ZYA's status is unknown, but it would appear that even they are losing to XEN.

Why?

Lack of Weapon Components.
That's it. I have been building up a complex in Hatikvah's to go around this, but gas mining is proving difficult. Helium I think is in short supply and I can't find any *anywhere* in the near universe; practically closest good spot is in PAR space.
That's filled with death and decay.

Now my newest start? No issues other than pretty heavy Kha'ak infestation in every sector with mineable resources - I have traders, no miners (stupid I know) so if I want to mine, I might have to hop on L miners from the beginning. And that's an investment I'm not too happily going to make!

Some comment on the broken ZYA/FRF - for me FRF has no Hull Parts or Engine Parts. They don't manufacture *either* at all. Good way to earn some cash though, hauling tons and tons and tons for them. Also free silicon wafers in return for ARG - couple minutes and hundreds of thousands of credits profit.

[Tempest]

i have been blanketting my trouble spots with Adv. Satellites to get some kind of early warning, 2 or so Clusters spawned in small gaps, and ever since i plugged those up, things seem to have quieted down, but that might be a coincidence really.

not sure if we could get some clarification on these Cluster spawning mechanics?, im a bit worried they''ll start spawning behind the "satellite net" at 800KM+ ranges from 0,0 to be honest.

[Raptor34]

i have been blanketting my trouble spots with Adv. Satellites to get some kind of early warning, 2 or so Clusters spawned in small gaps, and ever since i plugged those up, things seem to have quieted down, but that might be a coincidence really.

not sure if we could get some clarification on these Cluster spawning mechanics?, im a bit worried they''ll start spawning behind the "satellite net" at 800KM+ ranges from 0,0 to be honest.

Don't they jump on you? I'm uncertain if that means they spawn on you, or spawn at a nest and jump.
If its the latter, could you theoretically just have ships sitting outside of the nest and drawing their aggro that way?

[Tempest]

as far as the mechanic goes, it seems to be:

- a cluster spawns
- small KHA strikegroups start appearing across the entire sector (using the cluster as some sort of anchor-point)

- destroy the cluster (usually spawning KHA defender craft)
- in-sector KHA spawning stops


edit; to clarify:

a cluster will be identified as " Khaak installation" by Betty

it is a smaller version of the initial installations located in Matrix 451 / Pious Mists / Silent Witness 12

i couldn't wrap my head around this at first, as ive never seen one.

bottom line, trouble spots for miners being harrassed by KHA will have a cluster in-sector somewhere.

[Marco Nero]

Can for the love of God somebody please explain me this?

https://ibb.co/fXsCcpm


Silicon miners seems to are depleting the Silicon in "Asteroid Belt", i have 110 miners + or -.

I have source Probes in Getsu Fune too, which is pretty rich of Silicon, but the result is this and i'm having serious problem to keep my stations working without Silicon.

PS: my stations are in Mars, so Getsu Fune is perfectly in range for the miners, but in Getsu Fune only goeas the miners which are harvesting Ice or Minerals....the Silicon miners are still mining in Asteroid Belt, coming back to the station with 1 or 6 or 150-200 silicon.

I've stopped playing right now till this will not be fixed....the milions i've spent on my 4 complexes are not usefull without Silicon.

[al_dude]

I started using L miners (Split L miner due to its insane speed and 2 L mining turrets). Wyvern has got 9,500 travel speed with ARG engine. 9,500!

Problems lessened greatly. Not going back to M miners once I have the money. Split L miner mines so much faster. And don't need to worry about some Kha'ak or SCA.

[Marco Nero]

I find out what the problem is:

they are mining Silicon with the rest of free cargo space they have, becouse all the other cargo space is full of Mineral, wich are currently not necessary to my station couse it's full...
my god...

[M66]

So I've spent most of today chasing down and destroying khaak installations around my HQ and the 18 Billion region.
I had already given up on M miners, but since I finally managed to get a couple of L-class cap ships, I thought I'd play along and do it "properly".

Mechanically, this is not an enjoyable system to interact with:

- It takes a lot of micromanaging to find the installation in the first place. It may not even be in the system where we see the raids. It might even be in an area we've previously explored but is currently under fog of war. If I use Explore sector, my ships drift about aimlessly. If I set up a ton of spiralling Move To orders or if I want to use my own Long Range Scanner and ping everywhere manually then that's still a very tedious operation. And again - it may turn out that the hive isn't even in the sector where I'm seeing attacks.
- It takes a lot of time to move a sufficient force into position to do anything about it. I'm using two destroyers and though it still takes them forever to take out a single installation, my ships are in zero danger since their shields recharge faster than any incoming damage.
- Even with 4-star destroyer pilots (the best I have to work with), they stagger around, shoot at the empty space between the Khaak structures, sometimes use turrets and sometimes don't, and basically require handholding during their entire attack if I don't want them to take even longer. It's a separate issue, but the AI is having a hard time with this very simple task: Stop moving around, point the ship's bow at the immovable object and put a heavy book down on the FIRE button. If you want to get fancy then they should use RCS/thrusters to do repositioning moves (or withdrawals) while keeping the main battery oriented correctly but I would be happy if they just stopped jittering around.
- I have taken out four or five separate installations. By the time I finished the last one, the khaak were back in the first sector, but not in the same place, so now I need to start looking for them again.

Even after sweeping every sector, I still can't field M miners without expecting to lose them because there's never a grace period between attacks. And before someone says "Well you just need to hunt harder", actually I don't: The dominant strategy is to ignore the hives altogether and just field L miners. It is simply not worth the time to engage with the system.

Surely that isn't the design intention?

Assuming that my save isn't just broken (I started this game on 4.00 before hotfix 1), then maybe there are some things that might help?
- Make it easier to find the installations. Let us build a Deepspace Khaak Detector module or something on a defense platform.
- Reduce the hull hitpoints on the khaak structures. They're not dangerous to take out; they just take forever unless we throw even more resources at them.
- Drastically increase the time between installation spawns. After spending an entire day on this, I have basically nothing to show for it. After all this I'm still down one more M miner (replaced with an invincible L miner now of course) and the khaaks are back in the first system I cleared. If I at least knew I had several dozen hours of respite, it might even have been worth it.

Maybe we're not supposed to be using M miners at all? Like they're supposed to only be valid for the early game and then you outgrow them permanently? Or maybe you're only supposed to use them as ore transports (since they can use highways) in the mid/lategame?

[grapedog]

There are respawn timers on the hives and clusters. I believe i read a hive the big base, is 96 hours. The cluster, the small outpost, i think was 48 hours. And these are game hours. The big hives only spawn in like one of 8 sectors, places like 451 and company regard. Then i believe, within 3 sectors of the hive is where a smaller cluster can spawn. I dont know for sure on the last part.

I just go and manually long range search for em, takes some time though.

[LoneStargazer]

This system is completely broken because you can't currently in anyway automate how you deal with khaak and dealing with them personally is poor use of your time.

Before introducing such a mechanic you need either (or better both):

- To have way to defend against khaak (make ships on patrol command actually respond to threats and defend you assets, right now they just fly randomly. In sectors where mining takes place far away from ecliptic or spread across vast distances like in Asteroid Belt they are even more usless as they don't patrol the actual places where mining happens)

- Make stations automatically restock subordinates (if the intention is taxing the player for mining)

M miners right now are unviable because I'm not going through humdreds of miners to assign each one escorts and monitor their inevitable losses, it's also bad use of resources that could be used for a couple of functional patrols.
Unfurtunatly I have to pause my current save until it either gets fixed or (more likely) a mod comes out to disable khaak entirely.

The idea of putting player miners in some danger is not bad, but the implemetation is purely annoying to gamebreaking point and not well thought out.
Having to constantly spend considerable time to personally find khk stations and deal with them is just wasting limited play time on indecisive, repetitive, unengaging, dull and ultimately futile activities.

[SpaceCadet11864]

This system is completely broken because you can't currently in anyway automate how you deal with khaak and dealing with them personally is poor use of your time.

Before introducing such a mechanic you need either (or better both):

- To have way to defend against khaak (make ships on patrol command actually respond to threats and defend you assets, right now they just fly randomly. In sectors where mining takes place far away from ecliptic or spread across vast distances like in Asteroid Belt they are even more usless as they don't patrol the actual places where mining happens)

- Make stations automatically restock subordinates (if the intention is taxing the player for mining)

M miners right now are unviable because I'm not going through humdreds of miners to assign each one escorts and monitor their inevitable losses, it's also bad use of resources that could be used for a couple of functional patrols.
Unfurtunatly I have to pause my current save until it either gets fixed or (more likely) a mod comes out to disable khaak entirely.

The idea of putting player miners in some danger is not bad, but the implemetation is purely annoying to gamebreaking point and not well thought out.
Having to constantly spend considerable time to personally find khk stations and deal with them is just wasting limited play time on indecisive, repetitive, unengaging, dull and ultimately futile activities.

I like the idea of automatic restocking of subordinates, but also you can automate finding khk stations by putting ships on patrol. The patrol ships will find the KHK stations so you dont have to fly around and find them yourself, but that still is better than just sitting there with SETA on.

I mean honestly the only time I have ever had a problem with losing subordinates was when I had SETA on over night and was like damn I lost a lot of subordinates wtf happened. I just dont play the game with SETA and honestly it just turns into an autoclicker at that point. I used to play with SETA on over night all the time and really it just makes the game pointless, the money is great but you could have made way more money and progress actually playing the game, and the other factions wouldnt get further advanced to the point of spamming stations everywhere but I'm sorry I digress.

just use patrols and they'll find the KHK stations, then send a fleet to clean them out.

Still I love the idea of making stations automatically restock mining ships

[XGamer]

This system is completely broken because you can't currently in anyway automate how you deal with khaak and dealing with them personally is poor use of your time.

Before introducing such a mechanic you need either (or better both):

- To have way to defend against khaak (make ships on patrol command actually respond to threats and defend you assets, right now they just fly randomly. In sectors where mining takes place far away from ecliptic or spread across vast distances like in Asteroid Belt they are even more usless as they don't patrol the actual places where mining happens)

- Make stations automatically restock subordinates (if the intention is taxing the player for mining)

M miners right now are unviable because I'm not going through humdreds of miners to assign each one escorts and monitor their inevitable losses, it's also bad use of resources that could be used for a couple of functional patrols.
Unfurtunatly I have to pause my current save until it either gets fixed or (more likely) a mod comes out to disable khaak entirely.

The idea of putting player miners in some danger is not bad, but the implemetation is purely annoying to gamebreaking point and not well thought out.
Having to constantly spend considerable time to personally find khk stations and deal with them is just wasting limited play time on indecisive, repetitive, unengaging, dull and ultimately futile activities.

Cannot agree more

[aquatica]

I have issues with the fact that we cannot choose which kind of enemy to ignore and which not.

I'm not worried about Hive Guards or similar on my L miners, they handle those easily. However when there's that damn pirate Rattlesnake (!) or SCA Behemoth (wtf, they used to have Teladi ships before?!) raiding on my mining stuff it's pointless.
Luckily those are *very* rarely anywhere near my miners, but they do harass my traders bad.

Also even on top of this, we'd need to have trade ships to simply IGNORE pirates. Now if I have them on Escape, they stop their travel mode and select the nearest station - giving time to the pirates to actually do piracy and kill my ships. If they would simply ignore the demands and NOT STOP, they'd survive easily - Boa can outrun almost anything. Except when they are harrassed by pirates, they stop and try to make a run for it -> recharging travel engine takes more time than it takes to be blown up. Why they don't even deploy mines or laser towers?

[sanas]

So I've spent most of today chasing down and destroying khaak installations around my HQ and the 18 Billion region.
I had already given up on M miners, but since I finally managed to get a couple of L-class cap ships, I thought I'd play along and do it "properly".

Mechanically, this is not an enjoyable system to interact with:

- It takes a lot of micromanaging to find the installation in the first place. It may not even be in the system where we see the raids. It might even be in an area we've previously explored but is currently under fog of war. If I use Explore sector, my ships drift about aimlessly. If I set up a ton of spiralling Move To orders or if I want to use my own Long Range Scanner and ping everywhere manually then that's still a very tedious operation. And again - it may turn out that the hive isn't even in the sector where I'm seeing attacks.
- It takes a lot of time to move a sufficient force into position to do anything about it. I'm using two destroyers and though it still takes them forever to take out a single installation, my ships are in zero danger since their shields recharge faster than any incoming damage.
- Even with 4-star destroyer pilots (the best I have to work with), they stagger around, shoot at the empty space between the Khaak structures, sometimes use turrets and sometimes don't, and basically require handholding during their entire attack if I don't want them to take even longer. It's a separate issue, but the AI is having a hard time with this very simple task: Stop moving around, point the ship's bow at the immovable object and put a heavy book down on the FIRE button. If you want to get fancy then they should use RCS/thrusters to do repositioning moves (or withdrawals) while keeping the main battery oriented correctly but I would be happy if they just stopped jittering around.
- I have taken out four or five separate installations. By the time I finished the last one, the khaak were back in the first sector, but not in the same place, so now I need to start looking for them again.

Even after sweeping every sector, I still can't field M miners without expecting to lose them because there's never a grace period between attacks. And before someone says "Well you just need to hunt harder", actually I don't: The dominant strategy is to ignore the hives altogether and just field L miners. It is simply not worth the time to engage with the system.

Surely that isn't the design intention?

Assuming that my save isn't just broken (I started this game on 4.00 before hotfix 1), then maybe there are some things that might help?
- Make it easier to find the installations. Let us build a Deepspace Khaak Detector module or something on a defense platform.
- Reduce the hull hitpoints on the khaak structures. They're not dangerous to take out; they just take forever unless we throw even more resources at them.
- Drastically increase the time between installation spawns. After spending an entire day on this, I have basically nothing to show for it. After all this I'm still down one more M miner (replaced with an invincible L miner now of course) and the khaaks are back in the first system I cleared. If I at least knew I had several dozen hours of respite, it might even have been worth it.

Maybe we're not supposed to be using M miners at all? Like they're supposed to only be valid for the early game and then you outgrow them permanently? Or maybe you're only supposed to use them as ore transports (since they can use highways) in the mid/lategame?

Try to "place construction site " and you see blocked place where is haak station.

For all players i recommend dont asume miners to station, create indepedent mining fleet for every resource separately 1 fleet - ore 2 - silicon etc. It will be work very fine also they can trade resource to npc station or your in big gate radius. Use main ship for every resource and other give mimic command.


And my very important question - how strong we need resource probe? They realy give productivity or it more to inform player. Also they affect to game perfomance? Or i can place million probes every 10 km in every system?

[Raevyan]

Also the khaak Installation in Matrix #451 seems to be invulnerable...

[M66]

Try to "place construction site " and you see blocked place where is haak station.

Omg, you're right... that's hilarious! Thanks haha

[Old Drullo321]

I don't really want to necro this thread but as of patch 4.10 is out and no realy changes in this regard, are there any plans in the future to implement some of the mentioned ideas or adjust the way to deal with Khaak in a more automatic way?

It is fun the first couple of times to find and deal with the hive and the raid station. It also is fine that you should not ignore this threat or it gets worse. However searching for one of those stations the 10th time is boring and tedious. I don't want to waste time to manually command 10 scouts sector to sector, teleport to them, look around, teleport to the next and when i found the station just send my armada of destroyers to quickly destroy it just to get annoyed two hours later with the next station. While there are many reasons to use each of the L and M miners, the current Khaak implementation and the lack of automated ways to replace M miner losses practically removes any use for M miners, you could just delete the blueprints...

Also it is hilarious that even when the local sector owner faction is somewhat aware of those stations, even in terran space, by having laser towers, satellites or (before they die) police right beside the Kha'ak station, the local forces never try to deal with this threat. In asteroid belt there are like dozens of Terran destroyers with hundreds of assigned S and M ships just 20km away and they don't do anything against that well known Kha'ak station.

This is such a no-fun annoyance, please do something @ Egosoft. Any of the previously mentioned ideas would work.

[Treycore]

I’m all for the khaak, and subsequent danger to miners but respawn timers after destroying a khaak hive should be longer, we deserve a break/reward for hunting down installations

Also looking through the khaak files, it seems khaak react more to player actions then NPCs and this to me violates the nature of the sandbox, they should be equally reactive to NPCs and players

Also would be nice for the AI to actually respond to khaak installations and attack them

And the hives should spawn a bit closer, they spawn wayyyyy to far out of the bounds of the sector