Is there any hardware that would make the VIG fight good?

[Alan Phipps]

I have often thought that VIG should have large carriers on patrol. Rather than having all those many huge swarms of fighters milling around their sectors doing pretty much nothing apart from eating up cpu resources, why not have the fighters docked in several patrolling carriers per sector and only launching locally when an enemy or smuggler is detected at range by their carriers or anti-smuggling patrols?

As a moderation remark, don't let this become too hardware/processing technique-centric a thread rather than about gameplay or it could be moved to off topic.

[LameFox]

I do think they should have had carriers, just logically it makes sense for them. Though in this case I don't really think it would help because in this fight they will of course launch anyway.

It honestly seems like just the perfect storm of things that work to break performance. Not only a faction made from lots of small ships, but all in the same place, at the same time, and they don't really leave in significant numbers either so you can't even siege them and fight them in small groups because those raiders/trade ships just are never going to deplete the main force loitering in their systems. I really wish they'd reassess the whole thing because if it's going to be like this on any system the player has then WHY would it ever be designed this way?

[Retrox]

Logically, it would be good for them to have carriers, but it doesnt fit by lore: they are in a system, that was cut off from ressources, so they needed to scrap things and put ships together, to get some working ships again. Thus, they mainly have small fighters, while their transports are L (cost efficiency maybe). Where should the XL carriers come about? Maybe, we can assume they have new ressources from the plundering, after the gates connected again, so they should have the ressources to build a carrier now, but thats up to ego to add one for them.

[LameFox]

Logically, it would be good for them to have carriers, but it doesnt fit by lore: they are in a system, that was cut off from ressources, so they needed to scrap things and put ships together, to get some working ships again. Thus, they mainly have small fighters, while their transports are L (cost efficiency maybe). Where should the XL carriers come about? Maybe, we can assume they have new ressources from the plundering, after the gates connected again, so they should have the ressources to build a carrier now, but thats up to ego to add one for them.

Eh, they could be L carriers. They can build wharves and XL construction ships though so it's not like any particular relevant function is beyond their ability.

[Alan Phipps]

A cobbled together large carrier design doesn't have to be a major potent and complex fighting ship like a Raptor, it could almost literally be a mobile landing dock and hangar that relies on its fighters for defence and offence. It would almost certainly have to be big (XL size) with multi-launch S pads/slots to take and launch all those fighter wings though.

[LameFox]

In other news I ended up doing the fight OOS (again) and there were so many ships involved that twice my fps dropped to 1 until I reloaded, and once my map just spontaneously stopped showing enemy ships (again until I reloaded).

I also couldn't get my support ship to deploy any drones until the fight finished. I tried every setting, including escort, but it just would not happen.

[Buzz2005]

drones OOS are not shown but are calculated in the attack

[LameFox]

drones OOS are not shown but are calculated in the attack

They are if set to escort, but anyway, I was looking at active drones shown in its loadout (the map was an absolute mess, I probably couldn't have seen them there anyway).

[Buzz2005]

that steam FAQ from Kajar (I think) has the script looked at, its tied to pilot skill or something else for drones to launch, at least the number of them

[vkolosov]

I did a huge battle with VIG fighters, around 150 ships on my side. Got about 12-15 FPS, regardless of graphics settings. Still enjoyed the hell out of it, piloting a tiny Takoba in a fighter wing for one of my destroyers. Such experience is what makes X4 special.

My rig: Lenovo Legion laptop, i9-14900hx, RTX 4060, 32 GB RAM, NVMe SSD.

[LameFox]

that steam FAQ from Kajar (I think) has the script looked at, its tied to pilot skill or something else for drones to launch, at least the number of them

In this case the ship was staying at zero active no matter what. After the fight was over (I'd left them on escort) I saw it flying around with a fleet of them, so it was certainly capable of it.

[LameFox]

I did a huge battle with VIG fighters, around 150 ships on my side. Got about 12-15 FPS, regardless of graphics settings. Still enjoyed the hell out of it, piloting a tiny Takoba in a fighter wing for one of my destroyers. Such experience is what makes X4 special.

My rig: Lenovo Legion laptop, i9-14900hx, RTX 4060, 32 GB RAM, NVMe SSD.

Was that stable? It had too many sudden drops for me to have flown a fighter that's for sure.

Though, I used more ships than that in the end, even after giving up on small ones and churning out a few Asgards to soak up fire. Initially my plan was to try a least-cheese fight where I send in carriers so I had two Tokyos of fighters there and a few dozen Odachis and around 9 destroyers.

Curiously, despite heavy fighter losses, not one Odachi died when I finally did it OOS.

[GCU Grey Area]

Got an adequate fps when I did this mission. However my fleet was substantially smaller than those described above. Suspect that's what made the difference. Fleet consisted of 1 Condor, 1 Stork, 9 Phoenixes (all capitals had a full set of beam turrets), 40 Buzzards (3x bolt mk2) & 10 Ospreys (beam turrets, shard mk2 main gun & tracking launcher, with 100 L.Smart missiles). That was sufficient to fight off the VIG horde, get the fleet to the target station & eliminate it, while maintaining sufficient fps throughout for personal involvement in the fight to be enjoyable (I flew one of the Buzzards). Hardware is 3900X cpu, 3070 gpu, 32GB ram.

[alt3rn1ty]

Also reference Intel 13th and 14th gen CPU's, here's a post by CBJ mentioning the problem ..
viewtopic.php?t=470537

Reference what I said about the I7/9 13th & 14th Gen .. and also about the best of the AMD Ryzens with the big L3 cache (which are all sold out as far as I can find right now) :

There is another option which I havent really looked into before today.
Recently I have been noticing Intel Ultra CPUs' popping up in offerings from various retailers, so I did some digging and it seems they are pretty decent.
About Intel Core Ultra CPU - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... ultra.html
Laptop Ultras - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... brief.html
Desktop Ultras - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... brief.html

Gaming laptops are now being offered as pre-order with very good Series 2 Ultra CPUs specs, doubt if they will help the VIG situation as even the best of the communities desktops still have snags with big battles and lots of fighters .. But the machines I have seen have piqued my interest.
Might get one and see how it goes, I'm due a treat

Edit : Fancying this one https://www.scan.co.uk/products/predato ... nhqx2ek001

[Imperial Good]

The fight ran pretty well >20 FPS on my R9 3900X. But this was back when ToA DLC released, so it likely will perform worse now that there is significantly more content.

My fleet consisted of 2 carriers of S ships and an asgard. I even managed to solo it with just the Asgard but it crashed before I could save and I was not able to repeat it consistently.