Does the AI have any agression in this game?

[Tidbury]

So admittedly I am early/mid into my first game. But so far no factions are at war. The Xenon and Khak send a ship or two in a sector every now and then. But that's it. Is the player supposed to be the only aggressor? They say this game basically "plays itself". That may be true but so far it doesn't include any AI drive to conquer anything.

Am I wrong here? Do I just need to play more?

Thanks.

[GCU Grey Area]

There are most definitely wars between factions. Some are present from the start of the game, some can be started (or stopped) by choices made during some of the plots. The wars are however generally quite slow paced & I would speculate are balanced to produce a stalemate - lots of fighting, which destroys ships & stations (to drive the economy), however in my experience not much of greater consequence occurs unless the player gets involved. This can be a simple as trading with a faction (so they have the edge in ship production etc over their rivals), or by choosing plot outcomes which favour that faction.

For example this is the current map for my game. As you can see HOP have been doing rather a lot of warfare. ANT are homeless (they do have some ships & stations left, but control no sectors), ARG only have a handful of sectors left, HOP have started making inroads into BOR territory & have recently gobbled up quite a bit of TEL territory too. HOP currently own 35 sectors (if I recall correctly they start with 5).

To assist with this I have built several production stations in Holy Vision to support their shipyard & wharf, I have progressed the Paranid plot to the point where HOP & PAR are sufficiently friendly to trade (rather than shoot at each other), & have been taking every station demolition job HOP are willing to offer me. Have also taken a fair number of defence platform build missions to reinforce HOP's control over their new sectors & I'm currently in the process of building HOP a shipyard in Argon Prime, so they'll soon have ship-building facilities closer to the front line.

[jlehtone]

Do you have eyes on the entire Galaxy?

The NPC factions prefer "by attrition", rather than "We want that!" approach.

[Tidbury]

There are most definitely wars between factions. Some are present from the start of the game, some can be started (or stopped) by choices made during some of the plots. The wars are however generally quite slow paced & I would speculate are balanced to produce a stalemate - lots of fighting, which destroys ships & stations (to drive the economy), however in my experience not much of greater consequence occurs unless the player gets involved. This can be a simple as trading with a faction (so they have the edge in ship production etc over their rivals), or by choosing plot outcomes which favour that faction.

For example this is the current map for my game. As you can see HOP have been doing rather a lot of warfare. ANT are homeless (they do have some ships & stations left, but control no sectors), ARG only have a handful of sectors left, HOP have started making inroads into BOR territory & have recently gobbled up quite a bit of TEL territory too. HOP currently own 35 sectors (if I recall correctly they start with 5).

To assist with this I have built several production stations in Holy Vision to support their shipyard & wharf, I have progressed the Paranid plot to the point where HOP & PAR are sufficiently friendly to trade (rather than shoot at each other), & have been taking every station demolition job HOP are willing to offer me. Have also taken a fair number of defence platform build missions to reinforce HOP's control over their new sectors & I'm currently in the process of building HOP a shipyard in Argon Prime, so they'll soon have ship-building facilities closer to the front line.

Thanks for the reply. That is pretty cool. I definitely need to let it progress more.

[flywlyx]

X4 leans more heavily toward economic and logistics simulation than actual combat or strategy as a sandbox game. The AI has only basic tactical and strategic abilities and tends to react slowly in most situations. Battles are generally small in scale—typically involving around 3 to 5 destroyers and 20+ fighters per side—so you need to know where to look if you want to catch the action. Placing advanced satellites in border sectors can help you monitor for upcoming combat.

[PilotterDib]

Most of the war can be seen in the first minutes of the game especially if you start near border between ARG and HOP then conflicts peter out everywhere since everyone just runs out of resources they started new game with. Sadly npc faction logistics is too complicated to function without player intervention.

So you wont see much conflict unless you start supporting factions in conflict.

[Daemonjax]

Beyond the very early game, not much happens. In the early game, you can see: vigor vs teladi/argon, and arg/ant vs hop. But that's pretty much it, except for some minor stuff. That's a good oportunity to use the surrender option to get some free ships (a nemesis is probably the best catch) -- I would say "abuse", but it's really the ONLY use for it, so it must be working as intended at this point.