Just my two Cent. I could make the Xenon haunting again, with increasing their hulls and dmg of the bullets, at least OOS, which did the job for me. Implemented in Easy Life. Of Course.
Also I could find out, that the big issue with X4 7.5 seems to be NVIDIA DLSS, which more or less breaks the game for me. Switch back to FSAA works wonders, but doesn't solve the flickering completely, just improves it a bit. For my relatively weak Rig, didn't test too much with the RTX3080 and plan to get a new Rig, some time in the future, just not sure, when I can spare the money, some other stuff has to come first.
Even more important than X4.
There is another post somewhere deep in this forum that goes into detail about Xenon behavior that explains how different games can end up with different levels of Xenon power, and I can anecdotally confirm what was written. I was unable to find a link to the other post unfortunately but I'll keep looking.
I'm going from memory but basically the Xenon have a certain number of offensive fleets and a certain number of defensive fleets. If you are looking for active Xenon this limitation can result in two negative outcomes. First, the Xenon can accumulate a number of defensive fleets that don't go anywhere outside of their own sectors. Second, they can focus in areas that are less than viable or spread their resources too thin.
The Xenon's relative weakness is magnified if you do heavy trading with any existing faction, because the economy really does work and the various factions will crank out ships if you provide them with the good they need to produce them. For example, in the game I'm currently wrapping up I'm pretty much the main/only producer of weapon components. The computer factions buy them pretty much as soon as they are manufactured unless I lock them out, and once I started really filling that niche I saw numerous fleets accumulate. Between that and running construction missions for them I've made most of them strong enough to fight off Xenon - except for the hapless Split, who I've kept poor due to their distance from my main factories.
Note that when you build fleets for the computer factions in construction missions, they become real fleets that do real damage. For tracking purposes I've renamed the fleets that I make for the computer factions and I see them flying around doing stuff.
For the first countless hours of this save I focused on local economy. I decided to take out Tharka's Cascade, Matrix 79B and Savage Spur. A lot of grinding with my Asgard with my Erlking providing cover and I was able to wipe them out completely. During this process things remained quiet everywhere and I was building defence stations and supplying fleets constantly for Paranid, Argon and Terran factions.
Destroying the center Xenon sectors weakened the Xenon even further but having just read that post about Xenon defensive and offensive structuring I decided to dedicate some resources into destroying any defensive fleets to see if I could make them flip to offensive. I started in Emperor's Pride. I took out Emperor's Pride IV quickly enough but found in Emperor's Pride V that the Xenon were camping with about 8 Ks, 2 Is and countless other ships. I wiped them out and things started to get interesting.
That fleet in Emperor's Pride must have locked out some serious Xenon growth because almost immediately the sectors Rhy's Defiance and Matrix 598 started cranking out Ks and blowing up Split sectors. The Xenon have now taken over half of ZYA Split space in a pretty short period of time. Additionally, they've now started sending Ks every few minutes into my controlled Tharka's Cascade.
Rhy's Defiance and Matrix 598 are pretty terrible for mining so I'm surprised the Xenon are as productive as they seem to be. Part of it is that they send out miners to Split space with little to no resistance because the Split have essentially lost all hull part construction, meaning they can't afford to replace lost ships at all.
Again, playing the economic game I could easily save the Split simply by running hull parts to their shipyards but by just leaving them be I expect there to be no more Split within a few hours.
Long story short - if you find that the Xenon are just sitting around, take out their least productive sectors and once the game shuffles in new offensive fleets you'll probably see a completely new game.
I'm going to try to find that other post about Xenon behavior (or maybe poke around the game files myself to see if I can fend the details). I can't guarantee that everything I've put in here is completely accurate but anecdotally the defensive/offensive fleet behavior sure lines up with what I'm seeing.
Personally I'd love for there to be a way to ramp up the Xenon offensive fleets without using mods (I'm a mod-free player in general) but you can get a lot of the same effects by culling poorly performing Xenon sectors on their behalf.
