Xenon need a boost?

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GCU Grey Area
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Re: Xenon need a boost?

Post by GCU Grey Area »

LameFox wrote: Thu, 27. Mar 25, 14:08
Blaze1st wrote: Thu, 27. Mar 25, 13:41 1) Make ZYA stronger somehow. They get decimated by Xenon & Arg/Ant/Bor so they have no chance unless player intervenes.
Given they've canonically just finished a war it may be their weakness is intended.
Have suspected the same for many years, i.e. ZYA in an intentionally dodgy geopolitical situation to give people playing the Spear of the Patriarch start a fun challenge to save their most closely aligned faction (I thoroughly enjoyed it when I played that start anyway). Particularly since there's an apparent backup plan (CUB faction) to ensure players still have access to all of ZYA's blueprints, ships, etc even if they're wiped out by the Xenon.

If that is the case, it didn't work particularly well in my current game (started the same day 7.50 was released). This is the current map, just over a week since game start. ZYA still strong & own the same number of sectors they did at the start (lost Rhy's Defiance, but gained Heretic's End).

In ALL of my previous games would expect ZYA to have lost far more than that by now, potentially down to less than half of the sectors they own at game start. Have done very little in the region; no miners, no trading, no stations, just a few ZYA v ARG war missions (mostly ARG station demolition), so it wasn't that I was in any way the decisive factor in this. Do know the precise distribution of Xenon forces is a random factor controlled by game seed, however they do seem particularly weak this time round.
jlehtone
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Re: Xenon need a boost?

Post by jlehtone »

LameFox wrote: Thu, 27. Mar 25, 14:08 Not that it would help Xenon any—only drive home how poorly they perform if they could no longer take territory from even the weakest main faction.
... and the big difference is that ZYA has trade partners. They can be resurrected from complete oblivion. Xenon have no such mitigation.
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jlehtone
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Re: Xenon need a boost?

Post by jlehtone »

LameFox wrote: Thu, 27. Mar 25, 10:57 All of that is pretty internally consistent if you understand that players just don't want the game experience to feel cheap and random. Whether it's their destroyers committing suicide for no reason or the game's designated "big bad" faction getting cleared by random NPCs while the player isn't looking.
True. The players are very consistent in disliking something. :wink:
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Blaze1st
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Re: Xenon need a boost?

Post by Blaze1st »

My understanding is that factions (except Xenon) never claim a sector that starts neutral unless the player (or Xenon) claims it first then releases/loses it so Heretic's End should always be neutral unless one of the above scenarios is the case.

Certainly in my current game (started pre 7.5) neither ZYA/ARG/BOR tried to take it for several days until I eventually did.
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Re: Xenon need a boost?

Post by jlehtone »

Blaze1st wrote: Thu, 27. Mar 25, 17:30 My understanding is that factions (except Xenon) never claim a sector that starts neutral unless the player (or Xenon) claims it first then releases/loses it so Heretic's End should always be neutral unless one of the above scenarios is the case.
That is not related to state of Xenon, but ... some neutral sectors are taboo until player claims them. Heretic's End is one of them.
Heretic's End is also where the PHQ starts in with Boron DLC, which makes it relatively intuitive for the player to claim the sector.

There are other neutral sectors that factions are free to take from start. For example, HOP in my game took something new from South after 7.0, and BOR from West after 7.5.
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Tharrg
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Re: Xenon need a boost?

Post by Tharrg »

LameFox wrote: Thu, 27. Mar 25, 14:08
Tharrg wrote: Thu, 27. Mar 25, 13:32 Think it is just luck.

Xenon is doing fine in my game. I am using X4-Reemergence, which, unfortunately, forces VRO. I lost my first ship when the Agron Prime shipyard got destroyed. I am desperately defending Holy Vison to protect my Hyperion until I get a third Progammable Field Array. Pretty sure it would have fallen without my help. It is tough going as I only have the first Hyperion, the Terren plot's syn and the abandoned Odysseus Vanguard with which to defend Holy Vision.

Project Genesis start with seed="3396568906" but using X4-Reemergence andTrey's sectors Reemergence Patch standalone

https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/1166
https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/1556
This is changing so much I don't think it can really provide any meaningful information about the state of the vanilla game.
True, but in this game I pottered around doing not much for a couple of days and suddenly, the Xenon appeared to be winning on all fronts. You are unlikely to get that happening in Vanilla. I just mention it in case someone wants to try such a game.

What might be related to vanilla is that I did not activate the boron or split plots while triggering the Terran vs Xenon missions. Which might have helped the Xenon get strong.
Last edited by Tharrg on Thu, 27. Mar 25, 18:25, edited 4 times in total.
Blaze1st
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Re: Xenon need a boost?

Post by Blaze1st »

jlehtone wrote: Thu, 27. Mar 25, 17:39
Blaze1st wrote: Thu, 27. Mar 25, 17:30 My understanding is that factions (except Xenon) never claim a sector that starts neutral unless the player (or Xenon) claims it first then releases/loses it so Heretic's End should always be neutral unless one of the above scenarios is the case.
That is not related to state of Xenon, but ... some neutral sectors are taboo until player claims them. Heretic's End is one of them.
Heretic's End is also where the PHQ starts in with Boron DLC, which makes it relatively intuitive for the player to claim the sector.

There are other neutral sectors that factions are free to take from start. For example, HOP in my game took something new from South after 7.0, and BOR from West after 7.5.
I know I was just thinking why ZYA took Heretic's End, perhaps Xenon took west ZYA and that sector then ZYA were able to push them back somehow...

Same in my game HOP took Freedom's Reach which confused me but that is the only one I've seen get taken. I wondered if Xenon had slipped in first there too but that would mean they must have "jumped" sectors.

Which would also be one more way to boost them, let them expand to any sector rather than neighbouring ones (if not implemented already).

Also correction, none of this applies to neutral sectors added in 7.5. BOR/PAR/PIO will take those, at least they did try in my game as soon as it updated to 7.5 (they failed of course tehe).
Gigawatts
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Re: Xenon need a boost?

Post by Gigawatts »

Yes, the economy is very interesting now. The only thing that irritates me is the logic of the AI ​​mining ships. Why mine huge ore deposits in your sector when you can fly to mine through 5 sectors and get stuck there looking for a single asteroid that another ship has already mined))) https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxme2vXDXLeZ ... bpy84H99QK
adeine
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Re: Xenon need a boost?

Post by adeine »

jlehtone wrote: Thu, 27. Mar 25, 10:31
adeine wrote: Thu, 27. Mar 25, 01:00 This is a problem not just with Xenon.
A side-effect.
We used to send ships to kill stations. They ventured close. We were offended that a station that we wanted dead dared to hurt our worthless scrap and shouted: "Stupid AI!"
Egosoft has tuned those ventures.
Now ships kill stations and we see a new reason to shout: "Stupid AI!"
:gruebel:

It is true that all stations are vulnerable, but not to Xenon. Xenon ships are forced to go into kill zone to hurt any station, and everybody else can bombard Xenon stations. Hence, they are an edge case.
Yes, both states of affairs are bad/broken.

For the player, their ships needlessly venturing into turret range and getting blown to pieces is not fun. Attacking stations with fleets effectively was (and occasionally still is) like herding cats, where the difficulty was not in any part of intended or enjoyable gameplay but in preventing this from happening. To kill a station yourself, you could always just park your ship outside range and hold down a button for however long it takes. Also not very thrilling. If stations outrange destroyers and the player can't just sit in one spot and hold down a button, it's not a problem that the AI can't do so, either.

For NPC factions outside of the player's POV, the fact that this happened sort of masked the fundamental problem we're seeing now due to how turrets and destroyer main weapons are balanced. If you build a defence station and ships that could outrange it suicide into it instead, this is not the same level of annoyance. If Xenon/other factions are more resilient because this happens, most players probably would not even notice or stop to think about it. But it's still not a good 'solution'.

This needs to be addressed in a way where both ships and stations can work as intended; not just for the Xenon (though they do suffer more than other factions from this), but on the most basic level.

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