Ignorant Sector Patrol

[sware]

So the war AI for Xenon seems to be updated and improved a lot. But the other factions seem to lag behind.
In Ianamus Zura IV there is a xenon invasion and they are building a defence platform there (which is almost finished). On the other hand there are 4-5 Xenon K roaming around and destroying stuff and the local destroyer patrol (5 Pheonix) are going around with an explore command instead of attacking the xenon.

Then there is the Teladi Trading Station with the faction representive... They decided to upgrade the defence module (or rebuild it) , without making sure they have enough resources. Now i have a partly invisble station which is impossible to dock manually and is not capable of defending itself. Meanwhile the xenon build their station next to it and nobody is doing anything against it...

The same happens with the Argons in Hatikvah's Choice where the local defence forces like to hunt small pirate fighters around the whole sector and never catch them instead of fighting with the roaming xenon destroyers. They already destroyed a few stations and nobody seems to care.

Now i go around and try to destroy their L turrets to make sure they don't make to much damage but since I only own a Nova thats the most i can do. Shouldn't there be a priority list for defence forces when it comes to defending stuff??

Am I the only one experiencing this stuff or is it common?

[Alexraptor]

As a new X4 player I also have to agree that the AI is pretty underwhelming when it comes to sector defense.
Last night I took out 3 Paranid destroyers.... with an L freighter.
There was absolutely no attempt by the other ships or the fighters in the area to reinforce each other as I picked off the destroyers one by one. A stark contrast to X3 where I remember launching attacks in systems patrolled by capital ships was like stepping in a hornets nest.

[Raevyan]

Seeing the same all over the place. Xenon in Holy Vision are completely ignored by local destroyers and are happily killing everything in their way.

[sware]

It seems that the ships have to be attacked directly to respond to some threat. I tricked the xenon k into shooting the defence destroyer and then they started fighting each other. But still only the destroyers who where hit started shooting and hunting the K.
There you could also see that the main weapons of destroyers are not enough to destroy a single unarmed K... it took two phoenix forever to shoot down the K. They should either have more powerful main weapons or should try to use their turrets as support when most of the turrets are taken down.
I had to help and destroy the engines of the K because is was fleeing all the time and the destroyers were to stupid to use their travel drive to go after them..

I hope they rework the ai for patrol ships and get rid of these issues...

On the other hand i experienced some strange xenon behaviour were some smaller ships happily ignore you and don‘t even fight back when you shoot them. The same also happens with L turrets on the K. They only shoot back when their shield is gone or try to „unfold“ and get stuck in some kind of loop

[Red-Spot]

If the same attack/patrol logic is used in X4 as was in X3 then the issue is literally very easy to remedy.
In X3 attacks are issued and very little is done to prioritize targets. This attack continues until the attacker loses focus, and focus may not even be lost when a ship docks, usually it means the target needs to get killed or leave the sector.
In X3 this more or less worked since the relative small sizes of the sectors, but it did not prevent your capitals to run past enemy capitals in effort to chase down a tiny ship. It just did not prove that much of a problem as few minutes later the ship would lose target, retarget and end up chasing down the enemy capitals. Even then some really dumb behavior presented itself.

In X4 with the vast sectors there needs to be a time-out in targeting enemies so if a ship chases down an enemy it should time out eventually or it should do a simple distant check and notice the distance between it and the target is only increasing. No complex attack-logic is needed, any logic you add just becomes a potential player exploit

[photomankc]

Yes, so far the races have been extraordinarily poor at defending their sectors against anything but a single rouge K. Teladi were the worst but Argon and GOP were also poor and eventually ground themselves to a standstill by throwing fighters at the battleship K's. HOP have thus far been the best at holding the Xenon in. They had a massive fleet on their side of the gate and almost nothing could seep through. Watching the others pit destroyers one at a time against 3 or more K's was depressing.

[sware]

I finally tracked down the SCA Kestrel which the destroyer tried to catch and destroyed it. Then the destroyer gladly decided to attack the xenon K in the sector just to get wiped out in under 30 seconds without lowering the shield of the K below 95% .

Did anybody notice that some Argon L freighters have 9 M turrets compared to the 8 M + 2 L Turrets of the Argon destroyer. And the Destroyer can only use 5 at a time for 1 target. I was shocked when i found this out. Because the main weapons hardly ever get used by the AI, and even three phoenix firing their main guns had a hard time destroying a single K.