Fluctuating strength / difficulty level with Xenon opponents

[Stoneval]

Hello everyone,

I am currently in the process of clearing the "Tharka's Cascade" sectors of Xenon in the context of the Timelines release and especially here I have the impression that there are massive fluctuations in the behavior of the Xenon or the strength of my own fleet. While my small fleet of one Syn and 6 Behemoths had been clearing the Xenon K's and I's very consistently and smoothly over the last few days, yesterday evening was really strange. The ships (7!) found it incredibly difficult to get a single Xenon K down. An Xenon I without losses in my own ranks was only possible with the help of additional Katanas. And apparently the Xenon in the two shipyards in "Matrix #79B" and "Savage Spur I" also have an almost inexhaustible supply of materials, because they were just piling out the K's. After I had already cleaned up around 15 Ks, two Is and two Hs and what felt like hundreds of S/M ships within 3 hours, I got impatient and placed satellites to see how many enemy capital ships were still waiting for me. And it just went on happily, so at least 10 ships are still waiting for me. I'm kind of amazed by this amount, but well - at least I have a lot of material that can be cut down. But what really bothers me is the battle per ship itself. Because as I said, last night it always took at least 5 minutes until a K was finally broken and I had to reload several battles because the one K magically dragged one or two of my ships into the grave. And today? Suddenly everything is back to "normal" - when my fleet concentrates on a K, it takes a maximum of 30 seconds for the shields, and at worst another 30 seconds for the hull. This, as I said, without any situational changes - all OOS, just looking at the map. It's just a day later, I freshly loaded the savegame and just picked up where I left off last night.
Do any of you know of such fluctuations and is there any information on the causes?

Thanks for your insights and ideas.

Best regards, Stoneval

[iceshard]

Xenon Ks (and even more so Is) are very slow, very durable, short range, and very very high damage. Destroyers all outrange them with their main guns. A Syn's main guns are especially strong, as well. If those 7 ships engage a Xenon K or I from max range, they will win pretty handily. If the Xenon capital ships get in range, however, they will tear your ships apart rather rapidly. So without more detail, my guess would be that your ships didn't engage from the proper range, or perhaps had poor target selection and didn't shoot the Xenon vessel until it got into range, resulting in losses for your capital fleet.

It also makes a very large difference whether you were physically present for the fight (High Attention mode) or not (Low Attention mode). Ships perform very differently depending on whether or not you are present.

[fade7]

Hello everyone,

I am currently in the process of clearing the "Tharka's Cascade" sectors of Xenon in the context of the Timelines release and especially here I have the impression that there are massive fluctuations in the behavior of the Xenon or the strength of my own fleet. While my small fleet of one Syn and 6 Behemoths had been clearing the Xenon K's and I's very consistently and smoothly over the last few days, yesterday evening was really strange. The ships (7!) found it incredibly difficult to get a single Xenon K down. An Xenon I without losses in my own ranks was only possible with the help of additional Katanas. And apparently the Xenon in the two shipyards in "Matrix #79B" and "Savage Spur I" also have an almost inexhaustible supply of materials, because they were just piling out the K's. After I had already cleaned up around 15 Ks, two Is and two Hs and what felt like hundreds of S/M ships within 3 hours, I got impatient and placed satellites to see how many enemy capital ships were still waiting for me. And it just went on happily, so at least 10 ships are still waiting for me. I'm kind of amazed by this amount, but well - at least I have a lot of material that can be cut down. But what really bothers me is the battle per ship itself. Because as I said, last night it always took at least 5 minutes until a K was finally broken and I had to reload several battles because the one K magically dragged one or two of my ships into the grave. And today? Suddenly everything is back to "normal" - when my fleet concentrates on a K, it takes a maximum of 30 seconds for the shields, and at worst another 30 seconds for the hull. This, as I said, without any situational changes - all OOS, just looking at the map. It's just a day later, I freshly loaded the savegame and just picked up where I left off last night.
Do any of you know of such fluctuations and is there any information on the causes?

Thanks for your insights and ideas.

Best regards, Stoneval

did you upgrade game version to 7.00 during the course of those battles? Because there was probably big changes to Xenon ai/fleet compositions due to all their new ships they have now(Space control and sabotuers) and some people have reported Xenon kind of spaz out while it transitions into the new ai or whatever.