Beta 7 Feedback Xenon too weak

[Igab]

The Xenon are too weak in Atiya's Misfortune, Faulty Logic and Matrix # 451

all are defeated by their neighbors, Without the player's involvement.
I was able to observe this in Multiple game Saves.


P.s Sorry My English is bad

[geldonyetich]

It's ideal to submit a saved game so they can see it for themselves and try to figure out why your game is that way.

But, speaking in terms of general feedback, I think changes in 7.0 have made it clear different players prefer different levels of Xenon aggression and some means to set that might be ideal.

Personally, I am in favor of a perpetual existential crisis mode where they start weak and trivial but get stronger every wave. A pressure cooker scenario might be fun!

[Igab]

think changes in 7.0 have made it clear different players prefer different levels of Xenon aggression and some means to set that might be ideal.

That would be great

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/r22vbhkt ... qav90&dl=0

hope that's right, I'm not really familiar with something like that

[Scoob]

In my game, Matrix #451 was taken by TEL very early on, as was Faulty Logic. I've not discovered Atiya's Misfortune yet.

This saved game will show it, though I didn't make this save specifically for this. It's just the latest one I had on Google Drive.

Conversely, I'm thinking that the Tharka's Cascade systems must be pretty strong, as there's a steady flow of Xenon entering Hatikvah's Choice I in my game. This is often a critical area to defend to prevent massive civilian ship losses and economic crashes due to Xenon killing everything. However, and perhaps linked to the weak Xenon issue, local faction forces have been doing a REALLY good job of fending them off. There's pretty much always a decent sized fleet here. I have my own fleet and now a Defence Platform too, but I'm not sure it was as necessary as it's been in prior game versions.

[Astalid]

in my 3 day save (without mods). xenons not able to capture any border neutral sectors and it was taken by other nations. and.. splits didn't lose any sector too. looks like xenon bulds too may new ships that are weaker than old models

[TroubledRabbit]

new game beta 7.3.

Xenons are more or less the same nuissance as in 6.3 though still less aggressive than they used to be against the split. BUT - this time the GOD did not build def station in the Hatikva's Choice (there is HAT one in ridiculous place behind the accelerators).

BTW - a lot of stations (normal ones) are built now far outside sectors' 'inner circle, sometimes really far away.

[Zekavin]

Same result in my save, The Xenon got wrecked in barely 10 hours in Faulty Logic. The issue however is that Paranid are unified (Custom Budgeted start)

[X4Starter]

I imagine it is hard to find a balance. Small tweaks can go a long way in terms of over and under powering.

I am coming back into the game after almost a year.
Started messing with the beta. I remember from 6.0 it seemed like xenon were there, defeatable but non defense stations (aside from split) were able to tank xenon k's by themselves especially in hatikvah's choice. Where before wandering K's and fighters would start taking over the northeast corridor and wreck any shipping going through there.

My plays usually included a lot of strategic positioning of Osaka's and Syn's so I could jump into a shipping sector (quite often) due to the incompetence of the other factions to deal with a single K.

The defense platform at the gate might be a bit much as the xenon can't push past it and just break themselves upon it. The new fleet ai may be all that is necessary as previously the other faction combat programming seemed grossly ineffectual against the K's unless there were truly overwhelming numbers (or until the xenon capital presses upon even a non defense station)

But there also seems to be a problem with the xenon programming. I watched, in sector, 2 Syns and an Osaka near the south gate of the void deal with a swarm of S and M class xenon. The Osaka got wrecked because it wandered into the K's path, but then the K did nothing except wander around without attacking the Syn's and decided to dash itself against a factory.

The Syn's were divided in two, each with a smallish swarm of S's and M's (classes not ship models) and defeated them. Repeat, the Syn's defeated the small and medium craft on their own, without fighter coverage and without significant component damage. This would have been unheard of previously due to the poor AA defense, and my previously documented experiments using Flaks as AA defense.

I almost always set an Osaka or other destroyer with a Syn to provide it AA defense

It took a while but the xenon did no appreciable damage. Much to my chagrin as I would liked to have acquired the two vessels early on while they were distracted by the xenon.

A behemoth E wandered in and promptly defeated another swarm. Which based on my previous tests with non-e behemoth would not have ended well.

So clearly I need to do some more experimenting on the new ships, the xenon anti-capital ship programming (not sure they are doing the dive-bombing/strafing tactic of previous versions), and current AA effectiveness of the various M-class turrets.

[maderas]

It's easy to see this in action by starting a creative custom game in 7.00 and giving yourself satellite coverage of all the Xenon sectors. I did this a few times last night and Xenon consistently lost or were close to losing Frontier Edge, Faulty Logic I, and Matrix #451 with significant incursions into adjacent Xenon sectors. They get invaded by destroyer fleets and can't muster any meaningful resistance. They spam suicide a ton of SEs into enemy territory, crippling their economy. I've also seen many posts on Steam about a bug where they fail to deliver wares to build storages properly and thus never expand their number of stations, but I can't verify that one firsthand.

I think SEs on mining duty should be restricted to Xenon space unless they're explicitly making deliveries to stations outside of Xenon space during expansion. They have some of the best resource sectors in the game, there's no reason they should be mining anywhere else. The OOS combat strength of some of the new ships probably needs to be looked into as well, as I've seen PEs losing fights to single fighters where before a P would mulch entire squadrons of strike craft.

[Koizuki]

It sounds like there's a big combination of factors contributing to this; I'm not participating in the beta, but from what I've read so far it sounds like there are a couple issues related to each other here that contribute to the Xenon being quite lackluster in general.

1) It sounds like AI piloting/movement in general has been improved a bit, which enables the various factions' fleets to perform better, especially against the Xenon's typical smaller excursion groups
2) It seems like the factions now have additional Defense Stations spawed in key areas to prevent their early collapse to the old Xenon
3) If the stats on the new ships on the QSNA site are correct, the biggest issue appears to be that the new PE and SE ships only have a single shield generator now, meaning they've lost half their shields with no meaningful boost to hull, trading instead for a modest speed bump for the PE, and a near insignificant boost to the SE, but otherwise losing a significant amount of eHP

I feel #3 is one of the bigger issues, and I'm not sure why their shields were cut down making them now much easier to pick off. I can only assume it was changed because those ships are player-capturable now and they didn't want them that tanky in the players' hands, but the Xenon gets hamstrung by the change because they will lose them so much more quickly, especially since the S/SE is critical to their economy. If their ships are more vulnerable now they need to boost up the amount of ships the Xenon can field at any given time to offset their greater losses during combat. Otherwise, the Xenon end up not really being the "primary antagonist" of this game, as they won't really be the threat they're supposed to be to the galaxy.

With the buffs to the ability of the factions to fend them off, I think the Xenon need some buffs as well to keep up and keep things interesting. Things like giving the SE/PE their second shield generator back and/or increasing the number of Xenon jobs available, and adding a Solar Panel to Xenon Wharves and/or allowing them to build additional buildings/defense stations in their sectors for some redundancy and be resilient against being "accidentally" kneecapped if the player isn't actively hunting down all their SE's intentionally.

[Monstrosity]

It's easy to see this in action by starting a creative custom game in 7.00 and giving yourself satellite coverage of all the Xenon sectors. I did this a few times last night and Xenon consistently lost or were close to losing Frontier Edge, Faulty Logic I, and Matrix #451 with significant incursions into adjacent Xenon sectors. They get invaded by destroyer fleets and can't muster any meaningful resistance. They spam suicide a ton of SEs into enemy territory, crippling their economy. I've also seen many posts on Steam about a bug where they fail to deliver wares to build storages properly and thus never expand their number of stations, but I can't verify that one firsthand.

I think SEs on mining duty should be restricted to Xenon space unless they're explicitly making deliveries to stations outside of Xenon space during expansion. They have some of the best resource sectors in the game, there's no reason they should be mining anywhere else. The OOS combat strength of some of the new ships probably needs to be looked into as well, as I've seen PEs losing fights to single fighters where before a P would mulch entire squadrons of strike craft.

That’s been a major issue with the Xenon - them sending civilian ships just to die trying to go between sectors.

I’m not sure how the decision process works, but I would think adding a large penalty to the decision making for going through any enemy owned sectors, per sector, would help.

Would also need to make sure they are building miners where they actually need them and not some other sector hoping to have them traverse enemy sectors to get into the correct location.

How you prevent all the mining jobs being allocated to miners in wrong locations due to shifting needs, I’m not sure. Maybe have them recycle extras or something so they can build elsewhere. But I assume that’s also part of the problem.

[Koizuki]

That’s been a major issue with the Xenon - them sending civilian ships just to die trying to go between sectors.

I do believe they need to still be able to send them between sectors, as I recently had an issue in 6.20 that could only be solved by the Xenon sending out an S from a different sector.
That said, there are definitely improvements that must be made here.

First, and foremost, they should not send all of their S/SE out; the AI needs to ensure that there is a minimum of 1-2 S/SE within its origin sector, or adjacent sector depending on which one has resources, to ensure they always have a "safe" one.
Beyond that, they really need a way to allow the Xenon AI to reallocate them, as in the case of the issue I ran into in that thread, one Xenon sector only had one kind of S and none of the other kind, and they completely stalled because the miners were not able to shift into the Power Distribution role (or vice versa.)

[maderas]

I think it would help a lot if the Xenon in different sectors were split into their own AI subfactions. Expecting the AI to intelligently weigh decisions like this when it's trying to manage multiple fronts on opposite sides of the galaxy is probably too much.

[Pesanur]

IN my game, even after blocking the TER, TEL and MIN shipyards, the Xenon are unable to keep Matrix #451, the Teladi are crushing them with large fighters swarms.
Also the Xenon stumping their ships against my station in Fires Of Defeat instead of using those forces to defend their own sector don't help. We have a lot of broken logic here.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!An3feJbv1gLazhhBb9G ... u?e=u2xmBB

[adeine]

It's easy to see this in action by starting a creative custom game in 7.00 and giving yourself satellite coverage of all the Xenon sectors. I did this a few times last night and Xenon consistently lost or were close to losing Frontier Edge, Faulty Logic I, and Matrix #451 with significant incursions into adjacent Xenon sectors. They get invaded by destroyer fleets and can't muster any meaningful resistance. They spam suicide a ton of SEs into enemy territory, crippling their economy. I've also seen many posts on Steam about a bug where they fail to deliver wares to build storages properly and thus never expand their number of stations, but I can't verify that one firsthand.

I think SEs on mining duty should be restricted to Xenon space unless they're explicitly making deliveries to stations outside of Xenon space during expansion. They have some of the best resource sectors in the game, there's no reason they should be mining anywhere else. The OOS combat strength of some of the new ships probably needs to be looked into as well, as I've seen PEs losing fights to single fighters where before a P would mulch entire squadrons of strike craft.

That’s been a major issue with the Xenon - them sending civilian ships just to die trying to go between sectors.

I’m not sure how the decision process works, but I would think adding a large penalty to the decision making for going through any enemy owned sectors, per sector, would help.

Would also need to make sure they are building miners where they actually need them and not some other sector hoping to have them traverse enemy sectors to get into the correct location.

How you prevent all the mining jobs being allocated to miners in wrong locations due to shifting needs, I’m not sure. Maybe have them recycle extras or something so they can build elsewhere. But I assume that’s also part of the problem.

From what I've seen I think faction AI really struggles when it has disjointed territory, which is one of the main problems with the Xenon. I've never seen them have more than one effectively functional pocket of space in any of my games, and the same is true for other factions that own unconnected sectors. It's worse for the Xenon since they're hostile to everyone else, so trying to traverse the space between their various systems is suicide.

[aza502]

yep i've noticed the xenon getting wrecked and even pushed back in some areas. they feel like a joke. it's why i was hoping the crisis would be a huge overall buff for them to mess some stuff up but instead it's just a horde wave mechanic on the player only which feels so lazy and modders have done a better job years back of making a xenon crisis

[SpaceCadet11864]

From what I've seen I think faction AI really struggles when it has disjointed territory, which is one of the main problems with the Xenon. I've never seen them have more than one effectively functional pocket of space in any of my games, and the same is true for other factions that own unconnected sectors. It's worse for the Xenon since they're hostile to everyone else, so trying to traverse the space between their various systems is suicide.

Yes! I've noticed this too. I think it has something to do with the job system, it really just says "make me this ship, make me that station, get me these wares"

In the case where the job system says: "create a fleet of these such and such ships and place them at the following location" - you'll see all the different members of that fleet commute from different locations, and they are very vulnerable. On the way to the convergence location, a lot of ships end up dying. Has anyone here discussed having separate xenon sub-factions for each "corner" ? They could be "allies" and maybe be separate "branches" - or something. That way they wouldn't be flying across the map to assemble a fleet, or sending SE ships to their deaths.

Also I noticed an SE ship in hostile space just flying around, doing nothing. I then used the cheap trick of using "live stream" on it and it showed me its order - which was "AutoTrade: Energy Cells" - really? in the middle of hostile territory? c'mon man!

[SpaceCadet11864]

Also I noticed an SE ship in hostile space just flying around, doing nothing.

by hostile space, I meant hostile to Xenon. Basically it was flying around in Hewas Twin II, where in my particular game, it is filled with both mine and teladi space stations. In fact there isn't even a neighboring xenon sector. A few "jumps away" there is the last holdout for xenon but teladi have control over the whole corner. Xenon got crushed so hard, even me regularly hacking all friendly stations to make them stop building ships for at least 20 hours, and also building yaki ships nonstop, which really restructured the universe, didn't help the xenon.

[X4Starter]

It sounds like there's a big combination of factors contributing to this; I'm not participating in the beta, but from what I've read so far it sounds like there are a couple issues related to each other here that contribute to the Xenon being quite lackluster in general.

1) It sounds like AI piloting/movement in general has been improved a bit, which enables the various factions' fleets to perform better, especially against the Xenon's typical smaller excursion groups
2) It seems like the factions now have additional Defense Stations spawed in key areas to prevent their early collapse to the old Xenon
3) If the stats on the new ships on the QSNA site are correct, the biggest issue appears to be that the new PE and SE ships only have a single shield generator now, meaning they've lost half their shields with no meaningful boost to hull, trading instead for a modest speed bump for the PE, and a near insignificant boost to the SE, but otherwise losing a significant amount of eHP

I feel #3 is one of the bigger issues, and I'm not sure why their shields were cut down making them now much easier to pick off. I can only assume it was changed because those ships are player-capturable now and they didn't want them that tanky in the players' hands, but the Xenon gets hamstrung by the change because they will lose them so much more quickly, especially since the S/SE is critical to their economy. If their ships are more vulnerable now they need to boost up the amount of ships the Xenon can field at any given time to offset their greater losses during combat. Otherwise, the Xenon end up not really being the "primary antagonist" of this game, as they won't really be the threat they're supposed to be to the galaxy.

With the buffs to the ability of the factions to fend them off, I think the Xenon need some buffs as well to keep up and keep things interesting. Things like giving the SE/PE their second shield generator back and/or increasing the number of Xenon jobs available, and adding a Solar Panel to Xenon Wharves and/or allowing them to build additional buildings/defense stations in their sectors for some redundancy and be resilient against being "accidentally" kneecapped if the player isn't actively hunting down all their SE's intentionally.

I agree with a lot of this. Though I am not sure what the solution is as I don't have a clear grasp of what the underlying problem is.

Thanks for pointing out the shield discrepancy. I think that goes a long way in explaining why swarms in the past did more damage because of staying power.

Also not sure how the new needler weapons of the xenon compare to the older weapons

I like that the other factions are able to defend their territory now. I also like the fact that I don't have to babysit the gate network all the time to allow traders to function.

But I feel like the xenon have been continually nerfed, and maybe it is not necessary as much as you discuss.

It might be good to allow non-E variant ships that can't be captured in, like the old tanky P's. Personally I like the variety and the idea that maybe the xenon came upon a group of old isolated terraformers and out them to use as is rather than switching over to 'obsolete' older models. But not sure if that is enough

Ideally it is not just a stalemate. There should be back and forth.
In the old RTS's of the past, You push hard and take territory and the enemy got a buff to push back and vice versa between AI players.

[electricalfrost]

From what I've Studied throughout my experience throughout 5.10-6.20, the Xenon initially had some advantage from a few factors:

• Xenon Defense Platforms, K, and I are sturdy (and in the K's case, quick) with powerful, yet short range Graviton turrets.
• Commonwealth and most Terran Ships in the past wander within 5.5km from Xenon Stations and destroyers and greatly risk destruction.
• Xenon K are quick, despite their Cruiser Class-alike size, and can close the gap effectively.
• NPC Destroyers could target S/M ships despite more suitable L/XL opponents rolling in.
• Certain factions were not well-equipped to handle external threats in order to at least hold their territory(ZYA, FRF)
• CoP/Split Defense platforms may sometimes use L turrets that are not feasible against destroyers, due to stations randomly picking their types. (for Split, I've seen missiles and plasma do well, maybe mixing the two could do wonders)
• Tharka's Cascade and Matrix 451 are not considered as dangerous routes, contributing to countless freighter casualties.
• Adding to Patriarch Zyarth's frustration, Argon sends commuting destroyers through Tharka's Cascade to Reach Eleventh Hour, undermining Split defenses against Xenon along the way.

Ofc the Xenon's biggest caveats were the amount of patrols leaving one Xenon cluster to go to another, pushing through Commonwealth fleets and traffic, same with Power Distribution S/SE.
Xenon K in Argon prime? he probably just wanted to return to Savage spur 1, a portion of K and I in Family Zhin might've targeted Matrix #598 or Emperor's Pride for patrol, and thus saw various things in their path as interlopers.
Sometimes they just focus on the travel and not fire back. Basically, half of xenon invasions can simply be Commuters with Bigger Altima Energy.

Xenon had the handicap, and originally felt powerful as a result.

Breakthroughs against the xenon I've witnessed can happen either due to Terran Intervention Corps making their big shot count, or xenon exhausting their patrols and miners via attempted commutes, but not without a considerable amount of damage to neighboring CoP faction territory.

With what we have cooking in Beta, some factors have, for the most part, changed.

• Xenon Defense Platforms and stations are not as much a threat to most destroyers as before, due to weapons range differences, requiring a K or I to intervene.
• Teladi especially have the potential to saturate their patrols in borders with the Xenon.
• Commonwealth and Terran ships can consider battery/turret ranges to attack targets.

Likely breakthroughs can now happen due to effective use of destroyers deployed by the CoP, without the need of the player.

So at this point, it's simply the Xenon are next to seek some improving.
My two cents: Xenon would see improvements in their survivability if their Defense platforms are close to gates to help capitalize on their shortrange but powerful turrets,
though, having a few more dispersed around can prolong the Xenon's hold.

And of course, Xenon S/SE would benefit more from staying within their own sectors, with excess S/SE being allowed to exit the cluster to aid other clusters, including instruction to use Scale Plate Green's alternate gate to mine in Turquoise Sea.
Same with patrols, having the Excess go to other places and a separate incursion/invasion fleet for the task of attacking.