Is it even possible to flee from a Xeno ship?

[digitcruncher]

Playing as a sneaky spy. I'm not great, but not entirely new. Survived for nearly 6 years, got an extremely effective crew (although didn't end up getting much money). Did 47 missions, and was moving to a new sector as my home system was both a chokepoint and had a Xeno Swarm

Then I fought my first Xeno randomly for no real reason. No opportunities to avoid the fight, but that makes sense. Also, remember that Spy captains have +10 escape. Turn one, used 'Bolt' (+30 escape). Turn two, used that lvl 5 navigator skip talent (+15 escape). Turn three, cleared debuffs. Now I have +55 to my base escape, as well as having one of the highest evasion ships I could find. So I should flee right?

Nope. Xeno tries to move forward for the first time in the fight AND SUCCEEDS. And then succeeds every round after that until my hull buckles and everyone dies. Sad violin music plays.

Since Xeno ships can appear literally out of the blue, and can win in a straight up fight against anything short of a combat-specialist ship, does that mean that there is only one viable playstyle that can survive a decade of space travel: All combat xeno hunters? I honestly can't think of anything I could have done to make my escape chance higher!

[Füchsingeist]

Check your pilot, nav and command pools. Pilot for not getting hit, nav for changing range, command the same. ECCM matrix would help. First xeno encounter is always like that - either you are ax-crazy-prepared and go for boarding kill, or you skip off the void (nav 11 talent), or escape.

What year was that?
What difficulty?
Do you have screenshots?

[JimmysTheBestCop]

It's possible but you need to stack command and tactics on your crew. Command for fleeing tactics for range change. Both standard dice but you can get a lot of them.

Alternatively you could upgrade your ship with nav assist modules and escape modules. Since at long range nav is strong dice for range change and fleeing.

Either option works just depends which one works for your ship and your build.

Or you need to get skip off the void on 2-3 navigators so you can use it at the encounters screen and avoid combat.

[JimmysTheBestCop]

Remember torpedo hits can cause escape debuffs. Aka Distortion fields.

So your buffs can counteract the debuffs if you have enough base dice you can escspe round 1.

But you won't stand up to multiple rounds of torpedo hits cause too many debuffs will be applied on your ship.

Xeno love torpedo

[Tuidjy]

Xenos are deadly. They appear at some point, and you better have a plan for dealing with them.

If you are flying an un-upgraded starting ship, and all your crew is selected to facilitate missions running and card game, you will die. Period.

So what can you do?

1) Have an officer with the Jump off the Void talent. It's a way to avoid combat. Yes, an officer slot is not a trivial resource. It's still easier than the alternatives.

2) Build a second ship for combat early on, and switch to it before Xenos show up. Harder than it sounds, but with enough high end components, especially defense matrices, you may be able to simply dominate early Xeno ships. You will still need the crew to run it - if the components do not challenge your skill pool with their dice, they are probably not good enough.

3) Have a ton of military officers, who will increase your defense dice, via Command, and your range change dice, via Tactics. This will allow you to survive long enough to flee... or to blow the Xenos apart, as long as you are at it.

Personally, I just combine 2 and 3, and prey on the Xenos for reputation and profit. But I have never really played above Brutal difficulty long enough to meet Xenos.

Also...

4) Some people will tell you to build your ship for fleeing. I find that advice sheer nonsense. Xenos may just start the fight with three Twitch Surges in a row, and once they are at range 1 or 2, good luck ever getting away.

[Gilmoy]

You had 40s+0 escape dice (+10 from your Spy captain, +30 from Bolt).
That's decent, but it's less than 1/3 of the story.
The other 2/3 are the rest of your dice, and whatever the xeno rolled.
Don't leave those out. They matter: they're why you lost. Learn from it.

What did you actually roll? What did the xeno roll? What were the actual die rolls?
Open the Combat Log and look at those numbers first.

I assume you had about 40s+0 from your ship's navigation + engine speed (not agility).
Your crew in year 6 contribute some standard dice, maybe 0s+20 if you didn't build for it.
So your total is maybe 80s+20, which has an expectation of 36.0.
(That's [80*2 + 20] * 0.2 expectation for a standard die = 180 * 0.2 = 36.0.)
I simplify that to "mid-30s".

Now, I have no idea what you actually rolled. Maybe you fumbled the roll, and you lost 19-22. Or maybe the terrox rolled a hole-in-one and beat you 38-39. We can't distinguish from your bad luck vs. its good luck. I'm a bit surprised that a year 6 terrox beat your mid-30s. But I've seen weirder results than that, so nothing really surprises me.

At the bare minimum, you need to learn: a Terrox Dart rolls [EDIT] low-50s to range change.
That's your target number for all future playthroughs. Then always compute your ship's expected escape die roll (on your own, in your head or in external notes), and be constantly restless until you've upgraded it to mid-30s. Don't ever assume your game is going well until you haul your expected die roll above the danger line. In fact, let that be your new sense of "game is going well": when you know the target die rolls for ship defense, range change, and escape, and you finally surpass them. In a hostile galaxy full of terrox, progress is not measured by the number of missions you've completed, but by your expected die rolls in things that matter.

If you died and you didn't even learn that target number, then you can learn it in your next game, when this happens again. By game rule, the game engine cannot give you xeno ships before year 5. So expect them right around year 5.x, like clockwork. (It used to be worse ) That year 5 threshold is deliberately and carefully chosen so that a typical crew does not have Navigator T11 Skip Off the Void yet.

Off the top of my head:
1. Human ships roll high-50s to hit you.

Corollary 1.1: When your expected defense die roll is low-70s, congrats, you're ready to prey on human ships for fun and profit. Open with 1 Evasive Maneuvers to boost your expected defense die rolls to mid-90s, and you will never get hit by human ships. Then you can fight 1 ship every 6 weeks, and never lose.

Corollary 1.2: If your expected defense die roll is mid-50s, you are not ready yet for ship combat. You can still fight, but you must expect to get hit and take damage. The pirate's life is maybe not for you. In future work, we will consider adding more +defense strong dice to the ship, and/or more +Command levels to the crew, until Corollary 1.1 applies.

2. Terrox roll low-90s to hit you.
Corollary 2.1: When your expected defense die roll is low-110s, you're ready to farm xeno ships. Hire a Xeno Hunter crew and take T5 Here Be Monsters. You no longer need +escape, Skip, or jump-Skip fuel capacity. If you're nearly out of fuel and a terrox jumps you, you just fight it and win.

3. Terrox roll mid-50s to range change.
Corollary 3.1: If you're not at Corollary 2.1, you're here Then avoid terrox altogether (which means Skip), or beat that range change.

Corollary 3.2: Nothing beats Twitch Surge. If a terrox opens with that and you're here instead of in 2.1, the terrox say "xx", which is terrox for "gg". That terrox is living the pirate's life, and you are the checkbox on his task list for this 6-week cycle.

To summarize: Yes, it's possible to escape terrox. Just beat its die roll.
Prepare your ship + crew so that the sum of all of your dice gives an expected die roll that's greater than the last terrox ship's actual range change die roll.

And in your future posts, it would help greatly, as a form of discipline, to quote your ship + crew's total escape dice, compute your own expected escape die roll, and then quote the actual die rolls from the Combat Log. That meticulous work tends to improve all aspects of your game.

[digitcruncher]

Thanks for this. I have never understood the combat system in this game, but thought I understood the escape values, and assumed the +55 was applied to the 27/30 value on my M2400 engines speed/agility values, which meant that that +55 modifier should have dominated. I see now that that +55 was applied to my dice rolls (which I didn't even know was a thing in combat, I thought it was just for random events during travel and events during missions!). I am now reading the wiki on combat to work out just how much I don't know.

This game is certainly a lot deeper than I gave it credit... I was running of a very old review that said that this game has great story but a 'lackluster combat system' ... maybe the problem isn't that the combat isn't lackluster, but is actually a little obtuse. Thanks for adding the 'The opponents ship has better/worse defense/attack/range change/escape capabilities' tooltip though, as that helped me a lot.

[Edit]Oh my goodness! Something just clicked. For a long time, I thought that the downside of more expensive weapons and technology was that it was more expensive and that the ship dice pools were increased. But now, after looking at the tooltips for the ship-based skills (like Pilot), I actually see that having higher dice pools is a GOOD thing, as it increases your ships stats in combat[/edit]

[Gilmoy]

You're not wrong. Your escape dice are:

27s+00: engine speed
21s+00: navigation (estimated) -- I don't know yours, so I use mine from my Juror Class in year 7
10s+00: +escape from Spy Captain trait -- I assume your ship components add +0s escape
00s+21: electronics (estimated) -- from my Juror Class
00s+40: command (estimated) -- my 3400 mass Juror had 48 Command in year 7, so I prorate it
=======
48s+61 = (48*2 + 61)*0.2 = 157 * 0.2 = 31.4 expected escape roll

So that's low-30s to escape, just from your ship. That's a decent threshold.
In fact, that's exactly my threshold to escape from human Bounty Hunters in year 2.

Then you add from talents:
30s+0: Spy T5 Bolt on turn 1
20s+0: Navigator T5 Fast Getaway on turn 2
======
50s+0 = +20.0 expected escape roll

These dice do add linearly to your engine speed. Then your total expectation is the sum of those two parts, or low-50s. The only detail you're missing is that a strong die has 0.4 expected success, by definition.

~~~~~~~~

The problem is that the other terrox has itx own dice, and they swamp your total, even with both of your talents. I browsed my archive of ship fights, and I see that I've totally misremembered terrox range change die rolls. (Sorry )

- Terrox Dart/Spine: engine 30/30, range change = low-50s
- Terrox Cruiser/Heavy Cruiser: engine 15/12, range change = mid-50s

In that light, your failure to escape is actually average. On turn 1 with only Bolt, you had low-30s + 12.0 from Bolt = mid-40s, but any terrox will roll at least low-50s. On turn 2, you may have already lost some components and/or crew from damage, and even then your low-50s total is only a coin flip with the terrox. So you lost 1 coin flip.

Ugh. So the threshold to escape a terrox is high-50s. Egad. I just blew up my own opening theory This, from the data, we learn.

[Tuidjy]

Originally posted by Gilmoy:

21s+00: navigation (estimated) -- I don't know yours, so I use mine from my Juror Class in year 7

You're flying that piece of sнiт in year 7?!

Is this a self-imposed challenge? Why on earth are you trying to polish a turd?

I know that you can get a better ship, I learned how to play this game from you, and I get a Sword Cutter before Xenos show up. Is there something that I am missing?

[Gilmoy]

Basically, it's just the granularity in mission tours. I was in the Juror for 2 mission tours, and I bought the Reach between them. It can't fly on the turn I buy it, and yy.ww 6.40 was the earliest I got back to it.

Impossible, Alta Mesa = Orion Expanse. My game goal was to go to Minervas Helix once.

1. Juror Class
Erik Faen sends me to Dark Maelstrom and back = 4 years. (It wasn't my fault!)
I buy the Reach Cruiser.

Mission unwinding takes me to Ironforge Abyss and back = 2 more years.
This was the only risk I took. I knew it was a race to L14 before a terrox.
In the end, my Juror never saw a terrox ship. They were so late, it retired intact.

2. Reach Cruiser, have been Captain for 6 years 40 weeks.
My bucket list takes me to Minervas Helix and back = 4 years.
It beats human ships! It finally met 3 terrox ships, but I had Skip Off the Void by then.
Bought a Sword Battlecruiser.
Missions took me to Hyperion Abyss and back = 3 years.

3. Sword Battlecruiser, have been Captain for 13 years 34 weeks.
It was only about 3/4 upgraded, but I kept checking its expected die rolls, and it was already Simply Superior In Every Way to the Reach. So it was ready to fly. It beats terrox ships!

The Swordfish's maiden flight lasts 17 years
Around year 40 (not kidding), I finally start to upgrade its small tier 3s to 4s, and its cargo holds.
It wins already, so there was no urgent pressure.

[Tuidjy]

Ah, I think I see what creates the big difference.

I usually play Steel Song, and all of my Faen missions are very much concentrated in the nearby quadrants. I start with 6 contacts, and I often carry 20+ missions at once, being very careful to never take anything that takes me further than The Loop. A lot of quick money rolls in.

Thus I can afford to buy a Wolf Vector in Hyperion Abyss, and install 5 Javat matrices at once. That ship lasts me a long time. Meanwhile, I commission a Pallas Freighter from the same planet and keep switching between it and the Wolf, upgrading one as I fly the other.

I only switched to the Battlecruiser to tackle the Jyeeta. The Pallas was perfectly OK for anything, including Jyeeta, but I wanted to play with crafts. I found them lacking.

(It all was on Brutal. On Impossible money is tighter, mostly because I cannot just reap the wilderness in the first year the way I could on Brutal. On Impossible, I need to level my marines over my captain, first.)