What happens when all the Xenon are eradicated?

[Azrael]

I tried googling it and found many old (and possibly outdated) threads, that they don't come back, if you destroy every last ship of them.
Now I'm not actively hunting Xenons, but I wanted to see the Xenons invading Hatikvah's Choice I, having epic fights with them at northern jump gate in that sector.

What I got instead, after several raid fleets (but only with small ships of S and M size) and their destruction was the Xenon basically afk'ing in Tharka's Cascade and the other Xenon Sectors in that northwestern area of the map.
And now ZYA is eradicating them there one sector after another, having already secured both of the Tharka's Cascade Sectors.

I got satellites at the jump gates and ship wharfs and stations of the Xenon there, but they don't build ♥♥♥♥ up there, nothing. Basically, besides Defence Drones, when you attack their bigger stations there or fly near, these sectors are devoid of Xenon Activity with the stations sitting there only waiting to be destroyed. I guess my Defence Station in Hatikvah's Choice I was too good at killing off the Xenon, including their mining ships and energy transporters.

And the Teladi are pushing slowly but steadily into the Xenon Sectors between them and FRF, pushing there Xenon out too.

It seems to me that the Xenon have too few ressources to compete, wherever they are and are no real threat, they just die out, even if the player doesn't intervene by actively hunting the Xenon.
I wish them to be a bigger threat and for my next playthrough I'm probably going to pick up one of the Xenon Mods to make them a bigger threat.

What happens now, in 4.0 (or upcoming 4.1), when the Xenons are wiped out? Are they gone for good, really extinct or does the game at some point maybe spawn two or three battlefleets of them back in, clearing a sector of all life and reviving the XEN Faction there?

[Pathogenic]

If they were not gone for good, then players who took the effort to wipe the out would feel cheated that the game simply spawns them back in, erasing their previous efforts, and making it feel pointless to try to remove them from the game.

But they will never get wiped out completely without significant player intervention.

[Azrael]

Originally posted by Pathogenic:

If they were not gone for good, then players who took the effort to wipe the out would feel cheated that the game simply spawns them back in, erasing their previous efforts, and making it feel pointless to try to remove them from the game.

But they will never get wiped out completely without significant player intervention.

Well in my current playthrough, they seem to be easily wiped out in the cluster between ZYA and ARG Space.

The only upside I see from this (maybe), is, that maybe, once ZYA is finished with wiping out the Xenons there, he turns his fleet to attack the Argons, that's what I'd like to see.

But honestly, this contrast is so huge, like every piece of Ingame lore tells you, that the Xenon are the biggest threat to the civilizations, nearly wiping out the Terrans, the one big enemy, all of the people of the Gate Network can and need to unite against and so on... and in reality they're a joke, a mere nuissance at best.

That is a huge disappointment to me, so I already started eyeing several Xenon Mods, having to decide, which one of these is the best, unless Egosoft fixes the Lethargy of the Xenons themselves.

Imho, since they added more enemies with the Terrans and Segaris Pioneers, that fight the Xenon, they should up the cap limit of Xenon Ships and Fleets and give them more ressources to mine within their sectors, so they can actually keep up with the all the Factions that want to kill them off.

[Navy~]

i dont know these issues. In all my games ZYA gets wiped out by xenon, they remain with the capital sector only.

You might have impacted too much with defence stations or something that got them this weak. i had one savefile in which i had built defence stations at their exit points in argon space and teladi or free families after that xenon become irrelevant. So i guess its your choice if you want them life threatening or not by doing something about it.

I prefer them in game though. Too much nothingness without them.

[Azrael]

Originally posted by Navy~:

i dont know these issues. In all my games ZYA gets wiped out by xenon, they remain with the capital sector only.

You might have impacted too much with defence stations or something that got them this weak. i had one savefile in which i had built defence stations at their exit points in argon space and teladi or free families after that xenon become irrelevant. So i guess its your choice if you want them life threatening or not by doing something about it.

I prefer them in game though. Too much nothingness without them.

Well I only have a defense station at the exit of Tharkas Cascade XV into Hatikvah's Choice I.

I built that because the Xenon were harassing my miners, coming from Silent Witness and HC III, there, I wanted that threat to be dealt with.

But this was before I read into the matter, how the factions AI internally works, that it like hands out "Jobs" that should be done and allocates them to sectors, no matter where the sector is and no matter how far away it is from a ship, it has allocated the job to.

So I assume, that the AI behond the XEN faction has sent mining ship after mining ship to the Sectors between ZYA and ARG to fulfill jobs there, that these ships only fly through HC I and then got killed by my station and that starved the Xenon there of ressources.

I guess I'll have to demolish my defence station then and give up the plot, to test, if that helps the Xenon to get back on their feet in that area.

I'm wondering, if it would help the Xenon, if they'd be split up into 4 factions (for ease, if you call them NW, SW, NE and SE Xenons), these factions all being allied together of cause, leading to them not sending Mineships through a wide hostile area for them from e.g. the Southeast Xenons in Scale Plate Green to the NW Xenons in Tharkas Cascade and beyond, so the NW Xenons in Tharka's Cascade would build their own miners, which use solely the ressources present in Savage Spur II, their Matrix Sector (can't recall the number of that one) and the Tharka's Cascade Sectors, in the end establishing real invasion fleets, that really are a threat that could challenge ZYA, ARG and TEL/MIN and conquer a sector or two.

[Daddy Shark]

When the game as younger, the xenon were free to do their thing and usually ended up steamrolling the entire galaxy before the player could muster enough strength to stop them. So the devs put a limiter in place to keep the xenon under control so this no longer happens.

The problem is they nerfed them a little too hard. Now they're not so much of a threat.

I made a mod that basically doubles the amount of ships the Xenon are allowed to build. In the case of miners and transports it triples the quota. It doesn't mess with their guns or engines or anything like that. It just allows the xenon to make more ships.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2523754405

[lnomsim]

The problem is that it is very hard to balance the Xenons.
On my vanilla playthrough, they aren't that much of an issue, and they invade rarely. They also lost a lot of sectors really early.

In my modded game, even after dozen and dozen of hours I still can't build my empire, because they wreck sectors after sectors, no shipping lines are safe, and they often destroy trading stations.

I spend more time playing the gate guardian, moving all across the playfield with my fleet than actually building said fleet.

I have never encountered the in-between where they can put up a fight but the other factions know how to retaliate accordingly.

[Dudefast]

yeah, in 4.0 the Xenon seem weak. I've started 2 games in 4.0, and HOP steamrolled them both times quickly along with ANT in the bottom left corner. And ZYA in the top left. Each time the only place they didnt get wiped out fast was on the far right, where they fight TEL.

On the Yaki invasion mission, I cleared out all the TER destroyers and carriers, and sabotaged stations along the way, and the Xenon still didnt make it past Getsu Fune with 2 Is and about 10 Ks.

The Xenon just seem handicapped

[Ruges]

Pretty early into my 4.0 play through. but so far Xenon seem much weaker then before. Normally by this point Hatikvah's choice I is crawling with them to the point where I have to limit my ships from entering until I am ready to deal with them. Company Regard is still under Teladi control. Hop has not taken Faulty logic, but AR has taken Frontiers Edge without my help. Zyartts dominion is not crawling with xennon. Niether is two grand or Fires of defeat. Have not made it over to wretched skirs or family areas to see how its doing over there.

But so far Xenon seems much weaker then they have in the past. Granted people usually complained they where too strong before (although I did not have an issue with them before).

[Azrael]

Originally posted by Ruges:

Pretty early into my 4.0 play through. but so far Xenon seem much weaker then before. Normally by this point Hatikvah's choice I is crawling with them to the point where I have to limit my ships from entering until I am ready to deal with them. Company Regard is still under Teladi control. Hop has not taken Faulty logic, but AR has taken Frontiers Edge without my help. Zyartts dominion is not crawling with xennon. Niether is two grand or Fires of defeat. Have not made it over to wretched skirs or family areas to see how its doing over there.

But so far Xenon seems much weaker then they have in the past. Granted people usually complained they where too strong before (although I did not have an issue with them before).

I once played a while ago, when Split Vendetta was somewhat fresh, but then stopped playing for a while until recently.

I remember back then, how the Xenon invaded HC I with an I.

Of cause I couldn't do something really, because it was very early game, my only ship was my Elite Vanguard from Young Gun Start and I was a clueless noob.
But nonetheless I liked that happening very much, because the Xenon really felt threatening to me then!

For me, a game where it is a climb up all the time, that is boring, a setback or two (and may it only be indirect, that you can't let AI travel through an Xenon infested sector) bring motivation and makes the game interesting.

Right now, the Xenon aren't really invading with K's or I's, I see them only invading once in a while with small fleets of S and M sized ships e.g. in Fires of Defeat, Frontier Edge and the Void (but that is really rare, Void is 99% of the time save) and, before I closed the gap, Hatikvah's Choice I.

The only time I see K's out of Xenon Territory (and so far in that 4.0. save I've NEVER seen an I out of Xenon Territory), they're not really invading with it, the K is alone and it just seems to me, that it is in a defensive stance and just transiting to another Xenon sector, but I don't even need to do anything, since they fly through heavily travelled (and thus heavily guarded) systems like Argon Prime, the AI factions deal with them easily by themselves.
And I can't remember seeing the Xenon ever invading with an L or XL sized ship like K's or I's in that 4.0. save.

As I said earlier, they just feel like a joke, a mere nuissance at best, not an existential threat that challenges me. Nothing challenges me in that save except my motivation to wait for profits to invest into new stations.

[BGratz]

Would be nice if every faction would have a own sector (with only one gate) the AI of other factions never cross, so only the player can eleminate them from the game

[Daddy Shark]

You guys are blowing the xenon way out of proportion. The only reason they're a scourge on the galaxy and all that is because of their massive numbers. Otherwise, they're stupid and weak. We've seen how a bunch of pirates on a shoe-string budget managed to trick and control them. Ren Otani managed to trick them with the help of the Split in Rebirth. I don't imagine it will be long before the galactic denizens figure out a way to defeat them once and for all.

The xenon aren't all-knowing and all-powerful. They've been (and still are) cut off from each other when the gates went down just like everyone else. That takes away their primary advantage of overwhelming numbers.

There's an entire galaxy of targets out there to fight with. You don't HAVE to fight the Xenon and ONLY the Xenon. If you want a fight, go pick a fight with someone.

Personally I hope the Xenon are eradicated soon and we come up with some other "big bad" to shoot. Maybe the Ancients come back and they're ready to kick everyone else out of their galaxy. Maybe Ren Otani built a massive militaristic force in the Rebirth sectors that exists until this day (he had control of Omicron Lyrea), and they're ready to smash everyone when their space reconnects with the x4 sectors. I could even go for a "branch 10" version of the xenon that are radically different.

Someone other than the exact same enemies we've been fighting for every game so far.

[Riepah]

The Xenon being horrible push-overs is the reason I have not played in quite a while. I hope they'll fix it soon. If the next big update doesn't address this, I guess I'll finally start modding and get used to the fact that I'll never get to do Ventures.

[Big Papa]

Not sure about X4, but X3 I think you could never wipe anything out. They will respawn with set amount of resources to attack, and try to establish sectors. Not just Xeon bit all factions.

[Wraith]

Originally posted by vanhelsing:

Not sure about X4, but X3 I think you could never wipe anything out. They will respawn with set amount of resources to attack, and try to establish sectors. Not just Xeon bit all factions.

X3 unless you modded it you can never really affect the factions that much.

[BurlsoL]

Originally posted by Azrael:

So I assume, that the AI behond the XEN faction has sent mining ship after mining ship to the Sectors between ZYA and ARG to fulfill jobs there, that these ships only fly through HC I and then got killed by my station and that starved the Xenon there of ressources.

This makes me wonder if something was done between Split and Cradle DLC where the Xenon AI or resource availability was changed to make their miners prioritize areas outside Xenon space instead of mining locally. And that this change was what made the Xenon either crushing everything or getting destroyed by the AI depending on what version of the game was used when the game was started.

In my own game (4.0, cradle of humanity) the Xenon pretty much do nothing of note several hours into the game and have mostly lost ground in several sectors. I not only had to install Xenon Proliferation mod to keep Xenon from getting wiped out by Terran Protectorate, but had to tweak the mod to make the build costs and time much lower to give them a fighting chance. But they are still sending out their miners senselessly.