L Miners vs M Miners

[CaveSpider]

With the nerf to mining and would seem to be the abundant Kha'ak spawning on them I have been trying to keep stations stocked. M Miners get wrecked by Kha'ak now and I would take an epic amount of Kha'ak to kill a large so I have moved to large.

The problem is even after testing M Flak seems the best for killing Kha'ah that spawns on them but still will not really get the job done so all that really happends is they keep the L ship from using travel drives so it slows the return speed of the ship. Making the fast ones like Split/Para ones kinda bad. I love the look of the new TER ones on a side note.

Any one have any ideas on how to make this better, with the nerfs and how demanding the TER production line can be its taking me 50+ L miners to keep up with just one large factory. Silicon and Methane being the pain. I really do not want to give every miner a escort of M ships that would be spendy just to speed up the return. And even policing or Patrol the ships dont respond to miners getting attacked (Its dumb police should respond to attacks in the sector).

[Нагризолич]

You are building workforce infrastructure, right?

[CaveSpider]

Originally posted by Нагризолич:

You are building workforce infrastructure, right?

Yes for the HQ shipyard TER so the 3 TER resources needed to produce ships
Any mass mining in a sector will draw large amounts of Kha'ak

[Нагризолич]

Then you likely have chosen the wrong sector to build. I suggest you find good silicon spot somewhere, build a tiny station right there with nothing but dock and storage on it and base your miners there, and repeat-order-deliver that silicon across the sectors.
Also your miners will pretty much always mine out of sector, thus turret stats other than damage and range don't matter, so equip full plasma on everything (they don't even need mining turrets to mine). I also suggest thickest shields and default flee order when attacked, so that they would survive a fly-by past a xenon destroyer.

[blackphoenixx]

You don't need a fleet of M ships, all you need a single frigate in the sector you're mining in and the willingness to make 2 clicks to give an attack order when your miners call about being attacked by khaak.

It's not like Khaak attacks happen every 5 minutes. Your miners get attacked, you give your frigate in that sector an attack order and go back to what you were doing and it'll be calm for an hour or two unless there's a base.
It doesn't NEED to work completely without your input.

If you want it to you can just use repeat orders with attack targets in range to have it patrol your mining areas.

Also no non-base khaak spawn i've ever seen needed more than 5-10 interceptors to deal with, if that. A well equipped frigate can handle them easily alone, especially with defense drones out. A multi-frigate escort is simply overkill.

Also crew skill for miners has a huge influence on mining speed (A 3-star average crew is about 3x as effective as a 1-star one) so you can look into improving that to reduce the number of ships you have to protect (or at least expand without having to increase it as fast).

You don't have to farm seminars to level every pilot up to 5 stars but at least making sure they have 2 already makes a huge difference (you can give out seminars over comms btw, don't have to fly there) and you can easily get hundreds of 5 star service crew from buying a builder ship and having it build stations.

1-star piloting seminars also drop fairly regularly from the inter-faction conflicts. Set up a scout or courier to repeat orders collect items in the HOP border sectors and you'll get a steady trickle of them without having to comb station traders manually.
You'll also be swimming in mod parts, hacking tools and SETA components.

[CaveSpider]

Originally posted by Нагризолич:

Then you likely have chosen the wrong sector to build. I suggest you find good silicon spot somewhere, build a tiny station right there with nothing but dock and storage on it and base your miners there, and repeat-order-deliver that silicon across the sectors.
Also your miners will pretty much always mine out of sector, thus turret stats other than damage and range don't matter, so equip full plasma on everything (they don't even need mining turrets to mine). I also suggest thickest shields and default flee order when attacked, so that they would survive a fly-by past a xenon destroyer.

it would seem for me the repeat orders will not deliver all the cargo after a bit leading to them doing 1 unit at a time after a bit

[CaveSpider]

Originally posted by blackphoenixx:

If you want it to you can just use repeat orders with attack targets in range to have it patrol your mining areas.

This seems to be a good solution as well as really fast Katana's almost 1km/s unmoded

[Valhalla Awaits]

M miners are better at actual mining than L miners. (Significantly) But the L miners are the only ones that can survive without constant protection. Sadly you just have to live with this fact and adapt as best as possible. I've had to start replacing my M's with L's too due to the raids, but god almighty are L miners crap at mining regardless of star rating in most sectors. (They are decent is SOME sectors if the asteroids are concentrated enough.)

What the game really needs is a "working" defend sector fleet setting that causes your ships to IMMEDIATELY go after ANY hostile target that pops up in ANY of your ship/station/statilite's radar ranges.

[CaveSpider]

Originally posted by Valhalla Awaits:

What the game really needs is a "working" defend sector fleet setting that causes your ships to IMMEDIATELY go after ANY hostile target that pops up in ANY of your ship/station/statilite's radar ranges.

Agreed even if you need to own the sector for this to happen

[blackphoenixx]

Originally posted by Valhalla Awaits:

What the game really needs is a "working" defend sector fleet setting that causes your ships to IMMEDIATELY go after ANY hostile target that pops up in ANY of your ship/station/statilite's radar ranges.

Why does the game need to play itself even more?

There is nothing wrong with NPC behavior not being perfectly optimized without actual player input.
In fact that's exactly as it should be - a player micromanaging or doing a task themselves should always be more efficient than simply clicking 2 buttons and leaving the AI to do it by itself.

As i said above you can easily guard an entire sector with a single frigate.
Multiple sectors even if your miners have good shields and you use something fast like a Gorgon.
You just have to tell it where to go when enemies appear which takes like 3 or 4 mouse clicks.

But if you want your sectors to be completely safe without you lifting a single finger after setting up the initial orders you can damn well pay out the nose for it and set up interceptors every 80km instead. That's the price you pay for being completely hands off.
That's balance, not broken.

[Valhalla Awaits]

Originally posted by blackphoenixx:

Originally posted by Valhalla Awaits:

What the game really needs is a "working" defend sector fleet setting that causes your ships to IMMEDIATELY go after ANY hostile target that pops up in ANY of your ship/station/statilite's radar ranges.

Why does the game need to play itself even more?

Because I don't want to have to micromanage the hell out of every sector in the game while simultaneously giving fleet commands in a major battle. I should expect the pilots I hire to have enough common ******* sense to know that bad guys need to go boom boom without me having to club them over the head each time one shows up.

As it stand the devs could remove almost HALF of the fleet commands from the game overnight, and noone would even notice for a few days given how USELESS many of them are and have always been.

[Flavalicious]

You need repeat order patrols in your life dude. lol

I run 3 squadrons of 3 "interceptor corvettes" per mining zone that Im operating in. 2 of them are set to attack with commander, last one is the patrol leader, i do repeat order > Attack enemies within range and then do that 4 times to give them 4 waypoints. The corvettes move so fast at travel speed the entire lap takes like 30 seconds, combine that with the other 3 squads and any medium miner that gets attacked is already saved before i even get the call on the radio.

Then I jump into one of the patrol corvettes and i go find the station spawning them. Usually about 200km out from the farthest lockbox you can scan, if you happen to see where they attack most often, the base isnt far out from there (and can be seen visually from super far away). Then i send in the destroyer to kill it with a few corvettes set to intercept on commander so they can clear the enemy fighters off

[blackphoenixx]

Originally posted by Valhalla Awaits:

Originally posted by blackphoenixx:

Why does the game need to play itself even more?

Because I don't want to have to micromanage the hell out of every sector in the game while simultaneously giving fleet commands in a major battle. I should expect the pilots I hire to have enough common ******* sense to know that bad guys need to go boom boom without me having to club them over the head each time one shows up.

As it stand the devs could remove almost HALF of the fleet commands from the game overnight, and noone would even notice for a few days given how USELESS many of them are and have always been.

You don't have to micromanage everything, you simply have to invest more to automate it. That's my point. You get either cheap or automatic, not both.

Your AI pilots will do fine intercepting enemies all by themselves, but they'll only do so in a 40km radius around their assigned commander.

If you want said commander to patrol a mining site you set a frigate on repeat orders to attack enemies in range at 3-4 points around the site, then assign interceptors to intercept for that frigate.
The frigate will fly circles around your mining site attacking enemies and the intercepters will attack everything within a 40km range of it.

But obviously the larger an area you want to protect the bigger the chance that your patrol will be on the other side of it when enemies appear, which is why you need more than one patrol for an entire sector or simply use miners tough enough to hold out until the patrol comes around again.

Though as a side benefit combat is the only thing aside from exploration i've found that levels up pilot skill over 2 stars at a noticable (though still slow) pace, so i'd treat it more as an investment.
They can even make you money themselves and a steady supply of mod/crafting items if you set the patrol commander to alternate between "attack targets in range" and "collect items" on repeat.

[Aeekto]

Set your miners on flee under all circumstances.
Didn't lose a single miner even using a swarn of terranships with mining turrets and basic equip (realy slow and no defense), even mining nividium and khaak spawning over and over.
I don't even have a patrol in those sectors.... my miners simply boost away as soon khaak spawn and before they get hit.

[arrak]

Originally posted by Valhalla Awaits:

M miners are better at actual mining than L miners. (Significantly) But the L miners are the only ones that can survive without constant protection. Sadly you just have to live with this fact and adapt as best as possible. I've had to start replacing my M's with L's too due to the raids, but god almighty are L miners crap at mining regardless of star rating in most sectors. (They are decent is SOME sectors if the asteroids are concentrated enough.)

What the game really needs is a "working" defend sector fleet setting that causes your ships to IMMEDIATELY go after ANY hostile target that pops up in ANY of your ship/station/statilite's radar ranges.

Like in X3. With "patroll Sector" i gave waypoints. Enemy apears, waypoints becomes
last priority, they Mark enemy and give immediate chase. Enemy can then go off radar, but still be chased because marked.
Other enemies apearing somewhere else in sector, are marked and added to a list of
"next one to kill"
The Enemy as diversion sometimes used their first cluster of ships, to divert your 1st fleet to chase that first enemy cluster.
The second cluster of enemy would rush your station.
Thats Why i had 3-4 Fleets in Sector.
Multiple Fleet Mechanics in X3:
First enemy cluster marked and chased by fleet in your multiple fleets. Second enemy cluster appear and a second fleet of yours puts first marked from first to last on list, and chases
new apeared enemy cluster. (while one of your fleet is still chasing the first "cluster")
Rince at repeat for all different enemy cluster being hunted.
Was a Very effective system with AI reacting pronto and with purpose. Kill or be killed.

In X3 you could individually set each ship how they should treat each "faction.
Regarless of repp.
In X4, after the last New Update, they have added a "FIRE OVERRIDE" function in
"CREATE Rule" Menue, where you can do the same about.
Have you tried that?
I´m busy experimenting whith that one :)

I only use M miners.
And you know why :)
That with the L miners goes a long way, But because of "newly" I have no choice
but to use M (or S. S is very effective and gets left alone, hold capacity to small though)

[Sungod1]

I am using L miners for Traders/Haulers from Resource Depot Stations that are stocked by M miners. I have figured out how to beat the silicon blues.