possible to cripple SCA?

[DrwHem]

the SCA keeps hacking my station so i have decided to destroy all of their stations in my sector at nopileos fortune II. Will this actually hurt them or will the game just spawn construction orders for new stations in the sector?

[hurepoix]

Afaik it is possible to destroy all SCA stations, but it will not prevent SCA pirate s ships activiy.

[eMYNOCK]

the one possibility to prevent them from hacking and stealing your stuff... from harrassing your traders and annoying you in general... is:

by banishing them onto the surface of their Homeplanet...

joke aside... this project unlocks their reputation and they just don't raid friends...

[Dracon]

My problems stopped when I found one of their plunderers who wanted to dock at my PHQ, and couldn't because one of my own ships blocked the dock... I then moved my Syn in annd destroyed their capitol ship. Haven't had any problems with them since, so it seems they've got the message.

[Нагризолич]

They will respawn rarely but regularily and attack your ships with cargo. You can set up an alert for L ships owned by SCA and deal with them manually. Those phoenixes are pretty expensive btw.

[narokusama]

how do get them to hack a station.... Never seen it happen

[Dracon]

Originally posted by narokusama:

how do get them to hack a station.... Never seen it happen

It happens when they pretend to be someone else and dock at your station. Afterwards, parts of your storage will float in space, and probably despawn before you can pick it up again. I lost the majority of what I had stored for the HMT I research that way.

[narokusama]

never happened to me

[Sola Di Ryuvia]

I've had it happen once on my shipyard and ouch it hurt. I even saw him trying to pickup all the floating cargo.

[Dinonoms]

Do you get a notification that someone hacked your stuff?

[Sola Di Ryuvia]

Honestly I would not have noticed a notification I get so many notifications every few seconds due to number of trades, police interdictions, asking to drop cargo (they never get it due to escorts), ships under attack 24/7 (I've been being the xenon to the xenon lately and invading them and setting up defense bases to control their sectors after wiping them out, im hungry for those 1,200k+ mineral/gas sectors now that i have 7 shipyards), lock boxes being found, ect. But i noticed it happens quite alot now to my stations without guards (even if it has like 500 turrets on it). Less so to stations with guards (even if it is a single destroyer). But i did watch as its happens now and then normally i just set 5 destroyers on the SCA ship for revenge before it can kill any traders/miners at the station once it turns red after the hack.

[DrwHem]

no, you have to just happen to be looking at your station.

[The Big Brzezinski]

From what I've seen, destroying SCA stations seems to have zero effect on the number of pirate ships. It's pretty unsatisfying, knowing they're just spawned in by fiat instead of built organically in a hidden pirate enclave somewhere. I guess once you made peace with the Scale Plate Pact and finally get the Xenon and Kha'ak suppressed, you've reached the win state.

[EPIC VOID]

Originally posted by The Big Brzezinski:

From what I've seen, destroying SCA stations seems to have zero effect on the number of pirate ships. It's pretty unsatisfying, knowing they're just spawned in by fiat instead of built organically in a hidden pirate enclave somewhere. I guess once you made peace with the Scale Plate Pact and finally get the Xenon and Kha'ak suppressed, you've reached the win state.

Imagine they had a sustainable economy solely based on raiding. That'd actually be an impressive in-game feature.

[The Big Brzezinski]

Ideally, raiding, piracy, and smuggling would just be ways of supplementing their economy. They'd have some factories and shipbuilding facilities on odd corners of the map. They'd be like any other faction, just with different priorities and methods.

The real problem is that nobody in this game (or most games) respects strength. It doesn't matter how much firepower I have or how close to destruction they are, enemies never surrender or give up the ship even when asked. I send out corvette and destroyer squads to eliminate every pillager and plunderer I see. I have satellites at almost every gate to monitor traffic. Whatever they're stealing, they're losing far more value than that in warship tonnage. By all rights, they should be leaving my ships alone, actively avoiding my assets, or even paying me protection money (which the other factions should then be mad at me about). I systematically removed every SCA station in Heretic's End, but they don't seem to care one lick. It's like killing enemy faction NPCs in World of Warcraft. You don't get anything for your effort, and they're going to quickly spawn again anyway like nothing happened. Heck, my gate watcher fleets have killed hundreds of Xenon ships, and the local sovereignties don't even thank me for it. All they care about is how many satellites and resource probes I've dropped for them.

Points is, pirates are more of an inconvenient natural phenomenon than a real faction. They're just something you put up with. They harass your traders, you hunt down and kill them. Their bravado and screams go equally unheard by the knacker's ears.

I guess they're a decent source of Behemoths at least when you're not otherwise busy.

[Sola Di Ryuvia]

If i remember right SCA (and all factions) have infinite credits. SCA and FAF (or whatever the split pirates are) just buy ships from every NPC faction's shipyards under non-pirate names. And they even spawn in random ships I think when they can't buy enough. I've sold ships to them somehow as "Argon", but then it says SCA when they go red instead of Argon. That's with SCA on blacklist.
(factions just don't make sense in X4 due to infinite credits. Though i can see why the devs did this to artifically keep them alive should they get "wiped" out.)