Anyone thinks that Xenon stations are so busted because Egosoft doesn't want us to take sectors from them?

[Skyguard]

Just a thought I came up with on the 6th hour of killing a xenon shipyard without losing every ship I brought.

[Oddible]

Not sure what you're trying to do or why, but station combat is one of the more challenging things to balance in the game. You can LITERALLY take out a Xenon Defense Station with a single destroyer (not even an Asgard, just an Odysseus). But at the same time you can send a fleet at them and the fleet will be wiped out. So if you want the station dead, kill it yourself. If you're complaining about fleets not being able to do it, well, there are probably several things you could do differently that would improve your odds. Rather than approach this and the forums as if Egosoft is a failure, why not ask the questions that will help you get what you want? (Hint: it isn't ES that is the failure in this scenario.)

I take out stations in one of 3 ways depending on how I'm feeling at any given moment and the urgency of my attention and how many highly skilled pilots I've got. 1) Fly a single destroyer of literally any type (Rattlesnakes are tougher because of their range but can be done). I poke out all the L Gravitons then I send in a fleet to finish it off. 2) If I don't need it done quickly and I've not got a lot of 4-5 star destroyer captains, I'll fly my destroyers (pref Odysseus with L Plasma Turrets) in a ring around the station. I'll manually position them at about 7-8km so their turrets can hit the station and I set turrets to Attack All Enemies. I do NOT give them an attack order so they don't use their main batteries. This takes a while but no one gets hurt. 3) If I have a handful of high star rating captains and I have the means to quickly replace losses, I fly in fleets and give them a coordinated attack order from ABOVE the station (that way they only are getting hit by one set of Gravitons). Ideally I've got fighters with missiles in that fleet. I take some losses but my high star destroyer captains mostly stay at range and the station defenses go down pretty quickly.

Good luck. Don't be busted.

[Damedius]

I tried the single destroyer last night. Drones ended up shooting out my engines and I ended up getting bored before I finished. That was just a Solar Power Plant.

I would think you would need at least five destroyers to make it less tedious and maybe 4 or 5 fighters to take care of the drones.

[Afro Luigi]

Drones only launch when you get within a certain distance of the Xenon station. It's entirely possible to sit outside the launch range and destroy the Xenon Dock modules before closing it to bring more firepower to bear.

That's how I've destroyed Xenon stations solo in the past.

[Oddible]

Don't kill the station with you in the pilot seat. Just shoot the L Graviton turrets then hop out and let your captain finish up. Yes, it takes forever. My preferred commonwealth ship is an Odysseus with L plasma turrets and M flack. Can solo defend the defense drones usually.

[Skyguard]

Lads, lads, lads. I know that it can be done. I did siege xenon stations before. My point is that it takes ten million years because for some reason they have 5 times the amount of health compared to regular stations and also no matter what kind of station it is they always have batteries upon batteries of completely broken graviton turrets so I have to do it myself every time. Asgard's laser oneshots every ship in the game but it barely scratches xenon station, it's ridicilous.

[Daddy Shark]

It actually makes sense.

Everyone in the galaxy is out to kill them at all times. Of course they're going to make their stations uparmored.

The silver lining here is that once you fight one of the real factions it seems like their stations are made of oiled paper. I can tear through an entire Split sector in the time it takes to kill a single Xenon solar power plant.

[[RLF]KING]

There are no Xenon sectors anymore in my galaxy. But that sad, as i'm missing the figths.

[Daddy Shark]

Originally posted by RLFKING:

There are no Xenon sectors anymore in my galaxy. But that sad, as i'm missing the figths.

So go pick a fight.

I see this so much on the forums and it drives me nuts. You know you don't ONLY have to fight the Xenon, right? You can declare war on anyone and everyone. You can't spend 500+ hours building a trading utopia where all the races hold hands and sing kum-by-ya together and then complain there's no fighting going on.

[Meme Turtle]

Xenon stations in particular and ship vs station combat in general are busted cause Egosoft knows how to develop game engines and game assets but not how to make balanced game mechanics out of those. Station combat has broken dichotomy: you are either being absolutely safe and firing with impunity or dead in seconds cause stations have firepower of a fleet packed into 1m^3.

Being a station, the station doesn’t move a lot. It’s got station-keeping thrusters to move it back into position in the event it’s moved away by a collision or some such, and that’s about it. The station also rotates slowly, making it more difficult to focus fire on a specific defensive module, especially if it’s got other ships escorting it.

Gameplay-wise, this presents a clear pitfall – if anything outranges the station, it’ll be able to damage it with impunity, because the station can’t move. This isn’t very different from what large and slow ships face already, though, so the solution is a more extreme version of the “dedicated targeting core” hullmod that most large ships install to increase their weapon range and ensure they outrange smaller opponents.

https://fractalsoftworks.com/2016/09/23/orbital-stations-in-combat/#more-2986

I really wish people from Egosoft played SS. It gets a lot of things(gameplay wise) right.

[hurepoix]

Originally posted by Daddy Shark:

You know you don't ONLY have to fight the Xenon, right?

Xenons s advantage is, it is the universal ennemy. The bad, evil, ugly of x universal. You are also at war with them from the start. Fighting xenons makes you the heroe.

Most time with other factions you have to declare war to them. You are supposed to this only if your foe have not a single chance to survive to next hour.

Of course you can act differently, but it means you decide to shoot your own foot (for fun ?), and it is very artificial.

At the end you will win anyway. You will let your ennemy live more than he should to play a cat and mouse with him.

That s why imo xenons have a specially place, Even if xenons s story is banal and Manichaeistic.

About xenons stations > it should have less Hit points. Deal with these structures is often uselessly time consuming but not that much exciting.

[Daddy Shark]

Yeah, none of that made any sense at all.

[[RLF]KING]

Originally posted by Daddy Shark:

Originally posted by RLFKING:

There are no Xenon sectors anymore in my galaxy. But that sad, as i'm missing the figths.

So go pick a fight.

I see this so much on the forums and it drives me nuts. You know you don't ONLY have to fight the Xenon, right? You can declare war on anyone and everyone. You can't spend 500+ hours building a trading utopia where all the races hold hands and sing kum-by-ya together and then complain there's no fighting going on.

I will fight the other races after all DLCs are out. In the meantime i play my game (~2300h already in one game). Wiping out all Xenon to get their sectors was the wrong decision for me.

[Oddible]

The Xenon are already a non issue that pose very little that unless the player literally ignores all economy. Why would we want xenon stations to be trivial to destroy too? Y'all talk like you want Cities Skylines in space. Just mod the xenon out of the game if you don't want any challenge and you don't want to think.

[Skyguard]

Originally posted by Oddible:

The Xenon are already a non issue that pose very little that unless the player literally ignores all economy. Why would we want xenon stations to be trivial to destroy too? Y'all talk like you want Cities Skylines in space. Just mod the xenon out of the game if you don't want any challenge and you don't want to think.

Because for teraforming missions I am forced to fight them and it's not fun in the slightest. I never bothered before and they were totally fine.

[Oddible]

If you have the resources to do terraforming missions you have the resources to kill that base super fast without any of your attention. Just do the middle option I gave, move 10 Odysseus destroyers to 7km with L Plasmas turrets on attack all. Go make a sandwich.

Want it quicker, spend 10 min personally shooting all the L Graviton cannons then just give your 10 destroyers the attack order. Trivial.