Give us some way to return Xenon to our games

[Cellar_Cat]

I am losing patience with the way this last update has been handled. Every vanilla game I have played since 7.0 and 7.1 has seen the Xenon whittled away by NPC factions without me even having to look at them hard. They either end up wiped out completely, or a kind of zoo attraction in Tharka's Cascade / Savage Spur. And then I'm locked into never clearing that area during the Yaki quest because that's it, there will be none left anywhere. Even the one very tedious thing players could once do to build their stations no longer works.

Egosoft go to such great lengths to maintain savegame compatibility, arguably to the detriment of game balance in some cases, but now I don't even WANT my saves from this period because the primary enemy faction just drops dead. It's reached the point now where I'm just going to shelve it and wait for the next update in who-even-knows how long to see if that fixes it, because if I don't, there's nothing I can do once they're gone.

I should not have to do this, least of all in a game that's been out for years. If you really want us having long term saves, we need some way to undo the damage you deal to them. Most factions can be brought back from anything that will happen to them in the natural faction conflicts of the game, but not Xenon. If it's not going to get patched urgently (and by now it seems not) then there must be some way to fix it later. Let us bring them back via the "Crisis" or something.

[Forgotten]

There are plenty of Xenon mods that will make them a serious problem.

[Cellar_Cat]

Naturally mods can do lots of different things, but I'm specifically addressing the balance in the vanilla game, and its consequences on player saves. Moving from 6.20 has had a drastic impact on their survival in every game I've started, even ones where I literally do nothing but watch. I shouldn't have to mod the game just to make a canonically threatening enemy faction survive.

[Lethalite]

🤷 The Xenon in my game have basically wiped out the Zyarth Patriarchy.

[Cellar_Cat]

Originally posted by Lethalite:

🤷 The Xenon in my game have basically wiped out the Zyarth Patriarchy.

The key difference is when you lose a normal faction like that they will still have some build sites that can be supplied by neutral entities (so in this case potentially you, or otherwise Teladi). If you lose Xenon no such neutral faction exists.

[Doom]

Originally posted by Cellar_Cat:

Give us some way to return Xenon to our games

Would like to have this too. At least a way to gift the zombie stations some materials would be nice.

[Great Lakes Wildebeest]

I just noticed myself that the wittling down of the Xenon seems to be the xenon trying to supply the dead weight shipyards and wharfs with materials weakening themselves as a whole, for a 300hour game all the center branch did was try to ship energy to the secondary branches because all the secondary areas like scale plate green or Emperor's pride lacked solar power somehow never having a solar plant when I visit, and the wharfs and shipyards are too turret ridden for the AI factions to finish off. I found blowing up those secondary areas early prevents this and causes the main branch to actually produce military ships instead of a stream of SE's to die in Hatikvah whilst trying to drive to those areas to deliver solar cells