X4 Foundations gameplay: large battle against VIG syndicate

As part of Tides of Avarice I had to take down a station protecting by a CPU-melting amount of fighters. Not the biggest battle ever, but the biggest for me yet!
Started a bit boring and even disappointing, and then it went to crap real fast. I was a very sweaty commander by the end

[@meaningofforeboding1555]

"Why's my framerate dropping?" *checks map* "Oh" *"oh no"*

[@DiArmada]

The reputation loss could've been caused by the laser towers. Very nicely done, the added text made it very easy to follow what was going on

[@leemills6825]

broadsiding with multiple ships can do it too, though it seems to happen less or not at all OOS

[@DeerRadio]

Interesting ship and station names, sir

[@goku546686]

I'm glad this is a cpu dependent game. Large fleets haven't dropped frames AT ALL. And I have some obscene amount of fighters

[@leemills6825]

nice battle =D friendly fire is a bit of a pain still in joint operations in fact the only time in weeks that i heard the incoming missile alert is when i spanked a TER by mistake & they just dont let it go do they, alone in one fighter against my battleship & five destos right in the middle of a XEN sector, & a line of LT mk2's have save me some ships a fair few times so i started loading my destroyers with them too, amazingly helpful right now building a defence platform in XEN space letting my mini-fleet of M ships cover two gates in that sector the one my platform will camp & the other one south going back out to hat choice I

[@3komma141592653]

There is a friendly fire mod, that fixes the problem.

[@guigolum]

I thought of doing this. Then I thought of placing satellites first. Which I did. Then I changed my mind. You need anti-fighter wings. Like 100 FAST fighters with mk2 pulse/shard. Chimeras are good, you need like 75% only. Set them to "intercept for commander" and they will melt incoming fighters. Since you have so many fighters, you need a carrier to repair them and cut your losses. It should actually be your fleet commander. Then you can set your destroyers in a "bomb with commander" dedicated wing - they will only attack big things that the carrier attacks, but still defend themselves.

[@foxcm2000]

I'm getting closer to wiping them out as a late-game fun activity.

[@egoaut]

Nice. I tried it 2x IS and lost all ships, even my Asgards. Then i did it OOS, the enemy missiles arent that dangerous then😮it felt like cheating. My second game, i tried it IS, was much faster without big looses. I placed around 200 lasertowers and FoF mines near the station, and focused fire on the station with my fleet. After the station is destroyed, i paused and destroyed all laser towers and disarmed my fleet.-So there was no Reputation loose. I think you did a good job, next time you will not have so much losses🎉

[@CreatorOfWorlds]

Nice video. A bit of advise, on the map you can have the left side menues for selecting ships/stations. If you also open the right side info menu then you dont have to go back and forth so much in the left side menu.

[@foxnipp4879]

Why did they all stop fighting at the end?

[@mikalichou]

This is part of a scripted quest, when it starts your existing reputation (e.g. reputation 7) is changed to -15. When you complete the prerequisite (destroying the station) your reputation switches back to its original value (so in that example it would instantly switch from -15 to 7) The problem is that even though it changes, some attacks are still underway, bullets that were sent before the switch will reach their target after etc. (this is only true if you're in system I think). Those bullets will give a rep loss and turn the involved ships hostiles again, which will draw allies from the surroundings, which will launch more attacks, which will drop more rep and turn more ships hostile etc, and so you end up going back to negative rep anyway :')

[@trlavalley9909]

Well if you can't get them to like you, just Conquer them.

[@WildHorseProductions]

Ah you set it so the battle ends once the station is destroyed. I lured the VIG out of the gate and killed most of the fighter fleet with a defense station before moving in. There'll be no peace in my game for VIG.

[@mikalichou]

Oh I'm counting on it too. Them and MIN are the first to go. But for now I need them to stop shooting long enough for me to build defense stations at every exit :)

[@leemills6825]

lure them to a defence platform fitted with 50 or so flak turrets, or even better make a few of them along their main trade lanes >

[@crosana01]

This series is so cool! What are your PC specs out of curiosity? I'm wondering if mine can run X4 well enough... 😅

[@mikalichou]

GPU: 3080Ti => definitely overkill, the game is not demanding at all graphics wise RAM: 64GB => again overkill, don't need that much CPU: i7-10700 => my main issue :/ it's clearly not horrible, but the game is really demanding on the CPU and it has to work full time and is slowing down quite a lot. I really wish I could upgrade to one of the X3D CPUs as it seems they are really good for this kind of games. Unfortunately it's pretty expensive and I would have to rebuild the whole computer from scratch ^^' But honestly I would recommend you give it a try, it will run on almost anything and it's such a great game it's worth it

[@CaliforniaSolder]

​@@mikalichou x3d is definitely worth it massive battles at 50ish fps and solid 70 in stations

[@crosana01]

​@@mikalichouUnfortunately my PC is a little more dated. Currently running an R7 3700x, 16GB of RAM and an Nvidia Titan Black. Are using lots of fighters pretty necessary in large battles or can you pull them off using just a few more large ships? Just thinking of ways to reduce the amount of work the CPU has to do...

[@Hyperion1722]

A good way to kill fps. Could be running 10 to 20fps

[@cf453]

That was fun! t looked like maybe a bunch of your fighters didn't respond. Were they set to Intercept? To prevent the destroyers wobbling when doing station attacks, set most of the medium turrets to fighter only. Some of the front ones can be set to any if they have long range station killing weapons, and all the large should be set to anti-capital. This helps them keep their distance and keeps the big guns pointed at the station.

[@mikalichou]

The way it was set up was that each destroyer had a fleet of 20 fighters set to intercept, and there were two fleets of ~30 fighters each near the gate set to "protect position". I didn't notice at the time but I think what happened is that once the enemy fleet moved to the station those fighters just went "yep, did my job" and went back to the gate Thanks for the tip regarding towers, will try next time!

[@trlavalley9909]

Good to know.

[@miikaniemitalo5551]

X4 npc's are stupid....they do not defend their stations....and they let enemies troll around their sectors