Aeonova wrote: ↑Tue, 14. May 24, 23:50
How do you trigger this end? I've been hit by at least 20 of these waves now. The last 2 had TONS of Ravagers each. It's really tough getting assets from one side of the map to the other in time. I broke my fleets into smaller response teams and that worked for a few waves. But now those teams can't stand against 6-8 Ravagers + 60+ KHK fighters + 1-2 I's + 4-6 K's + 40+ XEN fighters. I mean... dude.
I lost count of the number of cycles (Await Intel > Defend Sector) I did before it finally ended. It felt like 100, but I think it was in the 15-30 range. I've seen some other folks talking about the range being 20-40. Mine also got bugged somewhere along the way and for ~7 of the cycles, no Kha'ak spawned at all, just the 3 K's an I and a bunch of S/M xenon ships of various types. Boso kept using the same language about the Kha'ak and President's end at the end of each cycle, which is why I think it got bugged. Eventually the Kha'ak started spawning again and I got the message about the CPU ship 4 or 5 cycles after that. I didn't do anything special in any of them. I wasn't even in sector for some of them (I had a few where a wave started in a new sector before the old one finished). I had some cycles that took an hour or more with dozens of waves of Kha'ak (but only ever one wave of Xenon), and others where I got 0-3 Kha'ak waves and then it ended. In some of those shorter ones, the quest completed immediately after the Kha'ak stopped spawning, in others it lingered for upwards of 30+ minutes before clearing out.
In my opinion, if the number of cycles or the cycles being wonky (some with Kha'ak, some without, some doubled up, some short, some long) is a bug, it should be fixed before live. If it's a design choice, I think they need to go back to the drawing board. As it is right now, it's way too long, though, if it were more interesting, I wouldn't care. When I think of games that do this well (or at least, that I, personally, enjoy), I think of Stelarris, where the End Game Crisis can be one of several different scenarios and which one you get depends on the state of your game. I don't think that'd work in X4, because of the Sandbox, but I do think you could build a story around it. The Kha'ak don't just spawn in a bunch of random sectors, for example, instead, they start in one and start spreading from there, and it isn't just waves of ships, they spawn in hives et cetera, and if you can't stop them, they spread to the next sector and so on. And getting out of it shouldn't be 'spend 500 million credits', it should be something involving an investigation or story. I don't know, I'm just spit-balling. This is a feature I really want, personally, as someone with 2700+ hours in the game, but as it is, it feels monotonous and exhausting more than exciting and new.
