Big night in X4 last night as I tried to build a defense station. Let's see if I can explain it.
In this game, each sector of space is connected to others via some sort of gate. Some sectors are controlled by the Xenon, the main enemy of the game. While ships can mount some impressive weapons, stations can mount many more weapons for cheaper and are harder to destroy. Hence, in order to help keep the Xenon bottled up, you can build a station with lots of weapons on it to blast the Xenon as they come through.
This isn't a game where you just order up defense station #3 with extra garlic and plop it down in a good location. You first figure out the design of the station (preferably in such a way that its parts won't shoot other parts of the station too much), then license the volume of space to put it in, and hire a 'builder' ship to build the thing. Once the builder gets there, you need to get all the various resources it needs (hull parts, energy, lots of turret parts...) to the location in what amounts to a pile of goods for the builder's drones to work with. The process moves module by module, so a station with a dozen defense platforms doesn't build all 12 at once, it builds them one at a time and adds the turrets and shields as those parts show up as well. Each module takes, oh, 7-10 minutes to build assuming the parts are all ready.
I know a lot of Xenon come through here and I own a builder ship, so I have that builder ship plus some big freighters full of goods already at the site when I buy the plot. I also bring the Syn, a large fighting ship, as well as a couple of smaller Phoenix ships decked out with anti-fighter weapons. The freighters transfer their stuff into the pile and I send them out for more stuff. I also hand the proto-station a bunch of cash so it can pay for goods other factions are willing to sell to me.
And then I teleport away, of course, because this is an X game and this isn't the only project I'm working on. I look back from time to time, though, and notice a
Xenon K with a bunch of fighters sitting on the other side of the gate. A K is a bit, nasty looking ship but its weapon range isn't so great compared to a Syn. If I let my assigned captain fight it, she'll likely zoom right up to it and get demolished, but I can beat it pretty easily if I'm at the helm, so I save game, teleport over, and wait for it to show up.
A few fighters appear, but no K. That's... odd. I check the map again and see a second K flying toward the first on the other side of the gate! One I can take. Two? Maybe, but it's probably going to hurt, and those fighters will rip me to shreds if my shields go down. So, I take the fight to them and fly through the gate. I do manage to destroy the waiting K, but the second one settles in above and behind me while I do, and it rips me apart before I can even turn around.
So, re-load. This is earlier, so I use my foreknowledge and fly through the gate to attack the single K. Except now the K happens to be much closer to the gate. Remember what I said about range? That advantage was gone. I took down the K, but it broke through my shields and did some damage to my hull. As the fighters started blasting my turrets off, I ran back through the gate - as did several fighters.
When you go through a gate, though, the game tries to make sure ships don't pop up inside each other. With multiple ships going through, it decided to toss the bigger ship (namely me) kinda far from the gate. Hoo hoo! My repair drones set to work fixing turrets and my shields started to regenerate. The station hadn't started building yet as there still weren't enough parts for even the first module, and there was actually a line of freighters waiting to deposit goods. The two Phoenix ships were dealing with the fighters and the freighters seemed to be fending off the occasional stray that went after them.
Of course, the second K then shows up. My Syn isn't in the best shape yet, but it's going to have to do. Save game (in a new slot) again and head in. Luckily for me, the K was a bit distracted by... something. I think it might have blown up one of the waiting large freighters - I was too concentrated on killing it to really look. It blew up nicely, and now it was just a whole bunch of fighters. They're tedious but, with the Phoenixes...
And another K showed up! OK, maybe I should have waited longer before trying to make this station. I pointedly don't save the game and go after the new K. With fighters all over me, I can't exactly rush toward it, but I still manage to get in a good position to attack (so fewer of its turrets can shoot at me) and I take the thing down! Maybe it was blasting freighters, too?
There were tons of fighters by this point, but I had invested in some mighty shields on all my ships and one of the defense platforms eventually came on line. Then another. And the fighters were slowly burned down.
Now the station has a few platforms to it, so hopefully it will be able to defend itself. There is another kind of Xenon ship, though, that's even bigger. If one of those shows up tonight...
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