Argon now Viable as a Faction?

[Damian Swift]

Over the years i've played several games (until i get a Battleship, then the game gets easy mode) and in each of the games the poor Argon get trashed by every single opponent.

Had a few games where the Paranid easily took over Argon prime, with little or no problem, several games i instigated war between the Terrans and Argon and again, the argon were virtually exterminated.
If i don't instigate war or defend against the Parinid invasion fleets, then the Xenon wipe the floor with the Argon.

So, just asking, do these (re-imagined) capital ships for the Argon actually make them viable, or will they still be the push overs of the galaxy?

In the end i had to resort to mods just to make the poor Argon actually able to defend itself rather than be the galaxy whipping boy.

[LameFox]

I don't see those ships changing that. Hilariously they managed to technically improve the Behemoth E over the old Behemoth while also buffing the Teladi destroyer enough to make the Argon one decisively a worse choice than it used to be. Theirs is faster than a Rattlesnake, has slightly more guns than the Behemoth, and holds more cargo. Behe E has... 4 landing pads. For all the good that does it.

The carrier I think is fairly insignificant, because they just don't make good use of carriers.

[MKL81]

Over the years i've played several games (until i get a Battleship, then the game gets easy mode) and in each of the games the poor Argon get trashed by every single opponent.

Had a few games where the Paranid easily took over Argon prime, with little or no problem, several games i instigated war between the Terrans and Argon and again, the argon were virtually exterminated.
If i don't instigate war or defend against the Parinid invasion fleets, then the Xenon wipe the floor with the Argon.

So, just asking, do these (re-imagined) capital ships for the Argon actually make them viable, or will they still be the push overs of the galaxy?

In the end i had to resort to mods just to make the poor Argon actually able to defend itself rather than be the galaxy whipping boy.

I never found ARG/ANT to be pushovers, just that they have pretty troublesome start, where Hatikvah 1 is a number one target for Xenon intrusions in like 90% of games, also they wage war with HOP early in the game already. Surprisingly in my current game I decided to support their economy very early on and the results were pretty good. Not only they pushed back HOP effortlessly out of SC2 Flashpoint, they already have defence station and a number of factories in True Sight. They push Xenon in Frontier Edge as well, although so far with mixed success, they started a number of factories there, but then came an I and couple of Ks I'm like 40h into the game now.
Granted, if you antagonize them with Terrans - then Terrans will eventually steamroll them, but then again - Terrans steamroll pretty much everybody if they want to.

[VTJagatai]

I think they've always been viable depending on the randomness of your start. In mine the Argon and their sibling are very strong to the point they are pushing the Terran's out of Getsu. Taking over Split sectors, etc. They did get a big boost when I finished the Yaki plot since those resource rich systems opened up, but they were not hurting before then.

For me the issue is that neither the Argon or the Teladi feature heavily in the main plots (just some of the smaller ones). Because of that, and due to the generally lower resources of the Argon systems, they are not very attractive for placing your factories. I feel as a player we get pushed pretty heavily to be more active in other locations due to those plots and just kind of miss out on being Argon focused.

[Arisaya]

Games can vary significantly, player to player & game-instance to game-instance.

I've only ever seen the argon do poorly once - at the time I was a relatively novice player, the only DLC was the split DLC, and NPC economy was a bit ... hit or miss (moreso than it currently is at least). I had done the teladi start, so I was busy helping the teladi fight off the xenon incursion there, and my starting station was right on the front lines, meanwhile zyarth's split had their economy stall out hard and they got completely stomped on by the xenon, who then proceeded to invade the couple of argon systems up behind zyarth space. The Argon attempted to defend those outlying areas, but the trickle of ships sent in support slowly just depleted their forces. Eventually the xenon destroyed hatikva and established a foothold in argon prime before I had cleaned out the xenon down in scale plate green and was able to go over and assist.

In all my other games, Hatikva has enough defense stations that they never lose their sector and the xenon never manage more than a foothold, so the argon are essentially free to fight the paranid, which they have done reasonably well. Zyarth's split consistently get curbstomped by the xenon though in every one of my game instances since the split DLC added them.

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As for the ships, the Behemoth E will help the npc argon respond to things a bit faster, as it does have a speed buff over the old behemoth models, but its... otherwise essentially the same, and even still suffers from the issue where it cant easily use its main cannons and L turrets simultaneously on the same target - the high-attention AI isnt smart enough to perfectly aim the ship slightly down to get both turrets firing. If the old Behemoth was D-tier in 6.0, the Behemoth E I'd say is still D-tier in 7.0B1
And yes, the Phoenix E is such a HUGE improvement - its actually a useful ship as a sector patrol flagship as its tanky & fast (faster than any other destroyer with main cannons - only VIGs "destroyer" is faster), if a bit expensive. Also it does get an extra M turret over the argon ships for a total of 9, its still got the lowest theoretical frontal DPS among all the destroyers - except because the Phoenix E can actually shoot both of its L turrets directly in front of it (unlike the Behemoth), both the AI and player can actually use it more effectively in high-attention. The old phoenixes are the only destroyers I'd say that warrant F-tier (literally nothing redeeming about them, everything they do is average at best and frequently worst of the lot and terrible to fly to boot because the L turrets can only shoot in the lower corners of your screen nowhere close to the reticle), but the new Phoenix E actually has an important niche it excels at, which is leading fast-response sector defense fleets against light threats like L pirate ships & gigantic kha'ak swarms in mining-heavy sectors that even a "picket miner" would be unable to take down without getting severely damaged or destroyed.

[Zaphias]

Spoiler

Show

https://i.imgur.com/Bgznbfl.png

I know what you mean. I opened up the map and there it was. Never saw it before haha.
Definitely have seen stalemates or the other way around, not this one.

[Arisaya]

Somehow some xenon snuck an I and 3 Ks into Argon Prime in my game last night - I'm pretty sure they were from a crisis fleet that escaped their spawn system (I didnt get an alert for them passing through Frontier Edge and its the correct composition). I was busy testing captured xenon ships and didn't notice till I almost crashed into a pair of xenon Ks in the H I was testing. The Xenon ended up taking out almost everything by the highway including the wharf which had been there just an hour earlier since I had been using it to quickly patch up some of the xenon ships I had captured.

The Argon had only sent a single Behemoth E against them and it died because the rest of their ships that I could see were busy swatting small xenon ships in Second Contact II (and even those managed to die OOS to the swarms because xenon swarms in 7.0 are more dangerous..)

So its looking like its still very possible for them to defeat HOP only to get steamrolled by 7.0 xenon.

[Nerwesta]

This is why reading posts like this makes me want to see a fully fledged Diplomacy section on X4.