Wow, cool. I've heard multiple stories of people having some pretty crazy Xenon incursions, but on my game, Xenons got held back by everyone except by the FRF (Split Free Families).
I'm curious to see what will happen once I get back to my save, because FRF actually had some problems associated with it that got patched. I think it had too few resources or military ships to start with, so pretty much Xenon would keep their space nearly clean of civilian or military ships. In my game, FRF is constantly besieged by Xenon, but they limit themselves to raids without capitals for some reason.
Meanwhile, HOP (pink xenophobic paranids) and Xenon war was going crazy and kept pretty balanced, but since I eat HOP for breakfast (I cap their ships and turn them into my Military and Trade fleets), Xenon has slowly started breaking through the bottom-left of the map.
It's pretty funny that my actions would end up opening a Xenon pandora box right between the gates of both of my allies (ARG and PAR).
Not really sure if stuff was working properly on my game (it was a 3.10 save I think, or 3.20) - I really feel like the Xenon and ARG could've obliterated HOP and FRF and flooded PAR territory since - on my save - they have really weak patrols and military fleets.
PAR actually pisses me off since they only act and try to land-grab sectors that I have liberated while never throwing a fleet at HOP to help me out when I'm forced into an actual non-boarding, non-piracy engagement.
I am in serious need of Xenon K busters.
I feel dirty suggesting this, but in my experience..nothing deletes stuff faster than a Nemesis or Dragon filled with Torpedo Launchers and Heavy Torpedoes flown by yourself.
Nemesis works better for that due to the shielding, with Combat Engine. Modded parts makes it even more lethal and easy to use.
Since torps keep the speed of the ship that launches them, you can keep flying at 3k m/s and above, drifting around enemy capitals launching 5 Heavy Torps per salvo. I believe a couple of well-shot salvos kill the best destroyers, or at least makes them sitting ducks for any other ship to finish them off. You can kill whole squads of destroyers this way very quickly, but if it's a really large engagement it's hard to survive if you're forced to slow down.
Of course, this is a reasonably expensive tactic and doing it too much will drain the supply of Missile Components of the whole galaxy. It happened on my game and no one has missiles to sell to me anymore, so I'll have to make my own.
Later on if you grab hold of a Resupply Ship and fill it with Missile Components, you can have a squad of such Capital Killer Corvettes that are repaired and rearmed near instantly right in front of the enemy fleet.
It's still a
lot less expensive than running squads of Rattlesnakes and Raptors filled with fighter wings. Rattlesnakes are damn assassins in IS combat, and supported by Raptors they are pure evil.