Enemies spawn only if you are around some sector. Want to escort your own trader ? Bad luck with you being there enemies will spawn and will bust out your trader. If you won't escort it then trader will safely reach trading spot.
Heh. That's kind of a tradition in X games. The best way to do escort missions is to stay the fuck out of the sector where they are supposed to happen.
But yes, that's not exactly an achievement that this is still broken as ever.
Xtended mod for x3 tc mostly fixed that. Way battles are calculated though offscreen was retarded and that didn't change here.
OOS combat is mostly just based on dice rolls, they had to do it that way because your computorz would fry from trying to calculate hundreds of sectors in real time in detail. And it was a good thing because the AI for in-sector battles was completely useless anyway.
In all the X3's (X3, TC, AP), if you have AI ships protecting a freighter and you're in the same sector, it's best to hit Shift+J and GTFO pronto and watch the pirates melt away from another sector because if you stayed in the sector their puny M4 fighters would likely take down your super-expensive fully-armed M6 escort corvette AND your super-expensive XL freighter full of microchips before you can even reach them.
The combat mechanics of X3 are really fucked IMO, the shields are about as effective mosquito nets. In X2 (which I consider the best in the series), there was no way in hell a single fighter could take down an M6.