There are certainly ways the Thargoid war could work where that would be absolutely the wrong strategy.
Just to put up a very simplified model here:
- each Control system held at the end of a week generates 1 Alert the following week
- the Thargoids start with 5 Control systems
- human forces can win in 4 Alert systems or 2 Control or Invasion systems each week
- for simplicity we'll assume there is always a three week Invasion period as they're all against small systems.
If the humans attack Alert systems first (4 a week), then it goes like this:
Week | Alert (start) | Alert (end) | Inv A | Inv B | Inv C | Control |
0 | | | | | | 5 |
1 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 |
2 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 5 |
3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
5 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 6 |
6 | 6 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 7 |
7 | 7 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 8 |
8 | 8 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 9 |
9 | 9 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 10 |
10 | 10 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 12 |
If the humans instead attack Control systems first (2 a week), then the most urgent Invasions, then it goes like this:
Week | Alert | Inv A | Inv B | Inv C | Control (start) | Control (end) |
0 | | | | | | 5 |
1 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 3 |
2 | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 1 |
3 | 1 | 3 | 5 (-1) | 0 | 1 | 0 |
4 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 4 (-2) | 0 | 0 |
5 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 0 |
6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
7 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
8 | 0 | 1 (-1) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Now, obviously there's a very big question here: do the Thargoids get more Alerts if they have more Control systems? We don't know, and we won't have enough data to be able to tell for at least another couple of weeks even in the best case. And of course the actual war is rather more complex than the toy model above - different invasion lengths, uninhabited systems, eight maelstroms, per-system difficulty appearing somewhat dependent on Thargoid dispersion, etc.
I'm not saying "you're wrong, we should focus on Control first" - I'm saying "we have nowhere near enough data for anyone to be confidently declaring what the best strategy is".
The data I'm seeing has had the Alerts require fewer commanders than the Invasions - but not by anywhere near as large a margin as that, and with a sample size of 2 so far it's very hard to say if that's because of the Alert state, because of the measurement inaccuracy, or because of some other factor such as population, distance from maelstrom, efficiency of the commanders participating, etc.
It does appear to be - the question is whether the population comes back when the stations are repaired.
It does look like the extra Thargoid dispersion is helping, with that many systems reaching at least 2%, and the top target being almost half-done after a day. (And many thanks for all your work collecting this data!)
Close - unpopulated Control systems and any Alert system will return to "Normal/Safe" without needing recovery if the bar is filled.
On 5: No-one knows. It's unlikely to be absolutely the case, but there might be some delay before they can attack again. We'll know more in a few months!
I'm trying to collect factual summaries of how it works - leaving what that means for strategy to others - in this thread: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/analysing-the-thargoid-simulation.611382/
