Have you tried at a planetary base with a few other players? The Thargoids don't launch Thargons there, so damage is much less. NPCs help. Once you get the modified gimbal AXMCs, Scouts are toast, and those are also great for shooting hearts off interceptors. You'll need a couple of modified shards or gauss for the softening-up. The enhanced AX scanner makes getting a scan easy and once you unlock the caustic sink launcher you can shrug off caustic missiles. A shieldless medium ship with loads of hull keeps rebuy down, but once you get the hang of all the new toys rebuys don't happen.
I write this as a useless combat player; I've never managed one of those wing pirate-lord missions, but I can do OK in a AXCZ now.
BTW the single biggest improvement I've found for my combat skills recently is to use trailing sights instead of leading sights. Just put the dots on the Thargoid and shoot. The dots from the gimbals nicely indicate which sub-target you've selected when you do that too.
I appreciate the response.
I agree that Thargoid Scouts are easy to take out - weirdly they now they feel
too easy - and while it's fun to blow them up I don't like the combat against larger Thargoid ships fun as a whole and as I don't like prescribed is / how rote it feels, combat feels artificially like a bunch of game mechanics you have to keep in mind and doesn't feel organic.
I've got plenty of funds (Trade Elite V), a Fleet Carrier to get around and plenty of high end gear for AX combat - including Guardian Gauss Cannons and pre-engineered Guardian Plasma weapons which I think I got during an event a while back, hulls with Heavy Duty Grade 5 and Deep Plating, etc. - so have been able to try out different combinations of ships to get a feel for what they are like.
I just flat out don't like the game loop of Thargoid combat or the narrow range of ships, equipment and tactics that I found viable for Thargoid combat. I appreciate there are other activities like rescuing players and supply delivery missions, but Thargoid encounters in those loops remain pretty binary; either your ship is fast enough to boost away after being Interdicted/Hypereducated, in which case you live, or it's too slow, and you die - again that limits what you can do and what loadouts / engineering options are viable.
I still enjoy exploration - I'm Elite Exploration and find it very relaxing to do and have multiple specialist ships for exploration, frequently hopping between a DBX, Phantom and Anaconda - and I enjoy flying all sorts of others ships, from the Eagle (best ship in the game!) or the Vulture for Odyssey mission running, to the Corvette for non-AX PvE combat, but I have no interest in the current AX combat zones or the Thargoid combat loops as they stand. I am grateful for the Exobiology payout increase recently.
I also enjoy the Odyssey ground combat, it's not super challenging but I think it's fine! I am really hoping that if we get AX ground combat that it doesn't attempt to mirror the mechanics of AX combat in space though - i.e. that it doesn't rob players of agency with Thargoid specials like "disabling suit power", and I hope player choice is not further restricted to needing to use a specific set of weapons to be effective (especially given the already limited options).
