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Dear Thargoids, Tharglets and Thargons, please can you stop taking the destructive limelight and for but a moment, allow us to construct our own new battle vessels.
First look: THE SCYTHE!!! (New Thargoid ship)
im in a faction that got gifted taranis right in the middle and i would still rather lose the war than be associated with cheating abusing unbalanced mechanisms... it is what it is™
(again, just a personal point of view)
Nope. But I haven't been looking. I'm merely assuming.
I mean I sure would like the Thargoids to break this boring containment headlock we've got them in now. Seeing them actually manage an invasion state in a few systems again would be real nice, unless the intention at this point is for us to wrap this up soon.
Legacy is not getting any further updates. Hence legacy.
I’ve been trying - some of our recaptured have been close to Taranis with the express intention of increasing the difficulty of the Alerts to let some get through to invasion. HIP 25679 got blocked sadly - let’s hope the closer Gandje and Njorog have more luck.
The overpowered sampling specifically I doubt is intentional - from the research done on what the relative power of each action is, sampling would be fine if you couldn't chain sample the same Thargoid over and over again. A limit of one sample per Thargoid would keep it as a very useful supplement to combat (at the cost of reducing combat endurance somewhat) while not making it utterly dominant (and would be a far more interesting fix than just weighting it down as-is, because the amount of that needed would mean taking it out entirely.)
The general war balance ... I suspect that is entirely intended [1], because Frontier has made several major balance changes, and a few more minor adjustments since those, including some since sampling started making a serious difference to the outcome, and they've all been to make it easier.
- if they hadn't taken the Alert count down from 80ish to 40 (and therefore made it possible to contain most maelstroms through target shaping and target exhaustion) then they'd still be getting substantially ahead of us. The early attempts in Hadad to keep them away from inhabited systems would have worked in the short term ... and caused a massive increase in its perimeter in the long term. It certainly wouldn't have been possible to contain multiple Maelstroms at once, even on the current balance of difficulty.
- conversely, if following that they also hadn't balanced system difficulties down substantially, at least in the 15-30 LY ranges, it'd still be tough to win more than 30 systems a week.
In either case, we'd be getting more invasions, not fewer, because uninhabited systems would spread out well beyond the inhabited ones, causing re-attacking of every defended invasion over and over again until the defenders were overwhelmed.
The war balance is probably the worse of the two for making things a bit dull right now. Take away sampling and buff combat and hauling to give the same overall difficulty levels as now and still nothing would get near Invasion; indeed, probably the Thargoids would get knocked back faster if activities that far more people wanted to do were the powerful ones. People would have more fun repelling Alerts and recapturing Controls, but still no Invasions.
Keep sampling but also keep the earlier difficulty levels and Thargoid Alert budget, and the sampling wings are tied up trying to knock out as many uninhabited control systems as possible while the Maelstroms are adding them even faster, just to stop additional inhabited systems being brought into range (as it was in the early days of sampling, where it recovered maybe 10 mid-range uninhabited controls a week, not 50 including close-in and inhabited) and there's a definite strategic cost to keeping the Thargoids out of inhabited systems.
[1] What I don't get is why. Even on the original balance the Thargoids would be barely out to 35 LY at the moment, and they need 50 LY (which would have taken another two years) before they start seriously threatening anything of more than local importance as was the original marketing. They didn't need to tone them down anything like this much - or really, at all - if they were worried about the war getting too far ahead of their ability to develop the Glaive/Scythe/Bohemian Earspoon variants first.
I assume there's some plot point coming up where a (temporary) Thargoid withdrawal makes sense, so we need to have pushed them back enough that we can falsely assume it's because we won, or something.
Well, here's to hoping that U16 and the introduction of the Scythe might also coincide with tissue sampling being rebalanced a bit. What'd be really awesome is if new USS scenarios with the Scythe become more of the go-to means for pushing Alerts. Kinda like what they were trying to do with the Orthrus until tissue sampling dominated the field.
To be clear though; tissue sampling, recovering wreckage/survivors in escape pods/black boxes, and the trade route of evac-ing people and dropping supplies should all still remain viable ways to contribute to the war. People still have it in their heads that the Thargoid War is all combat and nothing else, and the fact that the way we're winning is tissue sampling is actually a direct rebuttal to that misconception. The ideas are good, they just need some balancing.
Of course, it'd also be nice to know anything about what's coming in U16 other than the Scythe...
To be clear though; tissue sampling, recovering wreckage/survivors in escape pods/black boxes, and the trade route of evac-ing people and dropping supplies should all still remain viable ways to contribute to the war. People still have it in their heads that the Thargoid War is all combat and nothing else, and the fact that the way we're winning is tissue sampling is actually a direct rebuttal to that misconception. The ideas are good, they just need some balancing.
Of course, it'd also be nice to know anything about what's coming in U16 other than the Scythe...
Fine by me.
imagine if purpose of the scythe was to drop in on sampling commanders and steal the samples mid flight
I’d take that. Make the optimal way to do things in the war somewhat interesting, damnit! My brain is melting after the Njorog grind.imagine if purpose of the scythe was to drop in on sampling commanders and steal the samples mid flight
They could do a lot more than just tweak numbers to make things interesting.
Take the "kill X interceptors" missions for example: nobody bothers with taking any variants except cyclops or hydra, because those are the only ones that can be reliably spawned. Why not add a small tweak so that any thargoid interdictions will be by the same thargoid type associated with ongoing missions? Why not add some missions to take out glaives? Why not tweak the mission's effect on the war so that it actually counts for something instead of a tiny miniscule fraction of a percent?
Same goes for fighting around capital ships - we had it in HIP 22460, and we keep finding destroyed capital ships in control/invasion systems - so why are there no scenarios where we actively fight around them, preventing the thargoids from routing them?
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Ehh, there's like three major things I think it could be doing it for:
1. Repurposing humans for ships
2. Repurposing humans for on foot combat either via removing the brain and installing thargoid remote controls in the now empty shell, or human thargoid hybrids
3. Installing some sort of other mental control in humans then dropping them back off in their escape pods with them and other humans none the wiser that the person is now compromised in some manner as they're taken back to human occupied space
None of which really explain why a specific ship is needed for this when interceptors can already pick up escape pods. Unless they need a ship with the ability to grab a lot of escape pods in a much shorter time for something weird like making them work at gunpoint at abandoned human settlements to produce tech and goods for Thargoids or simply taking a lot of people hostage. Or maybe they're looking for some kind of specific people and grabbing whoever they can then sorting out who they want and who to dispose of later.
Or hey, maybe they're just throwing a pool party and need people to show up at the mountain dew pools on Thargoid titans.
1. Repurposing humans for ships
2. Repurposing humans for on foot combat either via removing the brain and installing thargoid remote controls in the now empty shell, or human thargoid hybrids
3. Installing some sort of other mental control in humans then dropping them back off in their escape pods with them and other humans none the wiser that the person is now compromised in some manner as they're taken back to human occupied space
None of which really explain why a specific ship is needed for this when interceptors can already pick up escape pods. Unless they need a ship with the ability to grab a lot of escape pods in a much shorter time for something weird like making them work at gunpoint at abandoned human settlements to produce tech and goods for Thargoids or simply taking a lot of people hostage. Or maybe they're looking for some kind of specific people and grabbing whoever they can then sorting out who they want and who to dispose of later.
Or hey, maybe they're just throwing a pool party and need people to show up at the mountain dew pools on Thargoid titans.
Presumably the “sycthe” will come with a magical field that causes a total loss of bladder control, in conjunction with constipation, in all CMDRs within 10 clicks which will result in short-circuiting of all fight control systems … until we deliver 60 gazillionmegatons of cotton and rubber for the next CZ to unlock a new experimental “adult incontinence pants” module?
Sorry - haven’t been on for a while, I might be out of touch!
Sorry - haven’t been on for a while, I might be out of touch!
Whilst neither new nor separate; If nothing else, its introduction seems to coincide quite well with there being a megaship's worth of cultists in search of their idea of ascension on the loose...
nhss threat 6 in alerts can have 2 capships and 7 interceptors at once. But would be really nice if we could have capships in counterstrike czs. That could imo almost fully make up for lack of station czs. At least there would be something to take the agro from you to give you time to repair yourself in a distance. Now you get 1 nice spawn, take your time to repair and get back to cz devoid of all npcs.
Adding hunter kill missions wouldnt hurt either.
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Yes. If the war is boring because there are no Invasion states, one obvious fix would be to make Control and Alert states more varied.
It almost feels like fdev got the two BGS mixed up :
I'm sure some people would hate a Thargoid attack that actually was a threat, but it would probably be more involving.
- Human BGS has no limits on expansion, other than running into opposition - so PMFs are not penalised for expansion (and in fact that is about the only thing they can do)
- Thargoid BGS is self-limited so that it is increasingly difficult for Humans & Thargoids to push the affected areas from their natural size
I'm sure some people would hate a Thargoid attack that actually was a threat, but it would probably be more involving.
In my judgement Frontier aren't going to let content become redundant.