Instead of repeating myself... https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...amples-are-the-way-to-go.615544/post-10113669
Current state of the Thargoid war
- Thread starter Shadowsnog
- Start date
There's an option for more of them. We did the Chekhov's Scan CG for ammonia worlds, which ended in "monitoring" the regions for more Titan activity, if I remember that correctly.
Fools! You think you're winning the war by hauling live Thargoids limpet-by-limpet into station warehouses and private collections? When the time is right, they will (e)merge everywhere deep within our systems! The end is, uh, well, probably only a few decades away!
#OpenOnlyThargoids
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Don't nerf anything, boost thargoid killing outside of stations/in space (if that wasn't already the outcome of journal fixes).
For the war to guarantee invasions and have a semblance of game flow there could be a Titan Panic response:
- if a Titan loses all its alerts in a cycle it'll trigger an invasion on a populated system (either instantly or next tick but ideally with a warning)
- if a Titan loses X control systems in a cycle it'll trigger an invasion on a populated system
This kind of self-limiting to avoid a massive counterattack is bread and butter for many strategy games like AI War, Terra Invicta (haven't played it yet) and various paradox stuff (not super experienced in those either) where just attacking everyone tends to upset people
.Asking the samplers to stop for a few days a week isn't the answer, nor fair IMHO. I understand wanting that, but those sampling are clearly having fun doing it, and I don't want to take away from thier fun.
Having further triggers for invasions/alerts would help a lot as @Disemboweled Ego suggests. Maybe the last cleared alert system that week automatically becomes an invasion next tick? To my uneducated thinking, that would be easier to code than some complicated algorithm? Samplers can sample, rescuers can rescue, and combat pilots get a guaranteed AXCZ. Rescuers can also rescue at the AXCZ's.
Don't stop activities just because they reach 100%; it wasn't like that at the start and there is no need for it now as @Sighman said. Just give us the "Alert/Invasion finished" message when we drop into the system. If we want to move elsewhere we will, and if we don't want or can't because they are all finished, then we can still carry on till the next tick. To be clear, I think it should be this way for ALL activities, not just combat.
Having further triggers for invasions/alerts would help a lot as @Disemboweled Ego suggests. Maybe the last cleared alert system that week automatically becomes an invasion next tick? To my uneducated thinking, that would be easier to code than some complicated algorithm? Samplers can sample, rescuers can rescue, and combat pilots get a guaranteed AXCZ. Rescuers can also rescue at the AXCZ's.
Don't stop activities just because they reach 100%; it wasn't like that at the start and there is no need for it now as @Sighman said. Just give us the "Alert/Invasion finished" message when we drop into the system. If we want to move elsewhere we will, and if we don't want or can't because they are all finished, then we can still carry on till the next tick. To be clear, I think it should be this way for ALL activities, not just combat.
I'm going to answer by "take over the bubble", make every reachable inhabited system within, say, 200LY of Sol into Control. Some systems are more than 10 LY away from anywhere else so aren't reachable, no-one can agree on exactly where the bubble ends anyway. We can even allow minor player opposition provided it doesn't get as far as 100% in any system.
So, within that: unopposed from now, and allowing for a few early weeks to reset the strategic mess at a few positions and get invasions cycling through, they can capture exactly 40 systems a week as a long-term average.
- they don't appear to prioritise based on direction
- they pick the closest systems they can, inhabited or not, which in the absence of opposition would convert to "the closest reachable systems" pretty quickly
- at near-bubble stellar densities, 1000 systems out from each Maelstrom is 50 LY, and they'd need to expand their collective spheres to get to about 400 LY radius.
- system count is roughly inverse cube (slightly faster, as the density does drop off noticeably away from the plane) so 400 LY is very approximately 400,000 systems to capture.
- at 40 a week, that's 10,000 weeks, or about two centuries.
There's a bunch of effects once the Maelstroms start to overlap their spheres that make it a bit more complicated, plus at that radius I really should be correcting for off-plane density moving things much more towards inverse square after the first half-century, so it'd probably be quicker than that. Certainly more than a century, though, I would think, though almost all the bubble would be wiped out in the first century and then the rest would be picked off extremely slowly after that.
If we instead go for the "fastest possible" system they've had - uninhabited Alerts are slightly cheaper to place so they get more per week; prioritisation was never entirely figured out but seemed to get about 20-25 inhabited systems a week once it got going. Then it'd only take ~800-1000 weeks (15-20 years) to capture the bubble.
On current strategy, they'd need to capture a 22,000LY radius pancake of the galaxy, minus the bits they couldn't reach, which I think would take literal millions of years. The Bridge stations don't meaningfully speed that up even if they switch to a strategy of always attacking inhabited systems in range first, because they're far too far apart.
Presumably Frontier in 2223 would switch it back to manual in that hypothetical and just have a Titan in Stargoid mode roll up the Bridge and contest a system each week. Or maybe by then enough intervening stations would have been built that 10LY routing was fast enough to chain them.
The simplest fix - one that we know they could just apply on Thursday morning, having made similar changes in the opposite direction on weekly resets before - would be to multiply the system difficulties by about 2.5x across the board. Sampling would still be overpowered relative to everything else, but that wouldn't matter because the total activity requirement would be considerably more than the total player activity.
The following Thursday, whichever inhabited Alerts weren't finished off would roll into Invasion, reducing further the number of inhabited Alerts dealt with that week, and there would be plenty of Thargoids for everyone. It might take a couple of weeks longer for the Invasion stack to get up to speed and have some last out a full week, and maybe a couple of months before the Thargoids actually started winning the occasional inhabited system, but it'd be back to "good enough" in a week.
(In theory, without also fixing sampling, players could switch to doing "even more sampling" to counteract that. In practice, if players were collectively going to do that, we wouldn't still have as many Thargoid Controls around as we currently do, so it's probably not a risk.)
The nicest fix for the status quo would probably be "one sample per player per Thargoid; any more from the same Thargoid don't count / you can't get any more from the same Thargoid; keep the same per-sample value towards progress". It'd still be pretty effective as a supplement to combat, but you couldn't win a system purely with it, and pure combat strategies (where you're not taking up internals with limpet controllers and cargo racks) would be at least competitive (especially in Alerts, given how much Orthrus kills are worth). But that might well be technically quite difficult.
The funniest plot fix would be for the 40ish Barnacle Matrix sites to mature into Stargoids and spread out into the bubble, multiplying the systems affected each week by ~6. At that point it doesn't matter if a single player can beat a low-difficulty system on their own; indeed, at that point it's a feature. Invasions for everybody.
I see that more as someone from Frontier seeing the universal limpet as just outright superior to the dedicated research variant, and decided to show it some love to compensate for its 1 limpet per controller limit. Perhaps because of the popularity of tissue sampling, as it brought more attention to that module [type].
Not sure I expect them to become Titans, but I could see a bunch of smaller motherships à la First War coming out of that.
This could just switch it to sampling and killing many single scouts being the most effective strategy as long as you're able to tank a lot of scouts indefinitely. Promoting the least interesting and least risky version of the sampling gameplay during the war. Depending on the exact implementation it could make the sample failure rate RNG better or worse.
Make the point scaling dynamic.
As more of a single action is done in a system, it should become less effective. Meaning a combination of different actions is required to clear systems before tick. Let all the different groups (samplers, AX pilots, haulers/rescuers) have their fun.
(And most importantly, get the activity balancing sorted out before messing with the overall system difficulty - otherwise people will just overload on a single activity, like we've seen.)
thanks felix, but i cant really bother you for a location everytime i want to rekt some revenants, can i?
its just... with the amount of effort put into states that are just forgotten, into signaling various states and into herding people out of completed systems, i think that having some kind of a light bulb above available revenant missions shouldnt be that hard... its not supposed to raxxla hidden mystery. and after repeatedly spending around an hour trying to find some im just demotivated...thanks for the advice but i dont really appreciate being pushed into glitched system to get access to a gameplay that should (or at least could) have always been part of the war games. i also like at least some level of roleplay and breaking the law (getting fined in no fire zone) to save the bubble from goids is just not making it for me.
as i said this thread isnt really about blaming anyone, just a sort of an observation. a report. a vent, if you will...
i certainly dont blame anyone playing the game from stealing my gameplay. if you get to play on thursday and have fun and i get to play on tuesday and cant access that fun, i dont think its your fault.
you claiming im complaining about wining would be same twisting of words like me saying you support cheating to win the game. can we have a civil conversation without fallacies? im not here to attack anyone, nor complaining about wining. this is a deep sigh about the state of the war. i think you can very transparently and easily get what content i am talking about from the first post.
tldr: hunderds of conflict zones vs no station/base defence and horrible access to revenant reactivations.
to be honest, despite my saltiness abot it, i dont really find any problem with the gameplay of sampling scouts itself. especially not when someone is enjoying it. you can progress the war in relative safety and just watch a stream or read a book or look at memes while you are at it. i have no problem with that. and i absolutely agree with that second statement. if this is supposed to be a war why is picking your nose behind a corner more effective than holding the gun on the front line. why is combat (space conflict zones) so promoted (all other scenarios closed when completed and people are shoved into space czs that are everywhere) when it is so ineffective.
it just doesnt make much sense, does it?
it looks like there is a movement being made towards a permanents automated system, doesnt it? it would make sense and it is kinda my only hope left for this war. if we are being pushed towards some kind of plot bottleneck in the war that would result in cyclic scenarios providing all the funsies of the war i really wouldnt mind. thats a big if though... and at this point do i trust frontier to manage it successfuly? eeh... one way or another this just invites to give up the game, wait for some kind of progression, try it out, have a little fun while it lasts and then... ? so thats kinda my approach to this. im just waiting on how this will turn out. which is always valid. never play a game that doesnt bring you joy. but it also doesnt take away the bad taste in my mouth that these past events have left.
i have the same feeling as you, very much
if it required any proficiency it wouldnt be called cheese ^^ and it really doesnt require much. you just set up yourself a scenario where you are left alone with a scout in a shielded ship, you rubberband your mouse or put a weight on a button or whatever, and you can just sit and watch and rock in your chair for an hour like a sane and entertained person
im just making a little lighthearted fun...i was very much expecting some adjustement to be made with u16 as well. and im pretty sure frontier has been informed about the situation.
i think there are a couple of relatively easily made solutions that imo could vastly improve the war gameplay.
- get attacked base/station scenario back into play.
simple solution would be taking this scenario into occupied systems. since we have space czs everywhere these could be the thing to do in counterstrikes.
we could just have a station/base here and there activated and thats it. we could have an effort to create these scenarios: delivery missions with a progress bar that when completed would on next daily tick turn r&r in the station online. at least for a day. you can then fight there and protect your haulers who would assure stations operation for the next day.
if we would like to get into fantasy proportions we could have a continous cg for building combat megaships, that would be just sent into conflicted systems to provide space cz with r&r.
- balance combat and samples.
even if scout sample effectivenes was to be kept as it is, making it 1 sample per 1 scout would easily solve all the problems. to speedrun a system you have to at least chase the scouts down. put some effort into it. while staying relatively safe in a scenario that doesnt require much skill or grind or permitlocked equip...
effectiveness of kills could be pumped up a bit. since it looks like we are invited to just finish the war as fast as possible one way or another, why not actually put some meaning back into doing the "endgame boss" combat? make me feel like im pushing the goids back with wining the 30 minutes fight against one big thargoid instead of nibbling on the smallest one.
- make the alert state exclusive scenarios available outside of alerts.
i understand that it might not be that good to farm one completed system for its boons. but is locking a portion of players out of content the solution to this? give small orthrus spawns here and there. make ax reactivations more available and more visible.
i think there is a lot that can be done with relatively small effort from fdev side. but effort, at least from my pov, isnt really being seen right now...
that leads me to react in same way. lowering my effort to the point of not playing the game.
oooh we have been thinking we are speedruning the war by taking apart the scouts, while they were actually doing a secret invasion this way! we all thought (hoped[wished]) we will get on-foot combat in fargod megaship or at the barnacle matrices but it will actually be on the rescue megaships when the t-1000 scouts reassemble in their hold!
and then i woke up
very much yes! theres so many options how to achieve what little we would like to get. where is will there is way. my father always used to tell me when i was having excuses, that who wants, searches for ways; who doesnt want, searches for reasons. and it always ed me off because its true
this whole war i have been hoping for this. an exodus of whole of humanity to colonia (or wherever) and taking back the bubble. i was even so daring in my fantasies that I wanted the bubble to permanently become occupied territory, and people would scatter into the galaxy and start building bases
oh well... at least it kinda still looks like there is some possibility for a favourable (read: sensational and fantastic) outcome...
thats definitely one chip for the balance bingo
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The systems that can have AX reactivation missions are;
Chinas, HIP 20056, 20679, 21112, 21165, 21261, 8525,Holvandalla, Kaurukat, Lhou Mans, Liu Huang, Mapon, Obamumbo and Warnones.
Obviously you're then looking for an active alert system within 20 LY.
Chinas, HIP 20056, 20679, 21112, 21165, 21261, 8525,
Obviously you're then looking for an active alert system within 20 LY.
I've been thinking about how to solve this issue.
The clear desire here is to have invasions due to the CZs that only happen on populated systems, but due to the way the war currently works, they are the first targets every week, and if the thargoids are meant to lose territory it's obvious they will be of course dealt with so that the rest of the week can reclaim territory from harder effort control systems.
That said, we have the counterstrike control systems which currently aren't dealt with. I believe they should get some changes - by adding a "counterstrike" state to the ports in the system so they stop being just abandoned. This way they can re-use the scenarios that are only possible in populated systems while still keeping these systems in the control-state strength, so that they don't get as easily repelled like the alerts/invasions.
The clear desire here is to have invasions due to the CZs that only happen on populated systems, but due to the way the war currently works, they are the first targets every week, and if the thargoids are meant to lose territory it's obvious they will be of course dealt with so that the rest of the week can reclaim territory from harder effort control systems.
That said, we have the counterstrike control systems which currently aren't dealt with. I believe they should get some changes - by adding a "counterstrike" state to the ports in the system so they stop being just abandoned. This way they can re-use the scenarios that are only possible in populated systems while still keeping these systems in the control-state strength, so that they don't get as easily repelled like the alerts/invasions.
I don't see a major change like that happening before U17 and I wonder what might be left at that point.
In other words, too much tissue sampling makes them very angry and triggers a massive counter attack that effectively nullifies the gains, or even sets the progress back further? I think that could work, and if the solution is to try to fix with more tissue sampling, then that has a cumulative effect of causing more invasions in a feedback loop. If I'm reading that right though, there is the chance that some might make that the meta to try to help the Thargoids, and is also a dungeon masterDon't nerf anything, boost thargoid killing outside of stations/in space (if that wasn't already the outcome of journal fixes).
For the war to guarantee invasions and have a semblance of game flow there could be a Titan Panic response:
This could offer some opportunity to shape the attacks by spreading the effort, letting certain alerts go through to trade space for an easier time next cycle or just ignore it and deal with the consequences. Ideally it'd be a dilemma not a choice.
- if a Titan loses all its alerts in a cycle it'll trigger an invasion on a populated system (either instantly or next tick but ideally with a warning)
- if a Titan loses X control systems in a cycle it'll trigger an invasion on a populated system
This kind of self-limiting to avoid a massive counterattack is bread and butter for many strategy games like AI War, Terra Invicta (haven't played it yet) and various paradox stuff (not super experienced in those either) where just attacking everyone tends to upset people
way of achieving what I'm suggesting player groups do with their own volition and agency. Though, for sure, it would be more effective, but also more demanding of dev resources possibly too.Yeah but it's not just about tissue sampling it's about winning in general - it's just that tissue sampling is currently the optimal way to interact with the war.
Winning too hard also shouldn't reset all the gains just give some sort of new crisis or problem to slow down the snowball effect once some sort of critical mass of knowledge or player effort has been reached. Without any self-balancing elements the war would always need balancing to ensure invasions can actually happen and are possible to fight off andd that will feel very arbitrary.
Yeah there's the possibility to grief, even accidentally by clearing the last system that would trigger a counterattack, but if that's allowed to happen that might be a risk in the grand strategy side for not leaving enough margins and not the game mechanics being bad.If I'm reading that right though, there is the chance that some might make that the meta to try to help the Thargoids, and is also a dungeon master
I think I like this one the most out of the options, make it so that you can only get one sample per Thargoid probed or only one counts. I think the spamming of research limpets and stacking of tissue gathering is definitely a part of why this has become the meta strategy.
I can see some not finding that funny whatsoever lol.
Thanks a bunch! That was fun to read, quite informative.
Some minor notes:
Then the only remaining station would be Explorer's Anchorage near Sagittarius A*, which would mean no more Odyssey content, as the system has no ground settlements.
So, technically it's possible that most of the expansion's content is finite and will eventually run out! Wow! I should start a doom thread about how the developers want to eventually kill the expansion first, then later on, the game.
You know, if Frontier will ever allow players to beat back Titans and has a plan for what to do after they're all gone, then first "feeding in" new Titans from the new sites would make sense. Probably not all 40+ launching at the same time though. (Plus it's not like the Thargoids couldn't seed other sites out in the galaxy... although Stargoid travel speed would limit their usefulness.)
Still, it would be an option to consider if the Titans will ever become viable targets. If.
are those always the same? is it always the same systems every cycle?
(not like there is anything to do since all the alerts have been cleared. so i can just shrug and sigh and huff and puff and wish that i will get to play in the right place in the right time to not get locked out again... )
It depends on where the populated alerts are located - a military Odyssey settlement needs to be within 20ly to trigger those mission spawns.
Frontier actually fixed a bug here - as the original update notes for U15 stated these reactivations would be tied to alert and invasion states - but I’m not sure it was worth doing in regards to gameplay terms. Or at all, given that efforts to recover data and whatnot from behind enemy lines would occur even, or perhaps preferably, from systems(places) that are not being directly affected by the war.
The missions take place in control systems containing military settlements. These are the ones that meet that criteria.
These are all there are and all there will be because the number of control systems isn't exactly growing.
Holvandalla was sampled a couple of weeks back, all the others will be in the samplers target list.
Once they're gone, no more AX reactivation missions.
Damn. Thats... hmmm. Thats tough. Thanks for the info