My main gripe atm is the punishment for uncoordinated activity. Seeing all the weekly wasted effort on systems not reaching 33% is painful (especially Hupang). If they want thargoids to gain systems it was clear they'd keep changing the simulation rules until it happened. They could at least give something back.
Thargoid invasion - Next target systems?
- Thread starter Aleks Zuno
- Start date
Yeah, systems like Hupang being extra-super-hard and virtually impossible without Spire-support was not a secret though, that was already the case before the recent rule changes. For this lost effort nobody is to blame except the players who sunk all that futile effort into the system, despite better knowledge. Even if they didn't know about the proximity penalty beforehand, after a day or two it should have become obvious that something is not "normal" here and then to do a bit of research.
And as I wrote above, with all that effort that was pumped into Hupang we could have easily cleared 20024 and probably have a couple of days to spare.
And as I wrote above, with all that effort that was pumped into Hupang we could have easily cleared 20024 and probably have a couple of days to spare.
There were 26 human victories last week and with perfect coordination it could maybe have been 29 or 30, assuming something resembling the same target priorities and balance between Alert, Invasion and Control activities - so you can't e.g. take the lost effort at Hupang and put it into uninhabited Alert defence instead.
That's a small enough margin (on a potential 64 attacks) that it really shouldn't make much difference - especially since Hupang would be a lost cause even without the 33% reinforcements.
That's a small enough margin (on a potential 64 attacks) that it really shouldn't make much difference - especially since Hupang would be a lost cause even without the 33% reinforcements.
Hupang is of course the extreme of extremes, but on lighter invasions it might be a difference that prompts a last week coordinated attempt if it's getting 15-20% per week, for example. And shouldn't be too overpowered of a change that tips the scales against Frontier wishes for the war direction.
The change would also give some value back to spires affecting peripheries and titan rescues affecting counterstrike populated systems, though for that to really happen they'd also need to change alert progress to carry over to control. Nowadays both don't have much point.
I don't like blaming or punishing people that aren't playing in coordination. The thargoid war is meant to be for everyone - the UI and player tools are there for all to find a system to take part. Sampling eventually made the progress bar way less reliable, though, as it is progress being "sniped" from FCs.
At least this isn't like powerplay, where the worst case happens - uncoordinated efforts not being just a wasted effort, but also hurting the power itself due to the way the mechanics currently are.
With all the talk of coordinated efforts it's coordinated efforts that have taken the biggest blow.
At this point even if we bust a gut trying to clear just the unpopulated alerts it will make no difference if nobody is clearing any controls. It's not just a work increase to throw more Controls at us to stall us with, it's the knock on effects that have been the most devastating.
It's left us all in limbo wondering why we should bother with no motivation to play constant whack a mole. This was so clumsy and heavy handed all it's done is make everyone think this is too much hassle.
Everyone is sitting about waiting to see if others are still doing their bit before deciding if they will, and it has completely paralysed all coordinated efforts.
At this point even if we bust a gut trying to clear just the unpopulated alerts it will make no difference if nobody is clearing any controls. It's not just a work increase to throw more Controls at us to stall us with, it's the knock on effects that have been the most devastating.
It's left us all in limbo wondering why we should bother with no motivation to play constant whack a mole. This was so clumsy and heavy handed all it's done is make everyone think this is too much hassle.
Everyone is sitting about waiting to see if others are still doing their bit before deciding if they will, and it has completely paralysed all coordinated efforts.
This very accurately sums up my own thoughts and reaction. Whack a mole is the perfect description.
Henceforth I intend to do only one AX session per week to top off my Arx, and otherwise find other things to do. It doesn't make a difference either way.
At this point, it's clear that FDev will direct the Thargoids to do whatever the story demands in any case. I'd just say do whatever and only whatever you enjoy doing for its own sake, and wait for Frontier to godhand it again to compensate.
Yes, sadly I must agree. Gutted for all those who made such an effort to work with each other but you can't blame anyone for wondering what the point is.
One of the sillier theoretical consequences of the increased Alert count: the time for Taranis to attack Ram Tah in the total absence of opposition is now about 70 weeks; the time for it to do so if an extremely specific pattern of (lightweight) opposition takes place to herd it in the right direction is only 50 weeks.
Great, so we just need to wait a year in the most ideal Thargoid circumstances for anything to happen. At which point the difficulty curve will have simplified it enough that the invasion will probably be defended as it’s an engineer, even if a relatively unimportant one in terms of the modifications offered.
(And there could be a failsafe mechanism plugged in where said engineer just moves elsewhere if the system is under attack, or falls.)
RE controls - I’d maybe have been more interested in them, personally, if combat was a more viable option within them. But I’ve seen no indicators Frontier buffed it to be equal to or - god forbid - better than sampling in them after their… somewhat arbitrary tenfold increase to control difficulty without making combat a little stronger to compensate for that/the presence of AX CZs within them. Especially with it being so much less likely to find other players there. (If there were and I knew which AX conflict zone was being used by them or the most players, jumping out to a carrier for repairs, if needed, wouldn’t be the worst as I’d know the instance would likely still be there if I came back.)
As is, there seems to be no real reason to bother going there as a combat pilot. And spires, well, that requires a coordinated effort now as well, and singular focus on one Titan(and pod recovery may or may not be more effective with the 8 alert limit now, for populated ones at least). Plus the controls still need clearing once they reach the 85% limit.
The holding pattern wouldn’t be so bad if there was an end to it in sight. But there is not.
(And there could be a failsafe mechanism plugged in where said engineer just moves elsewhere if the system is under attack, or falls.)
RE controls - I’d maybe have been more interested in them, personally, if combat was a more viable option within them. But I’ve seen no indicators Frontier buffed it to be equal to or - god forbid - better than sampling in them after their… somewhat arbitrary tenfold increase to control difficulty without making combat a little stronger to compensate for that/the presence of AX CZs within them. Especially with it being so much less likely to find other players there. (If there were and I knew which AX conflict zone was being used by them or the most players, jumping out to a carrier for repairs, if needed, wouldn’t be the worst as I’d know the instance would likely still be there if I came back.)
As is, there seems to be no real reason to bother going there as a combat pilot. And spires, well, that requires a coordinated effort now as well, and singular focus on one Titan(and pod recovery may or may not be more effective with the 8 alert limit now, for populated ones at least). Plus the controls still need clearing once they reach the 85% limit.
The holding pattern wouldn’t be so bad if there was an end to it in sight. But there is not.
If it helps to know, to this day I awaken with amazement that so many different actions from so many Commanders—both at the desk and at the helm—together could clear away M. Taranis! It needed everything; testing, records, analysis, strategy, Alerts, Spires, harvest payloads, even Titan rescues in the weeks leading up to the final ten.
It is something for which I can only congratulate everyone, and also can not blame anyone, for we are given these scenarios with absolutely no directions! We have to explore the new areas, discover possible actions, discover their effects, devise ways to use them and plan ahead well enough that everyone on whom we rely is happy to lend their time. Emptying a Maelstrom was both possible and quite valuable under the existing rules, and 15% of the highest possible strength equaled the approximate mean strength of the top few cleared systems prior to that, so that conclusion was both perfectly logical and perfectly reasonable.
Using now the almost-certain presumption that it was not supposed to happen, I ask myself what were we intended to do with Spire sites and peripheral progress:
It is something for which I can only congratulate everyone, and also can not blame anyone, for we are given these scenarios with absolutely no directions! We have to explore the new areas, discover possible actions, discover their effects, devise ways to use them and plan ahead well enough that everyone on whom we rely is happy to lend their time. Emptying a Maelstrom was both possible and quite valuable under the existing rules, and 15% of the highest possible strength equaled the approximate mean strength of the top few cleared systems prior to that, so that conclusion was both perfectly logical and perfectly reasonable.
Using now the almost-certain presumption that it was not supposed to happen, I ask myself what were we intended to do with Spire sites and peripheral progress:
- One option hinted twice by Galnet was simply to evict them all, where each Maelstrom would require just enough Control clearance so that the final Matrix system would become peripheral despite Alerts, so that we can clear it then retreat while the Maelstrom recovers to a defensible radius.
- Problem 1: Spire sites were identified as a scarce resource, with which I agree. Along with periphery management, these introduced the first possible vector for sabotaging war activities.
- Problem 2: Despite the inner systems being inaccessible with no risk of being cleared for weeks, Matrix system strengths were increased very sharply twice, which puts pressure upon the qualitative strength of our goal. The goal of emptying a Maelstrom was one of few which survives that test.
- Problem 3: Each Maelstrom would have been left with at most 9–31 systems depending on location; with hindsight, Frontier did not want that.
- Problem 4: Also with hindsight, the Galnet hints were completely false insofar as no Titan was weakened in any way by being denied any Spire site.
- Another option was that we used casual Spire activity just to ease weekly defense and perhaps make general weekly progress.
- Problem 1: Making weekly progress then leaves everything dependent upon weekly Spire activity just to defend it.
- Problem 2: Losing the final Spire collapses the idea until the Maelstrom recovers back to its prior radius.
- Problem 3: It has no goal, or at best a goal which also can become the case at a farther radius without involving Spire activity.
In other words, one could help the Thargoids without being able to sign up for that in-game? I'm not going to lie, that does sound tempting.
Sadly, that's still a lot of time to dedicate to something that could, and probably would, be godmoded away by the developers. To say nothing about larger player groups thwarting the sabotage. Still, it's an amusing thought experiment.
A sad state of affairs indeed. Right from the inception of the Thargoid War, Fdev has failed to find a middle ground for the war.
Following the trajectory, from the Invasions and sense of fun and camaraderie at the start, to the ossified and meta gaming heavy sample show, to the state we have now. They have managed to suck the fun out of the war for pretty much every group.
Much as I'm personally heartened that Invasions are back, (well I will be once I can jump the carrier back from Colonia....), I don't like that its at the expense of folks who have put in a lot of time and effort
Also I may not have always agreed with the direction of travel especially from the organized groups but I also don't like to see dedicated players who have invested a lot of energy into the game so despondent and demoralized. Its bad for the game in general, a squandering of good will, especially after update 17, that iirc was generally perceived positively by the player base at large.
Trying to catch up via the forums after an absence, I'm left wondering what are Fdevs plans for the narrative?
Following the trajectory, from the Invasions and sense of fun and camaraderie at the start, to the ossified and meta gaming heavy sample show, to the state we have now. They have managed to suck the fun out of the war for pretty much every group.
Much as I'm personally heartened that Invasions are back, (well I will be once I can jump the carrier back from Colonia....), I don't like that its at the expense of folks who have put in a lot of time and effort
This right here is the crux of it-surely there was a way to balance this so everyone could get their kicks.
Also I may not have always agreed with the direction of travel especially from the organized groups but I also don't like to see dedicated players who have invested a lot of energy into the game so despondent and demoralized. Its bad for the game in general, a squandering of good will, especially after update 17, that iirc was generally perceived positively by the player base at large.
Trying to catch up via the forums after an absence, I'm left wondering what are Fdevs plans for the narrative?
Yes - it's not so much that they could do anything about the sabotage itself (they couldn't stop you doing it, and the odds of anyone even realising that your actions were intended to get Ram Tah eaten would be very low) as that even a moderately successful attempt to hold systems for their own sake or because fighting invasions is fun would slow Taranis down to the point of probably never reaching Meene.
Only speculation is available, although I consider it welcome!
One plausible thought at the Imperial Navy mathematics department is that everything is supposed to be at the halfway point, which is supported by the flurry of rule-changes but concerns ultimately the pattern of update additions. Setting aside the non-military Orthrus and Scavenger which have no proper weapons of their own, there are four Scouts and four Interceptors, but thus far only two Hunters and two surface vessels. This aligns also with having two entirely new types of accessible zone—the Titans and the Spire sites—and the halfway-hypothesis is exactly to suppose that the plan is to reach four of everything over the same amount of time.
Supposing that the case, of course not everything was supposed to fit together yet in terms of available actions, and the means to clear away a Maelstrom was at best unintentionally early by around six months. I know that only really addresses the how-much question rather than the what-next question; I imagine the latter will involve the various characters, although it has been a bit unhelpful that the recent activity has been only Palin failing to help, Jin-ae doing something nebulous we are not allowed to know, and Tanner surfacing only to tell us that the rules are being changed.
Conversely, the above notion that everything may fit together eventually is also a bit questionable; we have an example of one cause with an effect which has changed several times, which ought not occur if Frontier actually had a coherent plan. Specifically, the notion of Counterstrike systems has been very confusing from the start:
- Despite only inhabited Control systems receiving the icon and description, actually any Control system can be a hidden Counterstrike, which one can see at the Galaxy map with how Thargoid War mode uses a glowing highlight.
- Until shortly before update 17, the Counterstrike notion had no apparent effects at all, a gap of several months without knowing what it does.
- Extraction missiles were then available, and therefore Titan rescues; these were found to progress all Counterstrike systems, including the empty ones, themselves including those Matrix systems which were also Counterstrike.
- In one week, some Matrix systems were cleared that way before they ever became Spire sites, and Fleet Carriers swarmed them immediately on the Thursday. By the Friday, another Matrix system progress froze around 70%.
- Update 17 on the Monday reverted all of those to Control, and changed the Titan rescues to give peripheral progress instead, once again leaving the Counterstrike notion with no purpose.
- A few weeks after that, Titan rescues were changed again only to progress inhabited Counterstrike systems, making them relatively useless strategically.
They seem to think a happy medium is a cheerful person who talks to the dead, yes.
Indeed. For a while when sampling proved to be so effective I wondered (briefly) if that was the point, that perhaps they were trying to make it so we would be winning the war in ways other than fighting, and that still has potential to be a very interesting and different idea but not like this. When you have to find ways to make something fun that isn't - by winging up just to have someone to talk to, or to take the sting out of the grind, or finding ways to cheese things for kicks because otherwise it's just a chore - that should be setting off warning bells for everyone that the underlying gameplay is so unsatisfying that people are having to do this, and the underlying gameplay is therefore the problem.
Appreciate that. As someone who was blamed for a lack of Invasions (by some people to the point where it stepped over the line into harassment and abuse) I can see both sides of this.
That other side is that fdev gaslighted us for not doing Alerts at the beginning of last year, after once again someone did no more than skim read the situation, noticed that not many of them were getting cleared after Xmas and assumed we didn't know what we were doing. When in fact we had been clearing both Alerts and Invasions up until then but sometime between Xmas and New Year they increased the difficulty of Alerts.
HIP 20485 was the first Alert to be cleared and the second system to be cleared after the initial victory in HIP 23716. When HIP 20485 was Alerted for the second time in January, Operation Ida tested it with deliveries and delivered a quarter of a million tons only to move the bar by 8 pips in 2 days, which we calculated as being 4 times harder. At that rate it would have taken all the coordinated efforts at the time a whole week to clear just one or two Alerts, and while doing that they would not be working on any other systems at all. It was completely unworkable so we focused on Invasions, not because we didn't know we needed to clear the Alerts that caused them but because it wasn't physically possible to do so, therefore we took the decision to focus on what we could do.
Making Alerts so difficult that a top squad like Ida could barely make a dent and then gaslighting us for not clearing them as if we were idiots who didn't know what we were doing was just rude and even more galling because they ignored their own part in it. I'm sure someone there thought they were being clever and funny but it was nothing of the sort, just ignorant, crass, insulting and only validating the opinion of people who say they don't play their own game or read their own forum.
And then when they made Alerts more reasonable again without being too easy and finally seemed to get the balance right and we started clearing them again as we had been condescendingly and unnecessarily directed to, we got grief from other players because we were denying them their easy pew pew, as if it was our fault that fdev set it up that way and weren't creating interesting things to do in other systems.
Talk about can't win
.The next stage had better be worth waiting for if they have to hold us up like this.
Setting expectations straight is something that Frontier seem to have done rather… less well at, from the start. I thought I had a reasonably good idea of what they were going for(a Thargoid pushback after they were seeming to get overwhelmed by human defenders, at the point of… whenever the next update is), but apparently that’s not right, since there’s been these seemingly out of nowhere difficulty changes without any obvious story aspect to motivate them, or a major update.
(And I still want to know whose brilliant idea it was to buff controls tenfold as they did, but not encourage people to go and do fighting there. It pretty much did the opposite until sampling came along.)
Or what their direction is at this point. Are we really just supposed to push the Titans back out? Are we going to have to work with the Thargoids to rid ourselves of that idiot Salvation in his Guardian doohickey? Hell if I know.
The other alternative is that there wasn’t/isn’t much communicating going on between the GalNet writers and whoever’s responsible for the war balancing, which… really isn’t much better, if the case.
(And I still want to know whose brilliant idea it was to buff controls tenfold as they did, but not encourage people to go and do fighting there. It pretty much did the opposite until sampling came along.)
I’d like to think it will be, but whether I should hold my expectations to that level, I’m not so sure. It feels like things are building toward a… what’s the word? Mosh pit? I don’t know/remember, but while it feels like things might get messy, I’m not sure if Frontier are going to (be able to) deliver on it.
Or what their direction is at this point. Are we really just supposed to push the Titans back out? Are we going to have to work with the Thargoids to rid ourselves of that idiot Salvation in his Guardian doohickey? Hell if I know.
Problem now is if they do cut us a break now nobody will trust them not to smack us down again if we start doing too well, because that trust has gone.
If it helps to imagine—for every quite loud combat voice which will not fight in a Control system for lack of a restock service, there are also newer pilots, threatened factions, returning explorers, Fuel Rats, traders with useful market routes and unimaginably many others who are thankful silently and daily that you have prevented the Maelstroms from expanding larger than they did!
It gave me a quite magical feeling to see so many Fleet Carriers arriving in restored systems, where the following month becomes mutually exclusive with Alerts, and therefore such magic not could occur without losing future Invasions. More so than admiring that, each such Carrier represents at least one Commander who has benefited as a result. I have also been thanked before for having guarded Kagutsuchi, where the lack of attackers left it completely clear as a safe port in a time of need; I was very sure to mention those who kept the attacks repelled and refuse that credit for that myself!
The obvious part is that the loud combat voices should be pointed in the Frontier direction and ask for Counterstrike to provide Conflict zones with restock; the oft-hidden part is that much activity is better that way for many more Commanders, unquantifiably but assuredly!