WorldsGreatestForumDad
Banned
Im ready to be invaded.
Wheres MAH meaningful D-Day?
- Thread starter WorldsGreatestForumDad
- Start date
The Invasion Begins Soon!*
*Invasions happen weekly on Thursdays at 7am GMT. Frontier Developments offer no guarantee that you will notice the Invasion until after you have been Invaded.
*Invasions happen weekly on Thursdays at 7am GMT. Frontier Developments offer no guarantee that you will notice the Invasion until after you have been Invaded.
Alternatively, tell us which system you're in, and the BGS experts will arrange for someone to invade you shortly.
Unless, of course, your system already has it's maximum quota of invaders, in which case no further invasions are possible; you will have to de-invade somebody in order for another invasion to occur.
Which totally makes sense from a real-world perspective. The real reason why Philip of Spain, Napoleon and Adolf all failed to invade Britain was that, with the Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans already there, Britain already had reached maximum invasion quota. [wacky]
Unless, of course, your system already has it's maximum quota of invaders, in which case no further invasions are possible; you will have to de-invade somebody in order for another invasion to occur.
Which totally makes sense from a real-world perspective. The real reason why Philip of Spain, Napoleon and Adolf all failed to invade Britain was that, with the Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans already there, Britain already had reached maximum invasion quota. [wacky]
Thank you for calling The Thargoid Invasion Department. Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed.
If you'd like to have us invade your star system, please press one.
If you'd like to have us invade someone else's star system, say an opposing faction, please press two.
If you'd like to surrender to an invasion currently in progress, please press three.
Please note that pressing three will require you to admit that all your base are belong to us.
If you'd like to have us invade your star system, please press one.
If you'd like to have us invade someone else's star system, say an opposing faction, please press two.
If you'd like to surrender to an invasion currently in progress, please press three.
Please note that pressing three will require you to admit that all your base are belong to us.
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Still waiting for the Thargoid issue to hit. I mean really hit. When the base attacks started, that was kind of cool. Once. Then we fixed all the damn bases and it basically turned into bug-eyed green monsters spray-painting swears on our collective fence; there's no real threat!
What I want to see is a massive, concerted Tet offensive type of scenario. They come out of nowhere, hit hard, do SERIOUS damage, and leave us reeling. Maybe it leads into a ragged under-the-guns Dunkirk style evacuation effort, not just moving inconvenienced tourists slightly to the left.
I don't want to adjust the BGS. I want to see FD whack it with a mallet.
What I want to see is a massive, concerted Tet offensive type of scenario. They come out of nowhere, hit hard, do SERIOUS damage, and leave us reeling. Maybe it leads into a ragged under-the-guns Dunkirk style evacuation effort, not just moving inconvenienced tourists slightly to the left.
I don't want to adjust the BGS. I want to see FD whack it with a mallet.
[video=youtube;NJ-xcgBL1mY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ-xcgBL1mY[/video]
No Thargoids were injured in the making of this vidieo.
While Thargoid encounters have had a better atmosphere in general. Shivan encounters were a slight more imposing and kind of terrifying, especially when a colossal battlecruiser that took 20yrs of joint human-alien efforts could put nary a dent in the invasion. At the current moment, despite not having personally fought thargoids, I don't feel particularly threatened. They do however intrigue me more than the Shivans.
You can bypass the faction limit to invade anyway if you're not already in another conflict, but it's an obscure case and the historical invaders weren't aware of it.
Awesome! Thank you! FD, are you looking at this??
FD can learn a lot from that video.
Aliens should still be near invincible. Weapon development should be slower. It's not about killing them to begin with, but surviving long enough to get data, or evacuate.
Shields don't exist for us yet. Seriously. Lol Shields should have been invented later.
Damaged thrusters look awesome. I want to see my ship do this when an engine goes puff.
And that's how you turn up to destroy a station and everyone in it. You do not leave it standing, given the choice. And to don't do it on a Thursday when no one is around to see it.
I loved Freespace. Lol
Yes. Thinking about the reasons Freespace's invasion storyline was more exciting, though, a lot of them are intrinsic to the genre, while others would take a substantial change of direction to fix.
Intrinsic
- Freespace, of course, was able to skip all the boring patrols where nothing happened, both in terms of not having to play them out and in terms of not having to wait a week or two of real time between playing the exciting ones. (Similarly, it wasn't optional. You couldn't decide you didn't want to fight the Shivans and go exploring or trading instead.)
- Freespace was set in a relatively small region ... smaller in system count than Colonia is now. Jump routes between systems were rigid, intersystem travel was relatively slow, and so systems could be literally cut off if an intervening system was taken. Losing even a single system was a major disaster.
- The campaign could be settled in single climatic engagements. "What happened to the Thargoids?" "Oh, we had a big fight at Lembava. Lost a few stations, but we drove them off. Haven't seen them since." "Just my luck to have slept through it."
- Greater acceptance of "railroad plot". The FS1 campaign was linear, the FS2 campaign had a couple of optional branches which you could skip with minimal consequence. Ultimately you would win or lose battles but the war would continue (or not, if you lost particular battles, time to retry that mission). Frontier have been repeatedly criticised for - whether perceived or actual, and I think there's a mix of both - not letting players influence the Thargoid story very much.
- Ramping up of difficulty. A linear plot can have "training" missions earlier on, with all the technology and enemy curves. A new player joining Elite Dangerous now has all of that immediately ... which makes it difficult to have Thargoids (even the scouts) hanging around Eravate shooting at Freewinders.
- Conventional test cycles. The Freespace missions could be played and replayed multiple times to get the balance right before anyone outside the dev team saw them. Frontier with Elite Dangerous really only get one shot - sure, an individual battle scenario can be repeatedly tested internally - but the overall difficulty of the war? As we saw with the station repairs, they guessed targets which were theoretically possible for the player base to meet but in practice (because not everyone is focused 100% on the Thargoid war) far too large. Their fix for that wasn't ideal ... but it's not like they can go back and start over.
Too late to change
- The Guardian-equivalents in Freespace *lost* to the Shivans. Badly. They'd just about figured out the desperation move eventually used at the end of FS1 (which led to the similarly desperate moves at the end of FS2) but didn't have the forces left to use it. And what the wreckage of their civilisation left the allies was not a superweapon, but a strategy. What the Guardians have told us is that the Thargoids are not that dangerous. Not only can they be beaten, they can be beaten by a civilisation of similar capabilities to our own.
Not going to change in a hurry
- Freespace had a well-defined mix of small fighters, medium patrol vessels, and capital ships - on both sides. One-for-one, the allies were ahead on fighters and mediums, with the Shivans being ahead on capitals (and way ahead on supercapitals). This gave battles focal points and purposes. The players, of course, flew the small fighters, rather than the "armed scenery". Elite Dangerous doesn't really have that "medium patrol vessel" category - even the Corvette is basically just a big fighter ... and most engagements are extremely small wing-vs-wing skirmishes (if not 1v1s). The 1v1 combat wasn't as good in Freespace (match speed and get behind someone and you're mostly done) ... but it was much better optimised for mass engagements.
Could change, but not necessarily easily.
- In Freespace, once the Shivans showed up, the Terran-Vasudan truce and alliance came very quickly (both sides had dissenters, of course). In Elite Dangerous, even the NPCs seem uncertain about the scale of the threat, and aren't portraying any particular sense of urgency ... meanwhile, the Cold War between the powers was mostly over already.
- The Shivans took out the Vasudan homeworld then turned for Sol. Would the Thargoids in Elite really take out Achenar/Alioth despite players trying to stop them? (See above comment on "railroad plot": what would it take to make players accept that they lost - an important battle, though not yet the war - and this is the consequences of losing, but they *could* have won if they'd done something different?)
- In Elite Dangerous, with AX and Guardian weapons, we've already gone past the point where the Thargoids are militarily superior (indeed: the new AX/Guardian synthesis in 3.0 suggests that taking the fight back to them and operating beyond convenient resupply is on the menu). In Freespace, the Shivan flagship was entirely unbeatable and ate human destroyers for breakfast ... and it was introduced very early on while humans were still struggling to fight the basic Cain-class cruisers and had only just obtained shields and shield-breaking weapons themselves. By the time of FS2, the Sathanas was less far ahead - but even a single one was still incredibly costly to defeat - stopped at the cost of multiple destroyers and countless smaller ships, after it had rampaged through multiple systems, because it took that long to damage it to the point where the allies' largest ship could stand a chance.
(See above comment on railroad plot: would the players accept the appearance of a Thargoid capship which even multiple wings can't do any serious damage to before it completes its task and jumps out?)
All in all, I'm not sure the genre of Elite Dangerous particularly works with Freespace-like alien invasion stories. Could a different sort of story work well? Possibly. But I think the biggest problems will be linearity/railroading/one shot: how do you balance the war so that the outcome demonstrably depended on player actions, rather than being a near-unavoidable walkover for one side or another? ... because if you don't, no-one particularly has any incentive to engage with it.
verminstar
Banned
When I can see thargoids attacking stations and not just hearing about it afterwards...then its an invasion. When I can see the battles outside my cockpit, then its an invasion. Until that happens, then its not an invasion...its a new combat zone mechanic, nothing more special than that Im afraid. To progress further from that point, one would have to adopt a heavy role play scenario where yer imagination fills in the many blanks because the game fails to...fails quite spectacularly in this case ^
Locking the weapons behind yet another grindwall? Thats what ye might refer to as the final nail in that coffin...thats where what little interest there is comes to a complete halt and dies a very sudden and very final death ^
Locking the weapons behind yet another grindwall? Thats what ye might refer to as the final nail in that coffin...thats where what little interest there is comes to a complete halt and dies a very sudden and very final death ^
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I almost wet myself
People should know by now that the Thargoids only work one day a week, and that's on Thursdays. They should of been called Thurgoids instead of Thargoids.
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