Biggest related problem this game has is nothing is flagged as co-op when games have been doing that for at least a decade.
Am I getting too old but is the new content too difficult to access?
- Thread starter Phoenix_Dfire
- Start date
@Geronimo3
The thing is though that these activities have some weight in regards the thargoid war so the easy mode would break that and turn something that challenges into an easy farm.
They have made AX difficult deliberately, that much is obvious... and the thargoids always took some effort back in the day so it fits.
It's the best place for challenge as things stand and something to aspire to mastering, or ignore if not for you..
Should be a part of the game though.
The thing is though that these activities have some weight in regards the thargoid war so the easy mode would break that and turn something that challenges into an easy farm.
They have made AX difficult deliberately, that much is obvious... and the thargoids always took some effort back in the day so it fits.
It's the best place for challenge as things stand and something to aspire to mastering, or ignore if not for you..
Should be a part of the game though.
Herein lies the rub, though.
The initial mass incursion by the Thargoid Maelstroms (before they were identified as Titans) presented a huge challenge and the 'human' side were losing ground - as might be expected with relatively few fighting millions of invaders - complaints by some players were uttered loudly, with - if my memory serves me well (I'm old...) - the biggest group of players threatening to stop playing the 'war game' as it was too hard to win!
So, yes, Frontier can listen once again, and pull the teeth of the latest generation of challenge introduced in the game (they probably will) and, once again, the "Saviors of the Galaxy" will be massacring the overwhelming alien forces by sampling tissue, or something equally mundane.
Predictably, the aforementioned "Saviours" will utter "too easy" and complain that there is no challenge in the game, once they have eliminated what should have been overwhelming forces using the equivalent of pea-shooters against Gatling guns...
Either Frontier needs to wind the incursion up to 11, or just let it fizzle out like a damp squib...
ETA: If the 'war' was actually Galactic, rather than 8 'localised' regions that are not really presenting any threat to civilisation, then even players like me, who have been ignoring the 'war' as it has no effect on my day-to-day activities, would be encouraged to get involved - a war economy is a great one, logistics would play a part (not that I'd be interested in hauling, but there are many 'peaceful traders' who could benefit) as would multiple levels of combat (remember, the game, as designed, is principally combat oriented - with exploration being the get-out for those inclined to avoid it) - but, sadly, to do such would be considered too 'radical', so we shall end up with enemies that can be easily defeated 'by rote' instead of the survival of the 2 human bubbles being threatened with eradication.
Last edited:
@Geronimo3
Everyone is gonna have their opinions on it and it doesn't really matter who says what. Once you start going down that road where some opinions are more valid than others then that's not good.
The forum is for everyone to have a say, that's what it's for.
Ultimately, FD decide but i would suggest that this should be difficult and something hard to beat where situational awareness is key and you have to think before you act, a bit like the old hitman games.
They were fun.
Everyone is gonna have their opinions on it and it doesn't really matter who says what. Once you start going down that road where some opinions are more valid than others then that's not good.
The forum is for everyone to have a say, that's what it's for.
Ultimately, FD decide but i would suggest that this should be difficult and something hard to beat where situational awareness is key and you have to think before you act, a bit like the old hitman games.
They were fun.
I would expect that if they did increase the difficulty it would have been because the players were advancing faster than FDEV's "cunning plan" is predicated on. FDEV has a habit of using their "thumb on the scales" to manipulate players / story progression.
Edited for typo
Last edited:
From memory, there were probably two separate sets of complaint involved there.
The majority of complaints that the difficulty was too high came in the first week - when the total human activity, even if it had been deployed with perfect coordination, wasn't enough to win a single system. I think that's probably fair enough: if you're going to have global progress bars, they need to be in the "possible" range, or you might as well just have the pre-U14 "the Thargoids blow up the stations we say they do" war mechanic and make it easier for everyone. Once it got to the stage where it was possible to win at least a couple of systems a week (while losing seventy more!) the majority of that went away. [1]
Since then the complaints haven't really been related to where the specific difficulty setting is (and neither making it harder nor easier would fix that) - but more the inevitable settling of the war as a whole into a fairly static arrangement [2] where most effort is spent fighting over the same systems again and again and again with no end in sight because however strong your player group you're going to hit a point where you can't advance further eventually. And ultimately you either enjoy the day-by-day Thargoid shooting enough that doing it for a whole year isn't an issue, or you don't, because the strategic layer doesn't add enough interest on top of that. The more directly Frontier-managed post-2.4 skirmishes ended up with the same issue by the end. (As is also the natural state of Powerplay or Political BGS conflicts)
[1] Very similar to the Colonia Engineers project: it took most of three years to complete, but the complaints about the difficulty were only there when it was set to "it will take most of three years to get a single blueprint to G2". Once it was possible to make visible progress in a week - though often still only marginal! - everyone was fine with that.
[2] It'll be interesting to see what happens with the recaptured Spire sites in the next couple of weeks: if it does make it theoretically possible to wipe out a Maelstrom, that could break people out of their static patterns a bit. If the Thargoids respond to losing Leigong by sending eight more, that could make things even more interesting...
The Spire sites do present an interesting challenge - the Banshee missiles are initially a worthwhile threat, but as they appear to be dumbfire might easily be avoided by flying away at a reasonable speed. Likewise, attacking the Orthrus is simple if they are busy scanning (or whatever they are doing) near a spire as the become oblivious to one's attack and forget to fight back (please tell me this is a bug! If it isn't... Well...) but are challenging if attacked in normal flight.
I earned in excess of 400 million credis during 2 sessions where I was playing alone (my playmates were otherwise occupied - the bane of the working classes!) so, even for a mediocre AX player they are not insurmountable playing solo, but are challenging for one who disregards the 'proper way' to engae them!
It wouldn't surprise me if more teeth are pulled, and a 'magical reset' happens on Thargsday if the desired scenario has been upset by too many human pods rescued, or similar. Let's see what happens in the next few weeks.
But, in my opinion, the Spire sites are amazing fun and worth a visit (and possibly a few rebuys on bad days) just to see them, and hopefully to collect some of the new materials available there.
It probably was, as the bigger groups specialising in AX combat were used to 'just winning', even in Sidewinders.
It would have been interesting to see if the difficulty remained 'impossible' once the incursion had grown and Thargoid resources were spread thinner - but it didn't happen as Frontier 'adjusted' the difficulty to the point where it has been virtually stalemate for a year - and it appears, currently, that even the Spires are victim to rescuing etc.
Although we shall have to await the Thursday system update to discover if this is, in fact, accurate.
Definitely not dumbfired - they just move rather slowly for a missile. They behave more like the tragically slow torpedoes. And can be diverted via ECM.
I’d kind of like if the war did become a little more… dynamic again. First few months were great. Then it suddenly turned into “Oh but the humans are winning against a vastly superior alien force, anyway”. It’s almost just Thargoid hedge trimming at this point. U17 hasn’t done a lot to alleviate that.
I’d be more curious if there was a specific response coded into a specific Titan to respond to, well, losing all control systems*. Otherwise it’s just gonna sit there kind of looking all menacing, without doing much, since they for some reason are acting like a force that is limited by where it can appear at any given time. Which is, evidently, not the case with the Thargoids, and if a Titan decides to start moving again, it’s not like we can do much about it but see where it lands.
*If it’s just a simple ‘launch large capture attempt’ at the same distances that the Titans had upon arrival, even that wouldn’t be… extremely damaging around Leigong, at least in regards to human populated space. I looked around old galnets yesterday, and found that apparently no inhabited space was directly captured by it due to its location. Taking the spire sites back still wouldn’t be great, of course, under the assumption that they are probably not going to mean something good for us.
Assuming that it was on the same sort of quasi-cubic difficulty that it currently is, that would suggest:
- first victory somewhere in the 25-30 LY range, maybe after six-to-eight weeks of the war [1]
- ability to win multiple victories in the 30-40 LY range, though it'd have taken the Thargoids until U16 or so to be placing a substantial number of attacks out there anyway
- ability to win all important systems in the 50-60 LY range (which is the point where there really start being important systems) after a couple of years waiting for the Thargoids to get there
- possibly ability to generate a stalemate situation at 70-80 LY after five years or so but the details are so hypothetical at that point it barely matters.
[1] Assuming that coordinated actions continued that long, and it hadn't just been assumed that the bars were there for decoration to emphasise the overwhelming Thargoid firepower, so you might as well just fight them wherever you feel like it and not worry about that side of things. At some point further out it'd get noticed that "hey, we weren't even trying and we got 10%", of course. In the same way that AXI knocked themselves out trying to retake Swahku early on, and it took a month or so for the premature conclusion to be corrected from "Controls are impossible" to "Controls right next to a Titan are impossible".
There were about two months between "can a Titan actually place Alerts?" coming up as a hypothetical question, and the actual test of it, with no attempt to keep what was happening secret, and the expectation being that they could. So even if they just hadn't thought of that, they had quite a while to fix it if they wanted it to be fixed.
I have to assume - given the repeated balance changes in our favour - that it's something we're vaguely supposed to be doing at this point.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t really solve that we can’t really ‘remove’ the source of the problem itself, which is the actual Titan. But I guess it won’t be much of one with the control sphere neutralized… which I take will not be achieved any time soon? I don’t exactly know how long that plan would take to execute around Leigong.
Really depends how much firepower is available (and, of course, if Spires stay recaptured!) - it could theoretically be done in a month with a sufficiently strong attack, I'd expect more likely to be sometime in Q1 next year.
Brilliant! You are, as always, a great source of 'number twisting' response - Thanks for doing the sums I couldn't
As it stands, a small number of human combatants, in relation to the alien forces, are destroying literally millions of the Thargoid resources reasonably effortlessly, which makes the threat of Galactic war highly improbable - unless better and less predictable Thargoid assets appear over time.
Today, for me, the incursions represent not even a minor inconvenience, if I want to interact with Thargoids I have to go out of my way to do so. Will they ever be a real threat to humankind? (I seriously doubt it, but might hope otherwise)
Yes. Though, arguably, we're not supposed to be doing that sum, in the same way that we're not supposed to count up that a million or so pirate ships get destroyed every week without this ever seeming to deter them.
Yes, underneath all of the semi-realism and quasi-simulation, it is just a game after all.
The way I see it...
Some things are easy for me (trade, exploration to some extent, etc...)
Some are just the right difficulty to be challenging (human NPC ground combat in G3 gear, Thargoid Spire Sites, etc...)
And others are too hard for me unless I really REALLY want to invest and focus my time and effort in tackling them (mats for caustic sink/pulse neutralizer, solo Thargoid CZ/Interceptor combat, etc...)
Overall it seems to me a reasonable balance across the play surface, I can choose to have an easy session, a very difficult session or an in-between session each time I play.
If you wish to get the Caustic sink etc. mats in the future, I'll wing with you, if you wish. More guns can be helpful at times.
It would be rather odd if a Titan decides to just stay where it is once it's harvesting and "processing" grounds were lost.
If it cannot do it's thing where it is, it might decide to move around a bit and try again.
What if it'd park around Kamadhenu 2... that'd instantly cause a Power collapse for Arissa.
That might be more Titan Hadad's thing, though.
Anyway, the difficulty curve for Titan access is likely to have this "area-of-effect counterpressure" be predictable - rather then subjected to spikes because Elite got news coverage and everyone wants to see the new attraction and hop on that ride a few times.
It's pretty good at filtering for players who either have great skill, or who are persistant with a tailored min/max'd G5 ride - with a desire to learn.
If it cannot do it's thing where it is, it might decide to move around a bit and try again.
What if it'd park around Kamadhenu 2... that'd instantly cause a Power collapse for Arissa.
That might be more Titan Hadad's thing, though.
Anyway, the difficulty curve for Titan access is likely to have this "area-of-effect counterpressure" be predictable - rather then subjected to spikes because Elite got news coverage and everyone wants to see the new attraction and hop on that ride a few times.
It's pretty good at filtering for players who either have great skill, or who are persistant with a tailored min/max'd G5 ride - with a desire to learn.
Just to put a more balanced spin on this;- I'm really enjoying the new content in update 17. I haven't had that much fun since fighting thargoids around a planetary port. The fact that you don't need a pre-grind (Caustic sinks I'm looking at you) to access this content, is great.
To be honest, the initial problem I had with the war was not that it was too difficult. There was some balancing that fdev needed to do to start with It but it settled down. The main issue was was finding the Orthrus. I must have been incredibly unlucky because I think I only came across two or three encounters when the war started and I was under the impression that was the way to stop the alerts turning into Invasions. From what I understand, those encounters have been 'fixed' but the alerts are still clearing up too quick with sampling thargoids still having a massive effect on the Alert.
Now it might be that this is by design. They've been dropping hints that something is coming and that might lead to the thargoids expanding out again.
To be honest, the initial problem I had with the war was not that it was too difficult. There was some balancing that fdev needed to do to start with It but it settled down. The main issue was was finding the Orthrus. I must have been incredibly unlucky because I think I only came across two or three encounters when the war started and I was under the impression that was the way to stop the alerts turning into Invasions. From what I understand, those encounters have been 'fixed' but the alerts are still clearing up too quick with sampling thargoids still having a massive effect on the Alert.
Now it might be that this is by design. They've been dropping hints that something is coming and that might lead to the thargoids expanding out again.
