Analysing the Thargoid Simulation

[Northpin]

I wonder how safe it is to do non-combat activities in these systems? And no, it's not because I can't be bothered to engineer an AX ship, I just suck at aiming.

With a Phantom like this, you'd have no issues with hyperdictions or surviving running missions in the hot zones.
4 PIPS to Sys if being shot at should help alot, but most important is speed and using heatsinks to keep your heat under 20%
Even corrosive missiles can be evaded with enough speed, but that's not exactly possible when you try to land, so keep using those heatsinks to keep cold (the Sirius ones are especially nice in this regard, with their extra charge and no weight increase)

Cargo rack can be replaced with a mix of cargo/passenger cabins if the need arise - i have no idea how the missions look, i only did combat in the thargoid systems

 

[]M[]

This is brilliant stuff @Ian Doncaster!

One important question that seems to be missing: what effect does denying the Orthrus interceptor access to the Thargoid probes it's collecting (either by destryoying the Interceptor or destroying or scooping up the probes)?

Yes indeed!

…and yes, indeed :]

Yesterday i dropped in on a yellow-level alert system for the first time, FSS scanned 100% and a probe signal appeared within a minute or two. I collected it before an Orthrus appeared and soon after 4 rather irritable scouts waked in - was able to get away with the “stolen” item without too much trouble…

So, a key question, i agree: could enough of this (collecting probes and / or eliminating Orthrus) actually prevent an orange-level invasion?

Well, if it is possible to halt or even significantly delay a Thargoid invasion, doesn’t that achieve a strategic win with relatively little expense, ie: then “prevention is better than cure”? …except it may not be particularly easy to do this (hunt / destroy sufficient Orthrus) as appropriate to this strategic significance? :]

 

[Rainbro]

I've noticed some oddities while doing evac missions - I wonder if they indicate anything that could be useful, or are just weird 4.0 UI oddities I'm not aware of. Paranoia says that some of these might indicate that the missions are old/bugged and have no effect. Probably not but this game has given me trust issues.

• Some passenger rescue missions display a threat icon and level of 8, other's dont. No observable differences between the missions themselves.
• Some passenger missions have a link to the Salvage and Rescue codex in the left panel, other's don't. Maybe linked to the above.
• Some passenger missions can be handed in either at the passenger mission contact or the regular mission contact. Most work normally.
• With cargo pod missions, both the issuing faction and the system (port?) controller are listed in the results screen as having benefited. Even if they're the same. Does this mean they're 2x as effective? The popups in the bottom right have both a generic "Influence increased" message and a second "Influence increased" message that specifies the controller, though reputation does not change for the controller even with the specific rep reward. You can see the discrepancy in the screenshot, and missions handed in after that one were stuck the rep from the rightmost bar, so maybe it's just not updating too? Ehhh.

Edit: since the mission board broke today, the cargo pod missions are now listing a variety of nearby (to the attacked system) factions as recieving the mission. I assume the missions are generating like normal short-range delivery missions to nearby systems, then having their destination forcibly overridden to the rescue megaship? And with the faction not being present there, it likely has no effect, not even on reputation possibly. Ehh.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Does this mean they're 2x as effective?

Normally this would just mean "benefit to issuer in issuing system" + "benefit to recipient in receiving system" and if the two factions happen to be the same in different systems, influence is localised so that's fine (and back when it was last tested, which was a while ago, the recipient gained less than the issuer and didn't benefit from +INF rewards; the recipient may also get different State effects to the issuer, though as Odyssey's mission board doesn't explicitly show state effects, who knows...)

If this was an inside-the-same-system mission then it presumably gives both benefits ... but then, if it was an Invasion system the INF levels are frozen anyway so it also doesn't matter that it did.

I've added a link to your post to the "other sorts of bug" list on the off-chance that anyone from Frontier is reading this thread.

 

[Astaran]

The Colonia Engineer upgrading might be an interesting previous example for trying to predict this sort of thing with CGs.

The initial targets for that were set so that roughly 100,000 upgrades were needed to move a module to the next grade - so 100,000 G1 materials for the G1->G2 upgrade, more expensive for the higher grades.

They'd held a Research CG in Colonia not long before, and that had had 330,000 G1 materials handed in during the week. So based on that you'd get ~3 G1 upgrades a week, though spread out over the different modules it would take a few months to get them all to G2, and then keeping on that rate you'd finish the project within about a year.

Obviously, that didn't happen. Partly, it was slower because to hand the materials to the engineer you had to do it one roll at a time, rather than just saying "donate 300" at CG the research contact in seconds. But mainly it was because the CG itself provided visibility and coordination that wasn't ordinarily there. After three months of solid effort we'd got a few modules to show "5%" progress (the minimum displayed increment, though we were able to deduce some 1% progress from sort ordering)

Even when they reduced the thresholds by roughly 98% - which put a few of the more popular modules to "nearly complete" overnight - it still took almost three years to finish the job.


Similarly station repairs. Back at that sort of time, trade CGs tended to get 10-20 MT a week, so a 10MT station repair target, especially since it didn't have a hard deadline, must have seemed quite reasonable. But even after a >90% reduction most of them sat unrepaired for months until Op IDA could get round to fixing them.


Even without questions about bond hoarding and whether that matters, unfocused effort is going to be way less effective than a CG, most of the time - and the interface is not really set up to encourage fully-focused effort either. It wouldn't surprise me if - again - the thresholds are going to need a substantial reduction to get the balance to be where it was intended.


Since uninhabited systems for Alert and all systems for Control have nowhere in-system to pay in the bonds and only combat listed as a means of moving the progress bar, I'd assume that this means the bonds aren't relevant.

(Worse option: they are relevant and that's why none of those systems have moved even slightly)

I'll add it to the "questions" list.

Sustaining the current level of participation might become tricky as well. Right now, the Thargoid invasion is "new" and naturally people flock to what's "new". But the missions we're doing are the same we've been doing for years now: Shoot Thargoids, trade stuff. The new locations for fighting Thargoids and "docking/undocking while under fire" is at least a bit new, I wonder for how long this "thrill" will last.
Long story short: I believe over the next weeks and months player participation will drop significantly, if the war activities remain the same.

Second, related issue: Right now, the community can focus on "only" three Maelstroms. Soon there will be eight Maelstroms which will spread the community over a larger area. Once the Thargoid beginn to advance in earnest, due to lack of successfull resistance, this problem grows larger with each week. The more systems the Thargoid occupy, the more spread out the community becomes, the less effective resistance will be, the faster Thargoid can expand etc.

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

Some passenger missions will give warnings mid-journey that enemies are hunting you, probably tied to the threat levels.

The thargoid missions don't have any influence reward at all, sometimes leading to cases where you will have the difficult choice of +3 rep and credits, or +2 rep and no credits.
Also the thargoid massacres (wing missions) aren't restricted to a system, you can use targets anywhere. But the non-wing missions (which are typically for only one kill) are restricted to the issuing system.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Sustaining the current level of participation might become tricky as well. Right now, the Thargoid invasion is "new" and naturally people flock to what's "new". But the missions we're doing are the same we've been doing for years now: Shoot Thargoids, trade stuff. The new locations for fighting Thargoids and "docking/undocking while under fire" is at least a bit new, I wonder for how long this "thrill" will last.

That's true - though, equally, the game has kept going for eight years on the basic gameplay of "move some cargo over here, shoot up pirates in this RES there, scan some systems, etc." - so if people find it in general more interesting to do that "with Thargoids" there might be a persistent change.

Frontier will also be hoping that it causes a long-term increase in interest in Elite Dangerous to increase the player count, too. A big risk, naturally.

Second, related issue: Right now, the community can focus on "only" three Maelstroms. Soon there will be eight Maelstroms which will spread the community over a larger area. Once the Thargoid beginn to advance in earnest, due to lack of successfull resistance, this problem grows larger with each week. The more systems the Thargoid occupy, the more spread out the community becomes, the less effective resistance will be, the faster Thargoid can expand etc.

That certainly looks likely right now where I think even containing a single one would be more than we could achieve - and narratively it'd be a bit strange if things seemed easy to start with, of course - but it's possible that the Thargoids also get stretched more thinly as they take more territory, so having more systems (at least for any particular Maelstrom) doesn't necessarily make things harder and might even make things easier.

We probably won't be able to tell if their expansion rate is linear or curved for months, though since they're planning at least U15 and U16 I doubt it's curved upwards.

 

[Alec Turner]

Yes indeed!

…and yes, indeed :]

Yesterday i dropped in on a yellow-level alert system for the first time, FSS scanned 100% and a probe signal appeared within a minute or two. I collected it before an Orthrus appeared and soon after 4 rather irritable scouts waked in - was able to get away with the “stolen” item without too much trouble…

So, a key question, i agree: could enough of this (collecting probes and / or eliminating Orthrus) actually prevent an orange-level invasion?

Well FD have been strongly signposting that we should investigate the Orthrus' behaviour so it seems highly likely that it plays a pretty significant part in all of this.

 

[Jmanis]

Well FD have been strongly signposting that we should investigate the Orthrus' behaviour so it seems highly likely that it plays a pretty significant part in all of this.

Dare i say... "have you listened to them?"

Point being said signposting has never really amounted to anything in the past... we still don't know the relevance of morse from the sensors, octal from the probes etc. other than what it represents, not why it's how to use that info.

 

[Badmiker]

Disrupting Orthrus activities seems to make sense: deny your enemy any information and opportunities to expand.

How effective is this though, or more pointedly; how is information being collected on the war effort? I'm guessing that we will be able to tell, from weekly figures, how many 'under threat' systems do not covert to 'invaded' but are there figures on numbers of probes collected or Orthuses destroyed?

 

[Jmanis]

Disrupting Orthrus activities seems to make sense: deny your enemy any information and opportunities to expand.

How effective is this though, or more pointedly; how is information being collected on the war effort? I'm guessing that we will be able to tell, from weekly figures, how many 'under threat' systems do not covert to 'invaded' but are there figures on numbers of probes collected or Orthuses destroyed?

I dunno, it all seems a bit more straightforward to me, and people might just be overthinking the Orthrus in the same way every Thargoid/Guardian mystery has been overthought to date.

In the case of HIP 23716, feels like if we fill the purple bar in time by doing the things listed, we'll win, and if we don't, we don't.

Spoiler

Likewise, for Thargoid-controlled systems.... if we don't destroy Thargoid craft, we don't fill the bar and don't recapture.

Spoiler

Hence, if we don't fill the bar in "Alert" systems by doing the things listed and fill the bar, the system will get invaded.

Spoiler

It wouldn't make sense to have a completely different mechanic which doesn't get reflected the same way as anything else... that's just poor UX.

Also, Orthrus pay out 50m for a kill, noting they're rare and much less of a threat than Cyclops, Basilisk and Medusa (with the Hydra the only one that pays more). It wouldn't surprise me at all if that bigger payout is reflective of the fact whatever they're doing is special, like a logistic function or something, and that it's the magnitude of the payout that makes the difference to the sliders here.

But bottom line, if that slider's not going up... in two days, all those systems are gonna flip to the Invasion state. Happy for that to go to "Poorly aged things" if it doesn't... but anything else would just be weird.

 

[Alec Turner]

On a general note - it wouldn't surprise me at all if Frontier didn't tweak some variables in the early stages of this war. As with CG's, they've basically had to make an educated guess at how much effort the player base is prepared to throw at it. They don't want us to get completely and hopelessly overrun, they want this to be a war that, with a reasonable amount of effort, we can push back. There are obvious surface things they can control such as the arrival of the remaining 5 stargoids (and whether they inject more to follow), and also things like the unveiling of aditional weaponry that will turn the tide (such as the stuff that Palin and co. are working on from the grelic contributions they've received). But I'm sure there are also internal values that can be tweaked that feed directly into the algorithms controlling the Thargoid simulation. It seems (to me at least) highly unlikely that they will have got these values right first time.

---

Further to this - in a funny way (a bit like a factory worker involved in a time and motion study) we need to be careful not to work too hard because otherwise we'll end up with another massive grind on our hands (i.e. Frontier will observe that we're prepared to put <HUGE AMOUNT OF EFFORT> into war and adjust accordingly so that we need <HUGE AMOUNT OF EFFORT> to achieve X.

That's it lads ... everyone out!

"We do not and cannot accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal"​

 

[Darrack]

On a general note - it wouldn't surprise me at all if Frontier didn't tweak some variables in the early stages of this war. As with CG's, they've basically had to make an educated guess at how much effort the player base is prepared to throw at it. They don't want us to get completely and hopelessly overrun, they want this to be a war that, with a reasonable amount of effort, we can push back. There are obvious surface things they can control such as the arrival of the remaining 5 stargoids (and whether they inject more to follow), and also things like the unveiling of aditional weaponry that will turn the tide (such as the stuff that Palin and co. are working on from the grelic contributions they've received). But I'm sure there are also internal values that can be tweaked that feed directly into the algorithms controlling the Thargoid simulation. It seems (to me at least) highly unlikely that they will have got these values right first time.

---

Further to this - in a funny way (and a bit like a factory worker involved in a time and motion study) we need to be careful not to work too hard because otherwise we'll end up with another massive grind on our hands (i.e. Frontier will observe that we're prepared to put <HUGE AMOUNT OF EFFORT> into war and adjust accordingly so that we need <HUGE AMOUNT OF EFFORT> to achieve X.

That's it lads ... everyone out!

O7

 

[Blaggerdy]

It wouldn't surprise me at all if that bigger payout is reflective of the fact whatever they're doing is special, like a logistic function or something, and that it's the magnitude of the payout that makes the difference to the sliders here.

Is there any location significance to the sensors they are adding. Do they point to Merope, or to somewhere else such as Sol?

 

[nemolomen]

I've been concentrating some of my effort in Awara (Alert) [AX Combat - Scout Missions, Refugee Transport Missions, Wing Delivery Missions (not yet completed)] and some of it in 63 Eridani (Invasion) [AX Combat - Scout Missions].

If helpful, these traffic reports are from Awara.

There was a day in-between these when the total number of ships was either 1300+ or 1500+ which I do not have a screenshot of.

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

With the alert systems there will be loads of ships jumping in, checking the FSS for any NHSS threat 4 and jumping out again when there aren't any.

 

[graflex22]

what a great thread. makes me regret not having a proper PC to play this on.

cheers to FDev for a great story and gameplay and cheers to everyone here doing the research and posting up.

looking forward to flying with you all in the Live galaxy soon.

 

[St0rmFury]

With the alert systems there will be loads of ships jumping in, checking the FSS for any NHSS threat 4 and jumping out again when there aren't any.

Guilty as charged

 

[Ian Doncaster]

If helpful, these traffic reports are from Awara.

There was a day in-between these when the total number of ships was either 1300+ or 1500+ which I do not have a screenshot of.

Excellent, thank you! These suggest that the old 5-10% ratio for EDDN capturing travel activity still holds reasonably well, at least for systems this busy, and that we're not seeing an unusual proportion of participants being EDDN feeders, so we can use that as a rough estimator for systems without news reports.

So one question this raises is that Invasion systems with comparable traffic levels have generally seen at least one and sometimes two ticks of progress, whereas Awara still has none. It could as others note just be that the traffic levels are unusually high from people trying to find an Orthrus, and so it's not getting the same amount of general support as the traffic-comparable Imeut or 63 Eridani ... or it could be that the thresholds on an Alert are higher.

 

[nemolomen]

With the alert systems there will be loads of ships jumping in, checking the FSS for any NHSS threat 4 and jumping out again when there aren't any.

Guilty as charged

Whenever I've found myself in an instance with either a probe or a sensor, I ram them and collect the mats left behind and then leave.