First look: THE SCYTHE!!! (New Thargoid ship)
I would like to know how many players are actually involved in the spreadsheet/sampling malarky. I suspect its relatively few larger player groups/squadrons, and then I wonder if they could be convinced to lay off for a bit and allow the Invasions to creep back over a few weeks?
I know, I'm being a bit naïve...but if they could be persuaded that whilst 'winning' might be nice, 'losing' is more fun, in terms of gameplay anyway.
Herding cats comes to mind
sadly I get a little bit the feeling that, however many samplers are doing their business, they have very little regard for how they take away gameplay from others. The usual replies are "but it is valid gameplay", "we are using the tools Frontier gave us", "but it is effective", and "but we're winning". That's all very valid, but, once again, those who get stuff taken away (invasions and the planetary and stationary CZs they bring with them) are expected to understand and deal with it, because they have no tool at their disposal to counter it. I have gotten very salty replies about how I am being detrimental to and belittling the hard work the strategists of the war do when I questioned the tissue sampling strategy; and while that is true, it is hard work and the people analyzing the war have done some brilliant work, the "wanting to win" faction is doing it at the expense of those who want to fight the far, and does not really care. Sadly Frontier decided to allow the war to be won by tissue sampling.Maybe we should consider linking to this post in the next target systems thread..?
Yes, I am actually very salty about this by now. This is very lame, and while from a lore perspective it is right to want to "win the war" by any means (even if sampling the enemy away is outright silly and makes no sense), it just sucks. I am afraid if you ask the samplers to lay off a bit, all you will get is either be ignored, or one of the replies I cited above.
I kind of hoped Frontier would throw a wrench in at some point... but that does not seem to happen. And it's going on for so long now, if tissue sampling gets nerfed now, the outcry will probably be... too enormous for them to want to deal with it.
#NerfTissueSampling. There. I said it. You had your fun, now let us have ours.
I simply think the Dedicant story logs are the best we've seen so far, and I'm excited to pay back the Thargoids. Science and Progress and everything, but at this stage, it is absolutely clear they're our enemies, if not evil even. It has been a long time since the game story really excited me, but here we are
NB. IIRC I've never sampled a tissue before and would refuse to do so, it's disgusting!
O7,
NB. IIRC I've never sampled a tissue before and would refuse to do so, it's disgusting!
O7,
The DedicantI simply think the Dedication story logs are the best we've seen so far, and I'm excited to pay back the Thargoids. Science and Progress and everything, but at this stage, it is absolutely clear they're our enemies, if not evil even. It has been a long time since the game story really excited me, but here we are
O7,
logs were wonderful. I even enjoyed the fact that I had to put in some work to get them - something I despised in the past. I was smart enough to take my AX combat vessel to collect the logs, and it paid off. I collected half of them, got a Clops jump in with some Scouts, defeated them, collected the rest, and jumped out with a sense of accomplishment. And oh, were the logs creepy!I love the Thargoid war and everything that has lead to it. For a little bit of light roleplay, me and my CMDR always thought humanity was in the wrong (trying genocide twice, anyone?) and thus didn't want to take up arms against the Thargoids. Outside of RP, I wasn't really interested in AX.
The invasion of the bubble changed that. I got interested in AX, and explained that away with my CMDR having had enough and feeling he had to defend himself and humanity, even if we brought it all upon us ourselves.
I am really curious where it will all lead, and if Daddy Savlon will make his return as a creepy Robobrain. I love the Thargoid invasion.
On a bright side, the new Thargoid surface sites in certain control systems currently appear to act as effective progress blockers, if only for the prevention of retaking systems entirely.
I have actually had decent fun poking around controlled space trying to find them. Wish the content that is meant to go along with the storyline actually, you know, saw use. Rather than it basically getting nipped in the bud by the “I don’t care about this, get the goids off my BGS lawn” and “winner” crowd(you can still ‘win’ even if invasions exist, in the game sense - as long as they are fought off… and let’s face it, they will probably be cleared, so stopping all the alerts every week for at least three consecutive cycles now is a bit eh).
I have actually had decent fun poking around controlled space trying to find them. Wish the content that is meant to go along with the storyline actually, you know, saw use. Rather than it basically getting nipped in the bud by the “I don’t care about this, get the goids off my BGS lawn” and “winner” crowd(you can still ‘win’ even if invasions exist, in the game sense - as long as they are fought off… and let’s face it, they will probably be cleared, so stopping all the alerts every week for at least three consecutive cycles now is a bit eh).
Sampling was first used effectively in late March - to clear a few controlled systems.
Invasions didn't start to dry up until late May, when Frontier halved system difficulties again, and didn't fully disappear until after a further round of difficulty reductions.
It's not great that sampling is the most effective action in Controls (and if not the most, close in Alerts) from an immersion point of view, but it's not what's causing the problems; if direct combat was as effective per-hour as sampling is, then exactly the same problem would happen; probably even more so, because there are far more combat pilots than sampling pilots.
And you can't blame players for clearing all the inhabited Alerts; people who like the hauling/evac side of things only have inhabited Alerts to target now there's no Invasions, what else are they supposed to do? (Several groups which had been clearing local inhabited Alerts when the difficulty level was higher have been deliberately leaving them because they know it'll be dealt with by someone else; and it is, just at the Alert rather than Invasion stage...)
Ironically, sampling is now the best hope for getting Invasions back quickly [1]; the ability to store progress over multiple weeks without loss means it can be used to retake multiple otherwise implausible inhabited Controls, which then can't reasonably be cleared in a single week at Alert. It needs more than Njorog for that, of course.
[1] The lack of invasions is essentially caused by the Thargoids being (retrospectively!) massively overstretched by the repeated nerfs Frontier impose on them. So until the line is pushed back to one they can hold, they won't be causing enough strong inhabited Alerts that the hauling and Orthrus fans can't do them all. The faster the line gets back to where the new equilibrium position is, the sooner Invasions come back. Which is still months away, in the absence of Frontier reversing some of the difficulty cuts they've made.
Invasions didn't start to dry up until late May, when Frontier halved system difficulties again, and didn't fully disappear until after a further round of difficulty reductions.
It's not great that sampling is the most effective action in Controls (and if not the most, close in Alerts) from an immersion point of view, but it's not what's causing the problems; if direct combat was as effective per-hour as sampling is, then exactly the same problem would happen; probably even more so, because there are far more combat pilots than sampling pilots.
And you can't blame players for clearing all the inhabited Alerts; people who like the hauling/evac side of things only have inhabited Alerts to target now there's no Invasions, what else are they supposed to do? (Several groups which had been clearing local inhabited Alerts when the difficulty level was higher have been deliberately leaving them because they know it'll be dealt with by someone else; and it is, just at the Alert rather than Invasion stage...)
Ironically, sampling is now the best hope for getting Invasions back quickly [1]; the ability to store progress over multiple weeks without loss means it can be used to retake multiple otherwise implausible inhabited Controls, which then can't reasonably be cleared in a single week at Alert. It needs more than Njorog for that, of course.
[1] The lack of invasions is essentially caused by the Thargoids being (retrospectively!) massively overstretched by the repeated nerfs Frontier impose on them. So until the line is pushed back to one they can hold, they won't be causing enough strong inhabited Alerts that the hauling and Orthrus fans can't do them all. The faster the line gets back to where the new equilibrium position is, the sooner Invasions come back. Which is still months away, in the absence of Frontier reversing some of the difficulty cuts they've made.
Ian, you know I don't mean that in a... er... mean way, but that is the usual kind of reply I was hinting to. It's not that the effectiveness of sampling should be to be replaced by something similarly effective, it is just totally OP compared to everything else. Saying if combat would be as effective as sampling we would have the same issue is a whataboutism. It isn't, and if sampling wasn't OP, sampling away the invasions wouldn't be as easy.
Also, the point of people doing hauling and EVAC in alerts... I don't know how it is this week; but look at the past: Usually, the alerts are cleared by the sampling gang before the haulers and EVACers even start. Often, there is little more than one alert system left by friday evening. If you don't get to it right away on thursday, you pretty much missed it. I have little faith in the line being pushed back so far that invasions reappear. We're going into the third, fourth month now without invasions? And it will take "months" for them to reappear? Come on.
Yeah, yeah, it's all this "using the tools Frontier gave us". The tools suck. And believing certain parts of the community wouldn't use the sucky tools to their advantage would be like believeing we are living in fantasy land. But it still sucks. No whataboutisms will make that go away.
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Sadly, it is indeed possible for only a few random players to clear any such Alert - even if you managed to convince every group working on Alerts to leave it, which is rather unlikely.
This is really the cause here... the tools suck. I don't think that's on players to fix or accomodate... otherwise I've got a laundry list of issues.
- players need to stop farming anarchies, to allow more propagation of anarchies into control of systems.
- players need to fail missions more, to better propagate negative states that have interesting conditions related to specific game mechanics.
For a while there, Outbreak and Famine were non- existent, because players didn't do things to cause them. So FD changed the mechanics.
Any objective observation should be going "there's a full scale invasion going on... and yet we never see any invasion systems. Probably need to change that.
But frankly, FD have never been good at responding to these sorts of things in a timely manner. It's on them to fix, not the players.
That doesn't work because active players now get funneled towards the remaining systems, due to signals being removed in real-time from any systems that get cleared.
In the early days of effectiveness testing it seemed like there was a bonus if activities of different types were completed in a system. I have to wonder why there is no opposite effect (similar to how BGS has caps) where an activity becomes less effective if it is the sole focus in the system.
I never tried after realising FDs fix was to call this expected behaviour.
I did note mixed results so it might not be a hard/ fast thing.
FACESPLAT
I could add some things here about AX reactivation missions. Before U16, these missions did not exist only in Alert systems, but also in surrounding, human controlled and Recovery systems. And even after the alert was over, those missions could still be found and accepted.
And now, after U16, they exist exclusively in the Alert system and only during the period when the alert is active.
It's simply FDev's decision and the players have nothing to do with it, nor can they have any influence over it.
And what logic does that have? If the alert ended in, for example, Holvandalla (which happened yesterday), it does not mean that Chinas has recovered. Chinas is still, deeply under Thargoid control. So why cancel all missions for Chinas?
And why, with such a simple, crude administrative move, take away one of the players' favorite activities?
And it's not the first time they nerf something that's popular.
So what could be the reason for that?
Is there a possible reason to take the players to other activities, so that they don't get attached to just one, which they particularly like?
Because - if I offer some other reasons, then I will be attacked for being a fan of conspiracy theories!
I know this is a thread about Scythe, but as I see the discussion has gone in a different direction, so it's actually talking about how players should limit or stop some of their activities, to allow other players to enjoy their favorite parts of the game. And the history of the game shows us that Frontier is extremely prone to giving players control over some parts of the game
And now, after U16, they exist exclusively in the Alert system and only during the period when the alert is active.
It's simply FDev's decision and the players have nothing to do with it, nor can they have any influence over it.
And what logic does that have? If the alert ended in, for example, Holvandalla (which happened yesterday), it does not mean that Chinas has recovered. Chinas is still, deeply under Thargoid control. So why cancel all missions for Chinas?
And why, with such a simple, crude administrative move, take away one of the players' favorite activities?
And it's not the first time they nerf something that's popular.
So what could be the reason for that?
Is there a possible reason to take the players to other activities, so that they don't get attached to just one, which they particularly like?
Because - if I offer some other reasons, then I will be attacked for being a fan of conspiracy theories!
I know this is a thread about Scythe, but as I see the discussion has gone in a different direction, so it's actually talking about how players should limit or stop some of their activities, to allow other players to enjoy their favorite parts of the game. And the history of the game shows us that Frontier is extremely prone to giving players control over some parts of the game
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Since Jmanis hasn’t answered, I can - everyone at AXI who’s attempted this has shown a large increase in sampling return rates.
Since the introduction of sampling, Frontier have reduced the system targets multiple times, as well as taking other pro-human moves like reducing the Thargoid ability to Alert uninhabited systems or strongly discouraging persisting in a system that reaches 100%. We have to assume they've done this to achieve some sort of desired overall war balance.
If sampling wasn't OP, then to achieve the same overall war balance they'd have needed to make everything else even more powerful, or reduce the system targets even further.
Yes, it's a "what if" counterfactual, but all the evidence points to:
Q: "What if sampling wasn't overpowered?"
A: "Then Frontier would have found some other way to ensure an overwhelming human victory."
And that would have been an improvement on the current situation - at least people would be doing more interesting things in Controls and uninhabited systems - but there still wouldn't be invasions because those pretty much require a net position where humans are losing systems overall.
The last five weeks have had all Alerts cleared - but generally only by Wednesday night and the inhabited ones holding out longer than the uninhabited ones on average. This week is going a bit faster - partly because it started with fewer inhabited Alerts than average, and partly because of the new "activities disappear at 100% rule" being applied to Alerts too, and possibly partly because Frontier have yet again decided that "clearing all the Alerts by Wednesday night? Too SLOW!" and knocked the difficulty down slightly (unconfirmed).
Are you thinking of the last weeks of Invasions where there were, say, four of them and they all got jumped on by every AX combat pilot in the bubble and wiped out in a day or two?
At this stage it's up to the players if invasions reappear, since Frontier appears not to want to pull any of the very easy levers it has to do that. [1, 2]
The "natural" outcome is that the easiest targets get recaptured first, and because even sample-recovering an inhabited system close to the maelstrom is a tedious process, the most likely result from that is that it ends up with a stalemate line around 20 LY at each Maelstrom, which can be held by humanity easily, but which there's no particular incentive to push past.
So getting Invasions back will require deliberately overstretching human forces by taking back a lot of systems within 15 LY. The only practical way to do that is sampling, and even then it takes a couple of weeks per system and everyone wants a break afterwards. And it'd need a bunch of them running simultaneously to guarantee that they weren't shut down at the Alert stage. Hence, months. Minimum. Unless Frontier sees that it's taking too long to crush the Thargoids utterly and reduces the targets again, of course.
[1] One more interesting option than just increasing the targets or adding another eight Titans would be to make inhabited systems within 20 LY skip Alert and go straight to Invasion.
[2] To repeat: at this stage, they could set the effectiveness of sampling to zero and it would still be months before Invasions returned, too, if there were no other changes.
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I've not been involved in war for several weeks now due to lack of Invasions - I did prefer AX Combat either planetary or outpost with the new EAXMC's, rather than 'Sampling' to evict them? How does that work? (I am aware it does in game and has been tested and shown to work better, but I cannot RP that it gets rid of Thargoids rather better than any AXCZ.
Note that I have done a fair amount of sampling but am burnt out by that - I did it by killing all scouts until one left then continuous sampling with Multi Limpet control size 7 for 8 Limpets at a time tired of that now.
I stated weeks ago in forum, how is that better than killing more of them?
BTW, is there anything more to do at the Dedicant?
I have the 10 logs which was fun to get them all and very well done and creepy, but hanging around trying to get anything out of the cargo hatches prove useless, I have Collectors at the ready and Hatch Breakers but to no avail.
I wanna try killing the new Scythes but can't seem get any to hyper/interdict me without escape pods.
Where do I get these HIP 19600?
Note that I have done a fair amount of sampling but am burnt out by that - I did it by killing all scouts until one left then continuous sampling with Multi Limpet control size 7 for 8 Limpets at a time tired of that now.
I stated weeks ago in forum, how is that better than killing more of them?
BTW, is there anything more to do at the Dedicant?
I have the 10 logs which was fun to get them all and very well done and creepy, but hanging around trying to get anything out of the cargo hatches prove useless, I have Collectors at the ready and Hatch Breakers but to no avail.
I wanna try killing the new Scythes but can't seem get any to hyper/interdict me without escape pods.
Where do I get these HIP 19600?
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I think you can get them from the Dedicant with hatch breakers?
Funnily enough, once you’ve found escape pods to attract them killing Scythes in a Control system is a decent enough way to get war progression progress. (As well as the Dedicant, you can find escape pods in Control system signal sources)