Shouldn't Thargoids be interdicting us in supercruise?

[peteuplink]

You can always come hang with me, averaging 40 million per 5 minute trip hauling 700+ tonnes, damn NPC's wont leave me alone, I am carrying Silver/Gold/Meta alloys and weapons. Only weird thing I have found is that the Thargoids refuse to hyperdict me, not had a single one.

Out of curiosity, are you flying a smaller freighter? Perhaps the devs changed things for cmdrs in smaller ships, also what is your combat rank? Perhaps that makes a difference, you don't really hear newbies complaining about being killed anymore, just the occasional post.

I know the devs offered traders the chance to reset combat rank, thought that was to force lower ranked NPC's to do the interdicting.


If you haven't had a single interdict in months whilst flying freighters, most people would call that extremely good luck. Especially if you are flying out of lo sec and anarchy.

for example last night I was interdicted by an Elite FAS & Cobra (didn't get the Cobra rank) That was the only cargo run I did yesterday, you earn a little extra cash from the kills to cover any repairs.

Still have the claim in my transactions.

http://i66.tinypic.com/2wnpn41.jpg

I've been playing ED since premium beta and have played Elite since 84. My favourite being Frontier Elite 2.

Admittedly my combat rank is kinda low, because I reset my save a few months ago and I've not really have that many encounters with NPC's to give me a chance to raise it. My combat rank has only gone up from doing scavenger missions where I've shot a few skimmers. I'm currently flying an Asp with as much cargo space as I can get from it, and I use the new trading tools to find the highest profit runs. As I said I wander from system to system, so go to a lot of different security systems during a typical play session. I even take on high paying trading missions, and I get the mission update that says a hostile NPC ship is out there, but usually by the time it gets close I've already dropped into the station area and am well into the no fire zone.

Just to add to my post above. I'm not saying that the NPC's should be a the same level of difficulty as they were in the original Elite, because sometimes the game could feel incredibly unfair when you're minding your own business and get jumped by a small fleet of pirates with no chance of escape. But I think an acceptable ratio would be an interdiction in 1 out of every 5 journeys based on security level, and the longer the journey, like when you're passing through the empty space between stars in a binary system (afterall there's no police out there), should be more dangerous that travelling a shorter distance.

 

[Darth Ender]

The difficulty of NPC's should relate to the security level of the system and it's state. NPC's difficulty if done right shouldn't relate at all on the person creating the instance or (like it currently is) some RNG call or just a blanket easy fish in a barrel ai.

So players wanting easy npcs would stick to high security and prosperous systems.

Players wanting harder npcs should look for fringe systems and anarchy etc.

Thargoids should in general, be harder than human npcs ...with the weakest starting off where our deadly / elite starts off. And they would be invading in a way that makes sense for an invasion (assuming thargoids are limited in how far they can move in normal space like we are). So players who dont want to fight with them, would be forced to retreat from the front lines. An option that would decrease and decrease the "safe" zones as the invasion gets worse and worse for humanity (assuming we immediately start losing).

Players who want to avoid conflict as we totally lose the main human bubble will be forced to flee to Colonia.

If you dont like that, then you would probably have to find a new game to play. It's Fdev's decision to have an invasion and invasions dont work around someone's desire to continue business as usual space-trucking around a warzone.

 

[peteuplink]

The difficulty of NPC's should relate to the security level of the system and it's state. NPC's difficulty if done right shouldn't relate at all on the person creating the instance or (like it currently is) some RNG call or just a blanket easy fish in a barrel ai.

So players wanting easy npcs would stick to high security and prosperous systems.

Players wanting harder npcs should look for fringe systems and anarchy etc.

Thargoids should in general, be harder than human npcs ...with the weakest starting off where our deadly / elite starts off. And they would be invading in a way that makes sense for an invasion (assuming thargoids are limited in how far they can move in normal space like we are). So players who dont want to fight with them, would be forced to retreat from the front lines. An option that would decrease and decrease the "safe" zones as the invasion gets worse and worse for humanity (assuming we immediately start losing).

Players who want to avoid conflict as we totally lose the main human bubble will be forced to flee to Colonia.

If you dont like that, then you would probably have to find a new game to play. It's Fdev's decision to have an invasion and invasions dont work around someone's desire to continue business as usual space-trucking around a warzone.

This is kind of what I'm trying to say above, but not as well as you put it. Currently in a high security system there's a very slim (almost none) chance that you'll meet an NPC pirate. I've spent some time in anarchy systems last night and even then the level of NPC pirates increased but not by an amount that made me feel that the systems were very dangerous.

In the original game the Thargoids attacked the player in the same manner than NPC pirates did, but they were a heck of a lot tougher to take down. This is how they should have been implemented in ED. Also, I think hostile AI should be more prevalent in systems at war, civil unrest and other states where there could be conflict. Seems a bit odd to me that you can just wander into a war zone and are ignored by all the warring factions. Surely they'd be on a high state of alert to any strange ships entering the system and would try to stop and scan you to ensure you're not trying to help the enemy. War zones and civil unrest systems feel just as peaceful as everywhere else in the ED galaxy.

 

[Deleted member 38366]

For Thargoids to pull anyone out of SuperCruise, they'd have to be in SuperCruise in the first place. Which they apparently can't do.

Plus, what would be the point?
For as long as the entire array of Standard Weaponry is 100% ineffective and Thargoids enjoy "god mode" or can simply shutdown any Ship, such encounters would serve absolutely no gameplay purpose whatsoever.
Might as well introduce "spontaneous combustion" with our CMDRs... same effect, same gameplay value.

And since Thargoids are just reskinned, scripted NPCs (resembling a classic "Boss Fight" in some 90's Dungeon Crawler Game), there's virtually no point in engaging them other than doing it for fun.
Lacking a Sandbox, the galaxy-wide effect of killing 1 or killing 100 remains the same. None. It's just a different change in Credit Balance.
Thus... what's the point?

Just another isolated Tourist Attraction-type "Content" one can visit or leave it be. Makes no difference anyway, so the Opt-In approach perfectly makes sense.

 

[Aashenfox]

Or maybe the-powers-that-be agree with their opinions.

The mind is like a parachute. It only works when it's open.

Yeh, that's why democracy is working so wonderfully well.

 

[peteuplink]

For Thargoids to pull anyone out of SuperCruise, they'd have to be in SuperCruise in the first place. Which they apparently can't do.

Which is exactly why I said they should have been implemented in the same way as they were in the original game. They should be smaller, be able to be taken down with conventional weapons (but be a lot harder than normal pirate AI) and they should move in super cruise. They used to fly in fleets in the original game.

It worked fine in 84 so I don't see why it wouldn't work now. Basically FDEV went and "fixed" something that wasn't broken in the first place.

 

[Schmack]

Aren't we already in a situation with meta-build pvp ships vs. stripped cargo or passenger ships? The means to improve engagement/escape from thargoids exist within game already. It just seems weird that the biggest threat to humanity doesn't even have the ability to interdict us in SC.

Because it's an instance threat that's totally up to you to accept. I'm ok with that concept, but if we could do more than the scripted "boss" type fights that don't do much but add a few credits to your account when you manage to actually kill one, then it would be worth it to jump through the hoops to build a ship to fight just them. Until then though, I won't bother. I haven't been able to develop much concern regarding the plight of space flowers. I get it too that lore or whatever need meant they had to look like something not man-made. Fine. They aren't an unfamiliar shape however.

I'm not going to spend game time buiding a pinwheel killer. What a horrible design. Certainly not scary, doesn't invoke "alien" fear, and in fact, aside from the "Non-human" USS indication, it' just some War of the Worlds type loud honking noise, half expect to hear Dakota Fanning screaming throughout the entire fight.

 

[Schmack]

Obviously the solution is a multi-step one. 1. You get rid of this opt-in crap. 2. You get rid of this thargoid-specific weapon damage nonsense. 3. You make the AI of the thargoids better at combat than the fish in a barrel npc's we are used to.

Win for the game.

If that's something you would refuse to participate in and would rather not play the game then good. If we could get rid of those kinds of players the game would be healthier and better off for it.

Pretty sure the "we" you speak of don't include FD, because it appears to me that the large majority of ED players don't care much for Thargrind. There's no longer any reason to have a galactic economy once you introduce attacking aliens that players can't opt out of. There's no need to haul tourists, trade goods, do any mining, care one bit about bounty hunting or the C&P system. The problem with the concept you mention is how it would be executed. It would be such that an authority ship would shoot you while you were engaged fighting an alien who was attacking the station where the authority ship is patrolling. You'd have a bounty on you, and the Thargoids don't care about bounties at all. You'd have more to worry about because of your anonymous status with the local station than the alien invasion.

Show me something done right in the game, something with consistency where all elements of the game recognize and are slaved to the concept instead of a dozen individual scripts that often don't appear to be affected by the offset of your situation. Show me some story cohesion instead of crickets across the entire civilized galaxy except where the aliens are attacking or have attacked.

Once something makes sense and allows continuity in game play, I'll be more open to the idea of forced interaction with aliens. Until then, it's just another option you have in the game, disguised as content and pushed to the forefront like it's really and engaging experience. You could start as a new player today, and unless you visited forums and YT or traveled many LY across the bubble, you could play for quite some time and never know aliens even exist in this game.

You have station killing flowers a few LY away and all the factions in a station are paying you to go into combat zones and kill other factions, or scan something, or visit a beacon in Colonia. They should be scared for their lives, and doing everything in their power to get your ship outfitted to defend them. But no, you probably have to go more LY away to get Thargoid killing weapons and then go find specific missions, underpaid at that, to kill them.

It's a joke, really.