Thargoid Alert Systems profitability (of filling the system progress bar).

[Kerissimo]

As i have noticed players are tend to participate in thargoid attack activities and later recovery state system activities and much less likely to try to prevent the attacks. I assume it's because of much easier to concentrate in few crucial points of defence, than search the whole systems searching for few thargoid attacks or even less likely to see orthus spying on us with probes.

Iis there even a point in attempting of doing so? As far as i have seen (please correct me if im wrong) there was only one system where we have prevented the attack.

Judging by less players are doing war activities now, when the hype and excitement have subsided there will be even more systems falling into thargoid claws. And im getting an impression there is even less chance to meet the orhus now, than before the update 14.02. Also thargoid controlled systems get AX combat zones (according i understood correctly patch notes) which indicates we can no more efficiently get back taken systems.

Should we concentrate on "yellow" alert state systems now and get back attacked later? Maybe there is possibility devs could add some type of activity that could made us easier to concentrate on alert systems? Or just there is no point even considering any activities there, and we should stay focused on attacked systems?

 

[goemon]

all thargoid war states to clear need quite some commanders working on it.
with coriolis stations going damaged in invasion systems it gets harder to work the system non-combat, so i'd say it makes sense to focus on invasion systems with still some functional coriolis.
situation might look different for systems with outposts only.
in an ideal galaxy it would makes sense to counter any alert - but there simply to many of them.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Iis there even a point in attempting of doing so? As far as i have seen (please correct me if im wrong) there was only one system where we have prevented the attack.

Three, I think, though all in the first few weeks.


Whether it makes sense to try to beat an Alert really depends on what your objective is. (Considering Alerts in inhabited systems only, as uninhabited Alerts appear to be essentially impossible to beat - the only action is combat, but combat targets are incredibly rare)

If your objective is to minimise the number of Thargoid Control systems, then it doesn't apparently make a difference whether you stop it getting there at the Alert or Invasion stage, or indeed [1] whether you spend the time retaking existing Control systems.

Similarly if you count systems as "lost" the moment they go into Alert, any defeat of the Thargoids at any of Alert, Invasion or Control stage wins one system back.

So for both of those objectives, "whichever is easiest to fight / organise a large group to fight" makes sense. And it appears to be the case that Invasions take less effort than the Alert in the same system does, at least most of the time, plus a lot of people find the Invasion-style activity more fun which is really important for long-term capacity.


On the other hand, say the Thargoids stick an Alert in a really important system - for example, there's a couple of engineers fairly close by which they could start going for over the next few months. If that's defeated at the Alert stage, then starport services in the system aren't interrupted at all. If it gets into Invasion, then services will be partially down during both the Invasion and then the subsequent Recovery, which could be a couple of months without engineer access. In that case it might be worth stopping them at Alert stage even if it costs as much time as stopping two Invasions of generic systems elsewhere.


There was a comment made on the livestream last week that some people have interpreted as Frontier recommending that we focus on Alerts more than we currently are, but it's not clear what the strategic benefits of doing so would be (or, indeed, if that's the correct interpretation of Frontier's deliberately-ambiguous comment) and you'd need a very large group to be able to carry out meaningful tests on it: if you wanted to do a basic test of "what happens if we stop 2 Alerts in the same week at the same Maelstrom" at this stage you'd need to coordinate at least a quarter of all active AX capacity to carry out that test, and probably closer to a third of it.


[1] Assuming the sudden halt on any Control system movement is a 14.02 bug rather than intentional.