The nice thing about ECMs is that they just work and anyone can purchase them, no engineering or unlocking necessary, just go buy a couple.
Thargoid invasion - Next target systems?
- Thread starter Aleks Zuno
- Start date
Oh yeah they do and after engineering 40 ships, unlocking all gtech and a dozen modshards and modplasmas I can definitely appreciate just being able to buy something good for a change haha.
I ask this because i do not know: has anyone tested using FSD disruptors on thargiods, or the orthrus specifically?
I can attempt that later this evening if we get nothing definitive in the meantime, but generally Thargoids are unperturbed by any such special effects—that is to say, if it works then it has been allowed deliberately to supersede a wider rule with the opposite!
Without such an exception, FSD disruption places along with Corrosive shell, Thermal shock, Drag munitions and other effects which do not apply to Thargoids. Note that Thermal vent has no effect on the target!
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While I have seen that achieved with multi-cannons, the weapon of choice really is the Missiles! Sirius missiles are best for a high price, otherwise try the Enhanced AX missiles. Note also that laser weapons can help a bit versus the shield, the Cytoscrambler in particular, and that stabbing the shield also works if you are ready with Caustic sinks or other means to remove Caustic damage.
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Unrelated to the above, I am going to offer congratulations and respect to PDES for going the extra mile with HIP 21918 and clearing it despite the unfavorable final week scenario. I don’t think most would’ve bothered with that instead of visitng one of the convenient [active invasion] CZs nearby all over Indra.
Appreciated. It was a bit desperate and I questioned my sanity over the decision to stay with it but at this stage we had nothing to lose by experimenting and seeing if it could be saved in its last week with only a Damaged Outpost left.
And it can. The combo of Scythe kills and Critical Wounded work very well and in fact give a Damaged Port a really good chance of being saved, so we proved that all is far from lost in the last week.
Our AX allies used to not want Damaged Ports as the AX CZs are gone and the Goids you got from random encounter weren't enough to hang around for when you could farm an AX CZ instead. Perfectly understandable so we reserved them for rescues as a Damaged Port is the only place you get Critically Wounded.
That has definitely changed. Now the area around a Damaged Port keeps going with a stream of Scouts and Interceptors and Scythes so if you can cope with the mix and embrace the crazy there are a ton of kills to be had there.
You want to know the irony? Since I thought HIP 21918 would be a real chore except for dedicated masochists and insomniacs, and because HIP 20577 was next on our list anyway, I offered 20577 as an alternative target for the Attacked Ground Port and AX Reacs and nobody went there. Go figure. So after 21918 we helped finish HIP 20890 instead.
Tinfoil alert. Scythes hanging around in packs at Damaged Ports fits the abduction narrative. Even some of the NPCs simulate rescuing by landing, taking off and jumping away, which is unusual in itself (and a royal pain when you want to dock and repair with only 1 medium pad). At other Ports they usually hang around trying to repair you or fighting.
Why there and nowhere else? Well, an Unattacked Port will have only a few Injured. An Attacked Port if you are lucky may have 20 Wounded missions but usually does not. In both cases we normally supplement them with Passenger missions. Only at a Damaged Port can you get 20 Passenger missions or 20 Critically Wounded missions, so technically the Damaged Port is where the most potential humans are awaiting evacuation. Hence the targeting by Scythes.
That's my tinfoil anyway. YMMV.
Seems to generally be around 15-20, but you can get as low as 8-9 and as high as (in my experience) 31. Easily enough to fill up a hold without running out of missions, unless maybe you run a Cutter with two size 8 racks(I personally always went with a mixture of cargo and passengers for both large and medium evacs - lately swapped over to a Krait MKII though, kind of got a bit bored of the Python).
And defense forces generally also tend to be more busy around the actively attacked port - I’ve seen very little AX NPC spawns around those damaged port scenarios. (And they would also get slaughtered pretty quickly by all of the interceptor madness going around.)
It’s really not all that tinfoil-y and actually quite logical, if messed up, that the Scythes are lurking around the damaged port like vultures, or maybe rather hyenas waiting for prey. It’s something I quickly thought of when I witnessed it in Omumba at the end of U16.
(I also found it quite a neat scenario to have the NPCs interacting with the port there, when they don’t in the active CZ week.)
Still wonder why they decided to outright remove them chasing players beyond the Titan perimeter… unless it’s supposed to indicate that until a ship is scanned, the Thargoids can’t differentiate between ‘holds cargo’ and ‘holds cargo but at an insufficient amount to bother’ so they stopped pulling ships when Scythes got baited too often by ships holding a single escape pod.
Or maybe it was a conscious balancing decision because of the madness that players venturing into damaged port instances get to enjoy(so that GalNet about Scythes appearing elsewhere has little meaning unless it all happens ‘in the background’ now and we just don’t get to see unwitting cruise liners near a Titan’s sphere of influence get ripped out of hyperspace/supercruise).
Or or, Frontier removed it as players doing passenger runs with their shieldless paper ships and non-AX fits near Titan spheres were also getting pulled and apparently not happy with it.
It varies a lot, from around 6 to 24 ish?
So you could theoretically get 20 missions with 120t but that would be very lucky. For medium pads you have no choice except the Python for the best possible capacity but for L pads the Cutter with a single 256t cargo bay could do it, and the Conda and Beluga are ok as well.
Not that it's always necessary to take 20 missions at a time, it's just good if you can. Otherwise faster runs of fewer missions in a Phantom over a Python would probably balance out over a long session. The Phantom's longer range would cut down the jumps and its superior speed would get it out of mass lock faster and make outrunning Scythes pretty easy. Both ships have enough fuel for 200 ly without adding a scoop or an extra tank so they can both swing away from the arrival stars to charge the fsd as soon as it has cooled down, so jump times in SC will be similar. Low Emissions PP helps with this.
Getting jumped by Scythes all the way to the rescue ship and then getting jumped by NPC pirates in the rescue ship system itself did get tiresome, yes. Shieldless wasn't the issue if you knew how to escape but the tedious nature of it was not remotely fun.
Besides, although our rescue builds are shieldless they are quite tanky in the hull department, and with no shield the Scythe doesn't use its lightning attack, so it's easier to go shieldless and fit a couple of HRPs because Scythes take the shield down in seconds anyway. If you are boosting away and using your ECMs their actual guns don't do a lot.
The Glaive still does use its lightning attack, whether you're shielded or not, but that is where filtering the galaxy map by state comes in so you only get them on the way in to the Invasion system and occasionally interdicted by them while in system.
In short, with Invasions Glaives are your biggest hassle on the way in and Scythes on your way out.
I was not so much referring to your builds as random players minding their non-Thargoid business* where they tend not to get shot at. Or only by pirates whose pods they may pick up. But it’s not particularly relevant now since the Scythe interdictions are a thing of the past, presumably to never return.
(I’ve had reasonable success running evacs with a shield though. Prefer to since the breach drones only come out if it drops and I’ve not had that issue much if at all, or certainly not before getting out of trouble. Still with some hull underneath, because skimping on it asks for trouble.)
*And anyone that does try to take a paper plane for evacs will probably learn their lesson quite quickly.
Yes, the spoilsports put a stop to Scythe baiting which was a real shame since they were good for clearing Alerts. It was fun blasting them when they interdicted me in an Alert, in my FAS hull tank with 2 salvation plasmas and 2 azimuth multis, which I now use at Damaged Ports instead. The "Vulture on Steroids" is really nice for Scythe killing. Swap out the plasmas for shards if you prefer them.
You can use one but we found it was a bit less hassle not to. Again, your playstyle and mileage may vary and ED is all about playing your way.
Indeed. We've had a few drop in asking for build advice after experiencing this.
Oh okay, that's fine then. Last time I tried evacuating wounded -- that was a long time ago, mind you -- the missions iirc were just on the order of 2-6 or so per, and I was very disappointed to fill only a fraction of my hold.
Now when recently I evacuated passengers it was those missions that had become smallish, and all missions available only amounted to something like 120 total. That was also when I had to realize (the hard way) that a Python is no longer the ship of choice for these activities as it cannot outrun Scythes or Glaives.
Now when recently I evacuated passengers it was those missions that had become smallish, and all missions available only amounted to something like 120 total. That was also when I had to realize (the hard way) that a Python is no longer the ship of choice for these activities as it cannot outrun Scythes or Glaives.
Nothing other than a courier can outrun them and without large landing pads sometimes a python is the only choice. I prefer my cutter for evac missions hands down and can usually carry 4-500 a trip when stacking missions from places like Vistnero earlier this week. Evacs from surface damaged stations are fairly tame but from smaller stations like in hip 21918 it was 10x harder definitely more hostiles around them. Sometimes I could get away from the hunters with a combo of ecm, heatsinks and silent running but half the time I had to kill them. My rescue cutter doesn't even bother taking ax weapons it can always get away since it doesn't get mass locked but with a python I'm taking azimuth eaxmc's.
Each cycle I look for the top targets that have damaged stations, evac is what I'm best at and have been focusing it the entire war. I can hunt but got too much nerve damage to do that all the time. With damaged stations you can easily hit 4-500 when stacking 20 missions. When I have to use my python it's hard to stack 20 even with 250tn cargo space i sometimes have to wait on the mission board to refresh all the while goids are piling up outside.
Both my rescue cutter and python carry undersized g5 HD prizzy's I get way too many incoming enemy alerts to go shield less especially with the python since most of its slots are full of cargo bays. Never had the cutters shields go down but does happen to the python a lot and I just make a pitstop somewhere to recharge them. Most of the incoming enemy alerts hit you in the rescue ships system.
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Yes it has a 6a g5 HD prizzy with a few g5 HD boosters. Probably doesn't need it but I like killing the pirates in the destination system when I get bored so take it with me anyways. I've made hundreds if not thousands of runs this war and never had its shields go down but my cutter doesnt get caught. When a hunter pulls me out of hyperspace I immediately pop a sink point away from it and boost away. Most the time they totally lose track of me and sometimes I get hit with a fsd missle which just means popping a few more sinks while waiting on the reboot. They do seem to be getting more aggressive though might have start carrying azimuth eaxmc's on it soon.
IME Glaives don't seem to switch to high gear if you boost away from them immediately so that they don't get closer than 2(?) klicks from you. They seem to be limited to something around Basilisk speed if you don't full aggro them, meaning that Phantom and even MKII can outrun them comfortably. I don't even bother with heatsinks, just boost ASAP and leave them behind.
Indeed this is true and I've observed this myself and is probably why I get away most of the time. Though getting pulled out while shaking around there are times I'm basically shoved right in their face and they do fully aggro but that's like 1 out of 30 evac runs. The real hairy part comes in when picking up patients from a smaller orbital station by the time you go to leave you can really get swarmed by hunters who have been scanning you while your docked and know you just filled your hold up with potential meals for them(or whatever they do with abductees). You cant 100% rely on avoiding aggro which is why my python is geared to kill them if need be.
Plus I could never run evac missions in a krait even the python struggles to let me stack a full 20 at a time. Don't get me wrong I love my krait mk2 one of my favorite ships.
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We were told by Seo that we’re not food to the Thargoids, so you can probably exclude that theory. And, even if she hadn’t told us, there is no reason to think an ammonia-based organism would consider a water-based organism edible in any way. You might as well want to ingest acid.
I don’t think it - what they are planning - is necessarily “bad” in the sense of its involvement or impact in/on the war, at this point, but the recipients of the treatment might have some reservations about it anyway.
Well, we do have Finns and their Salmiakki
