The Great Orthrus Hunt - Lyncis Sector KX-U c2-16

[DemiserofD]

Edit: Thanks everyone for your assistance in killing Orthruses in the system! Likely somewhere around a hundred were killed in the system, which should be enough to reveal any effects.

Unfortunately, when I dropped off 300 tons of escape pods today, it indicated that it would take a minimum of 80,000 pods to finish the system. Obviously this is unrealistic, and this disproves my earlier data, which must have been corrupted by unseen outside influence.

Additionally, some great people over at AXI did some Tissue Sample testing, and have confirmed that there is also ZERO effect on tissue sample values.

I'm not saying that Orthrus kills have no value, but I'm once again befuddled as to why, exactly, Fdev have encouraged us so repeatedly to hunt them down. Any suggestions welcome.

Thanks again for all the help! I think we can say with some degree of confidence now that Orthrus kills do NOT impact things in a significant way, and absent some more specific prodding via galnet, that's likely how I'll leave it for the time being.


Galnet has been not-so-subtly prodding players to kill Orthruses for over a year now, but the effect of doing so has always felt less-than-good, so people haven't done it much.

This got me thinking; either Fdev are completely out of touch, OR we're missing something. It couldn't be a direct effect or we'd have seen it already, which got me thinking about indirect effects.

What if Orthrus kills multiplied the value of doing OTHER things in the system?

To test this, I dropped off some escape pods from a high-effort system, recorded the effects via my journal file, then killed 20 orthruses and repeated the initial test. Here are the results. Bear in mind, this data is NOT definitive, as there may have been interference by unseen other players, but it is promising.

For my baseline test, I gathered 96 escape pods/etc from Lyncis Sector KX-U c2-16, a system that will take ~16000 tissue samples to clear according to estimates. I then dropped them off at a nearby rescue megaship.

Start Value: 0.5949%
End Value: 0.6202%
Difference:0.0253%
Materials for 100%: 379,446

In other words, to finish the system, we'd need to drop off 380k escape pods, an absurdly high total. This also doesn't seem to line up with our existing knowledge AT ALL. Our data seemed to indicate that escape pods are worth about half as much as tissue samples, but this puts their value at closer to 1/10th. But this is the most it could be worth, and it could be even less if other players were active.

Then, I killed 20 Orthruses in the system. During this time the system gained a few percentage points, but ignore that, and instead focus on the difference value; I gathered another load of 96 escape pods and such, and dropped them off in a quiet part of the night.

Start Value: 2.2805%
End Value: 2.4707%
Difference: 0.1902%
Materials for 100%: 50,473

As you can see, after killing 20 Orthruses in the system, the value of the escape pods dropped off almost octupled. (7.51778x) This would be consistent with each orthrus kill increasing the value of in-system action by 37.5%. (0.375889) Now, there could have been other people working in the system, but I did ask people not to do so, and it's fairly late at night, and it's a deep system on the opposite side from the bubble. So the effect of that should be minimized. And for further validation, I tracked the next tick; The next tick went up to 2.4984, a difference of .0277, so that further supports the idea that there's minimal other work being done in the system. If that rate also took place in my experimental period, then it would reduce the multiplier value to 6.5x, rather than 7.5x.

This implies that my theory MAY be correct! Killing orthruses might multiply the value of other actions in the system. WHAT actions, exactly, is not clear, or whether there is a limit to the effect - but what people can do is go to Lyncis Sector KX-U c2-16, and kill Orthruses. The more we kill, the more potent any potential effect will become, and the more easily we'll be able to measure it.

So let the Great Orthrus Hunt begin!

Fortunately, this is a very pleasant system for Orthrus hunting, with no distant bodies, or planets at all for that matter. All signal sources should spawn within a few kls of the star, and I was getting consistent orthrus spawns throughout the day - enough to get 20 kills between 4PM and 10PM. I made about 800m doing this, which was nice.

Any assistance much appreciated! Remember, focus on the Orthruses, for now; save Tissue sampling for elsewhere. However, if you want to haul Search and Rescue stuff to the Megaships, feel free, and I'd appreciate it if you could record your results afterwards! You can find your journal file at C:\Users\<user>\Saved Games\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous . It backs up every time you relog or jump INTO the system, and you're looking for the Warprogress stat, which will display such that 1.0 is 100%, so for example 0.041855 would be 4.1855% complete.

Thanks for the help!

 

[Rat Catcher]

Players know more than those who actually wrote the game, apparently.

But, it is interesting to watch from the sidelines, currently. Who knows, perhaps a massive amount of effort could have some kind of result, this time?

ETA: It is good that you are doing your own research into this - from what you have written, the Pilot's Federation may even know what they are talking about!

 

[Kira Goto]

A good finding by itself, but just be mindful that there is a plan ongoing to not clear too many alerts this week to avoid exposing the inner spire site prematurely.

Edit - well, providing that the wave of alert clearance doesn’t carry on well enough to where the whole inner core of controls is exposed along with the spire anyway. If that happens, pretend I said nothing.

 

[DemiserofD]

Thanks everyone for your assistance in killing Orthruses in the system! Likely somewhere around a hundred were killed in the system, which should be enough to reveal any effects.

Unfortunately, when I dropped off 300 tons of escape pods today, it indicated that it would take a minimum of 80,000 pods to finish the system. Obviously this is unrealistic, and this disproves my earlier data, which must have been corrupted by unseen outside influence.

Additionally, some great people over at AXI did some Tissue Sample testing, and have confirmed that there is also ZERO effect on tissue sample values.

I'm not saying that Orthrus kills have no value, but I'm once again befuddled as to why, exactly, Fdev have encouraged us so repeatedly to hunt them down. Any suggestions welcome.

Thanks again for all the help! I think we can say with some degree of confidence now that Orthrus kills do NOT impact things in a significant way.

 

[vanFace]

I'm not saying that Orthrus kills have no value, but I'm once again befuddled as to why, exactly, Fdev have encouraged us so repeatedly to hunt them down. Any suggestions welcome.

Because FDev control the propaganda and the enemy. They are puppeteers, and as any good hindmost knows, misleading your enemy is better than open confrontation. If you need lore for it: Thargoids have infiltrated us by means of the captured and freed thrombies. They may look like regular people and/or journalists, but they are now spies, forwarding every military discussion and sabotaging coordination by launching false advice. Soon NPC AX-ships will start having a "bug" where they open fire at surprised CMDRs during attack runs. Or recaptured stations suddenly opening fire due to a scan-"bug" thinking you have illegal goods. There are many such possibilities.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I'm not saying that Orthrus kills have no value, but I'm once again befuddled as to why, exactly, Fdev have encouraged us so repeatedly to hunt them down. Any suggestions welcome.

The simplest explanation I can think of is that, while the game balancing staff at Frontier are for whatever reason unwilling to adjust the relative value of sampling and Orthrus kills, the narrative writing staff feel as silly as the rest of us about the most effective way to win an Alert being to bring back more samples from a single Scout than the Scout has mass in the first place, and so are encouraging the second most-effective action instead as it at least fits the theme.

 

[Blaggerdy]

Pity. Presumably you checked at least an hour after dripping off samples

I have wondered if killing the Orthrus, scouts that arrive and looting the drops such as biological, sensor, probe, alloys, makes a difference. e.g. clearing the area. I usually don't bother with the scouts as very difficult to kill with frag cannons and missiles. Can't see why that should matter but struggling to think of other options

Or if killing many Orthrus make a difference. I'd been spreading kills around several systems yesterday to try and help but if 100+ were done in one system yesterday that sounds unlikely also

Don't really want to rule out that we're missing something as that only leaves deliberate or accidental obfuscation in respect of in-game comms from Pilots Federation and also out of game guidance

 

[Blaggerdy]

Is the charitable view that clearing alerts is the primary intended way to win the war, and Orthrus were the primary intended methods of clearing alerts (it is certainly possible to do smaller alerts this way) but an unintended mass sampling that is more efficient has been found but won't be referenced

 

[Kira Goto]

If you need lore for it: Thargoids have infiltrated us by means of the captured and freed thrombies. They may look like regular people and/or journalists, but they are now spies, forwarding every military discussion and sabotaging coordination by launching false advice.

Ehh, that’s some strong conjecture there. There have been no clear narrative indicators to it(though that is very likely on purpose?).

But I do agree, there is some dissonance between the narrative/lore and the actual gameplay effects here.

Sure, on paper, the Orthrus seems important as a recon/logistical craft*, but that doesn’t really help much when hunting for their sparse signal sources takes at least as much time as it would to just do the sampling thing. And I’d say it’s less the issue of “Sampling is OP” as “There are not enough signals for the relevance of Orthrus at clearing the alert state to matter”. At least two ways to fix this, but whether Frontier would is more important.

*What is it scouting for? I dunno - analyzing the system’s mineral and other resources maybe because they clearly use them to bring back stuff for the Titan to keep running… I doubt it is just to look for human presence when they clearly already know where humans are present and send more Orthrus out accordingly, alongside keeping stronger forces in those inhabited systems they control. And logistical, well, I guess that’s what they do at spires when they “scan” the barnacles and occasionally the big towers.

 

[GroG79]

There are even orthusses in systems with the only bodies being two stars....

 

[Nowski]

Another orthrus-involved idea, crazy I guess but maybe worth considering: is it possible that the Oya alert rush is just something that attacked Titans can do if they have an active spire site?

Spire sites are known to spawn numbers of orthrus, and I don't think any Titans with active spires have been hit hard since we acquired nanite torpedos, have they?

 

[Blaggerdy]

Or kill these Orthrus before they line up the next 24 Titan sites...

 

[marx]

The simplest explanation I can think of is that, while the game balancing staff at Frontier are for whatever reason unwilling to adjust the relative value of sampling and Orthrus kills, the narrative writing staff feel as silly as the rest of us about the most effective way to win an Alert being to bring back more samples from a single Scout than the Scout has mass in the first place, and so are encouraging the second most-effective action instead as it at least fits the theme.

I don't think there's game balancing staff, not on Elite at least. Rebalancing things is all too rarely done on this game. Moreover, it appears that the usual rebalancing strategy is never to nerf anything permanent, but to buff other things up to its level, so that what was overpowered before becomes the new norm. (This is one of the common approaches, by the way, certainly not invented by FD.) Now, if there's an internal decision to always apply this, then it makes sense why they aren't touching the value of sampling: because by policy, they could only do that by bringing all (or at the very least most) of the other war activities up to its level. Now, I'm by no means an expert on the Thargoid war mechanics, but if they actually did that, then the players would be curbstomping the Thargoids, no?
So instead of bringing sampling back in line (one way or another), the decision is just to keep the status quo and pretend things are fine.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Now, if there's an internal decision to always apply this, then it makes sense why they aren't touching the value of sampling: because by policy, they could only do that by bringing all (or at the very least most) of the other war activities up to its level. Now, I'm by no means an expert on the Thargoid war mechanics, but if they actually did that, then the players would be curbstomping the Thargoids, no?

At least in the context of the war, they've increased the difficulty level of individual systems a few times, and decreased the relative effectiveness of things like pod rescues or spire attacks a few times as well, so there certainly doesn't seem to be a general aversion to making things more difficult there. Plenty of Political BGS adjustments have simply made things less effective, too - there hasn't been a move there to rebalance everything ever upwards. They seem to apply a different approach to aggregate balancing to the one used to balance individual earnings.

Certainly if sampling and combat were equally effective per hour (or even within an order of magnitude as effective) given equivalent skill and loadout, the Thargoids would be losing a lot more than they currently are because far more people like combat - but that could be adapted for by increasing the per-system difficulties (or, given that they're on an inverse-cube-approximation anyway, just accepting that the stalemate line moves inwards a few LY)