The Thargoid War: System States Clarifications

[CMDR M Kozak]

We are winning, the tide has turned HIP 23716

So I had a look around this morning to see the stats of the war. here you can see the progress made in the past 24 hours. If we actually get co-ordinated and focus on one system HIP 23716 we will win it by Monday 12th Dec. The 760pixel line (pixels are a measure of distance!) represents...

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[Jabo Zerstorer]

all it needed was an out of universe explanation such as .. when the thargoids are deploying they will be extremely difficult to defeat.. i have on the whole enjoyed my time so far but find myself extremely deflated at the prospect of more crushing defeats before fdev find the balance narratively or gameplay wise,

I agree. It really could have been explained a lot better, both in the Codex, on the Stream and on socials.

 

[Northpin]

It's an alert system so that isn't required. Invasion systems have the additional task of "Support human ships in CZs" (may not be the exact wording but it's something like that).

i meant generally, not in direct relation to the alert system being worked on by axi

 

[Northpin]

There might plausibly not even have been a manual adjustment - the total number of systems affected by Thargoids has slightly more than doubled, the difficulty per-system seems to have roughly halved based on how the progress bars are going, those two facts might not be unrelated.
(Needs more data ... but if that's true, it has very interesting strategic implications in a few months time, and would be a smart way for Frontier to ensure that their initial guess couldn't actually be "wrong" as such)

if so, the conclusion drawn by Cmdr Numa makes a lot of sense then

could be as well - that's the ingame lore explanation they gave through galnet news - which could prosaically translate in we lowered the requirements

it's also a bit counter intuitive
more maelstroms means the same number of thargoids spread over more systems which means easier to counter them in each individual system, but overall it's the same huge effort required to clear them out from all the systems?

bit far fetched, but then again, why not?

Would make the perfect ingredients to put the game on permanent maintenance mode. A tug of war, where it becomes easier and easier to push the Thargoids back the more they spread, so they can't overrun humanity. At the same time getting harder and harder to push them back the fewer places they control, up to te point of making it impossibl to completely clear them out.

 

[Jabo Zerstorer]

if so, the conclusion drawn by Cmdr Numa makes a lot of sense then

Well with 2 further updates known about and a key feature overhaul due next year, I don't think it's being put into maintenanc mode. It may be a mechanic that does allow the team to fx bugs, work on future content and the like. I do think the Thargoids are here to stay and I do think on-foot Thargoids are coming but I ultimately think they'll just become part of Powerplay/BGS in the end. Who knows, maybe we'll even push them back out all together? The game isn't dead though.

 

[Northpin]

Well with 2 further updates known about and a key feature overhaul due next year, I don't think it's being put into maintenanc mode

well, i didnt took that literally.
just as a way to express how the war will feel.

 

[Jabo Zerstorer]

well, i didnt took that literally.
just as a way to express how the war will feel.

We have enough "the end is nigh, Elite's a dead game!" threads already, so that's good to hear.

 

[galahad2069]

There might plausibly not even have been a manual adjustment - the total number of systems affected by Thargoids has slightly more than doubled, the difficulty per-system seems to have roughly halved based on how the progress bars are going, those two facts might not be unrelated.

Now we only need to figure out how to invite 20 more Maelstroms, that will thin out Thargoid forces sufficiently and we will finally be able to defend a single backwater system in the middle of nowhere.

:light bulb:

 

[gooddoc]

I wonder, lets say we managed to take back control of a system from the thargoids.

How long will it be before the they make another attempt at the system?

Probablly the week after we finished hauling stupid amounts of resources to get it up & running again

 

[Phoenix_Dfire]

There is the question about this bug (https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/55922) and how it played into last weeks figures. The most fun thing
to do at the moment is the defend the base scenarios and if they aren't progressing and the results are being processed correctly, then it has a knock on effect with the rest of the game. I hope they've that bug a priority.

 

[galahad2069]

It won't be though. You'd have stopped the Thargoid invasion for that week.

But only because fdev made it easier, not because of your effort. That was the point.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

if so, the conclusion drawn by Cmdr Numa makes a lot of sense then

Yeah, it's an interesting design if so - the war would (assuming constant human input) tend to a steady state in terms of number of Thargoid systems - but within that there'd still be opportunity to move the Thargoids around to keep them away from / encourage them towards specific systems. Increases or decreases in human activity would change the system count but not in a critical way.

Let's them be fairly confident that at a bubble-wide level it won't require massive adjustment, so they can get on with developing the next updates and wider plot-level stuff.

(Of course, it's early days yet. There are many other potential explanations)

 

[Quasipoisson]

The demotivating effects of the weekly reset that are rightly criticised by so many in this thread would be most straightforwardly fixed by just resetting it to 50% (or hell, even 20% would be something) of where it got to at the end of the week - rather than 0%.

 

[Northpin]

The demotivating effects of the weekly reset that are rightly criticised by so many in this thread would be most straightforwardly fixed by just resetting it to 50% (or hell, even 20% would be something) of where it got to at the end of the week - rather than 0%.

the numbers of people criticizing the so called reset, which is actually a single turn lasting a week in this turn-based thargoid conflict, is way smaller than the people that are actually out there helping humanity in this confilct

and all those mentioned above are only a small part of the general population

 

[Jabo Zerstorer]

the numbers of people criticizing the so called reset, which is actually a single turn lasting a week in this turn-based thargoid conflict, is way smaller than the people that are actually out there helping humanity in this confilct

and all those mentioned above are only a small part of the general population

Do none of these folk play the BGS? Especially on-foot CZs when trying to take Settlements for a minor faction?

There's no indication of whether any of those Settlements will flip. You could win 20 CZs in a row in one Settlement but if ubermassiveplayerfaction concentrates on that one Settlement and wins 21, then that Settlement remains their's. It can be just as fruitless as a bar being reset each week.

 

[CMDR Val Dudley]

So it seems that it was all "planned"..? https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/we-are-winning-the-tide-has-turned-hip-23716.611822/ New maelstroms arriving did make the bars fill out faster, implying a "stretching out" of Thargoid forces, as Galnet implied... Then instead of a game design fail we had a communication fail that got hugely worse by bugs like counting down weeks for days and immovable axcz progress bars/invisible interceptors. But at least it now makes sense to go kill a few bugs and see what happens.. It's a waste because I don't think the majority of the players will investigate to understand what really has happened, and that cost the game all the wonderful momentum that was building up, in terms of engagement.

 

[TheTechnobear]

we have expressed our opinions...
I think most of us are now just facing 'the reality'....
like it or not, Fdev are not going to do anything about this reset in the short term.
and these topics are going around in the same circles, as its all just opinion/speculation.

so we either chose to participate or not....your own choice.
I thought I was out, but then decided, hell I'll go makes some more credits, and get a bit more ax practice.
... but others will differ

as for the broader picture, on player numbers/participation - again, everyone can speculate, pontificate.

but we will see over the coming weeks, if the fear that it will demotivate become reality or not,
and if so, to what extent...

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

the numbers of people criticizing the so called reset, which is actually a single turn lasting a week in this turn-based thargoid conflict, is way smaller than the people that are actually out there helping humanity in this confilct

and all those mentioned above are only a small part of the general population

This is true for almost all political activity and it does not make the critiques themselves any less valid on their own merit through.

It's ok to not care about the bigger picture and some thargoid war bgs spreadsheet and just fight goids in the new CZs, but for the war thing to have long-term staying power it needs the community engagement and other fixes and improvements beyond the annoyance over the reset to motivate players and elevate it beyond just grinding another progress bar.

Do none of these folk play the BGS? Especially on-foot CZs when trying to take Settlements for a minor faction?

Yeah it's also frustrating, mainly because of the progress being entirely hidden before being reset, which is a big part of the point of it to add decision making in where to commit resources.

The thargoid wars using different mechanics from the rest of the bgs would offer a fun and welcome change from the frustrations of the regular bgs.

 

[Vurrath]

Wow.

And everyone is able to start at the starting-line,
on a Thrusday,..
...because...

BLANK

??

Frontier, that's a very basic-mistake to make, in terms of whether or not you're creating an unnecessary barrier/impediment,
AND, asking for the complaints/discontent/abuse/playing other games.

 

[galahad2069]

It's ok to not care about the bigger picture and some thargoid war bgs spreadsheet and just fight goids in the new CZs

...but actually it's far from ok because those CZs are bugged af