Update 15, the Upcoming Feature Rework and More

[Old Duck]

The devs kind of already told us, their entire war effort boils down to "path of least resistance", which places them at an IQ comparable to a locust swarm, or a swarm of zen Buddhists (little joke, don't hang me).

That's not necessarily a bad strategy, especially if it the AI can pursue this path by planning multiple moves in advance. I used something similar when attacking my enemy in that "other game". I could have just plowed through the system in a straight line to get to my target (the enemy's main shipyard), but that would have likely ended in my destruction, as there were some serious defense posts in that straight line approach. So instead I did a more involved flanking manuever (in 3D space, no less), which was "the path of least resistance" and incredibly effective. If the Thargoids follow a similar strategy, then that's pretty impressive. If they just look around and say, "Oh, there are tough humans on the skirmish lines, let's just stay put." then that would be a bit disappointing IMO.

I would also like to think that Thargoids have some sort of either bigger or secondary goal than to just wipe out humans. For example, if Thargoids are moving in such a way to occupy all AM systems first, there's a logic to that which adds to their realism. If Thargoids are just 3D Space Invaders, well that's kinda boring.

 

[Northpin]

The devs kind of already told us, their entire war effort boils down to "path of least resistance", which places them at an IQ comparable to...

That's water level IQ

 

[Coehoorn]

That's not necessarily a bad strategy, especially if it the AI can pursue this path by planning multiple moves in advance. I used something similar when attacking my enemy in that "other game". I could have just plowed through the system in a straight line to get to my target (the enemy's main shipyard), but that would have likely ended in my destruction, as there were some serious defense posts in that straight line approach. So instead I did a more involved flanking manuever (in 3D space, no less), which was "the path of least resistance" and incredibly effective. If the Thargoids follow a similar strategy, then that's pretty impressive. If they just look around and say, "Oh, there are tough humans on the skirmish lines, let's just stay put." then that would be a bit disappointing IMO.

I would also like to think that Thargoids have some sort of either bigger or secondary goal than to just wipe out humans. For example, if Thargoids are moving in such a way to occupy all AM systems first, there's a logic to that which adds to their realism. If Thargoids are just 3D Space Invaders, well that's kinda boring.

It's not a 'bad' strategy... But it's one strategy. One single strategy that isn't exactly a strategy, but more of a mechanism of nature. They really are bringing home the fact that Thargoids are animals in the new lore.
It's not hard to counter a strategy rooted in instincts, obviously. Our strength as humans is that we can reflect on it and think of ways to counter it. The fact the Thargoids do not reflect on anything and act like animals is very telling to me.

 

[Old Duck]

And on top of that, the bubble has 20,000 systems, taking out a system all else equal takes out both producers and consumers, and economy types are more-or-less homogenous in distribution ... so even if there was a detailed economic sim, the Thargoids would have to take a very substantial amount of the bubble before it had any noticeable effect on it.

I get that average prices across the vast Bubble would likely not move much, except with rares that are only produced in a few systems, but there should be localized "mini-bubbles" where supply chain shortages make a real difference. There are places in the US where gas prices are skyrocketing due to local distribution issues rather than global trauma, for example.

I probably oversimplified my conceptual "realistic BGS model" with the bucket analogy. It works great from CMDRs, because actual gameplay and human determination are "free" and not needed to be tracked and calculated. For example, if in order for system A to get food to system B, CMDRs need to fly the long way around to avoid Thargoid infestation, the actual gameplay of doing so will determine how much food is actually moved. There are variables of time, potential of loss due to being attacked, and even motivation - is it worth the extra hassle for a CMDR to run that route, or will they just pass and let system B starve? For a realistic BGS that includes NPCs, all of this would need to be considered. I'm sure it can be done, it would just be a bit more complex than a simple variable "n T9s transport food from system A to B per hour". I suppose you could use CMDR traffic as a "seed" and then just apply a multiplier to simulate "like-minded" NPCs. That's something I would at least try to see how it works. Call it a "poor-man's" form of machine learning.

 

[dannysquid]

Okay, I'm going to do it, I'm going to mention that "other game" (cough X4 cough), not to derail this topic, but to enrich it. One of the things I love about X4 is that I still have moments where the literal thought, "What is the AI up to?" crosses my mind. As if the AI is actually thinking. It's obviously not, but it's using some sort of algorithm to position its fleets, select targets, and start battles at various times. It's good enough to still trick me into believing it has an actual strategy rather than just an elaborate decision tree, and that is incredibly immersive, even when I'm not engaging in the battle myself.

I used to be a game AI coder back in the day and a recurring experience was that after your first pass at the code, when it was riddled with bugs and half-thought-through bits, it was at it's most ALIVE feeling. And the more you fixed it the deader it felt. I'd put in "randomly do something weird" stuff to try to get some of that life back, but it was never as lively as the broken version!

 

[marx]

Obviously there are. I think even Frontier is reasonably good for hitting schedules for its other products. But we know that - at the very least in the specific case of Elite Dangerous - that Frontier are not able to produce an accurate prediction more than about 3-6 months ahead for content and schedule, and that's been true since the original Horizons release.

You know, I'd say that that has been true since the original release. The original Kickstarter plans said that there'll be smaller expansions as well as major ones, and if memory serves it was mentioned somewhere that they'd plan to do quarterly for the former, maybe yearly for the latter. Obviously this didn't work out, since ED launched without a good number of features that would be basic to multiplayer games, so Frontier scrambled to address the common complaints. All of these were added between ED 1.0 (the launch) and 2.0 (Horizons):

• Wings
• Mail messages, plus private chat messages would fail to be delivered all too often early on
• Community Goals
• First Discovery tags, bulk selling of exploration data, star filters, route planner increased from 100 ly 1,000 ly
• External camera, but only the debug version, not the current one with all its features
• Powerplay
• CQC
• A large number of new ships (looks like there were twelve)

These covered the first year, so the roadmap-of-sorts was already delayed by then: out of the above, only the new ships were mentioned as a goal in the Kickstarter.
I'm not saying I like this, I'm just saying that delays and roadmaps not working out are business as usual for FD.

 

[Jokerman]

I'm not into the Thargoid war, I'm off away exploring. S! to all the Cmdr's engaged and here's to May being a good drop for all.
My takeaway really is that FDev are continuing to support the product.
So good news!

Onwards Pearson!!!!

S!

 

[Ian Doncaster]

There are places in the US where gas prices are skyrocketing due to local distribution issues rather than global trauma, for example.

And that's the bit which is incredibly difficult to replicate in the bubble, because local connectivity is immensely strong anywhere-to-anywhere, and even the rarest economy type (high-tech, for the main bubble) is 6.5% of all systems and they're spread out fairly evenly. You could completely isolate a fairly small blob of bubble systems from the rest of the bubble and so long as the main bubble economy was default-stable (i.e. production and consumption roughly matched in normal times, which they don't currently as they don't need to), the isolated blob would also be stable provided it contained a high-tech system.

A general "war front" push like the Thargoids are currently doing can't disrupt any of those local connections meaningfully. A targeted "swiss cheese" attack which very specifically took out all the high-tech systems to a decent depth first should cause an economic collapse on the further out bits closer to the main front as they no longer had a local HT ... but would of course also leave those pushes over-extended and very vulnerable.

The devs kind of already told us, their entire war effort boils down to "path of least resistance"

That's not actually how they're behaving, though, unless it just means "they'll win more territory when/where they're not resisted" which is true of all possible strategies and not particularly useful information.

The current Thargoid strategy regularly involves attempting to retake the same system several times over, attacking it often as soon as it becomes eligible again, even if it would be possible to go "around" it. That's not aiming for least resistance in the short-term (though it may be aiming for least resistance in the long-term by breaking human will to continue) - and sometimes, of course, they do succeed on the 2nd or 3rd attempt.

Their strategy changed in early February and their budget to execute it was changed in early March ... "path of least resistance" would have been a better description of some of their original strategy though still not accurate; their current strategy pays no attention whatsoever to the amount of resistance beyond "resisted there this week, better try again".

 

[Old Duck]

And that's the bit which is incredibly difficult to replicate in the bubble, because local connectivity is immensely strong anywhere-to-anywhere, and even the rarest economy type (high-tech, for the main bubble) is 6.5% of all systems and they're spread out fairly evenly. You could completely isolate a fairly small blob of bubble systems from the rest of the bubble and so long as the main bubble economy was default-stable (i.e. production and consumption roughly matched in normal times, which they don't currently as they don't need to), the isolated blob would also be stable provided it contained a high-tech system.

A general "war front" push like the Thargoids are currently doing can't disrupt any of those local connections meaningfully. A targeted "swiss cheese" attack which very specifically took out all the high-tech systems to a decent depth first should cause an economic collapse on the further out bits closer to the main front as they no longer had a local HT ... but would of course also leave those pushes over-extended and very vulnerable.

Well... Maybe Colonia could be the system for people like me who want a more realistic economy and supply chain, and the "big Bubble" can be for players looking for easy credits and an arcade-like economy.

Still, I'm just not convinced "it can't be done" in Elite without even trying. Not that your points aren't valid, but I feel you might be oversimplifying with the "everything is connected" argument. Everything is connected here in America, too, and yet supply chain and economics are still very real. The one major difference is that there's a cost to hauling IRL that Elite fails to represent, seeing that fuel and "vehicle" maintenance is essentially free in Elite (something I've complained about vehemently the past). Even then, time is still valuable to many CMDRs, and that's why the average CMDR isn't hauling to stations 1000+ Ls from the main star. If NPCs mimicked CMDRs, and prices realistically adjusted for the demand at these outer rim stations and outposts, then "anywhere-to-anywhere" connectivity no longer is an excuse.

In the meantime, I've got X4, where there are dozens of stations across multiple systems that offer the same commodity, and yet there's still a very real sense of supply and demand, scarcity, and economy.

Sorry, I feel like I'm starting to derail this thread from it's original purpose, so I'll leave it at this and save any future arguments / debates on this specific subtopic for a separate thread.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Everything is connected here in America, too, and yet supply chain and economics are still very real.

But not in the same way that it's connected in Elite Dangerous. If everything in the US was moved by plentiful supersonic air freight, fast and precisely targeted enough for cargo to be loaded onto a plane in LA and be in the shops in Maine under an hour later (not that there'd be any general need to, as every US state would have identical production and processing facilities for all commodities), there'd still be plenty of supply chain and economic issues but there wouldn't be logistical ones.

The X series - like the original Elite - has a meaningful concept of a route from A to B. The short way is through three specific systems / sectors which need to be traversed, the long way is a ten system detour and if you don't like that you might be lucky and have a 20-system option but sometimes there's nothing. In Elite Dangerous (inherited and strengthened from FE2/FFE) the intermediate systems are irrelevant and the equivalent largely-ideal routing options [1] are very numerous.

[1] For the first time, nine years in, the Thargoids have a fixed 10 LY expansion range, which is small enough to make inter-system connectivity meaningful (the 20 LY BGS cube is far too large for it to matter in the vicinity of the bubble), and people are finally starting to think about it a bit and try to get advantage from it - cut them off at bottlenecks, look for convenient systems they can't reach at all - and I really wish Frontier had made hyperspace work like that to start with...

Still, I'm just not convinced "it can't be done" in Elite without even trying.

Oh, interesting economic situations can certainly be set up in Elite, and a few have happened over the years - but they need to bear in mind just how massively overpowered the FSD is for travel within the bubble. They're not going to look very much like a real-world economic crisis would. The easiest way to do it would probably be to focus on the demands for "regional" goods - things like Ion Distributor or Emergency Power Cells - where the Thargoids could very easily damage production in a globally significant sense just by taking out a couple of systems, which could then create ripple effects as the remaining sources of those commodities couldn't serve everywhere at once. So you'd then see (likely the more distant unless explicitly player-backed) Industrial and High-Tech economies start to seize up as their supplies ran low, which would then spread to the (local) economies they served, and you get the disruption scenario you want via the processing side rather than the transport side.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Well... Maybe Colonia could be the system for people like me who want a more realistic economy and supply chain, and the "big Bubble" can be for players looking for easy credits and an arcade-like economy.

Still, I'm just not convinced "it can't be done" in Elite without even trying. Not that your points aren't valid, but I feel you might be oversimplifying with the "everything is connected" argument. Everything is connected here in America, too, and yet supply chain and economics are still very real. The one major difference is that there's a cost to hauling IRL that Elite fails to represent, seeing that fuel and "vehicle" maintenance is essentially free in Elite (something I've complained about vehemently the past). Even then, time is still valuable to many CMDRs, and that's why the average CMDR isn't hauling to stations 1000+ Ls from the main star. If NPCs mimicked CMDRs, and prices realistically adjusted for the demand at these outer rim stations and outposts, then "anywhere-to-anywhere" connectivity no longer is an excuse.

In the meantime, I've got X4, where there are dozens of stations across multiple systems that offer the same commodity, and yet there's still a very real sense of supply and demand, scarcity, and economy.

Sorry, I feel like I'm starting to derail this thread from it's original purpose, so I'll leave it at this and save any future arguments / debates on this specific subtopic for a separate thread.

Once again, I can’t help but point out Elite Dangerous once had what you describe, and there were enough vocal complaints about it during the original alpha, that Frontier pretty much scrapped their entire economic simulation in favor of what we have today.

Frontier Developments: replacing Depth of Gameplay with shallow grind at the request of the player base since 2014…

 

[Hellrider]

so basically we need more regional goods

 

[Old Duck]

Once again, I can’t help but point out Elite Dangerous once had what you describe, and there were enough vocal complaints about it during the original alpha, that Frontier pretty much scrapped their entire economic simulation in favor of what we have today.

Frontier Developments: replacing Depth of Gameplay with shallow grind at the request of the player base since 2014…

vs

Hehe, yea. I could make you a list of games which were a terribly fiasko at one stage, usually at launch and the first years after. But the developers did not merely give up, but sit down, listen to the players and even more so to those players who have left [1], and adjusted their game. And managed to turn the game around and get quite a fanbase. Some of them i also play now or have played and enjoyed for quite some time, in their revised version.

So while there might indeed be a certain number of players who (just like good dwarves) never give up a grudge, there's plenty of people who are more than ready to give a game a second and sometimes even a third chance, if the developers actually change and improve things. (For me personally, the list would be Elder Scrolls Online [...]


[1] Yes, this requires to have an ear to the community. Not just fan-videos and also not just the game forum. But rather google for the game and read what people in forums of other games and reddit threads for other games say. In a less emotionally connected environment, away from the game, you get clearer feedback.

I'm emphasizing ESO in the above quote because I think it's a game that has suffered from "replacing depth of gameplay with shallow grind at the request of the player base". I would have preferred the original leveling system, where your character starts off weak and is good against weak enemies, but you don't stand a chance against stronger enemies and bosses. But ESO replaced this with a weird leveling system where a level 1 character can actually be stronger than a level 20 character! This weird "we reward your hard work by making you weaker" system really turns me off, though at least once you get up to CP160 or whatever it is, then finally leveling means something (though trash mobs like wolves still take almost as long to kill as they did when I was level 1).

Then there's the "all races can visit all alliances" nerf that basically ignores that there is a war going on. I get irked every single time my Nord character is stopped by an Elf in Auridon with the words, "I wish to speak to you, citizen." (Or something like that.) I'm like, "Do I look like a citizen of Auridon to you?"

Then there's the fact that every merchant will buy all your goods for the exact same price. Shouldn't I have to sell my armor to an armorer? Why is the chef willing to pay top dollar for a dozen swords? Is it so he can cut his onions faster?

These are just a few examples of how ESO has been dumbed-down over the years, at the request of the player base, because everyone wanted easy-mode in their MMO. Now don't get me wrong, I still play and enjoy ESO almost every night, but I often think it could have been SO MUCH MORE. Also, don't get me wrong in thinking I'm opposed to community feedback - just go to the suggestions forum and you'll see I've given plenty of feedback. I'm just opposed to feedback that turns a realistic, challenging game into a dumbed-down arcade game because some "working dad" doesn't want to spend any time at all earning accomplishments in the game. I wish all these "working dads" would just play CQC and stop trying to dumb down Elite and other games even further.

/rant

 

[Hellrider]

Once again, I can’t help but point out Elite Dangerous once had what you describe, and there were enough vocal complaints about it during the original alpha, that Frontier pretty much scrapped their entire economic simulation in favor of what we have today.

Frontier Developments: replacing Depth of Gameplay with shallow grind at the request of the player base since 2014…

so frontier has 1 issue

Listening community.
"working dads", as you said should have 0 impact with their feedback, sorry. I don't start hardcore grind mmo if I havent time.
Or any game, which need more time than I have.

 

[Tetra Trash]

so frontier has 1 issue

Listening community.
"working dads", as you said should have 0 impact with their feedback, sorry. I don't start hardcore grind mmo if I havent time.
Or any game, which need more time than I have.

Conversely you could say that hardcore grinders should have 0 impact with their feedback, sorry, we need our games to appeal to a wide spectrum of people so we can sell enough copies to actually, y’know, not go bankrupt. And you’d probably be more correct.

 

[Darkfyre99]

so frontier has 1 issue

Listening community.
"working dads", as you said should have 0 impact with their feedback, sorry. I don't start hardcore grind mmo if I havent time.
Or any game, which need more time than I have.

Speaking as someone who has precious little free time in my hands to play ED, or any game for that matter, I have far more fun when the decisions I made have meaning (aka depth of gameplay) than I when no matter what I choose, I get the same result every time (aka grind).

In the case of ED, for example, an ABA cargo route in the original Alpha was a lot more fun for me than the grind it is today, because not only did I need to change my cargo assortment in reaction to a quickly changing supply and demand, but it encouraged me to take risks in order to beat the next tick of the economic sim, in the order reap the rewards of a previous optimized load.

Conversely, I will be bored to death running an ABA route today, because there’s typically only one commodity that’s worth trading at each of the two ports, and supply and demand don’t change enough outside if a CG to make an impact. That isn’t trading, as far as I’m concerned. That’s just hauling over a well worn path.

For me, it’s not about how fast I get a result, but the decisions I made along the way to that result, that matter. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a Cobra or an iCutter, if the decisions I make are meaningless.

 

[Hellrider]

In the case of ED, for example, an ABA cargo route in the original Alpha was a lot more fun for me than the grind it is today, because not only did I need to change my cargo assortment in reaction to a quickly changing supply and demand, but it encouraged me to take risks in order to beat the next tick of the economic sim, in the order reap the rewards of a previous optimized load.

Conversely, I will be bored to death running an ABA route today, because there’s typically only one commodity that’s worth trading at each of the two ports, and supply and demand don’t change enough outside if a CG to make an impact. That isn’t trading, as far as I’m concerned. That’s just hauling over a well worn path.

For me, it’s not about how fast I get a result, but the decisions I made along the way to that result, that matter. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a Cobra or an iCutter, if the decisions I make are meaningless.

Sadly, when I look at devs decisions you arent average "working dad", which they listening
They listen people, which need results ASAP, and cannot have fun without maxed gear.

 

[zimms]

Sadly, when I look at devs decisions you arent average "working dad", which they listening
They listen people, which need results ASAP, and cannot have fun without maxed gear.

Source?

 

[Hellrider]

Source?
Current game. Just look at credit gains

 

[zimms]

Credits won't give you maxed out gear. And it's not proof that players who make a lot of credits need everything ASAP and can't have fun otherwise.