Thargoids and Interstellar Space...too common?

[Switeck]

No matter when or where you do a misjump, be it on accident or purpose, there's always Thargoids waiting for you at the halfway point of your jump. While this might make some sense for heavily-traveled routes that Thargoids have set up an interdiction force to disrupt, repeated misjumps can put you outside the usual jump routes and at arbitrary distances from systems rather than almost exactly halfway between 2 systems.

I think there should be a sorting function for when/how much Thargoids show up, based on obscurity of your location *AND* whether the misjump was player-deliberate, randomly-caused, or by mission script.
If you're doing deliberate misjumps to nowhere in particular, only the first should be likely to have Thargoids.
Interstellar space is BIG, the odds of encountering Thargoids should be vanishingly low (like 1 out of >1000 jumps) outside of ambushes Thargoids set up in advance.

This leads to the possibility of a rare, hidden pirate/Galactic Navy/other "base" hidden in interstellar space that isn't constantly being harassed by Thargoids. As-is, such a mission/campaign/encounter would have to either remove Thargoids using a script or suffer from 1-8 roving Thargoids messing it up as the player arrives. (What's the odds of that?)

The game balance to this is misjumps themselves cut deeply into the fuel capacity of a ship. Even with multiple 3LY extra Fuel Tanks, doing more than 1 or 2 misjumps will leave a player's ship effectively stranded with no fuel to jump to the next system. Fuel Collector OXP might get around that, but only at the delay of 10 minutes at full speed (longer at slower speeds) per 0.1 LY of fuel recovered. Even at 16x TAF, that could take 30-45 minutes.

If someone wants lots of fights or enemy ships to kill, they'll have to risk regular systems rather than doing numerous Thargoid fights by doing multiple very short misjumps.

[Ganelon]

Well, the odds of an encounter wouldn't be so low due to the vastness of space. Since witchspace failures always dump the player at a point halfway between two systems, the Thargoids would know right where to have patrols. Obviously if they can build spaceships, they can do math.

If the non-Thargoid beings in the Ooniverse can manage to have a station with a patrol of Vipers in every system plus a Navy, it isn't too much of a stretch of the imagination to figure the Thargoids might have some sort of rotating patrol of the misjump points. If they view witchspace as their domain, it would be sensible to be protecting it at the only points they ever see us come through at.

Since all one sees in such encounters are warships, it can be assumed their manufacturing, resources, and shipping lanes don't follow the same logic as ours and are located a good distance away from the misjump points. Since there are no nearby stars, perhaps their technology is less dependent on direct stellar energy and resources. They may colonize in something like asteroid belts in the vast spaces between stars. Since they don't seem to be competing with "us" for resources (we don't see Thargoid stations near suns or planets), they have to be getting resources in a way somehow different than our usual routines. From a xenobiological point of view, very low gravity areas like asteroid belts might favour exoskeleton life-forms and as such they may actually have little interest in "invasion" in the sense of taking over planets.

Not to say they may not be keen on blowing up such planets to render them into more useful little chunks and "get rid of the squishies" at the same time. LOL

But my point is that the number of Thargoid ships encountered in misjumps isn't that much out of proportion with how many police ships are patrolling stations. Still, one would expect to sometimes find a misjump point unguarded, or to at least see ships bringing the patrol ships supplies and such.

I did once encounter a rather large group of non-Thargoids in witchspace. If I recall correctly, it was cargo ships with a good sized escort. But they were engaged in battle with the Thargoids, and as such not likely bringing them supplies intentionally. Not like I got any chance to ask questions.. After helping them beat the Thargoid ships, they turned on me, since my status at the moment was in need of a visit to the hacker outpost. Talk about a lack of gratitude..sheesh.

And people wonder why the Thargoids are winning..

[Commander McLane]

Well, the odds of an encounter wouldn't be so low due to the vastness of space. Since witchspace failures always dump the player at a point halfway between two systems, the Thargoids would know right where to have patrols. Obviously if they can build spaceships, they can do math.

While this is certainly true, Switeck's point was about repeated misjumps. If you jump out of the point-halfway-between-two-systems in the same direction and misjump again, you emerge at the point-one-quarter-between-two-systems. You can repeat this over and over again. You can also change your destination and emerge at the point-halfway-between-the-middle-of-nowhere-and-a-system. Switeck's question is a simple one: would the Thargoids have a presence at this rather obscure point as well? To be more precise: would they have a presence at any such point between any such other point and a system in the Ooniverse? I think they wouldn't.

So probably there could be an algorithm in the code which reduces the number of spawned Thargoids for each subsequent misjump. I think that would be sensible.

However, this would not influence Thargoids or GalCop ships added by scripts, because scripts cannot distinguish between different points in interstellar space. They are executed anywhere in interstellar space. And the majority of ships in interstellar space are added by script, not by the engine. Therefore even a change in the engine wouldn't make a difference.

It then becomes a problem of script interaction. Can you create a script which keeps count of consecutive misjumps (that should be fairly easy) and then reduces the number of ships spawned by other scripts (that would be the tricky part). Your script could remove part of the already spawned entities (lets say keeping half of them on the second misjump, one quarter on the third misjump, one eighth on the fourth misjump and so on). It could even keep the balance in removing. The catch is that the process would be visible for the player, because the script would have to wait until everything is spawned (including the player), and only begin to remove entities then. So the player would see ships appearing and then vanishing for no reason, which would look odd.

[drew]

I reckon the Thargoids cause the mis-jumps... so they're always waiting!

Cheers,

Drew.

[luminous]

How can a player induce a misjump, and why would you want to do so?

[Kaks]

Easily!

To 'meet' Thargoids, or oxp ships that are found there, of course!

[Commander McLane]

I reckon the Thargoids cause the mis-jumps... so they're always waiting!

That's right for unintentional misjumps. But what about intentional misjumps, especially somewhere else than in the middle between two systems?

Example: When Alex and Elyssia jump just one tenth of a LY out of Tionisla at the end of The Dark Wheel chapter 3, to meet Rafe in interstellar space in chapter 4, there is no mention of Thargoids, and they consider the distance of merely 0.1LY to be small enough to not meet any.

We could conclude from this that Thargoids will be lurking at the half point between systems, but less likely closer to the individual systems.

[Disembodied]

How can a player induce a misjump, and why would you want to do so?

Pull back hard on the stick as the countdown reaches zero ...

[Fatleaf]

How can a player induce a misjump, and why would you want to do so?

These are some of the best combat situations I have been in. Very often all that is left is me and one mark II battlebot and I've taken a bit of a pounding. But by the time you count up all the bounty filled your hold of all the spoil and blasted what's left, it is a very profitable thing to do.

I do it quite a lot

[Switeck]

I expect the first misjump, especially if unintentional (or scripted by a mission), to be crawling with Thargoids. It's deliberate misjumps after the first that should never or at least almost never have any Thargoids.

[Cody]

Somewhere in my memory, I think I’ve read that Thargoids are attracted to mis-jumps, and automagically appear whenever they detect one, rather than just loitering at midway points waiting for targets. But I'm not a lore-master, so maybe I've just imagined it to fit my Ooniverse.

[Commander McLane]

The more common explanation (given by Drew above) is that in fact the Thargoids have a technology to induce misjumps by breaking down wormholes. So the general idea is that they lurk at the midpoint between planets, wait for an unsuspecting victim to jump between those planets, and cause his wormhole to collapse, making him fall right under their noses.

Of course the galactic navy has understood this pattern of behaviour long ago, which is why you find their ships at the same place, already engaging the Thargoids.

Of course this illusion of a consistent in-ooniverse explanation breaks down when you begin to misjump more frequently. As long as you only experience the occasional unintentional misjump you can believe that you just got unlucky. Out of all mid-system points in your current galaxy you have endd up in the one where the Thargoids lurked. Bad luck. There is no need to assume that the Thargoids are everywhere. On the contrary, it is logical to assume that they currently are only attacking the route you happened to be on. This illusion breaks down the moment you begin to make intentional misjumps and encounter Thargoids everywhere. If they are everywhere, why haven't they interrupted every jump of yours?

So it makes sense to reduce the likelihood of meeting Thargoids for intentional misjumps, even to reduce it drastically. The general idea is that there are certain 'war zones' in the eight galaxies where Thargoids attack and the navy engage them (and each time your witch drive malfunctions and you misjump unintentionally you may assume that you have just been caught in one of these ever shifting war zones), but the Thargoids are far away from densely populating every last bit of interstellar space (if they were this ubiquitous, why haven't they already wiped out GalCop?).

[Fatleaf]

The general idea is that there are certain 'war zones' in the eight galaxies where Thargoids attack and the navy engage them (and each time your witch drive malfunctions and you misjump unintentionally you may assume that you have just been caught in one of these ever shifting war zones), but the Thargoids are far away from densely populating every last bit of interstellar space (if they were this ubiquitous, why haven't they already wiped out GalCop?).

So it would be a good feature to be warned in some way by news channel which areas are under attack and in those areas an unforced miss-jump becomes a lot more likely. So any bug hunter can be drawn to such an area and the traders can navigate around them, adding more to the flavour of the ooniverse.

[DaddyHoggy]

The general idea is that there are certain 'war zones' in the eight galaxies where Thargoids attack and the navy engage them (and each time your witch drive malfunctions and you misjump unintentionally you may assume that you have just been caught in one of these ever shifting war zones), but the Thargoids are far away from densely populating every last bit of interstellar space (if they were this ubiquitous, why haven't they already wiped out GalCop?).

So it would be a good feature to be warned in some way by news channel which areas are under attack and in those areas an unforced miss-jump becomes a lot more likely. So any bug hunter can be drawn to such an area and the traders can navigate around them, adding more to the flavour of the ooniverse.

Somebody could write an OXP to do that and inject their scripts into Snoopers to give the warnings.

[Commander McLane]

The general idea is that there are certain 'war zones' in the eight galaxies where Thargoids attack and the navy engage them (and each time your witch drive malfunctions and you misjump unintentionally you may assume that you have just been caught in one of these ever shifting war zones), but the Thargoids are far away from densely populating every last bit of interstellar space (if they were this ubiquitous, why haven't they already wiped out GalCop?).

So it would be a good feature to be warned in some way by news channel which areas are under attack and in those areas an unforced miss-jump becomes a lot more likely. So any bug hunter can be drawn to such an area and the traders can navigate around them, adding more to the flavour of the ooniverse.

I think that would be way too complicated.

What I wanted to convey is the extreme simpleness of the whole background thing, which is where its beauty lies. There's absolutely nothing in the game code itself supporting the whole idea 'war zones'. It's just that by complete random you end up in interstellar space, hunted by Thargoids every once in a while. Very rarely. That's all there is.

All the rest only takes place in the player's head: "Ah, my witch drive malfunctioned, and I'm surrounded by Thargoids. Maybe these two facts are related. Maybe the Thargoids can somehow interfere with my witch space tunnel. Hm, when I last jumped on this route, that didn't happen. But it happened once before in another area of this galaxy. Maybe the Thargoids were thereabouts at the time, and now they are hereabouts. Oh, there are GalCop ships as well, fighting the Thargoids. Maybe there's a real war going on out here, and unfortunately I've stumbled across the front line. So, the front line appears to have shifted since the last time this happened to me."

You see? All that's in the actual game is a rare random encounter. But in the player's head a complete scenario of an ongoing war with fighting backward and forward, shifting front lines, and mythical technologies evolves effortlessly, almost naturally. Again, nothing of this is actually in the game code. And this is the beauty of the open concept of Elite/Oolite, and why I love this game.

And in my opinion there is absolutely no need at all to 'fix' this natural background scenario into an all-coded scenario, where—instead of pure random—some formula or some coding people determine exactly where the 'front line' will be at every given moment, and take a huge effort to put this information into the code. And then devise a mechanism that for each of the player's jumps has to check where exactly the front line is located at this moment of time, compares the player's location to all possible front line locations, and then decides whether an unintentional misjump may happen or not. What a complicated way of doing things, compared to the simple beauty of Elite/Oolite! The normal player may not even notice a difference in practice, but the concept is totally different! On the one side the 'wide open sandbox', where anything can happen anytime, and we trust that the player will make up his own in-universe explanations (and yes, Elite/Oolite players do come up with their own explanations, like the one given above about the reason for misjumps, and what's more, they share these explanations in the Elite Wiki or on bulletin boards like this one here, and they find themselves agreeing with another person's explanation, because it makes sense and indeed can explain their own game experience; and so, over the years, most of what we 'know' about the background of Elite/Oolite has emanated more or less from the thin air of some (pseudo-) random numbers; there is no way Messieurs Bell & Braben could've come up with and explicitly coded all of this back when they first created the game), and on the other side there's the 'railroad' type of game, where everything is pre-determined and explicitly coded. Elite/Oolite is clearly on the former side of the scale, and quite extremely so. And again, its openness is the very core of many players' (including myself) fascination with this game.