Unusual planet jump failure

[Eric Walch]

As for rare occurrence, I'm amazed you've managed to rack up 3405 kills before getting your first misjump.

I'm at about 1200 kills with my current commander, and no misjumps. Actually, I can only remember having one for as long as I have played Oolite, but I may well be wrong here, (not counting self induced misjumps of course). Seemed to happen a lot more often on C64 Elite and Elite plus.

When you keep your ship well-maintained, misjumps will be rare. Roughly one out of every 400 jumps. Because I like the occasional misjumps, I never maintain my ship. And even than misjumps are rare. I think most misjumps happen as 'self-induced' when keeping on fighting while waiting for the countdown to hit zero. On the C64 that were also the main courses of misjumps. On the C64 it took me some time before I realized I created them myself.

[Commander McLane]

Yeah, but when I need to get to a planet really fast I often end up using about 6.8 ly of feul per jump, at least it is a rare ocurence.

Note that, if measured in game time (which is important for instance for contract or passenger delivery) this is by far the slowest way to get anywhere. The time used for a witchjump grows with the square of the distance.

[Smivs]

I had my first ever misjump the other day, after nearly two years of playing and 4000 kills.

[Staer9]

[quote="Disembodied"
A possible option could be, once the last Thargoid is destroyed, the player's wormhole (which the Bugs' dastardly wormhole-finagling technology had disrupted) reappears somewhere within scanner range of the player, and remains open for some short but (not too short) amount of time. The player can gamble on scooping up any floating dead Tharglets, but if they dawdle too long then they're stuck, and hell mend them (assuming they don't have enough fuel to make another witchjump).[/quote]

That would work, but as you see I dont have either of those OXPs installed... maybe I shall download one.

[Disembodied]

That would work, but as you see I dont have either of those OXPs installed... maybe I shall download one.

That's my point: the flaw in the game design can be circumvented, but only with OXPs. Because we can't guarantee what OXPs people might have, I think this needs to be sorted at root level.

The witchjump failure is a perfectly good match for the intended behaviour of the original game. But I'd argue that this one little piece of the original game is so badly designed – specifically, the part where a player, through no fault of their own, can be handed a "fight of your life" card, and then left to die regardless of the outcome – that it should be regarded as a bug. The misjump possibility is fine. The Thargoid ambush is fine. But it's a horrible piece of game design to deny players an escape route even if they survive the attack. It's worse than just flinging them into a brick wall, because, for a long time, players might not even know that they're screwed, and think that there must be some way out, if only they could find it.

[CheeseRedux]

But it's a horrible piece of game design to deny players an escape route even if they survive the attack.

I couldn't agree more. Though I'm not going to fault the original game on this; with the hardware limitations they had to cope with, it was either this or drop the Thargoids altogether. Furthermore, back in the day games were habitually harsher on the players, often killing them for no good reason, with few on no ways of saving your progress. (I still remember the frustration of repeatedly almost reaching the pyramid on the first level of Aztec Challenge - and how bloody easy the rest of the game was in comparison.)

One extremely easy fix would be to make the Fuel Tank (or some equivalent) part of the core game. I'm even inclined to argue that such a change could (should?) sneak past the Feature Freeze.

[Disembodied]

I couldn't agree more. Though I'm not going to fault the original game on this; with the hardware limitations they had to cope with, it was either this or drop the Thargoids altogether. Furthermore, back in the day games were habitually harsher on the players, often killing them for no good reason, with few on no ways of saving your progress. (I still remember the frustration of repeatedly almost reaching the pyramid on the first level of Aztec Challenge - and how bloody easy the rest of the game was in comparison.)

One extremely easy fix would be to make the Fuel Tank (or some equivalent) part of the core game. I'm even inclined to argue that such a change could (should?) sneak past the Feature Freeze.

For sheer frustration, I think The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure has to take the biscuit ...

Putting the fuel tank in the core game could be a workaround (although I don't think it's worth doing just now: a freeze is a freeze, and I wouldn't want to argue for an exception to be made in this case). But we still can't guarantee that everyone will have one, every time. Ultimately it needs a solution that doesn't require a piece of optional equipment. Everyone, if they've managed to survive the attack, should be able to get home and tell everyone else about it.

[Cody]

I think you've mentioned this before, Disembodied... somehow, your wormhole would need to reappear.

[Disembodied]

I think you've mentioned this before, Disembodied... somehow, your wormhole would need to reappear.

I think that – or something like that – needs to happen. Maybe there could be another type of Thargoid ship lurking behind its mates, with a big wormhole-interfero-doodad on it. It's big and slow and not hugely well-armed (maybe plasma cannons only), so it really should be left until last ... but if/when the player destroys this special ship there's a big puff of handwavium and a wormhole appears, leading either to where the player was heading to, or (perhaps) to the nearest system. Of course, if the player destroys the wormhole-blocking ship and flees before killing the other bugs, there's nothing to stop them pursuing the player down the same wormhole!

Basically, the game logic should be

1. You've fallen into a trap
2. You've managed to survive the trap
3. Now you can escape from the trap

It's step 3 that we're missing.

[CheeseRedux]

I still think the vanilla misjump should be classed as a bug

Putting the fuel tank in the core game could be a workaround (although I don't think it's worth doing just now: a freeze is a freeze, and I wouldn't want to argue for an exception to be made in this case).

You contradict yourself, my good man. If it's a bug, it's not frozen.

But we still can't guarantee that everyone will have one, every time. Ultimately it needs a solution that doesn't require a piece of optional equipment. Everyone, if they've managed to survive the attack, should be able to get home and tell everyone else about it.

My thinking when suggesting the FT in core is fairly straightforward:
-As changes go, it's a minor one to implement - at least according to one fellow who's not going to be doing the implementation bit.
-As a piece of kit, the FT is nicely balanced. You pay premium price for the actual fuel involved, so it's not economical to use as anything but an emergency reserve, be it in witchspace or when injectors can mean life or death. And it takes up a pylon, so each tank reduces your offensive capability. The missile you gave up for the tank could end up being the missile that didn't save your bacon.
-As for the escape route from WS needing to be always available, that's a valid argument. But any equipment is optional. You could just as easily perish in WS because you decided to not restock your missiles, or if, as opposed to the OP, you didn't have an Energy Bomb.

Feature Freeze aside, the FT is pretty close to a perfect temporary fix. And that might actually be the main argument against it: After all, there is nothing more permanent than a temporary fix...

[Cody]

Maybe there could be another type of Thargoid ship lurking behind its mates, with a big wormhole-interfero-doodad on it.

It wouldn't need to be a ship... some sort of jamming buoy would do.

[Smivs]

And of course there are always those who consider the fuel-tank to be a bit of a cheat, and something that can have a profound effect on game play, in terms of tactics and decision making.
Adding these to the core game would not be universally welcomed.

[CheeseRedux]

Smivs, could you expound on that?
(Not arguing, merely curious.)

[Cody]

For me, fuel pods belong in the OXP Ooniverse. I’ve used them to cross the Great Rift, and if I’m running Smivs’ TG 2 Armageddon they become a very useful piece of kit. I wouldn’t like to see them in the core game… the re-appearing wormhole solution seems the most ‘elegant’ to me.

[another_commander]

CheeseRedux: Well, for starters, the Nova mission becomes meaningless if we introduce fuel pods in the core game. The point of that mission is to send the player to the next galaxy by creating a sense of despair that can be resolved only by galactic hyperspacing. Carrying fuel tanks is the easy ticket out of the doomed system. You can try sun scooping as an alternative of course, but this, when done in nova systems, is a considerably dangerous operation and thus justified.

I am sure there are other game parts that are affected, but just this one, together with the fact that this change during a code freeze can distabilize the codebase and invalidate most of the effort done so far, would be a good reason to suggest that things are left as they are in the 1.x version and we reconsider for 2.0.