It's a premise, so fair enough, but...
Maybe they don't have to be everywhere.
The elite lore IIRC was that they could 'hang' in witchspace and occasionally pull travellers towards them. In practice, misjumps were player generated events (as they usually are in oolite) but then drawing attention to oneself can reliably encourage interaction from others.
Classically it was they they'd pull you. The fact that one's misjump can be plotted rather suggests that it might be the other way around but if Thargoids were 'nodal' in their lurking then they still needn't be everywhere.
The plotting was tokenistic in elite but in oolite it is considered accurate (has utility) and thus the difference.
Maybe they don't travel quite as we do. I think that was implied by the original lore, that they had some sort of mastery of witchspace that humans didn't.
Maybe they can 'node-hop' or witch-space travel for them is near instantaneous. You don't need to be everywhere when you can get anywhere really fast.
That could be really interesting if implemented further. Follow a thargoid through a wormhole and by the time you get out of the other side it's gone. Have a thargoid follow you through a wormhole and it's already waiting for you when you get there
Right, so there's already a possible excuse for Thargoids occasionally pulling the player towards them.Switeck wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 2:16 pmMisjumping doesn't have to be symmetrical like regular jumps.
This tends to happen when the total distance isn't evenly divisible by 0.4 Light-Years.
So 2 systems 1.2 LY apart would likely have a misjump that's 0.4 LY from one direction and 0.8 LY from the other...or 0.4 LY from both directions!
Of course, an oxp should do whatever it's designed to do but when there's enough variability inherently involved in the process then the player interpretation of what's going on has much more room for manoeuvre.
Maybe without the Thargoids there are no misjumps i.e. the player is exploiting the Thargoid compulsion to interfere with 'noisy' witchspace users (those that draw attention to themselves) for their own purpose.
I quite like the idea that witchspace is consistently dangerous. Rather like the idea that leaving the spacelane should be dangerous (a la deep space pirates), I think misjumping should be something to go fear, or at least be very well prepared for.
Of course, thinning Thargoids or removing them alltogether are different strategies, as is not thinning them in the first place.