How to cross VOIDS in Oolite!

[Switeck]

There's an important distinctions to make here that maybe I wasn't explicit on:

It doesn't make much sense for Thargoids to be everywhere in interstellar space.
But...Thargoids are expected to be at the standard mid-jump ambush spot.
As an unfortunate consequence of that, it makes sense that a misjump that arrives at the midpoint between 2 systems will bring the player in contact with "likely" Thargoids regardless of whether the misjump was deliberate or not.

But proper fuel management/maintenace removes this risk from deliberate misjumps.

By the same token, proper fuel management/maintenace removes the risk of being stranded by unintentional misjumps!
...and drastically reduces the odds of unintentional misjumps happening in the first place.

An old pic, as per the watermark. I splashed a whole load of warships in IS, but they kept on coming - leaving oodles of inert drones!

Older versions of Oolite (especially ones before about v1.77) would have Thargon drones go inactive because the search for a nearby Thargoid warship was ineffectively done.
Even a newly-spawned Thargoid warship that's beyond your scanner range by almost double its range might be enough to keep Thargon drones active now.

Unintentional misjumps should not have forever-respawning Thargoids.
That behavior is barely suited for when the Thargoid Plans mission is running.

I modified oolite-populator.js to change this.interstellarSpaceWillRepopulate ...if you kill them off quick enough, no more Thargoids show up.
It's hard for them to call in reinforcements if nobody is alive to make that call.

[Cholmondely]

I modified oolite-populator.js to change this.interstellarSpaceWillRepopulate ...if you kill them off quick enough, no more Thargoids show up.
It's hard for them to call in reinforcements if nobody is alive to make that call.

But the Thargons jolly well can. Just because they're not attacking anybody...

[Switeck]

I modified oolite-populator.js to change this.interstellarSpaceWillRepopulate ...if you kill them off quick enough, no more Thargoids show up.
It's hard for them to call in reinforcements if nobody is alive to make that call.

But the Thargons jolly well can. Just because they're not attacking anybody...

If that's the case, they shouldn't become permanently inactive when there's no Thargoid warship nearby...they should be calling for help and then reactivating when a Thargoid warship arrives.

I think we need to reconsider why/how Thargoids arrive when you're fighting them.
Does it make sense for them to only arrive if you're massively winning?

Where are the additional reinforcements coming from?
How are they arriving so fast?
Instantaneous jumps? Instant communication across light-years (hive-mind linked by quantum entanglement)?
If they take seconds instead of hours to cross light-years of space, why don't they simply mass-up into a group of 10 or more and annihilate the typical convoy sizes seen?

Does the whole idea of additional Thargoids arriving even make good game balance?
...Because if I recall older Elite clones didn't try to crush the player this way.

[Cholmondely]

I modified oolite-populator.js to change this.interstellarSpaceWillRepopulate ...if you kill them off quick enough, no more Thargoids show up.
It's hard for them to call in reinforcements if nobody is alive to make that call.

But the Thargons jolly well can. Just because they're not attacking anybody...

If that's the case, they shouldn't become permanently inactive when there's no Thargoid warship nearby...they should be calling for help and then reactivating when a Thargoid warship arrives.

I think we need to reconsider why/how Thargoids arrive when you're fighting them.
Does it make sense for them to only arrive if you're massively winning?

Where are the additional reinforcements coming from?
How are they arriving so fast?
Instantaneous jumps? Instant communication across light-years (hive-mind linked by quantum entanglement)?
If they take seconds instead of hours to cross light-years of space, why don't they simply mass-up into a group of 10 or more and annihilate the typical convoy sizes seen?

Does the whole idea of additional Thargoids arriving even make good game balance?
...Because if I recall older Elite clones didn't try to crush the player this way.

Aaah... How do you know that they are "permanently inactive"? Lack of movement is not proof of inactivity - especially for an electronic device (or a thinking organism). The fact that whatever they are broadcasting is not something which my Cobra Mk.III's detectors can detect, means nothing either, surely? I never hear the Thargoids communicating with each other or with their Thargons. Just with me. In gobbledegook.

And how do we know that they don't regularly exterminate typical convoy sizes? It could be them, it could be the pirates... in any case we have no statistics which give us an idea as to how many convoys disappear without trace.


And what do you mean by "older Elite clones"?

If you refer to the non-BBC elements in the Classic Elite stable then they all had to sell their games to wider public. Too tough a game = many fewer sales.

If you refer to such as Elite TNK, then I don't know.

But here at Oolite with almost 14,000 topics and over a quarter of a million posts - where stuff like this gets analysed in extreme detail, and our poor dev's (Lord help them) actually bother to read some of this stuff, and everything is free and infinitely .oxp'able... the vanilla game can be whatever it likes, no? If people don't like it they can just do away with the elements they dislike: Elite Trader's abolition of combat, Strangers World's abolition of supremely playable anti-science, your early mods making economics and pirates more believable, Redspear's modifications of Mass Lock and the Paddling Pool, Überships, Überweapons, anti-cheating OXP's, etc, etc, etc. So if we prefer something more realistic which makes the game harder (Cim's changes for out-of-system pop-up pirates), it just goes in, to be .oxp'ed out by those who dislike it.

[Switeck]

How do you know that they are "permanently inactive"? Lack of movement is not proof of inactivity
...
And how do we know that they don't regularly exterminate typical convoy sizes? It could be them, it could be the pirates... in any case we have no statistics which give us an idea as to how many convoys disappear without trace.

Yes, a lot can be assumed to happen "off-screen".
But "on-screen", Thargons don't get reactivated.

Wouldn't it be even more fun+realistic if Thargoids not only reactivated Thargons...if they did so by scooping them up first?
How would you feel if you also saw Thargoids scooping up escape pods?

And if we hand-wave that many convoys disappear without trace...convoy sizes/composition/tactics would not remain static if faced with high losses.

I've run trader convoys vs pirates and Thargoids tests with earlier versions of Oolite.
A 9-Thargoid group spawned along the main shipping lane will be wiped out typically in less than an hour.
Even large pirate groups eventually get thinned out and/or overwhelmed by arriving trader groups.

Thargoids can't continuously throw their warships nearly 1-at-a-time at the player after quickly losing many.
Either they'd mass up and/or they'd attempt to reactivate the Thargons to help.
In terms of game design, the current infinite supply of new enemies is contrived and more like the ai behavior in a 1980's arcade game.

[Switeck]

Something to note as a programmer of complex misjump routes...or user of my Variable Jump Drive equipment:

A fractional misjump is a percentage of the current jump distance rather than percentage of a 7 LY jump or 0.4 LY multiples.
25% of 1 jump might be shorter than 10% of another jump.

If I change the misjump distance by 1% on an early misjump, it makes all later misjumps longer or shorter by a tiny amount ...so lots of my misjump routes fail with the tiniest changes.

[Redspear]

Yes, a lot can be assumed to happen "off-screen".

Like how the Thargoids came to travel/wait/materialise in a particular point in witchspace in the first place.

It doesn't make much sense for Thargoids to be everywhere in interstellar space.

Can you see that is also based upon assumption?

The assumptions that they travel as the player does and that their numbers are too low (the latter being the more reasonable by my estimation).
They don't have to be waiting if they can get there quickly enough.

• Suppose a thargoid pack is waiting anywhere in interstellar space within perhaps 7LY of a particular system.
  • A trader leaving that system misjumps.
  • A ripple occurs in interstellar space, like a wormhole that only thargoid technology can percieve.
  • The thargoids catch this particular wave (without delay - it's no regular wormhole) before the time it takes for the trader to reach their misjump point.
  • The trader exits their wormhole tunnel and the thargioids are already there - it no longer matters where 'there' is.

Because the player didn't see how they got there (and none of it is obviously contrary to canon - it's a 'misjump', not just a short one - "uncontrolled" is rather vague...) then the above explanation is arguably as good as any other. Furtermore, I don't think there's anything occurring in game that appears to be to the contrary; in fact if the following is true,

Thargoids are never seen making wormholes themselves.

then it could even function in support of the above theory.

Wouldn't it be even more fun+realistic if Thargoids not only reactivated Thargons...if they did so by scooping them up first?
How would you feel if you also saw Thargoids scooping up escape pods?

More 'fun' if they were reactivated when a Thargoid showed up after the player had scooped them
Scooping up escape pods would be suitably sinister I think.

Thargoids can't continuously throw their warships nearly 1-at-a-time at the player after quickly losing many.
Either they'd mass up and/or they'd attempt to reactivate the Thargons to help.
In terms of game design, the current infinite supply of new enemies is contrived and more like the ai behavior in a 1980's arcade game.

That's the trouble with having your fear glands removed

In terms of gameplay however, if the player has just taken on a gang of thargoids and killed the lot with out taking any kind of significant damage then perhaps the problem isn't in subsequent numbers but in the fact that thargoids are no longer to be feared. If send 5 = lose 5 without weakening opponent, then send 1 and lose 1 is actually an improvement upon simply repeating the exercise. Subsequent arrivals should be to try to finish you off, not to commit suicide.

[Cody]

More 'fun' if they were reactivated when a Thargoid showed up after the player had scooped them

Indeed!  Lazarus

Scooping up escape pods would be suitably sinister I think.

Delightfully sinister!

[Redspear]

More 'fun' if they were reactivated when a Thargoid showed up after the player had scooped them

Indeed!  Lazarus

Ooh nice
I'd missed that. Thanks Cody.