Encouraging Thargoids to release their Thargons

[Rimbaud]

Hello all

I have been doing further pondering on why the Thargoids get beaten so easily with the Galactic Navy OXP installed, apart from Thargoid motherships being easy targets for turreted ships.

It seems to me that Thargoids release their Thargons much too late to be of any use. I may be misremembering, but even fully equipped, three or four Thargoid motherships was incredibly dangerous on the C64 as they would spew out lots of Thargons very soon after one appeared in Witch Space.

In contrast, in Oolite, they seem to only release them when they are being badly damaged, so that most of the time they are destroyed and the Thargons become inactive.

I tried adding fireMissile events to the config files, and they do indeed shoot out Thargons when the event is triggered, but they then seem to become inactive so that doesn't seem to work.

Any suggestions as to how I might twiddle with my files?

As a side note, the Thargoid laser seems to do very little damage when the motherships fire at me, and fires slowly: if I remember correctly, is it supposed to be the equivalent to a beam laser?

Still loving the amazing 1.72 release. I filled with the (fantastic) Galactic Navy OXP to fill Witch Space with loads of ships and it seems to run very smoothly.

[Commander McLane]

Indeed, the built-in Thargoid AI fires Thargons only with energy low, like many non-thargoid NPCs fire their missiles only as a last resort. And indeed in case of Thargoids this behaviour doesn't make real sense.

There were some problems in the correct recognition between Thargoids and Thargons in previous versions, but at least some of it was addressed in 1.72 (see release notes), and I guess also the AI department (Eric) has worked on some overhaules.

The expected behaviour for Thargoids is that they stay active as long as any Thargoid ship is in scanner reach. So even if their mother dies, they should be taken over by another Thargoid ship. If this is not what you experience, that's an indication that still something isn't right.

[Rimbaud]

Indeed, the built-in Thargoid AI fires Thargons only with energy low, like many non-thargoid NPCs fire their missiles only as a last resort. And indeed in case of Thargoids this behaviour doesn't make real sense.

There were some problems in the correct recognition between Thargoids and Thargons in previous versions, but at least some of it was addressed in 1.72 (see release notes), and I guess also the AI department (Eric) has worked on some overhaules.

The expected behaviour for Thargoids is that they stay active as long as any Thargoid ship is in scanner reach. So even if their mother dies, they should be taken over by another Thargoid ship. If this is not what you experience, that's an indication that still something isn't right.

The recognition problem does seem to be fixed now.

I think the Thargoids should release their Thargons as soon as they enter battle as they are much, much less dangerous now as it stands. I will check to see if another mothership takes over control.

[Rimbaud]

The expected behaviour for Thargoids is that they stay active as long as any Thargoid ship is in scanner reach. So even if their mother dies, they should be taken over by another Thargoid ship. If this is not what you experience, that's an indication that still something isn't right.

I just checked and this doesn't happen for me. There is a snowstorm of Thargons floating around, with white scanner stalks and they are definitely inactive despite loads of motherships around.