Oolite Bulletins

Okay, restarting my financially tough variant having tweaked Feudal States and removed Repair Bots to keep the toughness intact.

However, there is still one overly easy source for fast cash that I would like to remove from my game: the high bounties for deactivated tharglets. I can understand them getting full value (50 creds + illegal activity extra) when they are still rough, tough dangers to space travellers. However once they have lost their mother and become just a high-tech boulder then the full bounty seems misplaced - 10% seems a much fairer one.

Unfortunately I use an ageing computer so entities are the enemy of framerate and I can't just leave a tharglet cloud intact if I want a frame rate >10 FPS.

However, this post by Eric

Eric Walch wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

The code gives you one-tenth of the bonus as bounty for an asteroid, that's hard coded in -

Correct, and the same is valid for cargo. There you also collect only 10% of the defined bounties. But, for some reason cargo with a role of "tharglet" is excluded from this rule, hence you still get the 50 credits. I assume that in the case of 5Cr you have killed some custom tharglets that don't have a "tharglet" in their rolelist.

leads me to hope there may be a quick way of fixing this with overrides.

If I override the roles for the various tharglets (core & OXP) to exclude "tharglet" as a role what will be the effect on their bounties? And, more importantly, will it break other aspects of the game? I'd prefer to do things this way rather than just reducing the initial bounties, as I am trying to avoid "full value" bounty increments being applied to the deactivated tharglets too.

But a 'dead' scooped Thargon (robot fighter) becomes 'Alien Items' once in your hold. Are you seriously suggesting alien technology isn't valuable?

Smivs wrote:

But a 'dead' scooped Thargon (robot fighter) becomes 'Alien Items' once in your hold. Are you seriously suggesting alien technology isn't valuable?

Oh yes - it would be valuable as a scooped commodity for research etc. But if you are just blasting it into dust (i.e. the bounty payment) then it's only value is as removal of a hazard to shipping.

Heck, maybe even a negative bounty (for destroying valuable war materiel) would be in order

Thargoid wrote:

also not count as kills

They certainly shouldn't count as kills once they're dormant... but they should if still active.

Currently, if a Thargon has been scooped by another ship and then, errrm..., "set free" by you, it does have only 10% of its original bounty.

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to remark that there is something distinctly odd (or plainly wrong) about scooping Thargons: they're far too big! It looks extremely strange if I blow up a miner or smaller pirate ship and it releases three Thargons, each of which is bigger than the ship that supposedly scooped them.

Commander McLane wrote:

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to remark that there is something distinctly odd (or plainly wrong) about scooping Thargons: they're far too big! It looks extremely strange if I blow up a miner or smaller pirate ship and it releases three Thargons, each of which is bigger than the ship that supposedly scooped them.

That's a good point ... maybe it would be worth diverting a bit from Elite canon here, and making "alien items" what's left over when you destroy a Thargon, rather than the inert Thargons themselves? Instead of going inert when the mother ship is destroyed, Thargons could self-destruct – with a percentage of them turning into smaller "alien items".

Commander McLane wrote:

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to remark that there is something distinctly odd (or plainly wrong) about scooping Thargons: they're far too big! It looks extremely strange if I blow up a miner or smaller pirate ship and it releases three Thargons, each of which is bigger than the ship that supposedly scooped them.

What! You mean there are scale issues in Oolite? Shock!

Disembodied wrote:

and making "alien items" what's left over when you destroy a Thargon, rather than the inert Thargons themselves? Instead of going inert when the mother ship is destroyed, Thargons could self-destruct – with a percentage of them turning into smaller "alien items".

I quite like that idea! I always frag them anyway, as I rarely have the spare cargo capacity to scoop them (scooping them has never felt 'right').
[immersion mode]If I leave a bunch of dormant Thargons floating about, another Thargoid warship may appear and reactivate them [/immersion mode]

The sheer number of Thargon the average group of Thargoids can spit out in interstellar space can be enough to pay for the energy bomb used to kill them all. (5 thargoids + 25 thargons = 1750 total credits value!) Plus there may be alloys left behind or even last second Thargon launches that somehow avoids the blast. That won't be profitable with a Q-bomb though...and good luck catching them all in it!

In my mod -- Switeck's Shipping OXP, Thargons usually follow Thargoid warships around if there's nothing around that they want to kill. Thargoids also tend to travel somewhat in a group, instead of dispersing on diverging paths in a system. This means even if you kill 1 Thargoid, there may be other(s) left alive to keep the Thargons active. After the battle...some traders, most pirates, most bounty hunters, and even asteroid miners will scoop inactive Thargons. As such, it is considerably less likely you'll find inactive Thargons floating around.

Hmmm - tried a few experiments with a test pilot in witchspace (and vanilla Oolite - I really missed the Medusa HUD) and it seems the behaviour is consistent. Tharglets will give the high bounty and kill regardless of whether they are active or inactive pre-scooping, post-player scooping or after being scooped by an NPC (pity the GalCop who stumbled into that little test )

So it will be a quick 'n' dirty fix for me as, thanks to Disembodied's idea, they are now all set to becomeExplosion rather than becomeUncontrolledThargon when they lose their mummy. Works better for my no tonnage, financially tough variant and will brighten up my Ooniverse a bit

Back to Lave then...