Oolite Bulletins

Played my first galactic Navy mission these days. Since I will not find the time to play again in the next couple of days, forgive me being so lazy to ask you a few things that I may learn by playing sooner or rather later anyway


The Thargoids I know are the octagonal battelships and the small droid ships which are collectable as alien items.
In my mission I came across some other ships. I don't remember if that were cruisers or carriers or so. Do these carry warships? I did not see one released. In the end the scanner screen was fully white by the small droid ships anyway. Questin is, if it makes sense to take the carriers down first to avoid more battleships be released, or if it is better to take down the battleships to more quickly reduce enemy fire - as those are easier to kill.

Is the number of small droid ships released by the mothershop limited so that it could be prudent to kill some of those? Or are they replaced anyway, no matter how many I kill?

Depending on which oxps you have installed, you can have both carrier & cruiser thargoids (& battleships too). The cruisers are tougher & have more lasers than the ordinary warships. The battleships are even tougher, & have plasma turrets in addition to lasers. The carriers launch warships, IIRC.

It's usually better to kill the bigger ships first & kill them quickly, as they release fewer of the drones/tharglets/thargons (unless you want more of those for some strange reason).

If you really like to die a lot, try installing the swarm oxp.

Swarm? A bugger to destroy because they're sods to target but not terribly dangerous, in my opinion. Mostly nuisance value - if you're playing Thargoid Wars and the Coriolis station is attacked, if there are Swarm in the mix you can't dock until the last of them are destroyed, and that can take ages. Ramming them works quite well.

Played that one again.
It was Thargoid Invaders and Cruisers. No carriers.
The cruisers took an extreme amount of hits to be killed, but with some patience, that's ok.
For some reason, a bigger group of pirates joined the fight against the Navy. Didn't do them any good.

Another navy sortie. A few interesting things to learn:

1. Whilst I can be lucky sometimes to kill a Thagoid Warship with a full laser cold to overheat, a Cruiser takes endless fire.
2. The Navy seems to recognize your help only, after you kill a cruiser.
3. When having destroyed a Cruiser and around 5 Warships, there can be an impressive mass of neatly lined up Robot Fighters.
4. It can be REALLY annoying to find out right then, that your fuel scoop was damaged during batte.
5. Adding to your kill count by killing Robot Figher feels a bit like cheating, close to save game editing I suppose.
6. If the laser overheats, flying at full speed through a cloud of robots also kills them surprisingly easy.
7. The 50Cr bounty is more than you get by selling the Alien Items, which feels rather strange.

ralph_hh wrote:

Adding to your kill count by killing Robot Figher feels a bit like cheating...

Splash 'em all - you never know, they might re-activate! Hmm - there is an interesting OXP in Thargoid's portfolio somewhere!

Cody wrote:

Splash 'em all - you never know, they might re-activate! Hmm - there is an interesting OXP in Thargoid's portfolio somewhere!

 Lazarus OXP, if you dare...

Ewww.... Yes, the whole chestburster deal there does seem very slightly overkill. Though I did have something like that happen in Custodians of the Cosmos, the Oolite-inspired RPG I ran at the end of last year, where several tons of "jettisoned and scooped cargo" assembled themselves into a sentient nuke inside the players' ship.