Oolite Bulletins

or maybe not a bug but a flaw.

I carried out the 1st gal navy mission which was a kick as thargoid battle.

at the end of it there were literally hungreds of thargons.

i filled my scoops, but then realised.

1) at a bounty of often over 100cr its more profitable to destroy them than to scoop them.

2) these still act as a kill on your score, which for what is basically a cargo can this seems unbalanced.

i would suggest if possible, making the thargons not count as a kill on your stats AND removing the bounty from shooting them once they power down.

is this doable? even if it is, do you guys agree?

edit

if there is a limit in the code of making is so that any object with a bounty must have a kill value and that any bounty cannot be removed, i would suggest as a temp fix removing the bounty for the thargons altogether BUT making them scoop-able even when active so you can just fly in and grab one when it is shooting at you.

cheers

Yes - I would tentatively agree. I don't know whether it could be done though.

Just to play devil's advocate: this may be considered the thin end of a wedge, leading to arguments that larger, powerful ships should award more that one kill a piece;-)

Yeah, it's odd behaviour, they have their Bounty set at 50 if i recall, but if they kill someone it goes up to a higher amount, so the secret is to side with the thargoids and help them wipe out mankind, and then when you're the only man left, kill them all for the huge bounty

I would never have learnt I can scoop them myself. I only ever knew from reading it here.

I don't know, you might see it as equivalent to have a higher bounty/killcount on the Thargoid mothership.

I think the Gal Navy SECOM centres pay a high price for captured Thargons.

I remember there was a bug in the C64 version where tharglets scooped and converted into Alien Items in your hold didn't actually take up any space in your cargo hold (even though it was 1TC per Alien Item scooped) - which meant I used to carry around lots and lots of them and sold them when the price was high...

ADCK wrote:

Yeah, it's odd behaviour, they have their Bounty set at 50 if i recall, but if they kill someone it goes up to a higher amount, so the secret is to side with the thargoids and help them wipe out mankind, and then when you're the only man left, kill them all for the huge bounty

but that would make me a "baddie" where as i am not..... well there WAS that 1 ship, but it was a mistake, honest guvnor


i guess i need to next time scoop the bounty 50 ones and shoot the others thus maximising my profit.

Since they can reactivate if another Thargoid shows up it does make sense that GalCop offers an incentive for pilots to destroy them if they have no space in their holds. Without this any Thargoid warping into system could potentially have a ready made fleet to assist them.

Seems to be consistant behaviour too as NPCs without capacity or fuel scoops (especially police) will usually destroy deactivated Thargons given a chance.

Perhaps one solution might be to raise the price of alien items to encourage scooping rather than destruction.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I think the Gal Navy SECOM centres pay a high price for captured Thargons.

Yes, they pay around 85cr per ton.

The problem with this is that some thargons have a bounty of 114cr.

If you have the Bounty Scanner installed, I therefore recommend that you destroy all the high value ones, and scoop the low value ones for selling at the Secom station.

Yesterday I was involved in a battle where most of the human ships got destroyed and left a lot of Thargons untouched. I managed to scoop over 120 Thargons!

bigmike20vt wrote:

i would suggest if possible, making the thargons not count as a kill on your stats AND removing the bounty from shooting them once they power down.

Thargons don’t count as kills. At one point they also had a 90 % bounty reduction (like asteroids, cargo and buoys), but this led to complaints.

I’d suggest that this is really a balancing issue caused by an OXP generating “literally hundreds of thargons”, and there are limits to how far the core game should go to rebalance OXPs.

Ahruman wrote:

bigmike20vt wrote:

i would suggest if possible, making the thargons not count as a kill on your stats AND removing the bounty from shooting them once they power down.

Thargons don’t count as kills.

They still do in 1.73.4 (just tested), as they always have. It is the subentities that don't count as kills anymore.

Alot of things count as kills, I think maybe even asteroids and cargo cannisters. Havn't checked in a while, but my kill count is definitely inflated, far higher than it should be.

Commander McLane wrote:

Ahruman wrote:

Thargons don’t count as kills.

They still do in 1.73.4 (just tested), as they always have. It is the subentities that don't count as kills anymore. :)

*Hrmph. grumblegrumblemumble*
Oh, I misread the code.

ADCK wrote:

Alot of things count as kills, I think maybe even asteroids and cargo cannisters. Havn't checked in a while, but my kill count is definitely inflated, far higher than it should be.

This piece of rampant speculation, however, is wrong. :-)

Ahruman wrote:

ADCK wrote:

Alot of things count as kills, I think maybe even asteroids and cargo cannisters. Havn't checked in a while, but my kill count is definitely inflated, far higher than it should be.

This piece of rampant speculation, however, is wrong.

Some missions add kills as a reward, like the first big one (I forget its name).

Ahruman wrote:

Oh, I misread the code.

You WHAT?
*Faints*

another_commander wrote:

Ahruman wrote:

Oh, I misread the code.

You WHAT?
*Faints*

Hmm....

OK, who are you, and What Have You Done with Ahruman?