Oolite Bulletins

I had a misjump and was surrounded by Thargoid warships. This should be an "I'm boned" moment, but instead it was rather too easy to destroy them all.

This seems to me to be a balance problem - the Thargoid warships are too weak IMHO. I think that they should be faster and have better shields. Possibly they should also have better weapons.

Or it is yet another instance of the old Thargoids-attacking-each-other-instead-of-everybody-else problem? Although I thought we had squashed that.

Thargoid wrote:

Grab my Second Wave and/or TCAT OXPs.

They'll help toughen things up a bit.

Cool. I'll give those a try. Thanks.

Commander McLane wrote:

Or it is yet another instance of the old Thargoids-attacking-each-other-instead-of-everybody-else problem? Although I thought we had squashed that.

I didn't notice the warships attacking each other, but can't say for sure for the thargons.

You want some mean Thargoids that can put up a fight?
Grab Thargorn Threat. It lets the Bugs haul out the TCs of whup-ass. You'll get a fight, guaranteed.

Problem with the Thargoid ambushes...are their numbers and how slowly they spawn Thargons.
There's often only 1-4 of them, and only the one being shot tends to release more than 1 Thargon.
They normally never have:
fuel_injection
shield_booster
shield_enhancer

cloaking
invisible on radar (stealth)

They're big fat targets too.
They just don't seem as tough as they did in earlier Elite incarnations.
An Energy Bomb kills them all dead.

...But they are technically FASTER than ever. If you either have no fuel injection yourself (out of fuel or can't afford to use it in interstellar space), you'll see them closing on you faster even than an Asp.

Because they use Thargons instead of missiles, I don't see them as a particularly dangerous threat. 1 ECM-resistant Hardhead missile is a bigger scare to me than a pack of 4 Thargoids. Main way Thargoids kill me is accidental ramming.

In testing, I had groups of 6-10 Thargoids appear along the space lane between Witchpoint beacon and planet. Even when I had as many as 100 Thargoids added, the regular Trader traffic in an Anarchy system (which is near-devoid of Vipers) often had virtually wiped out all the Thargoids in less than 1 hour. How the bugs are supposedly "winning" in the backstory to the Galactic Navy OXP...I'll never know. I've seen a Behemoth toast Thargoid after Thargoid, taking few hits from each. Vipers and Asps do a decent job too, even when outnumbered 2:1.

Switeck wrote:

Problem with the Thargoid ambushes...are their numbers and how slowly they spawn Thargons.
There's often only 1-4 of them, and only the one being shot tends to release more than 1 Thargon.
They normally never have:
fuel_injection
shield_booster
shield_enhancer

cloaking
invisible on radar (stealth)

They're big fat targets too.
They just don't seem as tough as they did in earlier Elite incarnations.
An Energy Bomb kills them all dead.

...But they are technically FASTER than ever. If you either have no fuel injection yourself (out of fuel or can't afford to use it in interstellar space), you'll see them closing on you faster even than an Asp.

Because they use Thargons instead of missiles, I don't see them as a particularly dangerous threat. 1 ECM-resistant Hardhead missile is a bigger scare to me than a pack of 4 Thargoids. Main way Thargoids kill me is accidental ramming.

Good points, I agree. I installed all the OXPs that are supposed to make them more bad-ass but still they loose easily. In the original Elite I perceived them as much more deadly than now. Then again, I was younger

Tougher ships that fire thargons earlier and have some additional kit like cloaks and such is what made me write Second Wave.

Stealth and such is a new capability of Oolite, so perhaps I need to write Third Wave?

Easy way to toughen the Thargoids is to edit shipdata.plist found in ..Oolite\oolite.app\Resources\Config -folder.

For example you could add line or to the Thargoid entry.

Of course max_energy and energy_recharge_rate could be directly altered to make them even harder to kill, and missiles upped to give more thargons.

That would already be more exciting. Today, when my military laser is cool I can kill an Invader with one burst and don't even overheat. That renders the few Thargons that make it out dead before they even found out whom to shoot. If the Invader's shields were tougher I'd have to wait for the laser to cool down a bit, giving more Thargons the chance to come out and get nasty.

In my mod...
https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?t=8212
...I try to reduce the problems with Thargoids.

They'll spit out their max Thargons a little/lot quicker.
And hopefully the Thargons won't "go stupid" as fast.

It is also possible that the Navy exaggerates the "Thargoid Threat" to justify the budget for more Behemoths and etc. Politically, an "alien threat" may be being used as basically propaganda to keep the assorted systems at war with something besides each other. It might be how they discourage assorted systems from banding together against GalCop and mounting a coup/revolution. GalCop might even be in collusion with the Thargoids at high "shadow government" levels for some unknown "Illuminati" type purpose.

For that matter, are we actually sure there are any *real* Thargoids left? The big warships get blown and the bot drones are gathered up and sold or blown apart for target practice.. But how long has it been since anybody has actually seen a fresh corpse of a real Thargoid? But if all the Thargoids were gone (or actually living peaceably outside human space somewhere), what would happen to all the Navy commissions and the budgets that support them from taxpayer credits?

What about the rumour that the Fleet Admiral actually is a Thargoid? There were those blurry pictures where he looked a little insectoid if you looked at them just right and happened to be very drunk..

(Hey, gotta get some "conspiracy theory" stuff worked in somewhere, so the tabloids can flourish!..LOL)

This is exactly what Dr. Joreb Innitu was saying. No wonder they had him killed.

Going by Selezen's timeline there is a major war with the Thargoids due in 3149, about 7 years after 'now' in the game. This inflicts major damage on Galcop, weakening it further.

I'm plotting this for my third oolite novella. I was hooked by this line...

3151 - Thargoids defeated, presumed eradicated. Bioweapons are thought to have been used.

Who could resist?

Cheers,

Drew.

Maybe the Thargoids are hiding so that everyone will think the military is just exagerrating the threat to scam some budget money, and thereby cause unrest in GalCop. Public demands force the rulers to scale back the military forces to save money and cut taxes etc, weakening them drastically, and at that point the Thargoids will appear and kick effing butt.