Oolite Bulletins

They're ever-present lurking in interstellar space, dragging ships out of hyperspace to ambush them.
Sometimes they show up in systems, but seldom more than 1 or 2. Rumor has it they're more likely to show up in Corporate States than Anarchies?
They carry Thargons, small ships they "fire" like missiles to help whittle away at whatever they're after. But often the Thargons get left behind and become permanently inactive. Currently they're carriers in all but name, but cannot recover their "aircraft" after launching a sortie.

I propose a CHANGE to the game (or at least an OXP) that will explain all this behavior and make them more of a threat in-universe, at least for the "game in your head":
Give them fuel scoops and maybe 10-20 TC cargo space.
This way they can recover inactive Thargons...and via a script can replace the inactive ones with "fresh" Thargons at the rate of maybe 1 per minute if it scoops enough.

For explaining the other part, it's like this -- in interstellar space it's normally many Thargoids against only 1 non-Thargoid ship, hardly a fair fight. So Thargoids sometimes go to systems in 1's and 2's so they have less competition for the same target. They're not doing it out of any sense of fairness or because they're insanely brave. But they are driven by an insanity of sorts...they are insanely hungry.

Yes, that's right...they're going to regular systems for FOOD! They scoop up escape pods, and when their hold is full, hyperspace out. Since they attack on sight, you'll likely only notice this due to a LACK of escape pods after someone else loses a fight with them. And you may wonder why killing a Thargoid warship causes it to sometimes eject (empty?) escape pods.

Ejecting in interstellar space could even have multiple results:
1.Death by starvation/loss of power.
2.Against-all-odds rescue by a passing friendly ship.
3.A fate worse than death, captured by Thargoids. Do I need to explain what happens here?

**tries to find 'like' button...**

3.A fate worse than death, captured by Thargoids. Do I need to explain what happens here?

Please see sig.

Cheers,

Drew.

Personally, I'd like to see Thargoids having a real effect on the state of the galaxy. In particular, Thargoids should send serious invasion forces to systems instead of just sending a couple of warships to die, and something should happen when the human defenders lose. All stations destroyed, replaced by some sort of Behomoth-equivalent Thargoid supership sitting in orbit, perhaps? You may have to reconsider that contract from Lave to Lerelace if you hear that both Aronar and Begeabi are under Thargoid occupation. You might then participate in a Navy mission to reclaim those planets.

Is it practical to try to store persistent universe information about which systems are occupied by Thargoids, with mission variables or some such?

I'd prefer the Thargoids to remain totally alien and inexplicable. Look at it this way - there are eight different species in the Ooniverse, and we all get along in relative harmony (yes, even the felines and the rodents).

Thargoids are different. In all this time we haven't been able to establish communication with them. It seems to me that they are so alien we have no common base from which to start an understanding.

Maybe they're a swarm intelligence, maybe they're telepathic, maybe they're just the detritus of a species that exists in higher dimensions. We just don't know.

Maybe to us their attacks seem random and without pattern and in our four dimensions of existence, they make no sense, but in 13 dimensions, it's perfectly logical.

The Black Albatross wrote:

Is it practical to try to store persistent universe information about which systems are occupied by Thargoids, with mission variables or some such?

Depends what you mean by "practical". First of all, mission variables are the only way to store persistent information, that's what they're meant for. So it's not only practical, but also a necessity to use them.

People may begin to complain about the size of their save-files, but I don't see that as a real problem. Save-files are for storing all information that is deemed necessary to store, period. It's also a question of how you would store the information. Storing one line of text for each of the 2048 systems would make the save-file quite long. But if you only want to store whether a system is infested by Thargoids or not, you only need 2048 bit for that, which you can break up into a very limited number of long integers.

The real question is how feasible it is on the scripting-end. For instance, what would you do with a system that has been taken over by Thargoids? Would you give GalCop a certain chance of re-capturing it? On which basis? Re-evaluation of the whole Ooniverse on each jump? And what would the chances be? You want to see an evolving Ooniverse, but with any "realistic" time-frame (the Thargoids won't overrun one new system a day; and GalCop won't take back one system per day; both is going to work much slower) the intended changes will hardly be noticeable for the player. So is it worth the whole effort?

I have to admit that I'm a little intrigued by the idea, because I have the long-standing vision in my head of scripting something around the events which are going to lead to the demise of GalCop. The Thargoids slowly overrunning GalCop-space would certainly be an important part of that. However, those events don't start when Oolite starts, but only many years of game-time later. So only the most die-hard players would ever see anything of it, which is of course unsatisfactory. Thus I haven't spent any really serious thoughts about it yet.

The novellas already imply a lot of information about Thargoids is known, at least in terms of what they physically are...even if it doesn't explain their actions. Guessing whether they're strictly creatures of irrationality and "madness" in our sense of thinking, a hive mind, or hyper-reality-bending geniuses...can only be used to explain known behavior not what behavior they might be capable of.

The singular concept that Thargoids are raiding out of "hunger", or as a means of finding feed stock not for themselves but for their parasitic young...would partially explain previously inexplicable behavior. That is assuming of course each Thargoid ship is acting in its selfish (though probably doomed) interest to gain food. I would assume a hive mind would change tactics after innumerable complete failures, unless it is trying to kill off its failures/excess.

Thargoids in plain Oolite can best be described almost as a "paper tiger". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_tiger
Individually, their firepower is nothing impressive -- their Thargons are in many ways weaker than a belly full of ECM-resistant missiles. Kill the mothership and the Thargons can be dealt with at your leisure. Missiles on the other hand could inflict an after-death kill.

Sure, a large force could prove dangerous...but a large force only shows up in interstellar space as an ambush, never seen in a system. And an energy bomb is far more damaging in Oolite than it was in the Commodore-64 Elite, able to wipe out the entire Thargoid ambush -- possibly even generating more profit from bounties than the cost of the e-bomb! Reducing that 1-shot weapon to how it was in earlier Elite versions would eliminate at least 1 "I win!" button...without removing the e-bomb from the game. "You didn't kill them, you just made them mad."

I always assumed the Thargoid invaders were a minority of the Thargoid race, riled by the actions of GalCop (Was it GalCop or the Navy?), more a subsection of malicious nutters come to wreak revenge than representative of the actual Thargoid culture and its philosophies.
Not so keen on the eating intelligent species idea, it makes them seem like typical Sci-Fi 'monsters'.
It's safe to assume they are a prevalent creature as they appear anywhere in the eight galaxies at any time, this also suggests they are at least reasonably at home in witchspace (along with being able to disrupt it) and exist there to a certain degree, very likely in a fractured society.
I don't see why a seperatist movement over time wouldn't become it's own culture, choosing to see that remaining in Witch-Space makes them closer to their purpose, or some how 'higher' than the original culture they have diverged from, whom I can only suggest through wisdom turned their backs on the races we share space with in game, or simply have no interest.
This Witch-Space existence would also in turn drive a need for some kind of world to harvest if whatever they are using as a source of food gets corrupted or damaged (Witch-Energy-Farms I imagine) so some kind of invasion scenario is quite plausible within this idea.
It's scale simply depends on how large this subculture has grown or the level of unseen disaster they themselves are facing.

Commander McLane wrote:

I have to admit that I'm a little intrigued by the idea, because I have the long-standing vision in my head of scripting something around the events which are going to lead to the demise of GalCop. The Thargoids slowly overrunning GalCop-space would certainly be an important part of that. However, those events don't start when Oolite starts, but only many years of game-time later.

I love the Idea. Hope to see it live one day. Sounds like a continuation of Cataclysm.

But with the Thargoids isn't most of the fun is the whole mystery of them. I see the need to clarify a few things up, like a way out of a whitchspace ambush, but the more we write a history and detail about them the less fun they become and we run the danger of just making them out like any of the other known species in the Ooniverse and demote them to "just another pirate" role. They should remain the source of tales and the thing of nightmares, the bogie men who if your bad will come and get you.

I think Switeck's idea about scooping escape pods excellent in promoting the fear of the evil race. Great proposal.

As for pirates, it's really VERY rare for me to see them ever scooping cargo...yet that's their supposed point of existence. I mean they couldn't possibly be killing trade ships for fun...or as rebels with some obscure/unknown cause? About the only time I've seen them scooping cargo at all was because I was cheating using a hacked-up beyond ridiculous supership that was both cloaked AND invisible from most radars. Sometimes it's very nice to be the ignored fly-on-the-wall.

Blasting a Thargoid warship only to have a few escape pods fall out...and then scooping them up only to realize they'll all empty.
...I think would do more for setting up a mystery than explaining it.

You won't know if the escape pods previous occupants were already consumed as food, used as a baby parasite incubator, or were simply treated as guests who died...because *YOU* blew up the ship they were on!

But in the greater scale of things, that may not matter much. There is a war, under-scale though it may seem from the player's point of view. Maybe in the future (missions?) or due to other circumstances (OXPs!) things heat up? If only the other NPC ships could show us the proper amount of panic when Thargoids show up?

But if you play "this game" long enough, you will find yourself forced into the role of "hero" whether you want to be or not. There's different kinds of heros. It's up to you to find out which kind you are.

Switeck wrote:

There is a war, under-scale though it may seem from the player's point of view. Maybe in the future ... due to other circumstances (OXPs!) things heat up?

Almost certainly will

Bugbear wrote:

Look at it this way - there are eight different species in the Ooniverse, and we all get along in relative harmony (yes, even the felines and the rodents).

This is the weird thing: despite the 8-bit nature of the original game, there are actually nine different types of inhabitants in the Co-operative.

1. Birds
2. Felines
3. Frogs
4. Human Colonials
5. Humanoids
6. Insects
7. Lizards
8. Lobsters
9. Rodents

I've always seen these as classes, myself, rather than individual species (Human Colonials, obviously, are the exception).

ZygoUgo wrote:

I always assumed the Thargoid invaders were a minority of the Thargoid race, riled by the actions of GalCop (Was it GalCop or the Navy?), more a subsection of malicious nutters come to wreak revenge than representative of the actual Thargoid culture and its philosophies.
Not so keen on the eating intelligent species idea, it makes them seem like typical Sci-Fi 'monsters'.

Also there is no reason to assume that Thargoids are all one unified "race". Some of them may well be monsters in every sense of the word (including huge and highly aggressive), and some might be rather sedate and cultured, and we only see the ones that are encountered in witchspace or on the occasional forays into our space. Mind you, sedate and cultured doesn't necessarily mean they'd be averse to some experimentation on what they might consider lower life forms, as has been touched on in some Oo-fic.

If we consider that the Thargoids might have spread out from some homeworld in their own version of the diaspora long ago, then their degree of diversity in characteristics, philosophy, and tech development may be quite high. They may have a larger section of space off somewhere rather than only one or two homeworlds.

The truth is.. We don't know!

LOL

Ganelon wrote:

Also there is no reason to assume that Thargoids are all one unified "race". Some of them may well be monsters in every sense of the word (including huge and highly aggressive), and some might be rather sedate and cultured, and we only see the ones that are encountered in witchspace or on the occasional forays into our space. Mind you, sedate and cultured doesn't necessarily mean they'd be averse to some experimentation on what they might consider lower life forms, as has been touched on in some Oo-fic.

If we consider that the Thargoids might have spread out from some homeworld in their own version of the diaspora long ago, then their degree of diversity in characteristics, philosophy, and tech development may be quite high. They may have a larger section of space off somewhere rather than only one or two homeworlds.

The truth is.. We don't know!

LOL

Sounds like someone is building up to a feature request for Thargoid behaviour to be changeable and fully scriptable in Oolite 2.0.

Gimi lets his imagination wander:

News flash:
Diplomacy has succeeded, peace treaty signed with the Thargoid factions in Galaxy 8.
New worlds are opening up for trade and exploration

Gimi wrote:

Sounds like someone is building up to a feature request for Thargoid behaviour to be changeable and fully scriptable in Oolite 2.0.

Gimi lets his imagination wander:

News flash:
Diplomacy has succeeded, peace treaty signed with the Thargoid factions in Galaxy 8.
New worlds are opening up for trade and exploration

It can already be done, in JS. Just change the AI of thargoids to friendly helping AI such as offering Fuel(especially in interstellar space) or Goods.