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I read The Prince some years ago, but I'm not attempting anything, no. What are you attempting?
Powerplay 2.0 : what we know from partners' streams
- Thread starter Bard Voronwe
- Start date
Strange... My power says the exact same thing...
I feel like the safest assumption is that every power has done it, though most have been unaware of those who have been doing it for their powers.
‘“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”’ - 1984
Torval seems to have good enough momentum going into 2.0 to do well expanding to 6 systems in the past 4 weeks, though the loss of a lot of federal systems around Rhea come 2.0 is a given, Don't expect them to be a pushover come 2.0 as they control a far smaller area than most other powers and will have a whole lot less work to do.
Patreus seems to be in a concerning position as they are the only imperial power that has just sat back and done nothing, fortifying the same 12 systems each week... I don't know if they are hiding their cards or if they have serious numbers issues.
We will have to see- it will be interesting what support powers get, given you have a very good reason not to swap as time goes on (you lose all merits accrued) and that a lot of players will go with bonuses.
Exactly!
I don't agree that's a safe assumption though. It's quite possible for decent groups to receive unfair treatment and people to say "they're as bad as each other" to save them trawling TLDR evidence. But practically speaking, if the people you're dealing with on the other side now have a good attitude, you may be better off sucking it up about the history and playing what's in front of you. Very hard to do when you perceive the problems to be hugely one-sided! What I'm really saying is that to go forward like that, you need the system you're in to work better than the last one, and really, have none of the same kind of loopholes. That will require constant attention to tweak - and more so than the Thargoid war, which was really about tuning PvE difficulty, not balancing a competitive feature (a huge distinction).
Yes, though potentially in some respects also easier - it's probably less fun than it could be if "station advert hacking" is massively overpowered and having fleets packed full of recon limpets at each station ends up the way to take systems, but at least both sides can do it so it probably roughly evens out in terms of the actual territory until it can be rebalanced ... whereas with the Thargoid war, players getting ahead of the plot with some effective strategy or just a good organised push and needing to be slowed down in a fairly unsubtle way was a repeated problem.
The main problem with "unsporting tactics" in PP1 as I understand it was the ease with which powers could be damaged by their own pledges, something which seems entirely impossible in PP2.
The advantage PP2 has is that because it leans on a more compartmentalised BGS, its easier to deal with the bits that are causing issues.
The bigger threat will be balance between activities- which will largely be PvE too.
Never say never
. It's good work that's been done but replacing one problem with another isn't a solution. The difference is that it's easier to rebalance the weight of an activity than undo a fundamental design flaw like power self-harm. What worries me is that it seemed to take roughly the length of the Thargoid war to obtain a satisfactory balance of AX activities.To be fair it was a challenge considering Thargoids are the hardest NPCs in ED, outside of deliberately difficult ones like ATR .Never say never
PP2s issue will be balance between destructive activities and 'lawful' ones- FD have always nerfed things like murder (even though they are punished already) when in PP you need a balance that slightly favours attacks (to stave off stability).
False flags will likely be the problem in PP2 and be used to split up and harm alliances or provoke full-scale conflicts.Never say never
So just like BGS in that sense. It will become a choice on whether you take your allies at their word that they are not working against you. And even if you can trust them you still have to deal with the incursion into your space either way. Maybe it's designed this way to make alliances harder/impossible and create more galactic instability.
Almost certainly. If it's any sort of success (on say, the level of the Thargoid war) in terms of getting previously unaligned or pledged-but-never-does-anything players to take action for their Powers, the existing "unified" commands are going to find themselves a fairly small minority in terms of numbers anyway.
I plan to pledge to Kaine. I don't intend to treat Mahon's systems as sacrosanct (indeed, quite a few of them look like required targets to stabilise Kaine's core systems!). That's not a "false flag" operation just because some other Kaine-supporting player group thinks I should respect their agreement (to which I wasn't a party) with some other Mahon-supporting player group.
I'll just leave this here...
To any of the streamers here (@CMDRHatch @Alec Turner ), can you explain to me what these changes mean?
What are Powerplay 'hunters' in this context, and how often did 'high end' Powerplay security appear?
This is hard to quantify since I have not experienced it but, is FD nerfing everything into the floor too early? What was the Powerplay NPC response like?
What are Powerplay 'hunters' in this context, and how often did 'high end' Powerplay security appear?
This is hard to quantify since I have not experienced it but, is FD nerfing everything into the floor too early? What was the Powerplay NPC response like?
The problem will be that it will make having free rebuys pointless if pp2 NPCs are clown cars again.
What I'm trying to work out is why FD did not link NPC response to your weekly effort 'rank' so that people who want hard NPCs get them, instead of making everything the same.
I can understand if powerful NPCs appear out of context (like in deserted places / surfaces etc) or are causing issues around engineer bases, but there will be places they are warranted.
Very weird how fdev seem to be sending out update news to streamers this way? I don't mind people getting early access snapshots but this feels weird. I guess at least they didn't make ppl pay ARX to get previews like with the ships 
I wonder if what happened is too many people trying out powerplay 2.0 were flying the new ship at the same time and the resulting outcry made fdev think they had to nerf powerplay npcs? In a real situation you would not be visiting an enemy powers space and stronghold carriers in a Mandalay. Yet I have seen footage of streamers doing just that and it does make me wonder...
Yes you would. The Mandalay has teeth and makes for a very good powerplay runner. Don't get fooled by "it's not a combat ship".
The problem was that the pledged partners were interdicted left and right, both by power NPCs and non-power bounty hunters, even in systems where they were not wanted, to the point that it got very annoying and could potentially be prohibiting gameplay.