It is very vague, you're not wrong. I'm mostly concerned they're doing tweaks for a system designed for massive player engagement based on the feedback of a limited sample of the playerbase.
Powerplay 2.0 : what we know from partners' streams
- Thread starter Bard Voronwe
- Start date
Isn't there some logic in the BGS that states that particular type of factions when in conflict will go to war, where as other types of factions will go to elections? Obviously the war pigs will want war, but not all are so inclined. [grabs nearest air guitar and starts riffing]
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Well only two ish days to go- I'm going to test and feedback the living daylights out of it.
I'm sure they'll continue to tweak it - the video you referenced there RN is a little vague too he just glossed over the points (at least the one I saw) and there might even be a little lost in translation as I got the impression English wasn't his primary language.
From watching the latest Buur video the changes were more repairing the sheer level of aggro they were seeing initially and was deemed a bug by Frontier. There still seems to be concern there over the NPCs still being too aggressive to allow powerplayers to engage in "casual" stuff like meetups and Buckyballs. Which.. I mean, there SHOULD be.
From watching the latest Buur video the changes were more repairing the sheer level of aggro they were seeing initially and was deemed a bug by Frontier. There still seems to be concern there over the NPCs still being too aggressive to allow powerplayers to engage in "casual" stuff like meetups and Buckyballs. Which.. I mean, there SHOULD be.
Yes, but thats the BGS, not PP
From various GALNET articles, lore and CG events.
Its how Patreus managed to annex several Federal systems in the first year of the game running without it triggering into a full on Imp v Fed war.
The thing is- why should that be the case? I can understand in places that have no PP activity at all (unoccupied state in PP2) having hordes of PP NPCs (or places like engineer bases), but elsewhere it very much should be NPCs after you- otherwise there is no point to pledges, territory, or PP. It devolves into yet another meaningless background job you do.
It is a fine line but also its one where at some point players have to change for PP, not PP be continually eroded because someone pledged to power x ran out of fuel, or does some SRV racing in rival space. PP2 should be for as many people as possible, but in the end that can't be everyone.
The type of action will certainly be a bit different if you're off on the edge of the bubble "behind" Cubeo - where Aisling Duval's expansions, at least in the short term, are going to be largely uncontested because no other power can reach that far to expand and likely has higher-priority undermining targets, compared with on the border between her space and someone else's where any attempt to strengthen her systems is a direct threat to someone else. So if you want a fairly low-conflict time (and don't pledge Federal, who don't really have that sort of "bubble edge" territory) you can probably have that for now.
In the BGS context, yes - there are four "ethos" types that factions can have - Social, Corporate, Authoritarian and Criminal - and factions of the same ethos will contest by Election rather than War unless their shared ethos is Criminal, or the conflict is over system presence rather than asset control. But they still contest - there's no concept that a Social faction accepts another Social faction controlling a station, it'll just take different actions to remove it. And Social-Social wars still happen if there's more at stake than control of a couple of stations.
In Powerplay, "ethos" has a somewhat different meaning (and the PP2 ethos seems to be a little different to the PP1 ethos, too). A Combat ethos Power might benefit differently from various actions to a Covert ethos Power - so a "shoot everything" player might go for the Combat Power and the "stealth and sabotage" one for the Covert Power, but they're still going to use those actions to strengthen their own systems and weaken others. It's not going to be the case that two Combat Powers or two Covert Powers team up against the Economic Powers just because they share an ethos. But it might be the case that a Combat-vs-Combat contest plays out a bit differently to a Covert-Covert or a Combat-Covert contest in terms of what tactics each side uses.
The Powers are not in an all-out state of open warfare, all against all, but rather maintaining diplomatic and trade relations, co-operation in larger alliances (rivalries with other human superpowers, and the larger alliance vs the alien menace).
So to me it would make more sense for open hostility to occur only in systems where where the individual could act contrary to the occupier's interests.
It makes less sense (IMO) for anyone in service to a rival power to be chased out of any other power's occupied systems regardless of whether they have actions available that can impact powerplay progress. In terms of in-game logic, this would just be a waste of resources for the occupier. In gameplay terms, players who aren't entirely consumed by Powerplay most likely will enjoy engaging in other activites unmolested occasionally.
Different players will each have their subjectively valid notion of what "the point of PP" is, of course.
Given the list of usable actions (see CMDRHatch's post at https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...ow-from-partners-streams.628705/post-10459234 for a copy from the in-game manual) it'd be really difficult to build a ship which couldn't do at least some of that.
Acquisition and Undermining includes plenty of actions for which the only required fitting is an empty cargo hold or a weapon ... Reinforcement and Acquisition (Contest) are even more flexible as you only need a working Sensors Core Module. If you've got Odyssey, your ship loadout is entirely irrelevant in a lot of systems because you could be uploading malware to settlement data ports, or running reboot missions, or similar.
If you're doing anything in a system controlled by another Power, you are probably weakening that Power at least a little bit.
Ah, I didn't realise you could do these things outside your own Power's influence range!
Yes they are in conflict- otherwise why have twelve separate powers? Why is it that (from whats been shown) contested expansions are fought in CZs? Why is it there are defined ways to destabilise power control?
Any rival pledge can remove your power from that system- thats how the feature works and why PP NPCs molest you.
Me:
Conflict doesn't equate to all out open warfare. It's more like a Cold War situation, as I understood it. This is a bit of a straw man on your part, since I didn't claim there was no conflict? Anyhow..
I hadn't realised that you could do undermine actions outside your own Power's influence range. Hmm.
Conflict doesn't equate to all out open warfare. It's more like a Cold War situation, as I understood it. This is a bit of a straw man on your part, since I didn't claim there was no conflict? Anyhow..
I hadn't realised that you could do undermine actions outside your own Power's influence range. Hmm.
The thing about the Cold War is that if you lived in a proxy country rather than a superpower's core territory, the difference between that and a hot war could be very narrow indeed. The bombs falling on your house weren't nuclear.
The Powers are not directly and openly fighting each other, sure - everyone is very civil and polite to each other in public (except Delaine, who has occasional outbreaks of honesty). But the contest between the Powers to gain influence over particular systems still involves a lot of violence between their proxies and agents.
Exactly what I meant to imply by the Cold War analogy, yes. I don't want to go further because IRL politics are not a proper subject here
Regards the undermine actions, the new codex says:
Which implies you might not be able to effectively undermine outside your Power's control radius.
However, the Galaxy Map's right hand panel help says:
which instead makes the underminability dependent on the placement within the defender's control radius.
Maybe both are relevant..?
However that may be, perhaps there's still a possibility of correspondingly diminished levels of NPC aggression in systems where undermining actions have less or no effect because of these modifiers.
It will be interesting to see how much sway the player base has, and now much remains In the realms of NPC background simulation behaviours.
It would be a shame if the warrior types reign over the bubble, when there are clearly three other predominant types, the traders, the miners and the explorers. All a matter of BGS balance though, so it will be down to the devs. These groupings are of course sub categories of a much wider types, only currently represented in game be a few actions, but the societies are there in game, never the less.
I'm really looking forwards to finding out how they've configured all of this, it's going to be a lot of fun finding out. Just learning how to play stealthily at the moment, as you mention this is ever present even in times of peace and I could not agree with you more. Diplomacy's rough underbelly is of course a thing, yet so much less uncouth than perpetual confrontation!
In my opinion this is an area of the game that could also massively benefit from procedural generation, but I don't think that is currently how it is being done.
I gather that the two are very closely nit, and will be even more so with the new system.
Ah OK, I'm rather late to the party, still figuring it all out, or at least trying to. I was just now accused of murder for simply landing on a settlement pad, and had a bounty slapped on me! I must have landed upon, and killed, a foot soldier or something; Anyhow, I'm going to have to return to the settlement to see if the same things happens again, just for the fun of it. It appears to be a little game loop tied to this system that is about teaching how things work.
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Maybe you're missing the context?
He landed on a random spot on a random planet in the bubble and soon after he did, in spawned a wing on power NPCs, often not NPCs of the power that controls the region, not that matters when it comes to bringing together groups of people from different powers to do some planetary hijinks.
Don't know about you, but it seems a bit daft power NPCs suddenly appear at the exact spot on a random planet every time you create an instance. Surely it would be more suitable (and dare i say realistic?) that unless it was a mission POI or some other reason for power NPCs to spawn, they simply do not?
Not exactly. In PP 1.0 the fortification triggers were greatly affected by how close the governing faction type of a system (BGS) matched the preferred faction type by the Powerplay faction. In other words, close match equals lower fortification thresholds making it easier for the PP power to hold on to a system.
A player faction could, in effect, block or slow down the system acquisition of a Power without even having to be involved in PP - they just have to do BGS.
In PP 2.0 the link between the governing faction type and fortification triggers is gone. And with the elimination of the 5c exploit, the only practical remaining way to block a Power from taking over a system is to pledge to an opposing Power to contest the former.
And in PP 2.0, many of the activities that were formerly exclusively BGS oriented now earn the pledged player PP merits as well while retaining their effect on the BGS.
In other words, the linkage is tighter from PP to BGS but much looser from BGS to PP.