Powerplay 2.0 Activities

yianniv

yianniv
I agree that the variety of PP activities is very welcome and refreshing. Although I don't exactly like the previous nerfs, there are enough activities remaining to both enjoy and increase rank, especially now that it's been decoupled from the Power merit progress.

I'm looking forward to the next balancing pass and also hope that FDev will start logging PP data in the journal files, which will immensely increase the QoL of the 3rd party utils ecosystem.
 

Vurt

V
tolm said:
Interesting … surface or core mining?
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Just regular surface mining. I thought about core mining, and while it's definitely more enjoyable and you can go for minerals with actual demand, good core mining ships are smaller and more maneuverable, but don't have nearly as much cargo capacity, and since I was farming for merits I was definitely going for volume. With no demand for platinum in the system I was using (because clearly I wasn't the only one doing this), osmium was definitely paying out better, so there may be a case where a smaller core miner can make more merits per hour going after the right mineral, but strip-mining rocks with some lasers was relatively fast and simple.
 

tolm

tolm
Darkfyre99 said:
Exactly.

Personally, I've found that what I consider a normal game session, flying a ship I enjoy flying, and doing the things I enjoy doing, have been providing me around eight to ten kilocredits per hour, or about one rank. More importantly, it's been an interesting challenge balancing profitability with merit generation. I've never taken advantage of the various "gold rushes" over the years, nor had any desire to grind for either credits, ranks, or materials, so it's much more fun to do.

More importantly as far as I'm concerned, I find it a lot easier to squeeze brief sessions under PowerPlay 2.0 than I did before. That's important to me, because one of the chief sources of friction towards playing this game was how much time and attention it demanded. These days, if I have fifteen or twenty minutes to spare, I can hop in, grab a few retrieval/donation missions for the system I'm focusing on, and complete them in time. Manipulating the BGS for fun and profit required much more time than that to be effective.
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Wow - 8-to-10,000 credits/hour for “normal play” seems very good. I’m struggling to push the lower end of that on a dedicated HazRES session - which is my “normal play”.
 

Rock Hunter

Rock Hunter
tolm said:
Wow - 8-to-10,000 credits/hour for “normal play” seems very good. I’m struggling to push the lower end of that on a dedicated HazRES session - which is my “normal play”.
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One of the Industrial systems I’m 100% Allied to has been in a Boom state this week and they have high prices on Tritium and Palladium. By mining for Platinum and selling locally at different stations in the system I’ve been able to pick up Donation missions for both. They tend to come in 72T and 108T requests which give around 3400 and 5000 (I forget the actual total) merits each. I then stop by my Carrier and drop of any Palladium I’ve picked up and use it later, along with some of my stored Tritium to compete those missions - they often run for around 1 day plus 4-8 hours.

Without going too far out of my way I’ve been able to jump several ranks very easily in a day without counting the ‘general’ merits rewarded for basic activities. Though it’s getting expensive on the Tritium so I don’t rely on it.

Well worth keeping an eye out on the opportunities that crop up for certain system types in certain states.
 

Darkfyre99

Darkfyre99
tolm said:
Wow - 8-to-10,000 credits/hour for “normal play” seems very good. I’m struggling to push the lower end of that on a dedicated HazRES session - which is my “normal play”.
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One of these days, I’m going to stop conflating credits and merits… ;)

It’ll be interesting to see if I can maintain that rate when I switch to undermining. I’ve got a target in mind, but I need to focus on getting a nearby system at least fortified first. Fortification seems to require less effort than undermining on paper, but the proof is in the doing. :)
 

tolm

tolm
Rock Hunter said:
One of the Industrial systems I’m 100% Allied to has been in a Boom state this week and they have high prices on Tritium and Palladium. By mining for Platinum and selling locally at different stations in the system I’ve been able to pick up Donation missions for both. They tend to come in 72T and 108T requests which give around 3400 and 5000 (I forget the actual total) merits each. I then stop by my Carrier and drop of any Palladium I’ve picked up and use it later, along with some of my stored Tritium to compete those missions - they often run for around 1 day plus 4-8 hours.

Without going too far out of my way I’ve been able to jump several ranks very easily in a day without counting the ‘general’ merits rewarded for basic activities. Though it’s getting expensive on the Tritium so I don’t rely on it.

Well worth keeping an eye out on the opportunities that crop up for certain system types in certain states.
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Wait ... you get merits for completing missions ... ?
 

SergMx

SergMx
Darkfyre99 said:
One of these days, I’m going to stop conflating credits and merits… ;)

It’ll be interesting to see if I can maintain that rate when I switch to undermining. I’ve got a target in mind, but I need to focus on getting a nearby system at least fortified first. Fortification seems to require less effort than undermining on paper, but the proof is in the doing. :)
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As far as I'm concerned that's not the case.
For example the same mining, you have to mine and sell in the same system if it is RS.
And you can mine and sell in any system if it is RS -> AS.
 

Kayvan

Kayvan
Last night I tried mining for AS. Boy what a waste of time. Since the mining has to be done in a nearby SS, the available rings won't be too fresh. I found only rubbish of which Indite and Gallite were the best picks; after 2 hours my hold wasn't even half full and I got something like 3-500 merits for the effort, even with NK bonus. Rubbish.
 

St0rmFury

St0rmFury
Kayvan said:
Last night I tried mining for AS. Boy what a waste of time. Since the mining has to be done in a nearby SS, the available rings won't be too fresh. I found only rubbish of which Indite and Gallite were the best picks; after 2 hours my hold wasn't even half full and I got something like 3-500 merits for the effort, even with NK bonus. Rubbish.
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I'm guessing you were laser mining? The only ring worth laser mining is metallic (for platinum & osmium) and those are rather uncommon. Especially if you're looking for pristine reserved metallic rings in the bubble.

My suggestion to you is to try core mining since reserves level don't matter, rocky rings are more common and pretty much everything you core mine in rocky rings can fetch a good price.
 

nemolomen

nemolomen
St0rmFury said:
Only support/donate missions IINM.
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This information came from: https://heatmap.sotl.org.uk/powers/refcard (which is linked in the OP)
 

Darkfyre99

Darkfyre99
SergMx said:
As far as I'm concerned that's not the case.
For example the same mining, you have to mine and sell in the same system if it is RS.
And you can mine and sell in any system if it is RS -> AS.
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As I understand it, when undermining, you may suffer from two penalties: distance from the "front line" and "system strength." My chosen target had a "very high" penalty when it comes to system strength, which reduced the merits I earned to less than half of what I'd been getting while fortifying. When you combine that with the fact that many of the best undermining methods actually cost money, especially if you want to stay legal in the system you're undermining, unless you're sitting on billions with nothing to spend it on, you'll need to split your time between earning money and undermining.

That was the scenario during last night's session. I had a relatively long session, and I split my time between fortifying, undermining, and having to rebuild my credit reserves. I was breaking even when I was simply fortifying.
 

Kayvan

Kayvan
St0rmFury said:
I'm guessing you were laser mining? The only ring worth laser mining is metallic (for platinum & osmium) and those are rather uncommon. Especially if you're looking for pristine reserved metallic rings in the bubble.

My suggestion to you is to try core mining since reserves level don't matter, rocky rings are more common and pretty much everything you core mine in rocky rings can fetch a good price.
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Yes I laser-mined. That used to work reasonably well. Not interesting, rather tedious, but well paid, years ago. I did try ice ring core mining but that was a total waste of time and I haven't tried again. Basically I spent an entire hour looking until I found a single core and then it contained Brommelite or something. So ever since I've only laser mined in rocky rings (but not much; I stopped doing it altogether once I had Trade Elite).

Now anyway: I went for our priority AS and checked Inara: only 1 system within the control radius had a single planet with rocky rings. So not much choice. This one ring had only 2 hotspots. I picked one of them at random and, as I mentioned, only got rubbish.
Maybe I'll try again with core mining equipment but I'm not getting my hopes up.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
I did some core ice mining in a Void Opal hotspot earlier in the week and got a bunch of Void Opals, plus some Monazite and Grandidierite, all of which are decently valuable especially with the right states.
(If I hadn't just been testing the build and seeing if I could remember how to mine, I'd have got considerably more)

Took about an hour of looking to fill 100t or so of hold space, which I didn't think was bad for not having core mined for six years, so I'll certainly be giving it another go if I can find a system with better states.
 

Tifu

Tifu
I had an unusual experience in a Power Convoy Distress Call Zone (Mahon vs. Kaine) today in Reorte. She wasn't supposed to be there but two NPC Sidewinders pledged to Winters suddenly appeared and attacked the Mahon Convoy.

After I destroyed that first wave, two Kaine NPC Pythons finally showed up and were driven away in the end by the Mahon NPC ships and me.

What the hell were the minions of Felicia doing there in the first place? They weren't even invited to the party! 🤣
 
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Nowski

Nowski
Ian Doncaster said:
Has the list of Powers preferring this been lost in an edit somewhere?
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I looked at undermining for all Powers against about 4-6 different system owners each, making sure to cover undermining each Power overall, and the situation is that no Power has "sell mined resources" as an undermining Ethos activity.

For Zemina Torval, "sell mined resources" is a "vulnerability" (as noted in the initial post) so this will be listed in the "local activites" (at the bottom of the list) for any Power agent undermining a ZT system. I double checked, and as far as I can tell ZT does not get to sell mined resources as an Ethos activity for undermining, ironically making her the only Power whose agents never see this on the Local Activities list for undermining.

Tl;dr: initial post is correct as far as I can tell.
 

Darkfyre99

Darkfyre99
Looks like commodity donation missions went through a stealth nerf with the update on Thursday. Before the update, I was earning merits based on the sale price of the commodity at the destination station. After the update, I'm now earning mertis based on the purchase price of the commodity at the source. :(
 
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