Powerplay kills the fun!

[Neilski]

Three nights ago there was a stronghold carrier offering some good prices that i wanted to take advantage of, at the time i was in trading mode and cruising around in a type 9. I decided why not give PP a try. (lol at PP, immature i know) I pledged, landed, loaded up, went to a station that was in a state of reinforcement for the pledged power, unloaded the goods and got over 10k merits.

Wow, that's very dramatically out of line with my experience of trading for merits.
What was it you sold?
(Is it possible that a chunk of those merits came from completion of a weekly task? That still wouldn't close the gap to my own experience of trading for merits though.)

 

[Darkfyre99]

I'm genuinely curious how much player engagement PP2 would still receive if the modules rewards were removed from PP progression.

I know for sure I'd unpledge in an instant, as those modules (as meh as many of them are, and despite being familiar with almost all of them at this stage) are the only reason I bother earning merits. I don't play as part of a squadron, I don't find the PP2 lore/framework 'meaty' enough - or offer sufficient versimilitude - to allow me to RP around it, I don't care for the benefits* most of which are credit/rep bonus based, I don't see the point to change the power in random system ABC from blue to red or green, for it to be changed back afterwards in an endless tug of war.

*the one thing I find tremendously useful are Stronghold Carrier outfitting/shipyard facilities, given I still haven't unlocked ShinDez since I wiped my account last.

Personally, I began my Neo-Abolitionist Movement campaign (AKA supporting Aisling Duval) from the moment I could play PowerPlay 2.0. There’s enough meat on the bones of the Imperial Powers for my character to support Aisling, oppose Zemina, and be neutral towards the other two. This is in top her long standing opposition to the Evil Galactic Federation.

As near as I can tell, in my Theater of Operations, there are the equivalent of seven players as active as I am, averaging around four hours a week. Besides myself, there seems to be four supporting Arissa , two supporting Zemina, and another Aisling supporter.

 

[Markov Chaney]

I'm not aggressive. I'm frustrated. Some people say one thing, other people say the completely opposite thing.

That does happen a disproportionate amount on this forum. All you can is go with the comments which make some sort of logical sense, or explicitly go through what the thinking was behind their answer, or provide some sort of external evidence. Short "yes" "no" or "you're wrong" just simply don't help. FWIW I thought your comment read as frustrated, not aggressive, and frankly I've been admiring your patience in this thread.

 

[Rock Hunter]

[Edited for post length]


It's not that significant, really, at least not at the moment.
- bulk flooding is horribly inefficient in all cases
- rares trading is disabled
- mining disallows the use of a carrier
- profitable trade allows a carrier but since in most cases this will be doable with one-jump hops anyway it's hard to see that the carrier really saves time (and if you choose to exploit 1t trades your ratio of station time to flight time makes the carrier even less relevant)
- powerplay commodities are provided at a sufficiently slow rate even at max rank that the carrier doesn't help much
- all of the other tasks don't involve a cargo hold so someone else's carrier or an NPC station works just as well

My own carrier is still hanging out near Colonia and I've never felt the lack of it to be a problem for Powerplay. The most I'd ever use it for would be the occasional ship transfer.

Can you actually transfer them to your Carrier?

I’d tried to transfer a batch and couldn’t transfer them. I’m offloading them at a Planetary Port and thought I may be slightly more efficient if I could store my accrued Power Commoditites until the end of my play session.

When I couldn’t do it I assumed it was to stop control point sniping at the end of the week. I’ve no idea if this is true or if I just did something silly and you can transfer them. Perhaps I’ll try again tomorrow.

 

[Desirsar]

Given the apparent advantage of reinforcement over undermining would it follow that most systems will wind up as Strongholds?

Yes, and "eventually" isn't all that far away necessarily.

Recent weeks have shown an estimated surplus of effective Reinforcement over Undermining of around 70 million control points and this has been pretty consistent for a while.

Assuming current trends continue (including new Acquisitions being relatively slow) - and they are likely to hit diminishing returns in some ways:
- almost all controlled systems will be at least at Fortified strength in about two years
- almost all controlled systems will be at Stronghold strength in less than four years
- the entire current bubble will be Stronghold strength within about seven years

This seems like a relatively easy fix. Once a power has some arbitrary number of strongholds, they would decay without undermining. Same for a much larger arbitrary number of reinforcement systems.

 

[KRISXR]

Wow, that's very dramatically out of line with my experience of trading for merits.
What was it you sold?
(Is it possible that a chunk of those merits came from completion of a weekly task? That still wouldn't close the gap to my own experience of trading for merits though.)

I was using inara to find trades, agronomic treatment was offered on a stronghold carrier in Xinca and being sold at a port about 28 ly's away (cant member the port or system name) then I was hauling indite (i think) back to the carrier. I think merits are based on profit for the trade. Unloading 736 tons of agronomic treatment paid about 10 million in profit and i'd get just over 10k merits for the trade. I did have to wait in line at the carrier for 5-10 minutes almost every trip, so i looked on inara for another station that was selling it, it was more expensive there but no wait and the merits dropped down to around 7k merits per load. The Indite also gave merits but far less because, i think, the profit was lower. Kinda like how the reputation and rank for trading work, more profit in the trip more progress for the rep and trade rank.

I felt like if i could do it not knowing much about PP, a player who has the knowledge could probably quadruple the merits.

 

[Darkfyre99]

I was using inara to find trades, agronomic treatment was offered on a stronghold carrier in Xinca and being sold at a port about 28 ly's away (cant member the port or system name) then I was hauling indite (i think) back to the carrier. I think merits are based on profit for the trade. Unloading 736 tons of agronomic treatment paid about 10 million in profit and i'd get just over 10k merits for the trade. I did have to wait in line at the carrier for 5-10 minutes almost every trip, so i looked on inara for another station that was selling it, it was more expensive there but no wait and the merits dropped down to around 7k merits per load. The Indite also gave merits but far less because, i think, the profit was lower. Kinda like how the reputation and rank for trading work, more profit in the trip more progress for the rep and trade rank.

I felt like if i could do it not knowing much about PP, a player who has the knowledge could probably quadruple the merits.

Agronomic Treatments are one of those commodities that, when the stars align, sell at an absurdly high markup, and is rather valuable to begin with. It’s one of the commodities that I typically use to fill up my cargo hold when I have extra cargo capacity.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Can you actually transfer them to your Carrier?

Probably not.

This seems like a relatively easy fix. Once a power has some arbitrary number of strongholds, they would decay without undermining. Same for a much larger arbitrary number of reinforcement systems.

That ends up as a return to the Powerplay 1 "overheads" system, where people doing the things the interface says they should be doing (acquiring and reinforcing systems for their power) end up hurting the power overall by making it "too large".

It probably also encourages an even greater focus on reinforcing than active undermining - if groups know that they need to budget N merits just to keep systems in their current state, in the complete absence of any attacks, that's N merits they're definitely not spending on actively undermining anyone - without addressing any of the major reasons that there's already a weekly surplus of around 70 million CP reinforcement merits.
- organised groups are generally incredibly risk-averse and tend to see 1-for-1 trades of systems as unfavourable, so will almost always put more effort into defence
- you get to use a lot more of your rank bonuses when reinforcing because they only work in your existing territory
- reinforcement actions tend to be legal and profitable in credits and materials too ... whereas undermining actions tend to be illegal and only give merits
- reinforcement actions are far more "things someone might do anyway" (bounty hunting, profitable trades, hand in exploration data) whereas undermining actions tend to be things you need to deliberately go and do because you're Powerplaying today.
- weekly missions tend to be mostly reinforcement with the occasional acquisition and undermining task
- a lot of the equivalent reinforcement/undermining actions are just plain better in the reinforcement version [1]
- system strength penalty and beyond frontline penalty can cut the effectiveness of an undermining action in half or worse, while reinforcement actions are always carried out at full power

It really depends what Frontier see as the vision for Powerplay:
- if it's supposed to be a territorial competitive wargame, then the undermining/reinforcement balance needs to be neutral or maybe even slightly undermining-heavy so that there are more player-driven fights: it needs to be players directly causing the totals to be equal, based on the incentives and balancing Frontier set out. I don't think there is any easy fix for that - it'd require substantial adjustments to a lot of things.
- if it's supposed to be a polite "first come first served" mostly cooperative way of adding some variety and decorations to the bubble, then the current setup is fine, because Colonisation will provide new systems faster than Powerplay finishes reinforcing them, and even with further substantial delays to Colonisation it'll be ready in time.


[1] For example, Reinforcement gets "profitable trade" which even without the 1t exploit can easily get multiple merits per tonne (and "rares trade" when it was enabled was even more powerful). Undermining gets "bulk flood" which caps at about 1 merit for every four tonnes. Reinforcement gets bounty hunting (tens to hundreds of merits per kill, plus a few extra from scanning the pirates first) while Undermining gets murder for 20 merits a time (plus a bounty and notoriety to slow down how often you can do it).

 

[Neilski]

I was using inara to find trades, agronomic treatment was offered on a stronghold carrier in Xinca and being sold at a port about 28 ly's away (cant member the port or system name) then I was hauling indite (i think) back to the carrier. I think merits are based on profit for the trade. Unloading 736 tons of agronomic treatment paid about 10 million in profit and i'd get just over 10k merits for the trade. I did have to wait in line at the carrier for 5-10 minutes almost every trip, so i looked on inara for another station that was selling it, it was more expensive there but no wait and the merits dropped down to around 7k merits per load. The Indite also gave merits but far less because, i think, the profit was lower. Kinda like how the reputation and rank for trading work, more profit in the trip more progress for the rep and trade rank.

I felt like if i could do it not knowing much about PP, a player who has the knowledge could probably quadruple the merits.

Holy smoke. You said this was only a few days ago?

On the 9th of Jan, I did some test trades. One of those was selling 193 t of silver for a profit of 7.1M cr, which earned me a pathetic 668 merits. (The profit margin was enormous on that, as I was selling the silver for more than 10x the price I paid for it.)

Your results are more than a factor of ten better! Maybe I should retry my tests - have they retuned the merits for trading?

 

[Zador]

I had never paid much attention to the difference between the two, and never realized that there could be some significant difference. But, indeed, "metallic" rings seem to be richer (ironically enough) in more valuable metals than "metal-rich" rings. Certain valuable metals seems to appear only in the former, and overall valuable metals seem more abundant...

View attachment 415356

On the other hand, these didn't sell for much in the system in question, so only 5k merits for over 2 hours of mining...

Then you are:
1. Mining in the wrong place - laser mine in a platinum hotspot in a metallic (preferably pristine reserves) ring. Or core mine if you like, I don't know about that, but imo its slower.
2. Wasting time collecting low value metals. Use A rated prospector limpets and ignore any asteroids which are less than 20% platinum. Add silver etc. to the ignore list for impets so they don't waste time collecting that stuff. The only other metal worth collecting is osmium depending on market prices.
3. Selling in the wrong place. The higher the sell price the more merits you get. Its worth a little time searching your system or checking prices in Inara to sell at a higher price.
A 2 hour mining session nets me over 400T platinum which I sell for around 170k each at a ground station in the same system, and I get 60k merits. Admittedly this is in a large well engineered ship, but I would expect im a medium ship you ought to be able to get 200T of platinum in 2 hours which would get you 30k merits at a reasonable price.

 

[DjVortex]

3. Selling in the wrong place. The higher the sell price the more merits you get. Its worth a little time searching your system or checking prices in Inara to sell at a higher price.

It's still unclear to me whether the metals need to be sold in the same system they were mined from, or if they can be sold in any system controlled by my power.

I suppose I could test it, but if it doesn't work, it would feel like a waste.

 

[KRISXR]

Holy smoke. You said this was only a few days ago?

On the 9th of Jan, I did some test trades. One of those was selling 193 t of silver for a profit of 7.1M cr, which earned me a pathetic 668 merits. (The profit margin was enormous on that, as I was selling the silver for more than 10x the price I paid for it.)

Your results are more than a factor of ten better! Maybe I should retry my tests - have they retuned the merits for trading?

Yup, It was this past Sunday the 19th.

 

[Jmanis]

Probably not.


That ends up as a return to the Powerplay 1 "overheads" system, where people doing the things the interface says they should be doing (acquiring and reinforcing systems for their power) end up hurting the power overall by making it "too large".

It probably also encourages an even greater focus on reinforcing than active undermining - if groups know that they need to budget N merits just to keep systems in their current state, in the complete absence of any attacks, that's N merits they're definitely not spending on actively undermining anyone - without addressing any of the major reasons that there's already a weekly surplus of around 70 million CP reinforcement merits.
- organised groups are generally incredibly risk-averse and tend to see 1-for-1 trades of systems as unfavourable, so will almost always put more effort into defence
- you get to use a lot more of your rank bonuses when reinforcing because they only work in your existing territory
- reinforcement actions tend to be legal and profitable in credits and materials too ... whereas undermining actions tend to be illegal and only give merits
- reinforcement actions are far more "things someone might do anyway" (bounty hunting, profitable trades, hand in exploration data) whereas undermining actions tend to be things you need to deliberately go and do because you're Powerplaying today.
- weekly missions tend to be mostly reinforcement with the occasional acquisition and undermining task
- a lot of the equivalent reinforcement/undermining actions are just plain better in the reinforcement version [1]
- system strength penalty and beyond frontline penalty can cut the effectiveness of an undermining action in half or worse, while reinforcement actions are always carried out at full power

It really depends what Frontier see as the vision for Powerplay:
- if it's supposed to be a territorial competitive wargame, then the undermining/reinforcement balance needs to be neutral or maybe even slightly undermining-heavy so that there are more player-driven fights: it needs to be players directly causing the totals to be equal, based on the incentives and balancing Frontier set out. I don't think there is any easy fix for that - it'd require substantial adjustments to a lot of things.
- if it's supposed to be a polite "first come first served" mostly cooperative way of adding some variety and decorations to the bubble, then the current setup is fine, because Colonisation will provide new systems faster than Powerplay finishes reinforcing them, and even with further substantial delays to Colonisation it'll be ready in time.


[1] For example, Reinforcement gets "profitable trade" which even without the 1t exploit can easily get multiple merits per tonne (and "rares trade" when it was enabled was even more powerful). Undermining gets "bulk flood" which caps at about 1 merit for every four tonnes. Reinforcement gets bounty hunting (tens to hundreds of merits per kill, plus a few extra from scanning the pirates first) while Undermining gets murder for 20 merits a time (plus a bounty and notoriety to slow down how often you can do it).

Sounds like we're seeing classic "antagonistic behaviours get the short end of the stick" design as usual, if we're seeing fortifying activity well ahead of undermining.

EDIT: added clarity so it didn't sound like I was talking about your post specifically

 

[Ian Doncaster]

It's still unclear to me whether the metals need to be sold in the same system they were mined from, or if they can be sold in any system controlled by my power.

The location rules for mining are as follows:

- for Reinforcing: mine in any system of your power, sell to the same system
- for Undermining: mine in any system of any other power, sell to the same system
- for Acquisition: mine in a Fortified or Stronghold system of your power, sell to a neutral system within its Acquisition range as shown on the map Strategic View (there may not be any, for any given Fortified/Stronghold system)

Sounds like we're seeing classic "antagonistic behaviours get the short end of the stick" design as usual, if we're seeing fortifying activity well ahead of undermining.

Yes. Mostly unintentionally, I think - a lot of it is either inheritance from "being implemented in Elite Dangerous" or things which are thematic but set up strong incentives to play defensively.

I would guess from what the game provides for data that there is at least a 4:1 ratio of reinforcement to undermining in terms of the CP outcome, and it could be a fair bit higher than that.

 

[Felix DiCestria]

So unless some serious rebalancing happens or we get more Thargoids, now is the only opportunity for movement?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

So unless some serious rebalancing happens or we get more Thargoids, now is the only opportunity for movement?

If by movement you mean systems currently controlled by one Power becoming controlled by another Power ... that's already extremely rare, if you exclude the Thargoids we've already had and agreements between player groups not to contest undermining attempts. It'll technically get even slower but I think it's essentially already stopped.

Another thing I missed off the list above: undermining is an inefficient way to acquire systems even in ideal circumstances
- if you're expanding into clear "edge of bubble" space, of which there's a lot, you need to get one new Fortified system on the edge of your territory (200k CP if you're unlucky) and that gets you the option to acquire multiple new systems at 120k CP each, likely in a direction where no other power has any motivation to try to stop you. So your total spend per new system is probably 150-200k CP and you can afford to take your time.
- if you're trying to capture an enemy system, you need to undermine their existing position (probably at least 100k CP, which may need to be gained against SSP) and then reacquire the newly neutral system for yourself (at least 120k CP) so that's already higher than the "new acquisition" option even if you're entirely unopposed - if they put up even a token fight you could easily need to spend double that and need to get all those CP together in a single week

Without (going back to some earlier comments) a reason for system A to be more valuable than system B (even if it's just purely player-consensus prestige value like Sol), you're always numerically better off just leaving the other Powers alone.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Sounds like we're seeing classic "antagonistic behaviours get the short end of the stick" design as usual, if we're seeing fortifying activity well ahead of undermining.

EDIT: added clarity so it didn't sound like I was talking about your post specifically

Very short end of the stick. In my theater of operations, one hostile system I visit regularly yields only a third of the merits I’d get from the same activities in the system I’m reinforcing. Since it’s only one of four systems I regularly visit, and has four times the control merits being pumped into it compared to what I can add to the system I’m reinforcing, needless to say it’s a drop in the bucket compared to them.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Nope, you don't need FC to get to top 10, because you mine and sell in the same system

that isnt what i meant... and i know you do not NEED a fleet carrier but i wonder if it would not make it easier simply by the fact that you could stock pile over a few weeks and then all it would be is a simple matter of delivering the goods.

like i said i havent tried it but i cant see why it would not matter.

not sure why you find the suggestion amusing TBH. it seems on the surface of it like a decent method to me.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

like i said i havent tried it but i cant see why it would not matter.

Storing in the FC (even your own, without using the market interface) would remove the "is mined" flag and get you no merits at all.

Apparently this is fine, if you don't go via the market. Still, unless you're going to hang around waiting for a better BGS state to sell, I don't see it really giving you any efficiencies.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

No, for two reasons:
1) Carrier markets don't count for Powerplay purposes at all - the ability to set arbitrary prices would break a lot of it.
2) Sticking the goods on a carrier removes the "is mined" flag and makes them entirely unusable for mining merits (you can use your own carrier and the cargo transfer option rather than the market for Powerplay tasks which don't have this restriction)

ahh ok that is useful to know thanks.