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Elite Dangerous | Trailblazers Update 3 - Wednesday April 30
- Thread starter Phil W
- Start date
Will mixed industry economies still eat eachothers goods? This makes things like rocky/ice kind of a trap option for development as the industry will eat all the refinery outputs.
Powerplay is about being a spiteful nasty commander twisting the knife into your opponent and laughing. Its a competitive feature where you and your allies push your power to the top and scatter your enemies before you- its less this:
"hey guys, if you give us Wolf 123e3312 we'll give you Ross 1299fef9"
and more this:
PP2 is not supposed to be a passive BGS conflict layer.
This is unrealistic.
We knew it was a beta. If you've built a lot of stuff, and it isn't the same anymore, then you're going to have something that's not quite what you expected. It's not going to be worthless (especially if you consider the substantial outfitting and shipyard options you're likely to have), but it's not going to have the same value that you'd planned. I can understand the disappointment (I know how it feels to build an Orbis and discover that you can't buy metals there), but let's not get melodramatic about it.
Remember that undermining faces the System Strength Penalty and Beyond Frontline Penalty for a system, which can be up to a 60% combined penalty (and very easily 35% or more) - so this only makes undermining easier than reinforcement, all else equal, for a Standard:Standard system.I know you guys want us to fight but this is getting crazy. This will make it dead easy for the larger Powers to obliterate smaller ones. Also, it doesn't seem you fixed the completely unbalanced mined minerals merits/system score we currently have. Yes, it's dropped by 35% but so does every other positive action (ie: trading rares) which would keep things unbalanced.
Alright, ready to be corrected if I messed something up above. Go!
On top of that, there's still "not all else is equal".
1) As you note
... it's still going to be the case that reinforcement activities are generally intrinsically easier, safer, more suited to applying your Power's rank bonuses to, and generally more possible to do "while existing" in your own Power's space, rather than undermining that will take a specific effort and plan. Giving a slight relative boost to the baseline score for undermining probably won't go anywhere near far enough to compensate for that, but it's a step in the right direction.
So far the ratio of reinforcement to undermining, galaxy-wide, has been between 10:1 and 15:1. This is not going to change that to anywhere near even.
2) There's still no strategic incentive to Undermine.
- you don't directly benefit in any way from another Power being smaller
- you only very lightly benefit from your own Power being bigger (unless you support Delaine, or your Power is below 100 systems for a trade-focused power or down to its HQ only for a combat-focused one)
- there are thousands of Acquisition targets available to each Power to gain territory without contest (whereas gaining territory via Undermining involves first Undermining the target, then Acquiring the system yourself, all against likely opposition from the other side)
3) There's still the player tendency to focus on defence first rather than offence and be very risk-averse and loss-averse. So there's a strong chance that many player groups will respond to this by saying "we have to do even more reinforcement in case we get attacked" and therefore spending about a third less time undermining - which the 5% boost won't compensate for at all.
(See also: there are various worries about undermining now becoming overpowered; reinforcement has been obviously and clearly overpowered for months without any complaints at all. The "undermining data snipe" gets a lot more worry than the outright exploits possible for reinforcing systems)
Ultimately, though...
Powerplay is supposed to be the game's Competitive Feature™. It's not supposed to be about 12 Powers peacefully expanding their own influence on a first-come first-served basis, it's supposed to be about the 12 most ambitious and powerful politicians in the galaxy struggling for supremacy.
So for that to work it needs to encourage players to attack the positions of other Powers. That shouldn't be seen as a negative thing - people can still approach that competition sportingly and with good humour - but it's a feature about competition rather than cooperation. (Colonisation seems to be providing plenty of scope for cooperation, peaceful building up, etc. though the "first come first served" aspect is of course causing some contention)
It's going to take a lot more changes than this to make Powerplay into an actual competition and 12-way brawl, which Frontier know. And there's certainly as you say more balancing and debugging work to be done to get features more even in terms of merit generation per time. But having sold Powerplay as the competitive feature they need to try to get that competition moving on a big picture level.
This change alone is far too small to do that. The smallest Power still has 127 million control points worth of strength (87 million of which are in Fortified or Stronghold systems)
Total weekly undermining across all 12 powers is just 3-4 million CP a week - and that couldn't all be piled onto the weakest power without getting heavy Beyond Frontline Penalties - so even if this change were to encourage all undermining-active players for all 11 other Powers to strike down Torval (unlikely!), it'd take them over half a year to do it even with the new 5% bonus.
It's something which Frontier will need to consider as they introduce more incentives to attack, certainly.
Indeed- FD need to make PP2 have powers have a reason to attack and make promise of riches the driving force rather than safety.
I think FD ciould do something like this> https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...missions-but-power-wide.636156/#post-10597100
or at least have 'set' goals for powers and that bonuses reflect that achievement. For example, have all powers have a power wide credit multiplier / market bonus / BGS effect if they say, fully expand 10 systems, or fully UM 5 enemy systems (and so on). This then becomes an open guide for randoms and automatically drives powers into focussing on expansion / attack for gain. This might be magnified by how many systems you hold and how stable they are, or any number of factors that might be driven by a powers ethos (Aisling wants happy systems, Archer wants the most secure say).
Given how fast several of the colonization chains have advanced, I don't think it's really needed for speed.
The only problem with the 16 ly limit is that there are places that are trivially reachable even with a stock Sidewinder (with a slightly upgraded FSD) but are currently completely unreachable by colonization.
Whether that warrants increasing the limit is another question.
we dont know how detailed and proper it is, they also added a mechanic where you can see what your construction needs when you are buying commodities now but it only works for the primary port construction and doesnt count the stored commodities you have on your carrier
So just because they added doesnt mean its properly made
Moin,
Ciao,
Andreas
PS: a good patch before a long weekend? Perfect!
as
pointed out, this is a huge patch. I expect small hiccups and at least one patch the next day. Also, in some countries the thursday is a bank holiday.
Ciao,
Andreas
PS: a good patch before a long weekend? Perfect!
Who said, you should be able to reach every corner? For years there were systems, no commander could reach. Only the FC made it possible.
we arent trying to reach the highest part of the galaxy or the furthest system buddy yes we SHOULD be able to reach the orion cluster
if we arent meant to they can make them unavailable like the arena around orion
They did prohibit access, didn't they...
Maybe one day the Distance will be increased, but for now we'll make do with what we got. Or is it a Life or Death situation that you can't go there right now, and there's nowhere else that you'd consider colonising?
One small quibble, on any given week for millions of control points go into fully maxed strongholds that are 'meta' merits due to the systems being optimal for mining reinforcement. Likewise a whole bunch of levers are straight up disabled for undermining in strongholds, perhaps unintentionally. So imo it's less about player behavior to be risk adverse and more players doing what is rational given the incentives. This nerf probably isn't enough to stop players mining in Paesia, but puts other systems at risk. Likewise it doesn't make strongholds worth attacking.
That's true but the net loss is still fairly small at the moment. Last week, total net reinforcement over undermining was about 51M CP whereas the total gain in system strength was only 45M CP, so only 6M CP was wasted on over-reinforcement. In most weeks since the journal data became good enough to measure it, the totals have been closer together than that.
It's a bit of both, I think:
- at the moment there are no individual, group or strategic incentives of any sort towards undermining, so obviously no-one (rounding off) does it: that's going to need a lot of work in multiple places to properly change it (including some bug fixes, definitely)
- but making undermining more incentivised (or indeed possible...) then potentially means that the bigger groups will become risk averse because they hate being undermined much more than they like undermining their enemies, and so just spend even more time on reinforcement no matter how ineffective it is, and even less time on undermining
No fix to ?