Trailblazers | Update 3.4

It's going to make it more difficult for factions with lots of strongholds (I.e. the one I fly for), but to be honest, there does need to be more fluidity
Strongholds shouldn't be that affected - they can't drop below 25% [1], so 250,000 control points into Stronghold, which is a lot more net weekly Undermining than any individual system has got for a very long time discounting the recent data exploit (and even gross Undermining is almost always a lot less than that). Sure, you can't max them out even higher than that without constant effort but you mostly don't need to - a 25% Stronghold and a 100% Stronghold are equally invincible for now.

What it will mostly nullify is the accumulative effect of casual reinforcement of systems in Exploited/Fortified state. The vast majority of systems see <1000 CP of reinforcement a week, with most of the rest seeing <5000 CP, so any significant decay at all will keep those pinned very close to 25% of their band, and have the only (defensive) moves that matter be those made by larger organised groups who can rush a system by a full state in a week or two.

It'll be interesting to see how much practical difference that makes to the map since most successful reinforcements were already from the big groups, of course, and none of this makes it any easier as such for smaller groups to undermine or creates undermining options with comparable CP rates to the fast reinforcement ones, so I think this is only going to be buying Frontier a bit more time to fix the bigger balance issues. I think we'll still see R:U ratios in the 15-20:1 range in the short term.


[1] This of course is a threshold Frontier could reduce later. Move this to 1% so any unmaintained system is vulnerable to being knocked over by a last minute rush of 3-10k CP, and oversized powers suddenly get a bunch of opportunities to be cut down to size. Move this to -1% and there doesn't need to be workable player-led undermining at all, though it does change the nature of what players are defending against significantly.
 
It would be nice to see a change whereby 'encroachment' of a Power into an unexploited system of say, an unaligned Independent Faction, can be challenged. At the moment, it seems that the only way to halt encroachment is to wait until a tipping point is reached, and then align with a rival Power to start Undermining. Surely, there must be a way for a true Independent to kick back against the Powers than compromise their ethos and subscribe to 'My Enemy's Enemy' is My Friend' school of physical diplomacy. - and especially if one happens to be (space) legless! Maybe something like volume of Trade activity or Pirates destroyed? So if Independent Factions want to kick back at the 'Merit Morons' (hehe) they can do so by showing they are more engaged within their systems than those who seek to 'collect' it for the greater glory of their Power?
 
t the moment, it seems that the only way to halt encroachment is to wait until a tipping point is reached, and then align with a rival Power to start Undermining.
You can start before they actually take the system - pick a flag of convenience Power, and undermine the Fortified/Stronghold system(s) they're using to support the Acquisition. If that drops, the Acquisition can no longer proceed. The best defence is an overwhelming offence.
 
Oh, that looks good. Let's hope we also get a fix for the unbalanced merits (hauling vs. combat).
I would like to echo this sentiment. I fly and fight for the Emperor, and during reinforcement activities, I earn bonus merits for scanning ships, wakes, megaship data links, bounty hunting and killing power ships, yet despite those bonuses I get way more merits hauling commodities than I do bounty hunting. This seems lopsided.

In addition, why are there no merit rewards for taking on Bounty Hunting missions, or any powerplay activities around passenger missions? The former seems like a no-brainer, and the latter seems like a missed opportunity. Pilots that like to occasionally do passenger missions aren't able to contribute anything to powerplay at all.
 
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Issues which don't get 10 "can reproduce" comments from other players within a fairly short time after the initial report (looks to currently be 1 month) automatically Expire as a way of filtering non-critical issues away from Frontier's attention.

Generally you either need to accept that almost none of the bugs you experience will ever be fixed and stop reporting them, or ensure that all your bug reports get a bunch of follow-ups from Five-Alts Freddie and his friends within the first month.
 
All very lovely, I'm sure. Would be even lovlier if we could de-commission stations etc whilst in this beta (hint, hint FDEV). Thankyou!
 
Colonization claim fix - great.

Minor gripe - would have been great to know it was coming ahead of time when it led to systems most likely eyed by many people suddenly becoming available without much notice in the land grab war that colonization is. But whatever.
 
It is great to see PP changes, but why re-introduce one of the most annoying aspects of Powerplay 1 - decay? It isn't fun to reinforce because of arbitrary decay making it a weekly chore. What is next, making ranks decay too as a fix for excessive care packages? It is fun to counter active undermining. But a lot of undermining activities currently just aren't fun (more time looking for the activity than actually doing it) or efficient in merits:

  • Harder to find power ships of the controlling power in general.
  • Signal sources provide too little content, and are basically relog grinding for like 3-5 ship kills or cargo cannisters each time.
  • Power wreckage signals are still offering half of their cargo as escape pods, which have been permanently disabled as a merit source.
  • Balancing of expected merits/hour in lots of activities (not just for undermining). Nobody is going to lose a system to activities such as "flood markets with low value goods", "powerplay commodities" (lack of fast tracking with credits, or making the quota much larger and possible to accumulate over a period of say, 24 hours), "holoscreen hacking", "scan datalinks" unless the decay puts it at 0.1%.

There are also the "easy" rank methods that involve mining at systems that at this point are beyond maxed out, but still receive millions of CPs each week. Making it so that you can't earn merits at maxed systems would make players flock around a lot more.
 
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  • Further changes have been made to Powerplay, in order to encourage more aggressive play and create more vulnerability and therefore fluidity in Power territory.
Is it to be assumed that this is intended to limit and keep Powerplay restricted to the bubble and not spread to the satellite colonies?
 
This doesn't do anything to help the smaller powers who have no real way to catch up. By making this a global change, it actually makes it easier for the larger powers with more manpower to completely overwhelm a smaller power.

There needs to be a modifier based on the number of systems a power controls. The power with 1500 systems should be easier to undermine than the power with 500.
 
One last worry with decay, since it seems like it will impact not just "stale" systems that received 0 reinforcing on that week, is this the death of small group/solo player feeling like they can matter unless they can reach X merits per week to go uphill against the decay?
 
It is great to see PP changes, but why re-introduce one the most annoying aspects of Powerplay 1 - decay? It isn't fun to reinforce because of arbitrary decay making it a weekly chore. What is next, making ranks decay too as a fix for excessive care packages? It is fun to counter active undermining. But a lot of undermining activities currently just aren't fun (more time looking for the activity than actually doing it) or efficient in merits:

  • Harder to find power ships of the controlling power in general.
  • Signal sources provide too little content, and are basically relog grinding for like 3-5 ship kills or cargo cannisters each time.
  • Power wreckage signals are still offering half of their cargo as escape pods, which have been permanently disabled as a merit source.
  • Balancing of expected merits/hour in lots of activities (not just for undermining). Nobody is going to lose a system to activities such as "flood markets with low value goods", "powerplay commodities" (lack of fast tracking with credits, or making the quota much larger and possible to accumulate over a period of say, 24 hours), "holoscreen hacking", "scan datalinks" unless the decay puts it at 0.1%.

There are also the "easy" rank methods that involve mining at systems that at this point are beyond maxed out, but still receive millions of CPs each week. Making it so that you can't earn merits at maxed systems would make players flock around a lot more.
The problem then is, how do you control powers who are large in a feature where attacking is hard? PP1 had overhead but decay here works by having more 'spinning plates' to look after as you grow. Its not perfect but at least its better than not having it.

  • Harder to find power ships of the controlling power in general.
If murder of any NPC in a powers system was actually rewarded the most it would act as a turbo UM method open to anyone.
 
Making it so that you can't earn merits at maxed systems would make players flock around a lot more.
On paper a maxed system could be about to receive heavy undermining so pre-emptive reinforcement isn't completely guaranteed to be valueless in that sense.

One last worry with decay, since it seems like it will impact not just "stale" systems that received 0 reinforcing on that week, is this the death of small group/solo player feeling like they can matter unless they can reach X merits per week to go uphill against the decay?
I think "yes, for Reinforcement, and that's the point". Acquisition and Undermining don't have decay so the aim - we'll see how successfully - is presumably to push smaller groups towards those actions.

Is it to be assumed that this is intended to limit and keep Powerplay restricted to the bubble and not spread to the satellite colonies?
I'd see what Frontier's doing as somewhat disconnected from that question, and I don't read that as being the specific intent.

Mainly what stops Powerplay spreading to the new colonies is that it takes 5 player-hours to set up a new colony but probably closer to 10-50 player-hours except in very ideal circumstances to spread Powerplay to it, so the bubble is expanding way faster than total Powerplay control by any of the 12 Powers is: Powerplay covered about half of inhabited systems at the launch of Colonisation, it now covers less than a seventh of them. The majority of new colonies (though not necessarily the majority of current colonies, given sufficient decades) were never going to come within the scope of Powerplay anyway. Control decay will slow that down a little bit on paper but probably not a major amount in practice. The maximum 10LY/week long-term pace of Powerplay expansion means that many of the more distant colonies are already two or three years away at best.

Equally, nothing in this will directly stop uncontested systems from becoming newly taken over by a Power, or remaining stably under a Power's control in the absence of opposition. And nothing in it (with the small-scale exception of this week's CGs) specifically makes successful Undermining of systems easier or makes attacks on other Powers a strategically valuable thing to do given the widespread availability - from colonisation again - of essentially unlimited uncontested space for expansion.

Looking at Frontier's longer-term stated intent to encourage direct aggression between Powers ... certainly one way that could succeed is for the Powers to end up in such a fight over what they already have that the total size of Power-controlled space remains at ~10,000 systems. Though that could still spread out into some of the newer colonies a bit, if it causes the Powers to end up moving further apart and trying to maintain "no mans lands" between them on the inside while focusing their expansionism outwards. But it could also occur by providing ways for almost all inhabited systems to rapidly end up under someone's control, so that the only way to expand a Power further is either to colonise more or to take systems off someone else.
 
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