just to clarify - is this a fix for the thing where non-eu players can drop on the zones but no ships spawn, or the thing where power CZs despawn entirely if a bgs war starts or ends in the system?
Trailblazers | Update 3.4
- Thread starter Phil W
- Start date
Can't you answer just one question for me? Why should we fight? Seriously, what's the reasoning for it? How in any way does the current system make us want to fight each other? I think that maybe you should answer that question before you fiddle with mechanics anymore.
Regarding the merits earned changes: do these changes also affect the underlying Control Points (CP) earned / lost for the system or does it just affect your own personally earned merits?
For fun?
That sounds like Python mk2. Maybe (to avoid confusion) we need to call the new ship the "Plipper"?
Sorry, I was wrong, I thought about Panther Clipper MK2That sounds like Python mk2. Maybe (to avoid confusion) we need to call the new ship the "Plipper"?
rootsrat
Volunteer Moderator
For flex!
Since the decay doesn't go below 25%, existing systems are safe unless actively undermined. I think most systems are below the 25% limit anyway. But making the decay unlimited could lead to a domino effect of a collapse for smaller powers that don't have the manpower to constantly maintain everything. And be outright untenable for small player groups trying to maintain a few backwater systems the big groups don't care about.
Problem here is, to acquire new systems you first need to reinforce existing ones to at least Fortified state. That's the hard part for a small group or a single player to do as it was before current update, and decay will make it even harder. A system I would like to eventually acquire is juuust outside of the control radius required from a Fortified system. That means I either have to get an Exploited system to Stronghold or acquire and fortify an additional system in between. I guesstimated it to take approx. 1...2 years for a single person to do; and several months for a group smaller than 10. Add in the time to establish a redundant control chain for resilience to hypothetical undermining.
10...50 player-hours I think is a gross understatement, unless you luck out and have a system that has the highest merits per hour activities available (like mining--and demand for the mined valuable minerals at local stations*)
Now that is a really good point--why undermine a system and draw attention to it when you can sit quietly until it decays to 25% and then attack with overwhelming force? Instead of constant struggle you end up with "submarine warfare" where the adversaries sit very quietly still, and then launch the nuke
I think instead of control decay a more interesting mechanics would be random riots where a certain % of a power's systems go to an unrest state which would make firstly undermining easier, and secondly keep owning powers busy constantly putting out brushfires. That would not punish small player groups, but adds needed dynamics to the stalemate.
*I tried mining the common cheap minerals in a system--the merit/control point payout was not worth it. And the demand for Void Opals, LTD-s, Pt etc was non-existent (something like 10 tons per article).
What its doing is adding a little extra window for attacks to be more potent.
This is why overheads have to come in at some point, because large powers can keep on getting bigger without the size starting to be a penalty (and that attack is so hard over that surface).
Personally I'd want no decay at all, make UM (and murder) extra potent and keep the small bonus on acquisition merits.
Doing a quick check ... just over half of Strongholds seem to be above the threshold for now, about 40% of Fortified are over it, and over half of Exploited are also over it.
So it should affect quite a lot of systems, at least to start with. How much it affects them will be interesting to find out.
Rares works almost everywhere. I think I'd take about 12 hours for my system using Soontill Relics in excessive mode, or four times that if I had to use any vaguely normal rares supply. That's without an ethos bonus, with Ngurii being too close to my system to really work properly, and with a somewhat unoptimised ship for the job (I suspect I could save a jump on the return trip if I actually put Mass Manager on the FSD, for example)Problem here is, to acquire new systems you first need to reinforce existing ones to at least Fortified state. That's the hard part for a small group or a single player to do as it was before current update, and decay will make it even harder. A system I would like to eventually acquire is juuust outside of the control radius required from a Fortified system. That means I either have to get an Exploited system to Stronghold or acquire and fortify an additional system in between. I guesstimated it to take approx. 1...2 years for a single person to do; and several months for a group smaller than 10. Add in the time to establish a redundant control chain for resilience to hypothetical undermining.
10...50 player-hours I think is a gross understatement, unless you luck out and have a system that has the highest merits per hour activities available (like mining--and demand for the mined valuable minerals at local stations*)
(I did however get stunningly lucky with another group from my Power happening to place a Stronghold 28 LY away at a convenient time, so didn't have to start from building that. I wouldn't even have considered trying otherwise even before the decay changes which would likely make it impossible.)
Certainly, unlimited growth shouldn't be possible. But control decay is not, IMO, the correct answer. Easier undermining and harder acquisitions the more systems the power has, plus some sort of random brushfire mechanic to spice things up would be much better. IMO
I stand corrected
My impression that a lot of systems sit below 25% comes from stomping around in the periphery of the Powerplay bubble--over half of the Exploited systems here in my neighbourhood seem to be below 25% and background player activity is very low. Not many Fortified systems around and the few Strongholds seem to be at around 50%It's possible I'm doing it wrong, but when I tried rares with my 96 ton Mandalay, I was underwhelmed. I made more merits with my typical 8 Wreckage Signal session (32 tons of salvage plus combat) for approximately the same playtime. Even bounty hunting at Haz RES seemed more productive...
I dig it. Would reflect the difficulty of having maintaining a large territory and allow small groups to tend their favored patches.Since the decay doesn't go below 25%, existing systems are safe unless actively undermined. I think most systems are below the 25% limit anyway. But making the decay unlimited could lead to a domino effect of a collapse for smaller powers that don't have the manpower to constantly maintain everything. And be outright untenable for small player groups trying to maintain a few backwater systems the big groups don't care about.
Problem here is, to acquire new systems you first need to reinforce existing ones to at least Fortified state. That's the hard part for a small group or a single player to do as it was before current update, and decay will make it even harder. A system I would like to eventually acquire is juuust outside of the control radius required from a Fortified system. That means I either have to get an Exploited system to Stronghold or acquire and fortify an additional system in between. I guesstimated it to take approx. 1...2 years for a single person to do; and several months for a group smaller than 10. Add in the time to establish a redundant control chain for resilience to hypothetical undermining.
10...50 player-hours I think is a gross understatement, unless you luck out and have a system that has the highest merits per hour activities available (like mining--and demand for the mined valuable minerals at local stations*)
Now that is a really good point--why undermine a system and draw attention to it when you can sit quietly until it decays to 25% and then attack with overwhelming force? Instead of constant struggle you end up with "submarine warfare" where the adversaries sit very quietly still, and then launch the nuke
I think instead of control decay a more interesting mechanics would be random riots where a certain % of a power's systems go to an unrest state which would make firstly undermining easier, and secondly keep owning powers busy constantly putting out brushfires. That would not punish small player groups, but adds needed dynamics to the stalemate.
*I tried mining the common cheap minerals in a system--the merit/control point payout was not worth it. And the demand for Void Opals, LTD-s, Pt etc was non-existent (something like 10 tons per article).
It depends on the rare - one that's expensive to start with helps!
For Soontill Relics at 384t per trip I get ~7500 merits and can do 5 trips per hour if I concentrate, so that's just over 9000 control points per hour, which will Acquire a system in 13 hours. (With the allocation being 400t right now, obviously that's optimisable in a few ways. On the other hand, I'm not going to haul a single loop for 13 straight hours so that's not where the optimisation problem is anyway)
At their more conventional 80t allocation I'd get a quarter of that, so 2250 control points per hour. That's still pretty good for a "works everywhere" option, but is definitely in the 50-100 hours range now. Other rares tend to be lower tonnages than that and cheaper base cost, so yes, also not great.
(My system doesn't have a HazRES - caps out at High, which is a lot weaker - and is too far from other Powers for now to get reliably-appearing enemy ships to kill, so 32 tons of salvage minus combat doesn't cut it either. The supporting system isn't set up to do useful laser mining and I don't get 2kCP/hour from core mining either though it comes close. I do have an Anarchy station with holo-ads, so I could maybe also get 2kCP/hour there with heavy abuse of relogging, but that seems even less interesting than hauling rares)
I've learned what it means with my today's first rares delivery ... from 7k last week is now 5,6k (-20%) ... seriously?
Decay functionality alone isn't enough? So now are small groups and solo players punished twice as much? This game changes in a way where playing is less and less fun, and it will have only one possible outcome for me. I've planned play ED this afternoon, but lost interest after just first trading run.EDIT: To be fair, personal merits reduction will not affect system score points. If you do not care about merits, then these % changes are not a concern. Decay still is, this affects system score points directly.
Last edited:
There's nothing preventing small groups and solo players from being informed on what the big pp discord groups are doing, so as a small group or solo player you can still coordinate your efforts.
Last edited:
Or that the UI is informative enough to guide players to places that need help- if you have areas under attack / a bit weak where the UI says 'BIG MERITS HERE' its automatically going to attract.
Obviously you both engage mainly with PP (which is no surprise for Rubberbnuke), so you have no idea how is this new "counting" (for merits and for system control score) confusing for players which had other interests (like BGS for example). For Merits itself I do not care, they lost meaning for me after lvl100.
Unfortunately, I think this update has made undermining even worse. From the CS shift I have seen which emerged from roughly 30-45 minutes of agressively attacking a ground installation on-foot, uploading data to gather the defenders and repeat the attack, I had a notable merit income of roughly a pp level. This is in line with the pre-soontil stuff excluding 1 ton trading (which is a bad mechanic). However, it seems that the bonus is solely to individual merits. So while the activity looks good if you don't want to partake in pp (just grinding merits), actually attacking a power has a worse merit/CS ratio! Undermining has not been made stronger with this change, rather it feels weaker, because my merits count less.
If you really want to make the conflict stronger, improve the merit/CS ratio in undermining!
Last edited: