Michael Brookes
Game Director
It was by design - but we've changed that design so we'll add combat bonds affecting influence as part of the 1.2 release.
Michael
Mercs of Mikunn results after 3 weeks of effort - Also a request for documentation, in game and out
- Thread starter Walt Kerman
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It was by design - but we've changed that design so we'll add combat bonds affecting influence as part of the 1.2 release.
Michael
Sounds great to me! Thanks for chiming in before I made another bug report!
BTW: Here's the data showing proportional increases in the gaining factions. This isn't specific to Civil War, but seems to carry through it. As Dynamic Commodities lost Influence, each faction gained influence by the same proportion. Depending on how much DC lost, the remaining factions would all increase 1.02, or 1.04 on another day. That means the biggest gainer is the faction with the highest initial Influence that made a gain. Originally I plotted this as each faction's proportional gain, but rounding errors with the low Influence factions made it too confusing.
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Clearly a bug. Michael Brookes mentioned there was "an issue" when Dukes went to Civil War with nobody, then immediately went to Cool Down. Personally, I think we should own Gabriel Station, or at least get a Civil War over it.
At this point, we've seen you can start a Civil War by matching Influence levels*. We don't know if that will work with Dukes, as an expanded faction (which seems to have some bugs). If this hold true, we may be able to trigger a Civil War by lowering Dukes Influence to match either Law Party of Dynamic Commodities. We can do this by raising their Influence by trade or doing missions.
One problem is, we don't know if we'll be fighting over a station or not. We've been told Civil Wars are over stations, but logically, the gaining faction would attack the loosing faction's station. Dukes would be the faction losing Influence, but have no station to loose.
The other problem is, we want DC's stations since they're the controlling faction. But in order to get their stations, we'll have to match Influence with DC. At this point, Law Party has the higher Influence levels, so at some point, we'll have to match Law Party, going to Civil War with them, or Law Party will lower to match DC, making them go to Civil War again.
This would be much easier if Dukes got their Civil War.
*on Jan 29th, Dukes went Civil War Critical the same day Law Party went Civil War Pending, but if you look at the Influence level, Dukes and Dynamic Commodities went from a 4.1% difference to 2.9%. Perhaps that was suppose to be the trigger, but Dynamic Commodities didn't go Civil War Critical.
It's possible that a target station for civil wars is irrelevant.
The victor of a civil war may be decided by an influence difference threshold. Once that threshold is reached, the war ends with a victor and they gain a station/outpost from the other faction involved. If the threshold isn't reached within a a certain period of time the war ends with no change in station/outpost ownership.
The current problem with this assumption is the extreme difficultly of altering influence during civil wars, but combat bonds affecting influence in 1.2 sounds very interesting
The victor of a civil war may be decided by an influence difference threshold. Once that threshold is reached, the war ends with a victor and they gain a station/outpost from the other faction involved. If the threshold isn't reached within a a certain period of time the war ends with no change in station/outpost ownership.
The current problem with this assumption is the extreme difficultly of altering influence during civil wars, but combat bonds affecting influence in 1.2 sounds very interesting
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Here is my issue. The Dukes expanded, then became the top faction in the system by far. In what world of logic do two factions need to be equal or close in power to go to civil war with each other for one to take the assets of the other? A faction should have to have influence within a certain range of the other to keep it from being taken over.
Example- to keep control of a station a faction should have to maintain +or - 5 to 10 points of influence above or below a gaining faction for its station to be secure. If a gaining faction has surpassed 5 or 10 points of influence greater than the holder of a station there should be a civil war and the station owning faction should have to try to bring its influence up to within that 5 or 10 point range of the gaining faction or lose its station to the more powerful faction.
Having 20 points above a faction and not going to war to take its holdings seems just plain odd.
Using that Example (one I and pretty much every player I've spoken to find extremely logical) The Dukes being double the power of HR should go to war with HR Dynamics and it should take and act of god (or a crazy amount of players) for HR to raise its influence enough to be in the necessary range keep its station before the civil war ends.
Example- to keep control of a station a faction should have to maintain +or - 5 to 10 points of influence above or below a gaining faction for its station to be secure. If a gaining faction has surpassed 5 or 10 points of influence greater than the holder of a station there should be a civil war and the station owning faction should have to try to bring its influence up to within that 5 or 10 point range of the gaining faction or lose its station to the more powerful faction.
Having 20 points above a faction and not going to war to take its holdings seems just plain odd.
Using that Example (one I and pretty much every player I've spoken to find extremely logical) The Dukes being double the power of HR should go to war with HR Dynamics and it should take and act of god (or a crazy amount of players) for HR to raise its influence enough to be in the necessary range keep its station before the civil war ends.
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I hope it only gives influence that it has taken from the opposing faction, and doesn't just "generate" it. A civil war between two minor factions with 1% influence each shouldn't end with them having 10% and 30% for example. If that was the case, it would be a very bad idea for supporters of any of the larger factions in the system to get involved in the civil war, unlike currently where it doesn't matter.
An example of what I mean is the civil war between the 0% independant anarchy and 0% independant dictatorship in 78 Ursae Majoris I fought in recently. I am an Alliance supporter, and Alioth Independants (Alliance) were giving out missions to fight in the civil war to try to end it, as it was disrupting trade in the system or something. I am trying to help Alioth Independants conquer 78UM. If fighting for the little guys on the order of Alioth Independants took influence away from Alioth Independants, that would make the situation very unintuitive and counterproductive.
It's possible that a target station for civil wars is irrelevant.
The victor of a civil war may be decided by an influence difference threshold. Once that threshold is reached, the war ends with a victor and they gain a station/outpost from the other faction involved. If the threshold isn't reached within a a certain period of time the war ends with no change in station/outpost ownership.
The current problem with this assumption is the extreme difficultly of altering influence during civil wars, but combat bonds affecting influence in 1.2 sounds very interesting
That gives us a bit of a deadline. How long do Civil Wars last maximum? How long did yours?
Nobody disagrees with you. It's an acknowledged bug. I guess the question is, what do we or FD do about it?
These are some notes on recent civil wars with no active participation from our group.
The "Civil War" state was active for the following period of time:
9 days - civil war ended following day.
6 days - civil war ended following day.
8 days - civil war currently still active.
4 days - civil war currently still active.
3 days - civil war currently still active.
We had a civil war that started on 21st of February and ended on March 3rd without result. So thats 14 days.
Cool. Assuming a 14 day maximum to get the 5% increase you think we'd need, that means we need to gain 4.6% more, or about 0.4% per day. First day, we did 0.6%. We'll have to keep up this level of killing DC to do this. Also, 1.2 may drop in the middle of this, changing the equations.
Guys, with the amount of experience you have with the background simulation, could you explain to me why reputation with minor factions is managed on a per system basis?
There was a faction expanding from Achenar to Liabeze, I think, and I had "allied" reputation with them in Achenar and "neutral" reputation in Liabeze. For the longest time I was under the impression that this was a bug. But than Michael more or less said it's working as intended:
I don't get the logic behind this. Is there some game play reason for this design decision? Wouldn't one expect that if a minor faction knows you and holds you in high esteem, it doesn't matter where you encounter them? It also makes the faction system seem more arbitrary and less interesting than it should be. It would be nice if you could build up rep with a faction in one place and they'd remember what you did for them when you meet them somewhere else and than return the favor (by giving you more missions or some reduced price for some products in their stations etc.).
There was a faction expanding from Achenar to Liabeze, I think, and I had "allied" reputation with them in Achenar and "neutral" reputation in Liabeze. For the longest time I was under the impression that this was a bug. But than Michael more or less said it's working as intended:
I don't get the logic behind this. Is there some game play reason for this design decision? Wouldn't one expect that if a minor faction knows you and holds you in high esteem, it doesn't matter where you encounter them? It also makes the faction system seem more arbitrary and less interesting than it should be. It would be nice if you could build up rep with a faction in one place and they'd remember what you did for them when you meet them somewhere else and than return the favor (by giving you more missions or some reduced price for some products in their stations etc.).
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Your own quote refutes your claim. Reputation is per minor faction as michael says in your quote, not per system.
Just remember that same name does not mean same group, then it should all make sense. Except that FD could put a little effort in making sure that faction names were unique, but that's another issue.
[video=youtube;gb_qHP7VaZE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb_qHP7VaZE[/video]
Haha, thanks for the video. The Life of Bryan was already quoted when I opened a thread about the topic:
I do understand that there can be multiple minor factions bearing the same name. But in this very case, there are two minor faction with the name "Patron's Principles" in the same system! (Liabeze). And since they don't have any other distinguishing features - now that I am allied with the Empire I can't even tell them apart by reputation (back when I took the screenshot I at least had different reputations with both factions, so I knew who I was dealing with) - it becomes really confusing.
Say you want to support a specific faction in a system then you couldn't tell which missions to accept because they could be from the wrong "Patron's Principles" in the same system. Even if we can't have unique names for minor factions, I think we should have some way to see which faction is indeed offering a mission so we can decide who we want to support.
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This one is especially nice
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I would ticket that. I've heard other people complaining about the same thing. On a similar vein, I've had missions from the Dukes of Mikunn in HR 7327, then got an alternate from the Dukes of Mikunn in Mikunn, with BOTH delivering to Spassky's in Mikunn. When I get to the bulletin board, I needed to select which Dukes of Mikunn to deliver to.
Anyways, Michael Brookes posted the 1.2 beta 3 changes. These last 2 should make a big impact for us.
Michael Brookes said:
I already ticketed it on 16/01/2015 (ticket number 00000027385 in the old ticket system), but didn't get any reply. Perhaps I should open a corresponding thread in the new bug subforum.
While I admit the automatic state changes for conflicts are nice - especially for your experiments in Mikunn - they sadly don't help to much with the problem of ambiguous faction names. What if both "Patron's Principles" in my case or both "Dukes of Mikunn" in your case have similar system influences around 40%? Than they couldn't even be told apart by their respective states.
IMO even a generic unique identifier in form of a number ("minor faction 3124") would be better then the current muddy system of unidentifiable minor factions.
See the Spassky's Inheritance forum for my guestimate time-line and actions needed:
http://www.elithor.com/index.php?threads/hr-7327-status.61/page-2#post-441
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