More thoughts on taking control in Cerktondhs
And why no mining missions
Just a guess but maybe mining missions are only for Refinery economies?
JTi are down to
36% with Netcoms surging to
40%. Sigh. It seems that minor faction influence levels are very volatile currently judging by the reports on the main Slough thread and elsewhere.
I've been doing a lot more reading on the forums about the background simulation and I have some ideas as to why JTi has not been able to make a bid for power in Cerktondhs thus far.
1. Minor factions can have only one state at a time, i.e. JTi can be in
BOOM or
WAR but
not both at the same time.
2. Minor factions have
the same state in all systems, i.e. JTi
cannot be in
BOOM in Vesper-M4 and
WAR in Cerktondhs at the same time.
3. As a minor faction approaches being in a state it will show up in the "pending states" section of the minor faction details and it will have "critical" suffixed, e.g.
BOOM CRITICAL. Annoyingly there is a long-standing bug that means as soon as you look at the details of a minor faction that does
not have a pending state -- and you don't know which in advance! -- all pending states disappear from the UI until you go out to the main menu and back. This makes monitoring pending states difficult!
4. Once a minor faction finishes being in a state it enters a cool-down period. From what I can see this is 3 days for
WAR but maybe as much as 25 days for
BOOM! I have no evidence but I currently think cool-down periods may block other states and pending states. Confusingly, it also appears that this cool-down is indicated in the pending states UI by the name of the state, i.e. you'll see
BOOM pending after an actual
BOOM. This may explain why JTi has been showing a "pending" state of
BOOM for so long. (Not entirely convinced by this as there's a blue up-arrow against it this morning, although it's widely understood that these arrows are buggy at least for influence levels; we've observed
all minor factions with red down arrows in the past, for instance!)
5.
WAR can only break out when
two minor factions are pending with
WAR CRITICAL. So if the other minor faction you're trying to take over happens to be in
BOOM at the time, you're out of luck! If I'm right and you can now only have one pending state, even pending
BOOM CRITICAL would block. This might explain why we've not got into a situation with Netcoms today even though they've just passed us in influence.
So, what does this all mean?
Well, I think timing our efforts and coordinating between systems is key. Yes, we surged to over 80% but we were still (I think!) cooling down from a past boom. We need to wait until we have no pending states and neither does Cerktondhs Resistance. When we move, we also have to avoid trading and trade missions in both Cerktondhs
and Vesper-M4 to stop us accidentally triggering a boom instead; we should be focusing on combat and bounty instead.
