A Guide to Minor Factions and the Background Sim

[Szyslak22]

Great testing Jmanis. Appreciate you sharing the results.

Test 5: (Buy 128t of a high supply good 1t at a time from Faction A) was a complete writeoff, due to some effects which (might not be new to others but) were new to me.
The system I did this test in has a 4m population and six factions in it. During the tick, the faction with the lowest influence (a foreign faction i.e originates in a different system) disappeared, and was replaced by a new faction which was in expansion. Interestingly enough, the faction that disappeared appeared in one of my test systems (I noticed as there was no record of their influence level before the tick) and they are not in an expansion state.

Is that a previously observed behaviour? An expanding faction pushing the weakest faction into another system? And maybe it doesn't work if the faction isn't foreign (as i've been trying for ages to see if i can somehow get rid of an anarchy faction from my main system, but it's domestic)

Yes, this is a known behavior when expanding into a system that already has 5 factions, and FD has confirmed it's working as intended. Completely ridiculous from an in-game perspective, but working as intended. Native faction or foreign faction doesn't matter.

 

[goemon]

Quick question about how you're buying items one at a time. Are you staying in the commodities screen and just selecting an item, incrementing to one and clicking buy or are you dropping all the way back to the systems services screen and then back to the trade screen.

I doubt it makes a difference but I'm curious from a data point perspective. I do wish they'd treat influence gains on a per/unit sold basis rather than a per/transaction basis so that selling 100T of X one at a time or all at once has exactly the same impact.

if you have a really crappy data connection like i have it sometimes, you can see a "transaction authentication" (or similar)-message. i assume, that going back to the systems service screen makes no difference; mode switching might have, though...

concerning the design - i could imagine that they weigh all, number of single transaction, and value, and supply/demand. basically this wouldn't be a bad idea - a lot of "traffic" stimulating economy. markets and bars flourish, where a lot of people are doing their small scale business. but if you could game it like that, it wouldn't be too clever (on the other hand, only BGS people will be crazy enough to unload a cutter one item per time).

 

[Abil Midena]

OK, so my experiment...snip)

Thanks for testing and posting details of the results.

For test 1, it would be interesting to find out if selling anything for a loss would have the same effect. Trading 2t at a time is key, but I'm still not sure if selling biowaste is key, or is selling at a loss, or is selling something not on the commodity board the other key.

Test 2 and 3 confirms 1t per trade approach.

Population is still a little fuzzy for me as well. I still can't tell what the BGS thinks of as low pop.

 

[Jmanis]

*snip*

 

[Szyslak22]

Good to know, thanks. In this case it was six systems, so interesting...

I should have said "at least 5 factions". If a faction expands into a system where 5 or more factions are already present (native or not), one of them will get displaced to the system where the expansion came from. After badgering support about this for a while, they finally confirmed it was working as intended. I suspect they only move the faction instead of deleting it, because they don't want to leave open bounties, missions, bonds, etc. for the faction which could cause client side issues.

I did forget to mention, Test 5 (Buying 1t of a high supply item) was a write-off because as well as the expansion thing, the faction I bought from *lost* 6% influence. I didn't expect that in the slightest. Updated to reflect that.

This is also normal for the expansion scenario. The new faction comes in with around 8.2% - 9.1% influence, stealing most of it from the highest influence faction.

 

[Jmanis]

This is also normal for the expansion scenario. The new faction comes in with around 8.2% - 9.1% influence, stealing most of it from the highest influence faction.

Awesome, thanks. I'll write that test off and retry again today.

 

[A-Train Amick]

That catches a lot of people out who think its the same 5% as cw and election.

Its been mentioned a few times in the thread but probably gets lost in all the posts.

Actually I was under the impression it was 10% for a War (but knew it was 5% for CW and Election...).

 

[dynamicbob]

Actually I was under the impression it was 10% for a War (but knew it was 5% for CW and Election...).

thats still a bit fuzzy

 

[jimbeau1571]

Do wars/civil wars in your system, that you control, have any bearing on the system, even when they don't involve your faction?

 

[Jmanis]

Ungh. Buying experiment got the shaft again today by yet another bump expansion.

BTW, it's worth noting that the faction which got bumped held planetary outposts. Ownership of those have been dispersed amongst the remaining factions, but not the new faction.

 

[Belthize]

content removed by me.

 

[Jmanis]

*snip*

 

[jimbeau1571]

So things have been going well with my faction and systems. Now expanded twice, and I believed I had a firm grip on where the next expansions would be to give the information in this thread. I have a firm idea of where I want to expand to. Yes I have a specific system I want to get to.

And I had a plan. My next expansion form one system, given the rules of 30 Ly, would be an outpost system, and after 2 expansions form there I would have expanded into all the systems with under 5 factions present from here at 30ly or less. And that would leave 3 systems under 30ly with 5 or more to expand into, including my target system.

But whats this? FD say look out to 50Ly!!!! Oh O.

So now I have looked out to 50Ly from the point I need to, and now have 9 under 50ly <5 factions, and a further 17 faction under 50ly >4 factions.
So my question is,

Is the 30Ly rule now dead? or once 30ly is done then it goes to 50 LY? How the hell do you get into 5 or more faction systems in this case?

 

[Belthize]

Content removed by me.

 

[Abil Midena]

Quoting portions of my previous reply for context.

...snip...

I'm inclined to file a bug report unless somebody with more name recognition wants to do it.

I don't think it's a bug. It's how they have the system set up to take trade into account for the BGS.

You can still file a bug report, but the change will likely be making the total tonnage be taken into account, not how many trades take place. I don't know how hard that will be for FD to change, or when it will come.

 

[Belthize]

I've deleted the content of my previous posts.

After some consideration and testing I personally view this as an exploit not a bug so I've reported it as such. I'm sure others will disagree with that characterization which is fine but since I view it as an exploit I have to remove the text describing it.

 

[Jmanis]

*snip*

 

[Belthize]

Care to link where you reported it as an exploit?

Since it appeared more as an exploit than a bug to me I used the 'exploit' reporting feature in the support portion of the game client rather than posting in the bugs section.

 

[Jmanis]

*snip*

 

[Roybe]

So that means it's behaving like the mechanic should, suggesting it's the correct behaviour.

I might go ahead and bug report this anyway. Your use of the word "exploit" here is interesting, since it's usually associated with using a mechanic in an unintended way to gain an unreasonable advantage (for example, the "stolen goods" mission exploit, if you're familiar with that?)

You seem to be in agreeance that the effect of 1t sales is the "correct" behaviour, so that makes "typical" trades bugged, rather than 1t sales an exploit. But eh, semantics.

Not taking a side...but the idea of an exploit here is that 700 tons of an item sold in bulk<>700 tons of items sold individually....furthermore the amount of reward for such is way out of line with the expected result....thus 'exploitive'.