Is that true when one has taken a mission though? Because once you hand in the mission, that is 'outside' the CZ (indeed, you could have killed them folks anywhere). I think if its not purely CZ Bond action, then the above may not be true...
A Guide to Minor Factions and the Background Sim
- Thread starter Walt Kerman
- Start date
Is that true when one has taken a mission though? Because once you hand in the mission, that is 'outside' the CZ (indeed, you could have killed them folks anywhere). I think if its not purely CZ Bond action, then the above may not be true...
I'd go along with this!
My theory is the influence is swapped for killing an opposing ship in the combat zone (i.e. the influence loss for actually having a ship of the minor faction killed) - controlled by the bucket for the civil war, but where you hand the combat bonds in, it can leak influence to the station controlling faction, thus affecting at least one other minor faction in the system. I also believe the influence from doing the combat mission comes from the normal influence calculator for missions.
I would love to prove my wild speculations above, but alas I reset and went iron man mode when 2.1 hit (ok starting iron man mode at the time of the AI update was not my most sensible of decisions). One day I will have a ship capable of handling a conflict zone with me driving, alas a 9MCr Cobra is probably not going to hack it in today's combat zones.
Simon
My theory is the influence is swapped for killing an opposing ship in the combat zone (i.e. the influence loss for actually having a ship of the minor faction killed) - controlled by the bucket for the civil war, but where you hand the combat bonds in, it can leak influence to the station controlling faction, thus affecting at least one other minor faction in the system. I also believe the influence from doing the combat mission comes from the normal influence calculator for missions.
I would love to prove my wild speculations above, but alas I reset and went iron man mode when 2.1 hit (ok starting iron man mode at the time of the AI update was not my most sensible of decisions). One day I will have a ship capable of handling a conflict zone with me driving, alas a 9MCr Cobra is probably not going to hack it in today's combat zones.
Simon
Sorry - I should have been clearer. Cashing combat bonds affects your relationship positively with the faction on whose behalf you
I believe that if you don't cash the bonds, your relationship won't change. I may be wrong, of course.
You're right. Confusion can arise as there are three independent systems involved that are all affected by the player's actions:
1 The personal Reputation system, where a commander can be somewhere on a scale from Hostile to Allied with each faction in the galaxy. This reputation with a faction is constant wherever the faction is found.
- Reputation with a system owner is increased by general trade or selling exploration data, and with all factions by completing missions and killing enemies on a faction's Wanted list.
- It is lost by allowing a mission to fail or by killing a faction's ships anywhere except in a CZ (as far as is known, hence the100thmonkey's proviso).
2 The factional Influence system, where a limited number of points is shared between the factions in a system.
Simply put, this point swapping occurs when a mission is completed, exploration data sold, combat bonds or bounty vouchers are redeemed, etc. (Actually, all of these actions have a positive or negative numerical weighting with different values for different actions. The values are set against a total in a pool that is zeroed daily. At the end of each tick the value left in the pool, along with other factors, is used in the calculations for the point swapping that occurs with the daily tick.)
3 The personal Prowess system, where:
- your Combat rating is adjusted each time you kill another pilot - no need to report anything
- your Trade rating is adjusted each time you successfully complete a trade or a fetch/carry mission
- your Explorer rating is adjusted each time you sell exploration data.
(There is, apparently, another Prowess rating, but I don't know anything about it.)
Sorry, a lot of tedious repetition of what's already somewhere in the thread and will be well know by most readers, but I think it helps to collate the information every now and then.
- patch notes of 2.1. added (unknown) new conditions adding to outbreak
- my own (non-tested) observations let me track back outbreak to trade in waste, especially biowaste. the minor factions i had a look at are in systems, where under the exported commdodities from stations is biowaste. economies like colony (surface), tourism, service and terraforming mostly have only biowaste to export. e.g. i think the state of minor factions without player activity (or with player activity adding to it) is affected by the economy of systems they are present at.
- the station, where you cash in combat bonds doesn't matter. it only raises influence of the faction you cash them in
- i think, that shipkills in CZ do affect reputation. not sure about influence, though. cashing in bonds definetly affects reputation positively. e.g. you can get cordial/friendly/allied by cashin in combat bonds.
dynamicbob
Banned
Have the devs made any references to 2.2 potential changes or additions to the bgs.
there was a write up from lavecom somewhere. lockdown will get harder, maybe adjusted in its effects, and retreat will happen less often.
Deleted member 38366
D
I'd understand that (and had a similar theory) - but how would one "Trade" a Faction into Outbreak that doesn't own any Station nor Outpost anywhere ?!
I guess it's a BlackBox V2.1 BGS thing then, whatever causes it...
from a BGS-"manipulating" perspective there shouldn't be NPC from non-controlling minor factions trading in stations/systems at all ... but there are, plenty, spawning.
now, we know from various sources, that without players visiting a system no NPCs are spawn... we also know that NPC activity doesn't influence a system. but we also do know, that the BGS is moving influence and states in a system without players influence, very slowly, much more stabile then with player influence, but still a changing background. i did monitor some systems without player activity, beside myself docking doing nothing.
i think, there is something like a wator-simulation running in the background (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa-Tor). and that simulation got new conditions which lead to outbreak.
Something's going on. Why would a single faction in a system suddenly go into famine? We experiences a Bust last week for no reason that I could see. A Wat-or simulation would be a very sophisticated feature of the Elite universe - more likely that changes are introduced via RNG, given FD's history. And we all know what happens when your number's up.
Oh, while we are at it - please anyone help explain this:
"Bust - Trade double reduction of boom but no influence"
Double reduction of what? There is no boom anywhere, that's why there is a bust. Or is that a typo and it should read "double reduction of bust" and I am the only one to ever notice it?
"Bust - Trade double reduction of boom but no influence"
Double reduction of what? There is no boom anywhere, that's why there is a bust. Or is that a typo and it should read "double reduction of bust" and I am the only one to ever notice it?
The Wa-Tor simulation requires an RNG!
It would be awesome if FD had introduced something like this. However, I doubt it for two reasons:
1. If they had, they would have told us - it would be something to be proud of, and to my knowledge the first time that truly emergent gameplay was actually coded into a consumer title.
2. Small drifts have been recorded since players started tracking influence and states in systems.
Alternatively, perhaps the devs included some iterative code to make the bubble seem more "alive," and after an indeterminable number of iterations (ticks), the tiny differences combine to produce states seemingly ex nihilo. The butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon really does lead to twisters in Texas. In other words, the devs introduced emergent behaviour into the BGS unintentionally (which is potentially more awesome.)
Unless your traffic is zero, then someone is doing something.
Here's and experiment....find a small, system that will be easy to influence...that has no traffic. Then just watch the numbers and see if there is any movment. There shouldn't be...since the system will have no changes.
Now do the same thing and change something...and then sit back and watch.
What you should see is that the change continues onwards, until the system returns to its original resting state...the larger the disruption the longer it takes to get back to the original state.
This SHOULD be how the game works, as per the 60,000 player hour video...<shrug>
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I like this idea...a system of simple things that bring about unexpected results...because of small coding errors...
Deleted member 38366
D
After today's tick, I'm seeing even more Factions in Outbreak now, some in nearby Systems entered Famine state (this System had zero Influence movements for a full month, noone ever goes there).
IMHO something is definitely up.
Question being remains, if that might be an unintended V2.1 BGS Bug - or (worst-case) "working as intended".
IMHO something is definitely up.
Question being remains, if that might be an unintended V2.1 BGS Bug - or (worst-case) "working as intended".
True, but within a modest set of rules. I suspect the FD version is just a table of potential events, each triggered if a single RNG throw produces a number within a narrow range. Does it need to be more complex?
Love the idea. I would have expected that if FD had limited ED to the BGS - a sophisticated version of Civilization - a single facet with a lot of depth and subtlety.
With so many different facets, increased complexity introduces the possibility of contamination as the facets communicate. Every time you make a change you risk the chance of a minor change adversely affecting the behaviour of another facet if you don't have iron-clad controls over each routine. Unexpected behaviours with difficult-to-identify sources could be rampant - some bugs would never be tracked back to source. You would lose control of the software.
Who would release code like that?
Of course, I'm not being entirely serious here.
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Since the end of the Influence drift towards the average, I can't say I've seen anything like this except for the Commodities markets. We have systems nobody has been in for over a month and the figures are unchanged, remaining as they were following the last activity.
I quite enjoyed the Influence decay: it meant a lot of work, but it hinted that there was life going on even if you couldn't observe it directly.
And at least it told you that the tick had occurred.
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dynamicbob
Banned
i continue to think we should keep encouraging players to interact with "empty colonies" just to let the devs know there is room for additional expansion
from Falconfly "Since about ~2 weeks, I'm seeing seemingly random Factions enter Outbreak State.
- some of them in ultra-remote Systems
- some of them not owning any Assets within a System
- no discernable pattern exists (Faction types affected seem random)
- Player activity seems very unlikely (neither Traffic nor Crime reports points to it)
- affected Factions Influence varies greatly (I don't deem a persistent low Influence a factor, other Perma-1% Factions I know of never suffered from Outbreak in the past)"
You might have stumbled onto the start of the end....
- some of them in ultra-remote Systems
- some of them not owning any Assets within a System
- no discernable pattern exists (Faction types affected seem random)
- Player activity seems very unlikely (neither Traffic nor Crime reports points to it)
- affected Factions Influence varies greatly (I don't deem a persistent low Influence a factor, other Perma-1% Factions I know of never suffered from Outbreak in the past)"
Thargoid plague. Did we not do that to them last time?
You might have stumbled onto the start of the end....
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FD did say they were going to make some materials easier to find.