BGS: Effects of killing Skimmers on influence

[Greno Zee]

Hi all!
I remember Dav mentioning in one of the video streams that killing skimmers is bad for the owning faction. I assume the only bad in Elite is loss of influence.
Now we are trying to prepare a system for our own expansion but to achieve that we need to get someone to retreat, since there are 8 factions already. First we tried to trade and do missions for all other factions but that helped only by 0,3% per tick. So we though we'd move to to skimmer killing.
We killed dozens of wanted skimmers of a faction that had less then 4% influence. Now the tick occurred and they gained almost 2%.
Can anyone please shed some light onto this? Thanks in advance!

 

[Drelthar]

Probable that other things happened to counter act your efforts.

Seems to me that killing skimmers most likely works in the exact same way as killing ships, as, previously, they worked like that regarding massacre missions, and they just removed them, because they couldn't actually make it distinguish between the two.

they are just "Faction objects"

By the way, this is a guess based on various bits and bobs of knowledge there's no way I could find the source for, so, take it as you wish.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Hi all!
I remember Dav mentioning in one of the video streams that killing skimmers is bed for the owning faction. I assume the only bed in Elite is loss of influence.
Now we are trying to prepare a system for our own expansion but to achieve that we need to get someone to retreat, since there are 8 factions already. First we tried to trade and do missions for all other factions but that helped only by 0,3% per tick. So we though we'd move to to skimmer killing.
We killed dozens of wanted skimmers of a faction that had less then 4% influence. Now the tick occurred and they gained almost 2%.
Can anyone please shed some light onto this? Thanks in advance!

You need to get two factions to retreat!

 

[Greno Zee]

My bad, there are 7 factions actually.
Still, what I'm getting from the reply of Novo Mundus, this should work. Why doesn't it?

 

[Apos]

Skimmer missions, not just skimmers.

This has been practically mitigated due to the missions of the same type cap.

However if you want to hurt the faction in similar fashion, you should be attacking their settlements and earning a bounty on them. Not destroying "wanted" skimmers.

You'll have to get your hands dirty.

 

[the100thmonkey]

My bad, there are 7 factions actually.
Still, what I'm getting from the reply of Novo Mundus, this should work. Why doesn't it?

Not really sure, tbh. Are you shooting wanted skimmers and cashing the bounties at a station where that faction is present? Is the faction a superpower-aligned faction with bounties cashed at a station that's also aligned to the same superpower?

 

[Schlack]

some patches ago I tested by murdering over 100 skimmers in one tick to zero effect. Looks like your recent experience shows that still yo be the case.

 

[Drelthar]

some patches ago I tested by murdering over 100 skimmers in one tick to zero effect. Looks like your recent experience shows that still yo be the case.

100 might do nothing, if others also killed hundreds of ships on opposing sides, completed missions on opposing sides, etc, to balance it out though, so it doesn't really prove much unless you have full data of everything that happened!

 

[Schlack]

100 might do nothing, if others also killed hundreds of ships on opposing sides, completed missions on opposing sides, etc, to balance it out though, so it doesn't really prove much unless you have full data of everything that happened!

I should have been clearer. AEDC does BGS work for a living and we take our testing seriously . It was a clean test in a low pop system, with no other activity, traffic or faction state that might have effected results. This was without taking any missions and was purely based on murdering the little blighters at a settlement. 100 should have been plenty to see an effect unless its so small as to be meaningless.

I'm therefore reasonably confident that murdering skimmers has zero influence effect .... or at least had at that time, it was some patches ago 2.0, 2.1 maybe?. Haven't tested again since though.

 

[duckofdeath]

One way to get a faction down to 0% fairly quickly is to "help them" trigger a war with another faction in the system, if there is a suitable "incompatible" faction there.
In a war you can easily push factions down to 0%. Though, that's only half the job. After that, you need to make sure they stay below 2.5% for about a whole week. That part usually fails. Because of some random bypassing CMDR picking up a handful of missions for them.

 

[CMDR Endincite]

One way to get a faction down to 0% fairly quickly is to "help them" trigger a war with another faction in the system, if there is a suitable "incompatible" faction there.
In a war you can easily push factions down to 0%. Though, that's only half the job. After that, you need to make sure they stay below 2.5% for about a whole week. That part usually fails. Because of some random bypassing CMDR picking up a handful of missions for them.

Actually only the last day matters.
I've had a faction enter retreat, go up 20%, and then "successfully" retreat because I got them back down below 2.5% on the fifth day.
Mind you "last day" can be altered if the state is overridden by a conflict. Provided you're below 2.5% at the tick the state is overidden, the retreat will still go through - as opposed to expansions, which seem to always succeed when overridden, even with influence tanked.

As for the OP: we ran a test in no traffic and killing ordinary skimmers outside of missions had considerable effect. Perhaps not as much as murder, but right up there.

117k pop. No other traffic reported during test period.
Faction state: None
9 skimmers killed.
Starting influence: 31.7
Final influence: 23.7

 

[FrogsFriend]

...killing ordinary skimmers outside of missions had considerable effect. ...

By ordinary do you mean 'not wanted', or doesn't it matter?

 

[Ryan Murdoc]

There have been reports that 2.5% is the initial threshold to trigger a Retreat state, but you have to be above 5.0% on the 5th day to avoid to be expelled.

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

One way to get a faction down to 0% fairly quickly is to "help them" trigger a war with another faction in the system, if there is a suitable "incompatible" faction there.

I agree with this. A war is the easiest way to get a faction to retreat. but to get two factions into war, their influence need to be above 7% to start with.

Also, to state the obvious, the faction you want to retreat can't be native to the system.

 

[Greno Zee]

Thanks for all the reactions!
I have to concur with Schlack, ad-hoc killing of wanted skimmers seems to have 0 effect on the owning faction's influence.
Alse, thanks for all the advices, we're in business

 

[irongut]

I'm therefore reasonably confident that murdering skimmers has zero influence effect

The op didn't murder any skimmers, he assasinated wanted skimmers. Try again with clean skimmers.

 

[Patau82]

war is a good way to go, used it a few times to capture stations in systems we control but didn't own yet
we push non native faction in to conflict with station owner win the war on 3rd day and drive them down to 1% on the 4th

 

[CMDR Endincite]

By ordinary do you mean 'not wanted', or doesn't it matter?

Sorry for the incredibly late response; kinda forgot this thread.
I've never seen a wanted skimmer. Didn't know there was such a thing. These were not wanted.
(I don't do a lot of surface...anything. This test was requested)

 

[Schlack]

Sorry for the incredibly late response; kinda forgot this thread.
I've never seen a wanted skimmer. Didn't know there was such a thing. These were not wanted.
(I don't do a lot of surface...anything. This test was requested)

Skimmers generated at surface POIs are usually wanted.

The op didn't murder any skimmers, he assasinated wanted skimmers. Try again with clean skimmers.

I haven't tested killing wanted skimmers, but i suspect the Inf effect would be very small, if any at all. They do of course generate bounties. Not sure if the BGS treats them any different to ship bounties. I doubt it.