Hoping people can look over my maths and tell me if I'm right or wrong...
The theory of influence changes as I understand it is something like this.
- A system has a certain number of "points" in it's bucket, spread proportionally amongst factions.
- Positive actions add points to those factions buckets.
- At the tick, the points are tallied, normalised to the system norm, and then influences calculated based off this.
So lets assume an easy maths scenario where 1% = 1 point.
You've got 5 factions with influence:
2% (=2 points), 18% (=18 points), 20% (=20 points), 25% (=25 points), 35% (=35 points)
Total: 100% (100 points)
Now, lets say someone does 1 "point" for each faction, e.g lets say someone does 1 courier mission for each faction for inf+.
We get :
3, 19, 21, 26, 36 (total 105); and normalising to influence %s we get:
2.9%, 18.1%, 20% (exactly), 24.8%, 34.3% =~ 100% (not exactly, but read on)
This is why we have things like:
- Diminishing returns (equal effort put in, but the biggest faction "lost" and the smallest faction "won")
- The old "influence decay" concept which is a byproduct of the resultant total not quite being 100%
- etc.
None of this is new... but I just wanted to get some verification that my maths and understanding is right, especially regarding the equal effort causing inequal results.