BGS changes: Learnings/Issues/comments

Jane Turner

Volunteer Moderator
I will keep this 1st post updated

Information
Positive
  • The faction status tells you where elections and wars are anywhere with the faction and what assets are at risk.
  • missions no longer say they give influence when (due to faction state) they don't /missions state whether they help in conflict and are conflict themed. (Whether they actually affect the conflict is still unknown. )

Negative
  • The information is frequently missing
  • display of information is very inconsistent even when it works. There are space limitations, certainly, in places, but e.g. happiness and conflict details could be on the system map, for example
  • Due to the influence lock it is no longer possible to determine if an action in conflict has been successful without a squadron view or a system visit


Conflicts
Positive
  • The new CZ are more involving
  • CZ factions are identifiable before dropping in.
  • When you finish a wave in a CZ, you can now release the limpets and suck up some goodies in peace.
Negative
  • Wars and elections still happen where there are no assets - (as currently), but they are no longer avoidable by strategic state management.
  • But zero-asset conflicts in unwanted systems no longer harm faction in systems it cares about (this will significantly help stability in Colonia, though this is an unusual region)
  • economic states no longer being mostly blocked by others allows greater variation in markets and outfitting production
  • Intended wars take 3 days longer
  • Influence gain is hidden until the conflict state is over making fine control hard/impossible This is incorrect - a win is +4% and a loss-4% regardless of starting influence
  • As soon as conficts trigger with 2 or more factions that hold the majority of influence there is no way to move the non-conflict factions significantly for 10 days - this produces gridlock.

Ethos/flavour
Positive
  • the local news articles have a bit mentioning the success of the union / corporation / regime / coalition which tells you the ethos of the faction.


There are now many cases suggesting that BGS actions are being attributed to the wrong faction in some cases
 
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Straight from patch notes:


  • Factions can now be in multiple states within each system that they are present
  • Economic and Security status added
  • War, Civil War and Election states are now a 7 day conflict, where players engage in activities (such as winning conflict zones in War and Civil War states) and attempt to beat their opponents
  • Added a new 'Happiness' level for each faction, that is a combination of various states and influence. Happiness also plays into the Expansion state
  • Civil Liberty state added (part of the Security Status)
  • Added more information to the status tab in the right hand cockpit panel to help players manage/support factions
 
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/452947-Beyond-Chapter-Four-Beta-1-Known-Issues

Background Simulation

Faction outbreak states aren't spawning often enough.
Some Conflict Zones and Installations close to very small moons or near planets with more than one ring might not have the correct locations.
Faction expansion states aren't always following faction happiness.


Scenarios

Conflict Zones - Objectives (such as correspondents) may still appear in between rounds.
Conflict Zones - Capital ships will not appear in high intensity zones for now.
 

Jane Turner

Volunteer Moderator
My guess (for testing is that it is a simple difference between the positive and negative buckets we already have)

These figures were given by FD. They were near enough impossible to test while the buckets were hidden
  • Boom: trade (1) Exploration (1) piracy(-1)
  • Bust: trade (-1) Exploration (-1) piracy (1)
  • Civil: Unrest: Trade (-2) Bounties (-1) Murder (1) Fines (2) Combat Bond (-2)
  • Famine: Food trade (-2) Exploration (-1)
  • Outbreak: Medicine Trade (-2) Exploration (-1)
  • Lockdown: Black Market (1) bounties (-1) murder (1)
 
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Minor bonus feature: the local news articles have a bit mentioning the success of the union / corporation / regime / coalition which tells you the ethos of the faction.
 

Jane Turner

Volunteer Moderator
+ The faction status tells you where elections and wars are anywhere with the faction and what assets are at risk. That saves a click per conflict

- Wars and elections still happen where there are no assets - so as now, but they are no longer avoidable by strategic state management
- In system blocking wars are shorter making it harder to pass unwanted wars


-- You can no longer access system influence data remotely with just a honk scan (that's 300+ nav beacons for me to scan)


- Intended wars take 3 days more to complete - no more ending them on the 3rd


- - Out of system blocking states no longer work - making most state management strategic play impossible - affecting retreats and many parts of strategic game play
 
being destroyed during a CZ reset your ongoing cz objectives.
I would say they are link to Cz instance you have jump in.
 
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So, credit rewards aside coz I don't care if that sticks or not... massacre missions are much more doable now.

From my perspective, I wonder if this will give rise to player factions supporting Anarchy factions in non-occupied systems for a semi-reliable way to keep other factions down.

My chain of logic is this:
- For non-criminal-ethos factions in non-war states, almost all massacre missions target criminal factions only, with spec ops missions occasionally giving missions to massacre an unknown target faction's civilians.
- By contrast, criminal ethos factions regularly offer massacre missions for many different named target factions which have non-criminal ethos.

Massacre missions have, in my opinion, generally been a bad idea for BGS effects due to the difficulty completing them compared to other activities. Now that mission USS are instantly visible within 1,000 Ls they are not only viable, but the ability to target semi-specific factions via support for anarchy factions makes them quite desirable as a BGS activity.
 
Who thought that??? This destroys the usefulness of edsm
EDSM will be fine - the journal entry for the FSD jump still has the full faction data in whether you scan or not.

Which makes it very odd if it's not showing up without scanning the system - it looked fine for me when I tried it.
 

Jane Turner

Volunteer Moderator
Who thought that??? This destroys the usefulness of edsm


I would expect EDSM to update if you have a tracker on - you just can't check in game any more - ie you have to visit the system or rely one someone else with a tracker on to visit the system, until you have a full scan of the system.


This is systems visited previously and honked - ie with unexplored bodies. I cannot access the system map remotely

An issue for us since we are deliberately off grid after we picked up a BGS troll
 
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I would expect EDSM to update if you have a tracker on - you just can't check in game any more - ie you have to visit the system or rely one someone else with a tracker on to visit the system.

Can you give an example system? I can check out plenty without having to physically go there. And don't forget, Squadrons will allow you to track the systems your squadron is affiliated with.
 
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