Rev-Enging Mission Boards

[Jmanis]

I had a much longer, more academic post in mind for this, but it tired me out and just kinda made me sad about the state of the game, so we'll do it like this instead.

For the last few months I've been looking into how missions spawn... specifically what makes things like Robigo, Sothis etc. tick, and how to find them. I've had this interest ever since I had a few sothis-likes crop up in my own backyard, but also because there's peculiar oddities that go on with some other systems which aren't immediately attributable to anything in particular, which I'd love to get to the bottom of.

Optimising profit from missions means optimising stacking, means minimising the amount of random that the boards can work with, to create an as-homogenous-as-possible board. That's how places like Robigo work; You only get short-range tourism missions to Sothis Atmopsherics, because it's all the system knows how to do. It's pretty screwy, but with FD's yolobinfire approach to the economy, whatever goes I guess.

Bottom Line: What's the conditions for certain mission types to spawn, and how you'd use that information to optimise location for that mission type?

Of note, the rules apply, except when they don't, and this most often happens around the tick. Strange things happen around then; one time in Sothis I got a small set of missions to deliver goods 130Ly away. That almost never happens, and sure enough a couple board ticks (every 10m) later, they'd all gone.

I'll kick off with a few I'm familiar with.

Lawful Assassination (Pirate Lord etc.) and Lawful Massacres (Pirates, Deserters, Plague Ships etc)
Targets any Anarchy faction within 10Ly of the location of the board, excluding the system you're in.
You can optimise this by ensuring that there's only one such faction within that 10Ly bubble, so all missions target that faction. If you want to get rid of these missions, make sure there's no Anarchy factions within 10Ly

Illegal Salvage
Targets any populated system within 10Ly. Read on a bit more though

Legal (space) Salvage
Targets any populated system within 20Ly. Strangely, you'll usually get lots of one, but not the other, at varying times. There's a target faction requirement for the Illegal salvage, though it's not clear exactly what this is, as I've seen both Anarchy and Lawful factions affected. There's no major optimisations here, but if all other mission types can't generate, these are pretty reliable.

Installation Surface Scan/Powerplant Destruction
Targets any populated system within 20LY which has a +/++/+++ facility not owned by this faction. Pretty straightforward... if you want to optimise for the same target, make sure there's just one valid target installation. Note: There does seem to be some conditions which make certain facilities much rarer for being the target, but I've yet to put my finger on it.

Deliveries
Deliveries are quite complex, but also simple. Targets any populated system and any faction within 20Ly, using goods which are available in the current station, which are imports of that neighbouring system. By "Import" I don't mean it can be sold for profit, rather, it's an import listed on the galaxy map (i.e the multicoloured arrows). Easiest way to optimise this is to ensure there's only one export destination from your current system, preferably to a target with only one potential target station. Ideally you do this from an Extraction, HT or Refinery economy so you get the high value goods (Palladium, Insulating Membrane, Superconductors or most HT goods) which pay out the biggest fees, counterintuitively (delivery fees would normally charge on volume delivered, not value of goods).

Some exceptions:

• States can mess with this and create temporary opportunities (or ruin the status quo)
• Commodities sometimes export to a system where the cargo is in supply rather than demand, which is odd, but w/e.
• As mentioned before, weird things like the Sothis 140LY at-the-tick missions can happen, but this feels like a bug more than anything, quite similar to the old "No Wartime Massacre Missions" bug where they'd rarely spawn at the tick.

Source
Counterintuitively, source missions look for demand goods which are available within a certain LY range (I thought it was 20, but have evidence of potentially out to 50Ly)... counter-intuitively
because you'd think the source missions would be for goods not readily available, but I digress. This one can be hard to optimise, but there's certain areas of space where there's only one or two potential candidates. In ideal circumstances, these are also the targets of deliveries, so you can get back-and-forth options.

Scratch that. Source missions are complex, and I don't have a thorough understanding yet.

Urgent Kill Order
These are quirky and can trip you up. They look for a +/++/+++ installation within 20Ly, but then pick a random populated system within 20Ly from there for the target. You wouldn't really optimise for these unless you were in a very unique situation, as they're a two-step mission and therefore take a lot longer than most missions (and you'll only get stacked scans one at a time via logout/re-instance)

Courier
20 Ly range, any target system/faction, unless you're in a tourism system, then they might go out to Colonia.

I'll leave it there for now, because life, but there's others I'm aware of. An odditiy I'll raise right now is Hijack missions. These are common for Elections (to get Diplo Bags/Political prisoners) but are quite rare otherwise. That said, I'm aware of one system near my hangout where I can reliably get them even in None states (for Hostages).... there's no real feature distinguishing that system from others near it, so I can't work out why that particular system gets them more than anywhere else.

Any insights on that, or other conditions for missions, chuck em here.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

In the Colonia region, Courier and Delivery missions, as well as the local targets, can also target any system within 11 LY of Colonia itself (and often do this preferentially to local targeting). I suspect there's a medium-range/long-range template for those as well, which possibly isn't quite working right in the bubble, or possibly the greater system density means that the short-range ones are more viable and therefore more common in the bubble.

Mining and Donation missions seem to be able to show up everywhere, so end up as a common fallback. However, not a universal one as the really isolated deep space stations don't seem to get them.

Mission offer variety seems to have been improved a bit recently, at least out in Colonia.

Tourism systems in Colonia are supposed to be able to generate return courier/passenger missions to the bubble, but for no obvious reason only seem to do this first thing after the weekly server reset.

 

[Factabulous]

Interesting - I hadn't realised there was a 10 Ly range for some missions - I'd been working on 20, but mainly because I never looked closely

Did a tour of the 'distant pairs', as I call them, this weekend (systems with only one other populated systems within 20 Ly - Sothis/Ceos being the most famous). Mostly they have zero missions, or just donations, and none have the clarity of tourist missions that Ceos has. I guess tourist missions are picking beacons within a range, and Ceos only has the one (I'm planning to check that at some point).

One interesting pair is Aditi / Synuefe RT-R c20-7- Aditi spawns a lot of base assault / base scans - but only has 2 targets (one in each of the pair) - so they are easy to stack. I need to check back on if there are other possible targets that are being ignored now

Source
Counterintuitively, source missions look for demand goods which are available within a certain LY range (I thought it was 20, but have evidence of potentially out to 50Ly)... counter-intuitively

Hmm - Pretty sure you are correct in that rarer goods can be from 20+ away, will keep an eye out. Not sure if this is actually limiting by range - but an interesting theory

Edit: And I guess once FC go live the plan should be to find Tritium sourcing stations for those sweet 'Tritium Supply' missions

 

[Jmanis]

Tourism systems in Colonia are supposed to be able to generate return courier/passenger missions to the bubble, but for no obvious reason only seem to do this first thing after the weekly server reset.

I'm really intrigued by the post-tick thing. Missions I've seen occur immediately after a tick are:

• Wartime Massacres (when the Wartime Massacres bug was extant, where they simply wouldn't spawn for one side of a war, sometimes)
• The delivery missions I recently observed in Sothis going =~ 130Ly away
• Source Meta-Alloy missions
• Miscellaneous, unaccountable anomolies which, if I think about it, make sense now if they happened around the tick.(more study required)

Makes me wonder if we're meant to see more diversity in the boards, but some aspect of them bugs out pretty much immediately after the tick. It would definitely explain the blobby nature of the mission boards at times.

Another curveball, especially in regards to Robigo, is the algorithm for generating the short-range multidestination tourism missions. A common "destination" in the list for missions is the Maia system, which is =~ 480 LY away. Maia is just 380Ly away from Robigo (as are many other tourism destinations), so it's a valid target, but it never is, with destinations being exclusively to Sothis Atmospherics.

 

[Jmanis]

Hmm - Pretty sure you are correct in that rarer goods can be from 20+ away, will keep an eye out. Not sure if this is actually limiting by range - but an interesting theory

So, my running evidence for that is:

• I frequently get missions to source H.E. Suits, which are 40-50Ly away on-average (58Ly from my home)
• There's those other missions to get regional goods (y'know, like Emergency Power Cells, which are 160Ly away)
• That whole meta-alloy comment I made before

Actually, I just realised that point #2 would contradict that claim entirely... i might edit that in a tick because the more i think about it, the c way more complex it gets... but yeah, there's never source missions in remote sectors with single stations, only ever donation, even in investment states.

 

[Jmanis]

Another one; mining missions in a none state would be for a mix of mineable- only commodities and purchaseable commodities... but boom time or investment are always mineable- only. Been waiting for my local industrial to get out of boom for ages.

Note: this might not apply to wing mining missions.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Makes me wonder if we're meant to see more diversity in the boards, but some aspect of them bugs out pretty much immediately after the tick. It would definitely explain the blobby nature of the mission boards at times.

The gap between the weekly server reset and the first BGS tick after it does often seem to have oddities - and not necessarily just in missions.

I wonder if the medium/long-range missions have hard-coded destinations (or destination regions, perhaps), while the short-range ones are built dynamically, and the weekly server reset clears the dynamic list (because it might have added new stations/systems) which doesn't get rebuilt until the BGS tick.

The bug, if that's the case, would be that the short-range missions are too dominant over the long-range ones ... though of course the restriction of Sol-Colonia missions to Tourism systems was due to long-range being too dominant over short-range in other contexts. It must be quite tricky to get that right overall.


The medium-range behaviour in Colonia also has the side-effect that you get plenty of edge->centre delivery missions, but no centre->edge delivery missions. Colonia with its small size and lower density would probably be better served by having a 50LY range on courier/delivery in general, but that would be excessive for the bubble. Maybe there just need to be separate mission generation rules and balances for:
- the bubble
- Pleiades/Colonia/Witch Head/California/other small settlements
- bubble fringes (Sothis, Robigo, Quince, etc.)
- genuinely isolated systems

 

[Dominic Corner]

Hi there,

Will have a read through this with a coffee later.

Speculation about the missions system is always interesting to see.

Thanks,
Dom

 

[Jmanis]

Maybe there just need to be separate mission generation rules and balances for:

• the bubble
• Pleiades/Colonia/Witch Head/California/other small settlements
• bubble fringes (Sothis, Robigo, Quince, etc.)
• genuinely isolated systems

I don't know if it needs to be that complex.

Realise I'm probably spearing off on a tangent for a minute, but there's a host of simple changes that could increase the diversity (And reduce the homogeneity) we see on mission boards.

• Include uninhabited systems in the list of destination systems for... let's say, the six closest ones.
• If the mission normally has a target faction/system associated with it (e.g assassination), randomly pick an appropriate target faction from the origin system.

e.g If an Assassination Mission usually targets an Anarchy Faction in a Foreign System, it chooses the domestic Anarchy faction to apply it to... if a Wetwork mission targets a lawful faction in a foreign system, it applies the effects to a lawful domestic faction.

The following missions could then spawn (especially in deep-space, isolated systems)
Planetary Surface Scan
Surface Salvage
Surface Search and Rescue (The ones with a + sign in the icon, rather than a salvage icon)
Salvage
Illegal Salvage
Massacre
Spec Ops
Assassination
Wetwork
... possibly some more I'm forgetting...

Even if there isn't an anarchy faction present, more than half of those types would still spawn, so suddenly isolated/edge-case systems get much more diversity of mission options.The old pre-2.4 mission boards used to target uninhabited systems all the time, so I don't know why they stopped.

Tangentially... I've posted in plenty of other places about my disdain for the scaling rewards for Cargo Delivery primarily based on cargo value, not cargo tonnage (180t of biowaste and 180t of palladium is the same effort and cost to the transporter). Especially, ignoring the case of a delivery to somewhere half a LY away from jump-in, when you consider a delivery mission for 180t of Palladium will reward you with around 10-12m credits, all of which is profit, meanwhile a "Source 180t of Palladium" mission will reward you with like, 5m tops(? It's been a while...), but will sub the cost of the Palladium, that pulls it inline with usual mission rewards (of =~ 1-3m)

 

[Jmanis]

Hi there,

Will have a read through this with a coffee later.

Speculation about the missions system is always interesting to see.

Thanks,
Dom

Just while you're perusing this while I do some more research for another post, 10/10 for whoever made the fix a while back to Hijack missions (e.g Recover 8 Hostages/Diplo Bags/Political Prisoners/Precious Gems) to make them dump the mission cargo first. Especially when the target is a DBX or similar, and tries to recover the dropped cargo at the same time, while combatting their PD turrets, and potentially tanking escorts (or killing them, which makes the hauler go red-ten)... and heaven forbid a tail from another mission drops in....

I used to ignore these missions because they were too fiddly working through all the other junk... now they're super-fun and I grab them where I can! Just dusted off seven of them tonight.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Tangentially... I've posted in plenty of other places about my disdain for the scaling rewards for Cargo Delivery primarily based on cargo value, not cargo tonnage (180t of biowaste and 180t of palladium is the same effort and cost to the transporter). Especially, ignoring the case of a delivery to somewhere half a LY away from jump-in, when you consider a delivery mission for 180t of Palladium will reward you with around 10-12m credits, all of which is profit, meanwhile a "Source 180t of Palladium" mission will reward you with like, 5m tops(? It's been a while...), but will sub the cost of the Palladium, that pulls it inline with usual mission rewards (of =~ 1-3m)

There's some need for the delivery missions for more expensive cargo to pay a bit more, just to stop it being more cost-effective to run off with the cargo instead.

180t of Palladium would sell on the open market for 2.5 million, while 180t of Biowaste would probably only make 125,000 most of the time. 180t of Meta-alloys would be about 36 million, for when they show up.

So if it was purely based on tonnage, it would have to all be levelled up to the most expensive goods - maybe Meta-alloys (and Tritium, soon?) could be excluded entirely from the set to be delivered, of course. Some dependence on the value of the cargo also seems reasonable - which could tie into tougher opposition as Palladium is more worthwhile to pirate than Biowaste.

 

[Factabulous]

meanwhile a "Source 180t of Palladium" mission will reward you with like, 5m tops(? It's been a while...), but will sub the cost of the Palladium, that pulls it inline with usual mission rewards (of =~ 1-3m)

Yes, I was looking at Wing Source & Return missiona and (assuming the estimated cost of goods in the mission description is correct) they were paying ~1M for the mission (after paying for the goods) shipping multiple thousands of T - not worthwhile. (Ordinary Wing Delivery is also not as good as basic Delivery - I'm seeing 7M for 180T Palladium, or 12M for 4kT Wing ... even with a full wing it's not great)

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Yes, I was looking at Wing Source & Return missiona and (assuming the estimated cost of goods in the mission description is correct) they were paying ~1M for the mission (after paying for the goods) shipping multiple thousands of T - not worthwhile. (Ordinary Wing Delivery is also not as good as basic Delivery - I'm seeing 7M for 180T Palladium, or 12M for 4kT Wing ... even with a full wing it's not great)

One of those very tricky things to balance, I think, wing payments.

With a full wing of, say, shielded and hardened T-9s, 4kT would be 8 trips or two each. So 12M for that or 7M for the Palladium is pretty even. (Though 10M for 180t of Palladium I think is more common, at least the ones I see)

But if there's more than one basic delivery mission on the board, you can fit three of them into the same T-9 and get 21M for one trip. Or if you're using Anacondas (3 trips per person) or Pythons (4-5 trips per person), then you can still do the single 180t mission in one trip.

(Ideally you'd combine the two - take individual missions for the main bulk and the wing then fills up on the wing mission as insurance on there not being enough)


Of course, 4kT of Palladium will sell on the open market for 56 million, which even with a bit of a black market penalty means that even in a wing of four it's probably worth robbing your employer in that case, and definitely worth it if you're on your own.

 

[Jmanis]

In case it's food for thought, I thought I'd drop a snapshot of the Conven system, one of the systems I anticipated would have a lot of Delivery missions of high value goods to just two target systems.

Conven is a system with two Refinery Outposts and One Surface Refinery, with the following relevant neighbours (Except the COL285 sector, that's just a border reference):

Some key stats on the other systems
Lozin: One Extraction Economy, One Terraforming Economy, One Surface Colony Economy
Kuo Ti: Two Industrial Economy stations, no landable bodies
HIP 99139: One orbital Extraction, One ++ Non-Landable Surface Post, One Surface Military Economy

Some things I anticipated with this system (and I just corrected my Urgent Kill Order range to 20 LY, since this reminded me of that):

• There would be no Massacre, Assassination, Spec Ops or Wetwork missions, as there are no populated systems within 10Ly
• Most Deliveries would be going to Kuo Ti, being an Industrial system and likely to import the Refinery goods.
• I'd expect some noise from Courier and Source missions, maybe even surface missions

I did make some mistakes in my assumptions, and I did want to look blind to things like Government, State and mixed economies... I think the results were in the ballpark of what I expected. Missions in this snapshot of a Conven Refinery Outpost are:

Independent Patronage (Boom): 1 x Donate Credits, 2 x Economic Data Recovery (targetting HIP 99139 ++), 4 x Delivery to Kuo Ti, 2 x Courier to Lozin, 2 x Delivery to Lozin
Federal Confederacy (None): 7 x Delivery to Kuo Ti, 2 x Donate goods (one industrial, one agricultural)
Independent Corporate (None): 1 x Delivery to Kuo Ti, 1 x Delivery to Lozin, 1 x Planetary Scan to HIP 99139 , 1 x Planetary Scan to Lozin, 1 x courier to HIP 99139 Surface, 3 x Donate goods (2 x Agri, 1 x Ind)
Imperial Corporate (None): 3 x Donate Goods (1 x Ind, 1 x ag, 1 x HT), 2 x source (1 x agri, 1 x HT), 3 x Couriers (2 x Lozin, 1 x Kuo Ti)
Independent Cooperative (None): 2 x Source Agri Goods, 1 x Planetary Scan to Lozin
Imperial Patronage (None): 2 x Source (1 x Agri, 1 x Ind), 8 x Courier (1 x HIP 99139, 3 x Lozin, 4 x Kuo Ti), 1 x Urgent Kill Order (Scan HIP 99139 Beacon)
Independent Anarch (None): 2 x Courier (1 x Lozin, 1 x Kuo Ti), 2 x Hub Access Interaction (target HIP 99139), 5 x Assasinate Politician (Kuo Ti), 2 x Surface Hunt for Politician (scan HIP 99139 beacon)

Interestingly, the Surface Port produces a wildly different list. I suspect this is because surface ports probably use a different generation algorithm, and good to note it's still a stacking paradise (Bolded) compared to when I went there last.

Independent Patronage (Boom): 6 x Courier (1 x HIP 99139, 2 x Lozin, 3 x Kuo Ti), 1 x Source (HT), 4 x Economic Data Acquisition (HIP 99139 ++ Target), 1 x Urgent Kill Order (HIP 99139 Target Scan), 1 x Delivery (Kuo Ti)
Federal Confederacy (None): No Missions
Independent Corporate (None): 2 x Donate Credits, 3 x Source (Agri, HT, Ind), 2 x Planetary Scan Jobs, 6 x Urgent Kill Order (HIP 99139 Scan Target)
Independent Cooperative (None): 6 x Covert Data Retrieval (HIP 99139 Scan Target), 3 x Planetary Scan Jobs (2 x HIP 99139, 1 x Lozin), 1 x Urgent Kill Order (HIP 99139 Scan Target)
Imperial Corporate: 3 x Planetary Scan Jobs (Lozin)
Imperial Patronage: 3 x Planetary Scan Jobs (2 x HIP 99139, 1 x Lozin), 2 x Courier (HIP 99139, Lozin)
Independent Anarchy: 3 x Destroy Generator (HIP 99139), 3 x Delivery (2 x Lozin, 1 x Kuo Ti) 7 x Surface hunt for Politician (HIP 99139 Scan Target)

Just to aggregate flavours, that's 10 Data Acquisitions, 3 Powerplant Destructions, and 13 Assassination missions (26 Total), from 7 factions, all targeting the same base, all from a single generation of the mission board. That's an unheard of level of stacking for most places in the bubble. You'll need to relog three or four times, depending on the scan targets, but that's insane.

Not that I'm asking for a nerf here... with FCs not budging from 5b, I'll take whatever cash cows there are now... bring back those "Smuggle 180t of Thargoid XXX" missions for 200m+ which accidentally ended up in the game and broke the boards IMO (Still dirty I never got the chance to do one of those).

So yeah, interestingly, I went hunting for a delivery system, and kinda got what I was after... actually found a crazy place to stack Installation Scan/Powerplant Scan-First Assassination missions, due to the single ++ within 20ly

Points to take out of this:

• Confirmatory about assassinations/massacres/wetwork/spec ops (given total absence)
• Urgent Kill orders look out to 20Ly
• Anarchy Assassinations/Urgent Kill Orders target out to 20Ly (Could this imply the lawful missions should be 20Ly too?)
• Of note, no "Massacre Tourist Ships/Civilians" from the Anarchy faction.

Anyways... bedtime for me now.

 

[FrogsFriend]

I wonder if the medium/long-range missions have hard-coded destinations (or destination regions, perhaps), while the short-range ones are built dynamically, and the weekly server reset clears the dynamic list (because it might have added new stations/systems) which doesn't get rebuilt until the BGS tick.

Just to add my observations on those post-maintenance long range missions. Starting from a group of a dozen or so systems in the heart of the Bubble, that generally have missions targeting each other and a few neighbours, following the maintenance they all get some delivery missions to a compact group of destination systems around 200-300Ly away, also in the Bubble. The missions may be for different goods, to and from different economy stations, but they all target systems in a small cluster.

I don't get to play at that time too often, so I've no detailed week-on-week observations, but from memory I've seen some of the target system groups come up more than once over time. Probably some sort of pattern to it rather than an entirely random selection.

 

[Jmanis]

There's some need for the delivery missions for more expensive cargo to pay a bit more, just to stop it being more cost-effective to run off with the cargo instead.

So, I disagree a little with that one. Bottom Line Up Front; I thought it was the potential fine which dissuaded running off with the cargo, not the reward, then it became a value-judgement of "What's my ability to interact with this faction worth to me?"

Let's say the reward was 100k for delivering either one of 180t of Palladium or 180t of Biowaste. 100k is more than the cost of that 180t of biowaste, but much less than the Palladium. Because the C&P system means you, eventually, have to pay fines and bounties (given infinite time), your overall would always be negative if you stole.

I.e stealing the biowaste would land you with, say, a 1.8m fine, leaving you -700k in the red overall after selling stolen goods, while stealing the Palladium might throw you a 3m fine, where your overall position is now -1.5m in the red after stealing and selling it.

.... if you ever pay the fine, and that's the nuanced bit. Having outstanding fines / bounties is A-OK, if you never plan on returning or interacting with the people you steal from (or indeed, if they can't interfere with you due to not owning assets). And I think that's kinda cool. For ages I had a 27m fine with a station under old mechanics, although we didn't have services restricted like we do now... then I had to go back there and do things. Wasn't too bad, except I then got popped and that 27m fine reared it's head again.

So, you can steal things and make some quick cash, but because of the fine, you either never interact with that faction again, or you pay the fine later as a form of "extended loan" if you like. Basically, stealing from missions is just a reverse-gift certificate.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

So, you can steal things and make some quick cash, but because of the fine, you either never interact with that faction again, or you pay the fine later as a form of "extended loan" if you like. Basically, stealing from missions is just a reverse-gift certificate.

Yes, perhaps - though the scale of the bubble means that you could run up hundreds of factions to never interact with again pretty harmlessly. Might be more interesting if fines eventually promoted to bounties (after a month, say, and only fines over 100k) so that eventually they'd send "debt collectors" after you - or worse, if you'd robbed lots of factions from the same superpower. At some point a serial robber should face consequences bigger than being shut out of 0.5% of the bubble.

Allowing "source and return" missions to also accept stolen cargo might mean it was a viable way to fill those contracts on Palladium, which might be interesting.

 

[Dommarraa]

Something that may need a look at (or at least I would like it to change) is the way that Expansion State tends to swamp the mission board in all systems with dull Courier and Salvage missions in ALL a factions systems. As expansion is now such a semi permanent state, it is often hard to even tell that a faction/system is in boom and find any usefull or interesting missions about half the time.

 

[Jmanis]

Something that may need a look at (or at least I would like it to change) is the way that Expansion State tends to swamp the mission board in all systems with dull Courier and Salvage missions in ALL a factions systems. As expansion is now such a semi permanent state, it is often hard to even tell that a faction/system is in boom and find any usefull or interesting missions about half the time.

Uuurgh... yeah.

I'm planning a post about war/civil war later tonight (spoilers: civil war feels like the spawns are right, but war feels a bit broken)... i find expansion really hit and miss though.

"Urgent terrorist kill order" is one of those missions which i skip... it's like an assassination and an installation scan combined , but for half the results of doing an installation scan and a n assassination separately (half the influence , half the credits). I'd go for them if they paid out ~4m... but i digress.

I find expansion fills boards with either those surface- scan assassinations, couriers or installation scans... the latter is alright, but yeah... feels like there needs to be a better distribution for them. One of my systems gets in expansion a lot and it's pretty frustrating coz it's a global state, wipes out everything.

EDIT: Oh btw... I don't mind Salvage missions too much, I just really wish they happened in hostile environments. I'm not proposing we chuck in NSP's in USS, but it's not unreasonable to assume a situation like "A cargo ship carrying some valuable supplies including an antimatter containment unit was lost somewhere in this system. We need you to recover it's black box to determine the cause of the incident. The antimatter unit was damaged and has created an area of instability around the incident site... it's subsided somewhat, but it's still very dangerous. Stay frosty."

EDIT 2: Salvage missions into damaged stations are really awesome, in that context.

 

[Jmanis]

So, one thing from tonight...

Surface Scan Kill Missions (e.g Urgent Kill Order/Surface Hunt for Politician)
Basically, these ones target a beacon within 20Ly, and then a populated system within 10Ly from the system the beacon is in. Worked that out by grabbing one a few of the dozens in Conven, which all target the HIP 99139 beacon. There's four beacons there, so I (could have) got four scans per relog... but the closest habitable system is over 10Ly away, so all the mission USS spawned in that same system. So with this condition, stacking them becomes massively viable on top of the crazy amounts of destroy PP and Installation scan missions.

Now, I did mention a post about War/Civil War, but i've done some sniffing, and I'm not convinced I've got it right, so I'll just let that one lie for now.

EDIT: Also, Wetwork missions seem to be out to 20Ly too... maybe Pirate Lord/Assassination are meant to be 20Ly too, but are 10?