Nice work. Did you notice if the destinations were in roughly the same area as each other or scattered about? (I know I can look them up but worth asking first 
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Rev-Enging Mission Boards
- Thread starter Jmanis
- Start date
Nice work. Did you notice if the destinations were in roughly the same area as each other or scattered about? (I know I can look them up but worth asking first
Nah, didn't check
No worries. I'll dig the map out later to satisfy my curiosity.
Hmm, still some around 2 hours after the restart
Interesting map. I wonder if there's multiple centres throughout the bubble, or whether there's just a bunch of hard-coded systems. More collection over a few weeks might answer that.
(Way back when I was in the bubble, I did used to get missions to distant clusters of nearby systems, so I suspect multiple centres like the one at Colonia)
(Way back when I was in the bubble, I did used to get missions to distant clusters of nearby systems, so I suspect multiple centres like the one at Colonia)
My suspicion is that it'll be the BGS tick which clears them, but I'm so rarely in-game at the right time on Thursdays that I've never been able to confirm this on the Colonia side.
I think the natural (10 min?) turnover on the board should wipe them out after a while if they only get put in the mission pool at server reset.
My impression is that the mission server is lazy, and only generates boards at all for stations where someone requests it [1], so while that might make them hang around a bit longer in busy systems, checking the boards at obscure stations which no-one else has activated recently should give a clearer picture.
[1] Given the number of extremely rarely visited stations, I don't see why it would proactively generate everywhere in advance, but I can't actually think of an experiment we could do to easily tell the difference.
Just got another one, at one of my destinations.
... which is coincidentally, back towards where I was (about 60LY north)
I actually think it might be a combination of both. I rekon there's some sort of tapering that goes on with mission boards to ensure there aren't too many of a single mission type generated... between the Powerplay tick and the BGS tick, that record gets blatted somehow and we're left with nothing but <20Ly deliveries. Until then though, we get these, but again, that count doesn't reset between mission board generations like it should... I went back to the station where I got all those generations on board #3, and couldn't get a single one to spawn now, so I rekon i exhausted the quantity.
It's a shame... I know it's just a chain mission, but these long-range 2-3t missions are a breath of fresh air, and would have me check in with engineers or other distant places of interest more regularly if they existed. More importantly, if they took me past those regional commodities which are occasionally asked for on the boards, I'd actually do them, if I had missions like this as a reason to go out. Hope @Dominic Corner is still checking in here... would be great to know if this is intentional or not (i suspect not, which would also understandably imply radio silence on it, but still)
(PS. Good luck getting me to ship 2700t of water that far though XD... though imagine a wing of 4 cutters pulling that one off in two runs... seeing ones like this for 1500-odd tonnes might be worthwhile though)
Alright.... so, tonight I spent some time trying to work out the influencing factors in cargo delivery missions. First up, suffice to say, there is a formula, and it's not random.
Now, I've been toying around with the numbers for a couple hours now... but I think my brain's starting to do circles, so I'll hand them over to you to see what you can discern. Here's the numbers for some missions I've been playing with.
(PS These are all Elite rank, Allied missions except the Polymers mission, which was Broker Rank, Allied)
Basically, I want to work out what factors Cargo Value, Distance (LY) and Distance (to station) have on the rewards, but that didn't yield anything straightforward or consistent when solving it like a simultaneous equation.
Some observations:
- The relationship between Cargo Volume and Cargo Value is not straightforward. Total cargo value for the 180t silver mission is lower than the 144t Superconductor mission to the same destination (~850k vs ~930k), but the reward is higher for silver. This suggests total tonnage of the mission plays a more significant factor than the value of the cargo.
- This is particularly evident if you compare Superconductors and Polymers; Polymers at =~ 1/20th of the cost, and 1/2 the volume should get =~ 1/40th of the reward in a basic system, but it's a more generous 1/5th of the reward.
- 400,000 seems significant, though I'm not sure why. My initial assumption was that this was a baseline reward (i.e calculating the reward of an Allied Delivery mission is 400k + <stuff>), but the more I tried to use that, the more incorrect some of my other calculations got. It might be a baseline reward for 180t missions (and using a similar logic, I get about 300k for a 144t mission)
- Further, if you try and scale-up the Silver mission reward by the ratio of difference between the cost of Superconductors and Silver (=~ 1.3) you get around 400k over the reward of superconductors
- There is possibly a threshold limit on station distance of roughly 2,000Ls, where the distance-to-station reward lement is capped, as some of my calculations went pear-shaped when I tried with the two 2310Ls distances. Whether that's the correct figure or not, it wouldn't be surprising if such a threshold existed given what went on previously with things like Rhea in the past. I don't have enough samples to back that figure though.
That's all I've got for now. My current train of thought is something like this for an allied mission:
Reward = 400,000*(some factor resulting from cargo value and tonnage) + (a*20/<distance to system>) + (b*T/<distance to station>)
...where a is some maximal reward, as is b, which scales down based on lower values of distance compared to their thresholds.
It's entirely plausible that the 400,000 is actually some constant, determined by the tonnage (as we know missions generally generate with fixed tonnage of 180/144/120/108/90/72/56 etc) , but working that out needs a fair whack more data.
Also note, all this is level-11 speculation, a lot of the assertions I make here I simply can't back up. But I'm curious to see if anyone else can make headway with these figures.
Now, I've been toying around with the numbers for a couple hours now... but I think my brain's starting to do circles, so I'll hand them over to you to see what you can discern. Here's the numbers for some missions I've been playing with.
Delivery Cargo Type | Cargo Qty | Cargo Avg Value | Range (LY) | Distance (To Stn) | Credits Reward |
Superconductors | 180 | 6477 | 17.36 | 437.48 | 6131091 |
Superconductors | 144 | 6477 | 17.36 | 437.48 | 4630204 |
Polymers | 90 | 308 | 17.36 | 437.48 | 1234441 |
Silver | 180 | 4769 | 17.36 | 437.48 | 4913628 |
Palladium | 180 | 12954 | 18.61 | 2310.01 | 10790467 |
Uranium | 120 | 2757 | 18.61 | 2310.01 | 2866981 |
(PS These are all Elite rank, Allied missions except the Polymers mission, which was Broker Rank, Allied)
Basically, I want to work out what factors Cargo Value, Distance (LY) and Distance (to station) have on the rewards, but that didn't yield anything straightforward or consistent when solving it like a simultaneous equation.
Some observations:
- The relationship between Cargo Volume and Cargo Value is not straightforward. Total cargo value for the 180t silver mission is lower than the 144t Superconductor mission to the same destination (~850k vs ~930k), but the reward is higher for silver. This suggests total tonnage of the mission plays a more significant factor than the value of the cargo.
- This is particularly evident if you compare Superconductors and Polymers; Polymers at =~ 1/20th of the cost, and 1/2 the volume should get =~ 1/40th of the reward in a basic system, but it's a more generous 1/5th of the reward.
- 400,000 seems significant, though I'm not sure why. My initial assumption was that this was a baseline reward (i.e calculating the reward of an Allied Delivery mission is 400k + <stuff>), but the more I tried to use that, the more incorrect some of my other calculations got. It might be a baseline reward for 180t missions (and using a similar logic, I get about 300k for a 144t mission)
- Further, if you try and scale-up the Silver mission reward by the ratio of difference between the cost of Superconductors and Silver (=~ 1.3) you get around 400k over the reward of superconductors
- There is possibly a threshold limit on station distance of roughly 2,000Ls, where the distance-to-station reward lement is capped, as some of my calculations went pear-shaped when I tried with the two 2310Ls distances. Whether that's the correct figure or not, it wouldn't be surprising if such a threshold existed given what went on previously with things like Rhea in the past. I don't have enough samples to back that figure though.
That's all I've got for now. My current train of thought is something like this for an allied mission:
Reward = 400,000*(some factor resulting from cargo value and tonnage) + (a*20/<distance to system>) + (b*T/<distance to station>)
...where a is some maximal reward, as is b, which scales down based on lower values of distance compared to their thresholds.
It's entirely plausible that the 400,000 is actually some constant, determined by the tonnage (as we know missions generally generate with fixed tonnage of 180/144/120/108/90/72/56 etc) , but working that out needs a fair whack more data.
Also note, all this is level-11 speculation, a lot of the assertions I make here I simply can't back up. But I'm curious to see if anyone else can make headway with these figures.
I might have a look at the same for courier missions later. Obviously they pay out a lot less, but it might be easier to pin down how the distance-LY and distance-Ls variables work for those.
Something important to note if you're looking at those ones; For all missions there's a 10,000cr "baseline" which I'm not entirely sure how to deal with at the moment.
Basically, it only applies if you take the credit reward...or is taken off if you don't.
Pretend you had a mission offering 2.5m credits, with an option for 5 x G5 materials (2m worth of materials @ 400k each).
The Credit Reward will be 2,500,000, ++ Inf, ++ Rep, but the Material reward package will be 490,000 cr, 5 x G5 materials, ++inf, ++rep
Meanwhile, if the reward was just 1 x G5 material, the material reward package will be 2,090,000cr, 1 x G5 material, ++ inf, ++ rep... i.e it's not part of the cost of the materials. You can also observe this with Cargo rewards.
The deduction applies to all mission alternatives, including couriers. Since they're rarely over 100,000-odd credits, that difference could be significant.
Okay, got the results for Allied courier missions (can't test the others, don't have any non-Allied factions for 2000 LY, be interesting to know if that adjusts the payout directly or just by manipulating what mission ranks are offered)
Formula (for the cash reward, noting your comment above) seems to be:
Payout = 10000 + (rank factor * (LY contribution + Ls contribution))
Rank factor = 0.1 + 0.1 per rank (so 1.0 for Elite, 0.9 for Tycoon, 0.6 for Merchant)
LY contribution ~= 8800 * adjusted distance
Ls contribution ~= 4.4 * Round(distance in Ls)
Adjusted distance = first take Floor(actual distance). If this is between 10 and 25, just use it. Below 10, add 0.25 LY for every 1 LY below 10. Above 25, add 0.25 LY for every 1LY above 25. (So below 10 doesn't drop off as fast and there's probably a minimum of 2.5 LY if you got a intra-system missions, and above 25 rises faster)
=10000+FLOOR((((A2+1)/10)*((8800*IF(F2>=10,IF(F2<=25,F2,25+(F2-25)*1.25),10-((10-F2)*0.75)))+(4.4*G2))))
Formula (for the cash reward, noting your comment above) seems to be:
Payout = 10000 + (rank factor * (LY contribution + Ls contribution))
Rank factor = 0.1 + 0.1 per rank (so 1.0 for Elite, 0.9 for Tycoon, 0.6 for Merchant)
LY contribution ~= 8800 * adjusted distance
Ls contribution ~= 4.4 * Round(distance in Ls)
Adjusted distance = first take Floor(actual distance). If this is between 10 and 25, just use it. Below 10, add 0.25 LY for every 1 LY below 10. Above 25, add 0.25 LY for every 1LY above 25. (So below 10 doesn't drop off as fast and there's probably a minimum of 2.5 LY if you got a intra-system missions, and above 25 rises faster)
- Yes, it's round to nearest for Ls and floor for LY - wouldn't be Elite Dangerous without arbitrarily inconsistent use of rounding functions.
- 8800 and 4.4 aren't quite exact - sometimes the formula is spot on, sometimes it overestimates by a tiny amount (<25 credits) - but it's good enough and I can't be bothered to pin it down further. I did not see the effect you described with Ls payouts capping at 2000 Ls
- There seems to be a consistent formula here for both short- and medium- range missions, with a range adjustment at 25 LY even though the banding between the mission types is at 20 LY. It'd be interesting to see if there's any further differences with longer-ranged ones if you can compare in the bubble next Thursday.
- The extreme range inter-bubble courier missions definitely do not use the same adjusted distance formula, or they'd pay out at about 242 million credits each.
- Whether or not the destination is a surface base seems to have no effect on the pricing.
=10000+FLOOR((((A2+1)/10)*((8800*IF(F2>=10,IF(F2<=25,F2,25+(F2-25)*1.25),10-((10-F2)*0.75)))+(4.4*G2))))
I'll play around with this for cargo missions, see if i can make sense of things.
Interesting that rank matters... my previous assumption was that it was just reflective of the overall payout (for cargo missions). There's a few other implications here, but i need to plsy around some more first.
Quick addition to the above: LY formula still works out to 37 LY, Ls formula still works out to 20000 Ls. I doubt I'll be able to test it further as we don't have many stations further out than that and they don't tend to be targets for couriers.
EDIT: found a 48 LY mission which fit the same formula
EDIT: found a 48 LY mission which fit the same formula
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After seeing who liked this post I now want to try it on other mission types - theoretically it would allow you to work out the USS range for BB missions / Deserter Assassinations etc, which would be very handy
I've tried doing something similar for surface scans (the procgen buildings, not settlements)After seeing who liked this post I now want to try it on other mission types - theoretically it would allow you to work out the USS range for BB missions / Deserter Assassinations etc, which would be very handy
Nothing useful yet, but, in case it helps analysing other types:
- It does look like these missions may have some dependency on the planet they go to, which is therefore presumably picked at mission creation time. Unfortunately that means I'd have to do all the missions - one per system at a time to make sure which is which - to figure out how the Ls dependency works and interacts with the LY dependency - and I don't have the spare time to collect that data. Maybe if I can find a few to systems with only one landable, but I think there's only one of those locally - still, at least I might be able to tell if this is an Ls dependency from that, and maybe get better data on the LY component.
- The rank dependency is not linear this time. Exponential looks like a fairly good fit, though I think I need a better sample size in the non-Elite missions to try to clear out the effects of the hidden factor. Surface Scans seem to bias a lot more towards Elite than Courier did.
- Follow-on surface scan missions appear to pay out based on a completely different formula (and about half as much in practice) - this was particularly surprising.
I'm not entirely sure... I stacked a bunch of these in Conven out to one of the neighbouring systems and there didn't appear to be any correlation between the planet the signal was located on and the reward. I'll do some validation this weekend, but I can say for certain that for fixed-facility targets (i.e installation scan, not planetary scan) the reward definitely isn't consistent. Again, Conven is a good edge case for generating same-mission, same-target missions ad-nauseum, and they'll be all different rewards for the same target.
The same generally applies to most other USS missions too... especially since the USS can be churned to change location (Though it's usually impractical to do so).
The completely different formula was surprising? Or the half as much pay?
The former isn't too surprising, given all follow-ons are usually very different formula... e.g the 2-3t delivery missions for a million or two (or more, depending on the type of cargo). The latter, yeah. Chain missions usually have some sort of credit incentive, maybe someone divided by two rather than multiplied a-la CZ massacres?
Oh btw... I'm doing some instructor-led online training which isn't taxing my brain particularly much today... I'm going to head out to one of these isolated stations ( 1000+ ly, normally just donations) in advance to see what happens wrt missions at the tick. I'm actually anticipating nothing, but will be good to validate.
EDIT: Now docked up at Sadr Logistics Depot, Sadr Region Sector GW-W C1-22 ready for the tick.
EDIT: Now docked up at Sadr Logistics Depot, Sadr Region Sector GW-W C1-22 ready for the tick.
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