BGS War Revamp - looking for critique.

[DemiserofD]

The recent addition of about 4x as many bases as before has changed BGS and Wars in strange ways. Taking over a system used to take a few weeks at most; now, some systems could take upwards of half a year to take over. This, in combination with the age-old issues of BGS, like the fact that a faction needs to hurt themselves to go to war with another faction, or the fact that a faction can have 1% influence yet control 95% of the assets in a system, and in fact be safer there than anywhere else, all have led me to try to think of a better way for BGS wars to take place.

Influence​

Rather than having Influence be a free-floating variable, like right now, a faction's influence level is based on the number of assets they control in the system. Each Asset is assigned a relative value: Stations are worth 5 Settlements, Ground Stations and Outposts are worth 3 Settlements, and Settlements are worth 1 Settlement.

For example, imagine a system that has 1 Station, 1 Ground Station, 1 Outpost, and 4 Settlements. That means the total available influence is divided between 15 settlements worth of value. If a faction controls just the Station, they have 33% influence. A faction controlling 1 settlement would have 7% Influence. Absent outside influence they would persistently rest at that point. Over time, they would be pushed in that direction, as well.

Taking Assets/Wars​

Whenever they gain enough influence to be worth an asset, it opens up a subtype of missions allowing players to target their desired asset. They take that mission, and then go attack targets near their desired asset; if they wanted to take over a Settlement, for example, they'd need to gain 7% influence, take the attack mission, and then wipe out the settlement. If no target is chosen but influence remains high, the game would automatically choose the ideal target.

War Duration​

War durations would vary based on the type of asset being attacked. Stations would take the current 4-7 days; Outposts and Ground Bases would take 3-5, and Settlements would take 2-3. This would help to account for the dramatically larger number of settlements, opposed to other types of base.

Result​

Rather than increasing your influence to take the first asset and then needing to lower your influence to take additional ones, you would just keep gaining influence. Some assets would change hands more rapidly, helping to make up for the increased number of assets post-odyssey.


I'm just looking for input on whether or not this would be a good change for the game or not, or if there are any problems I'm not thinking of.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

some systems could take upwards of half a year to take over

Remember that you can in theory - certainly if unopposed - win every Odyssey settlement that a faction controls in a single War conflict. So if your goal was total consolidation (which even pre-Odyssey a lot of factions had good strategic reasons not to go for [1]) you wouldn't necessarily be any slower than pre-Odyssey.

I'd also add that regardless of what any individual player group might want, total consolidation of all assets within a system under a single faction is actively undesirable for the BGS-as-background: there are already a lot of complaints about Odyssey power-up missions being very rare, and that's because controlling factions are:
1) likely to control most Odyssey settlements in the system if control hasn't changed since the Odyssey release
2) much less likely to end up in the negative states which shut down settlements.
Encouraging full consolidation of assets - or requiring substantial consolidation for factions which want to expand - is probably not a good thing for the greater variety of the game for everyone else.

[1] e.g. Odyssey settlements are an easy attack target and therefore often a liability influence-wise, as are the orbital non-dockable installations.
e.g. Having minor dockables in the hands of other factions helps you keep your influence down if you don't want to expand from a system right now.
e.g. Having assets owned by other factions helps slow down a challenger by letting you tie them up in wars on their way up rather than them heading straight for you.
Even pre-Odyssey most of the big groups didn't want to fully consolidate all their systems.

Absent outside influence they would persistently rest at that point. Over time, they would be pushed in that direction, as well.

This is the bit most likely to have weird consequences, I think.

At the moment, influence gains both have strong diminishing returns with increasing effort and are considerably less effective at higher influence levels. Both of those factors are required - and still arguably not quite sufficient - to counteract the sizable "passing traffic" advantage on trade, exploration and bounties that the controlling faction of a system receives ... which in busier systems make these "set points" naturally arise anyway in accordance with the actual quality of the held assets.

If they put the "set point" for the faction which already has lots of stations higher up, then the most likely consequence is the runaway leader / crushed secondaries effect like we saw with the Fleet Carriers release. This could be especially true in systems with very few assets - take the limiting case of a system which only has one asset (even with Odyssey, some still exist)

The asset holder therefore defaults to 100% influence; everyone else defaults to 0% influence. To start a conflict, one of the other factions has to push to 50% - but rather than as now that pushing being easier at low influence than high influence, instead, the "over time" effect pulls them back towards zero and pushes the current holder towards 100%, making system capture harder (and making expansions into that system much more likely to end in immediate retreat, too - though this is a problem even in systems with many more assets, as the newly-arrived faction will still be on a default of 0% influence until they can capture something)

(Would expansion still be automatic above 75% influence? If not, how would they be triggered? If so how do you stop permanent expansion in a system with only one asset, or keep it under control in a system with few enough that if you want the controlling station that puts you at/above 75%?)

Whenever they gain enough influence to be worth an asset

I'm assuming from this that the war results change from "win an asset or lose an asset" to "win an asset or nothing happens"?

Because it means you now have to take Odyssey assets 1 at a time I think it slows things down considerably in most systems even with the conflict itself only being best-of-2

It also makes controlling factions far more vulnerable to attack - which, again, will both slow down consolidation of a system and make it more maintenance work for player groups who care who is in charge of a system.

One system I was in recently - not that atypical of systems with a lot of gas giants - has
1 orbital (controlling) station (5x1 = 5)
3 ground bases or outposts (3x3 = 9)
1 Horizons surface settlement (2?x1 = 2)
3 Orbital installations (2?x3 = 6)
61 Odyssey settlements (2x61=122)

So the total points in the system are 144. If any low influence faction gains just 3.5% influence from its current position it's eligible to go straight for capturing the system control station (likely the ideal target) even though its opponent might be on 60% influence and perfectly safe under the current rules. Obviously supporters of the controlling faction could and should run missions for the upstart to try to distract it onto an Odyssey base owned by a third-party faction but in these bigger systems even "normal" influence fluctuation would make it necessary to be permanently doing that to one faction or another.



Aside:

or the fact that a faction can have 1% influence yet control 95% of the assets in a system, and in fact be safer there than anywhere else

This is of course only true of the faction's home system (otherwise it'll Retreat very quickly), and only true if the influence pressures on the faction are actively maintaining that 1% influence (highly unlikely if it's getting any significant positive transactions from all those assets). For a non-Anarchy faction remaining below 7% while holding decent assets is impossible in a system with non-negligible passing traffic unless it's being deliberately and constantly attacked by its own supporters.

And even in its home system, it's not exactly going anywhere if its supporters are deliberately pinning it to 1% to avoid conflicts, and an upstart faction can always go for the 60% coup route.

It's an interesting emergent tactic but mainly a curiosity in actual play, I think.

 

[DemiserofD]

Remember that you can in theory - certainly if unopposed - win every Odyssey settlement that a faction controls in a single War conflict. So if your goal was total consolidation (which even pre-Odyssey a lot of factions had good strategic reasons not to go for [1]) you wouldn't necessarily be any slower than pre-Odyssey.

Could you explain this a bit more? I've researched BGS a bit, and as far as I was aware, when the war was won, one asset would change hands, and the factions would be separated by 5 INF in each direction.

For that matter, do you have a BGS guide I could read somewhere? I've been reading the remlok one but perhaps that's not up to date.

One system I was in recently - not that atypical of systems with a lot of gas giants - has
1 orbital (controlling) station (5x1 = 5)
3 ground bases or outposts (3x3 = 9)
1 Horizons surface settlement (2?x1 = 2)
3 Orbital installations (2?x3 = 6)
61 Odyssey settlements (2x61=122)

So the total points in the system are 144. If any low influence faction gains just 3.5% influence from its current position it's eligible to go straight for capturing the system control station (likely the ideal target) even though its opponent might be on 60% influence and perfectly safe under the current rules. Obviously supporters of the controlling faction could and should run missions for the upstart to try to distract it onto an Odyssey base owned by a third-party faction but in these bigger systems even "normal" influence fluctuation would make it necessary to be permanently doing that to one faction or another.

Mmm, very good point. I was hoping for simplicity, but it does tend to break down a bit in cases of either large or small numbers of overall assets, doesn't it? I'll have to give that some more thought.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Could you explain this a bit more? I've researched BGS a bit, and as far as I was aware, when the war was won, one asset would change hands, and the factions would be separated by 5 INF in each direction.

4 INF rather than 5, but yes, that was true pre-Odyssey.

In Odyssey, elections still work on that "one asset at a time" model, but wars are fought over all Odyssey settlements owned by either faction as well.

So say Faction 1 owns an orbital station A and three Odyssey Settlements J, K, L ... and Faction 2 owns Odyssey Settlements W, X, Y, Z.

The War starts, faction 1 puts up A as its "stake", faction 2 puts up W as its stake. Those assets change hands as normal based on the overall 7-day winner of the war.
The other Odyssey Settlements J, K, L, X, Y, Z are also up for contest - but rather than being based on the overall war result, each one changes hands individually based on the balance of CZs won at that specific Settlement.

So it's possible for faction 1 to win the war with space CZs, keep A, and win W ... but be defeated on the ground and lose all of J, K and L. Or any other combination - usually even in a fairly one-sided war the loser gets to keep something - and player groups make use of this quite a bit to tune their Odyssey settlement mix to the ones they want to own.

For that matter, do you have a BGS guide I could read somewhere? I've been reading the remlok one but perhaps that's not up to date.

It's massively out of date, unfortunately - some of the information in it hasn't been updated since before the major BGS rewrite in 3.3 (and other bits are just plain wrong for any version of the BGS)

I'm not aware of any coherent public guides which are even fully-up-to-date with the Odyssey release, and most still have remnants of the pre-3.3 mechanics in them. (The basic problem is that they'd be a lot of work to produce and maintain, and everyone with the knowledge to do it well has other projects)

You can pick up a good picture of current thinking from a combination of the BGS Forum here, and the BGS Discord - but it'll take a while to pull it all together.