3.3 Whats the Point?

[Dommarraa]

Lets start with a premise that all the bugs are fixed, will be fixed, working as intended, or our own stupid fault due to the Fog of Willful Obfuscation. What we are seeing is pretty much what FD intended.

While I appreciate that our faction, with 40+ systems out on the edge of the bubble, with low pop (5m is a biggy to us) and virtually no opposition may not be the norm or FDs main target audience, I have thought reasonably long and hard considering other situations, but cant for the life of me see what the point of the 3.3 BGS is. Given the not insignificant development effort required, and the very obvious high risk of opening this particular can of spaghetti, I would have thought that "those who decide" would have put some considerable thought into the planning and be wanting a pretty major improvement to the game in at least one of these areas:
a) Be more realistic - Or at least make more logical sense
b) Be faster and more reliable or robust
c) Be more fun and/or engaging
d) Disadvantage some (vocal) disadvantaged group of players less

So what did FD do for us :
Lets exclude the new CZs and Megaships from this as while they are good, they could have been done without changing anything else.

1) Local instead of System wide states.

• Sure, on the face of it, especially for someone who doesnt play the BGS, it sounds like a no-brainer. More Realistic AND gives the bigger factions more to do. However, I would argue that a faction wide state, is MORE realistic than multiple. Look at the real world, nations at war and corporations competing for market share specifically avoid multiple conflicts and would rather lose a little influence and position. They know dividing their efforts is not cost effective. They may find alternate ways to control the situation, but they are not stupid enough to throw the might of their arms or marketing budget at it. Certainly arguable that it does not meet criteria a)
• These states now take forever to process regardless of the effort required or actually put in. The change has also required other changes (below) that are equally bad or worse. Fails criteria b)
• With local states, I no longer can see any strategy involved. In 3.2 there was great game to be had in studying surrounding systems, figuring out ways to distract an enemy, timing events carefully to ensure rapid progress and hamstringing the opposition. Now you just pound away at every system you want to increase, just varying the methods depending on the current state. Massively Fails criteria c)
• These strategies could be used equally by large factions to overwhelm small factions, and small factions to cripple larger factions plans. Now small factions have nothing by weight of numbers to protect them, and larger factions have much less to do, just in more places. I am still not sure if FD wanted to help smaller or larger factions (I have heard both side claim the changes were for them) but in either case, it fails criteria d)

2) Conflict by Days Won over a Week.

• In the real world, you roll your fleet in, smash the enemy to dust, you win. Some kid stealing a gun port cover from one of your ships every day for the next 6 days does NOT win them a war. Fail a)
• Some are short, some are long, it tends to depend on the relative strengths of the combatants. Fail a) and b)
• The binary win/loose per day makes it impossible to judge your efforts. Fails b) and c)
• While previously, we could apply overwhelming power, and get a commensurate reward, we now can apply minimal effort (1 transaction is frequently enough) and get the same reward as applying the Fleet of Doom. Fails a) and c)
• Then at the end we get some paultry increase/decrease which if the conflict had not happened, we could have done in 1 or 2 days. Fails them all.
• Trivial effort required over a long period for little reward. Grind. Boring Boring Boring. Fails c)
• Worried about conflicts being won before they started ? They could have just cut the Pending period to 1 (or 0) days

3) Absolute Inf Lock during Conflict

• Maybe its just an unfortunate consequence of one of the above (a failure of criteria b), or maybe I just cant get whatever they were smoking here. But whaaaaaat ? Worried about jumping factions maybe, but I never saw that as an actual issue that needed addressing in any regard.
• How can I possibly list all the ways it fails a). If makes absolutely ZERO sense.
• It frequently messes up all the other BGS Inf calculations effectively stagnating the entire system. Fails b) and c)

4) Inf Calculation Re-balance.

• The bottle of wine analogy is now "All factions have worked hard today, lets all have a glass of wine. Little Jimmy NoInf chimes in and claims because he has no mates and has not done any work for the past week, he deserves half the bottle". Fails a)
• Luke on 60% Inf does 4 missions, Han on 5% does 1 mission. Han gets a huge reward, Luke gets a kick in the wobblies. Fails c) and d)
• In our High traffic systems, we have just walked away. We still win all the conflicts automatically from random traffic, but are in constant conflict. Fails a) and c)
• Remember all that passive inf a System owner got from Bounties and Trade ? Doesn't seem to amount to a hill of beans any more. There seems to be little reason to own a station (unless you need to Nerf yourself). Fails c)

5) Expansion

• The one change that would (maybe) actually be of benefit, so we didnt constantly have to play whackamole, reducing our own factions inf everywhere to try and direct expansion.
• Yeah, the one they didnt do

If people can justify any of these changes, please chime in. If it made ANY sense to me, I might fell less like jacking the entire thing in.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

All speculation here of course ... but multiple and localised state I think is primarily to allow better integration with the Thargoid invasion (or other "disassters") without very odd consequences. Now you can have a system being attacked by Thargoids go into a specific state for that - while the other systems controlled by the same faction are not affected in the same way. In the old system, it would either have been impossible to attack systems with a higher priority state, or Thargoid attacks could have ended conflicts in distant systems for no particularly clear reason. Same with Pirate Attack and Outbreak, not that either of those does very much at the moment.

Multiple state also gives the option for more complex trade effects (Void Opals being the most famous but probably not the most interesting manifestation - but I'm still waiting for things to settle out a bit more before reanalysing that) and stops the "economic" states being rare and short-lived (because there'll always be a movement/conflict coming up to overrule them) on the larger factions. Sure, state priority manipulation was an interesting BGS tactic when done deliberately - but it also suppressed economic states quite a bit accidentally.

Possibly some of the things like Pirate Attack, etc. will have more done with them once basic restabilisation is complete.



Locking influence in conflict I don't think was the right answer for much the same reasons as you. However, the old system also had a problem - uninteresting conflicts would rapidly drain influence from both parties (especially in War) relative to the rest of the system, leading to a lot of extremely drawn out 1%-1% draws, which could have the opposite problem of making it too easy to grab a lot of influence. With multistate and localised state I think sticking with the old War model would have led to lots of systems where six of the factions were stuck in endless conflicts on ~1% (then potentially also activating Retreats), while the system controller ran away to 90%+

I can't think of a good alternative answer to this one, though.

Some of these problems are exacerbated by not having the new expansion mechanism, I think, to decouple that from raw influence - hopefully once they're confident the rest is stable they'll go back and fix that one up - but most of the issues here would remain even then.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I like the localised states. What they could do is expand on powerplay, make it a PvE (with some PvP in open for those that want to) experience and have that as another layer on top that spans over multiple systems.

For example Archon Delaine could automatically set all systems it has sway over into anarchy, other powers could give other major effects. It could really spice up the BGS dynamic.

 

[Rubbernuke]

For example Archon Delaine could automatically set all systems it has sway over into anarchy, other powers could give other major effects. It could really spice up the BGS dynamic.

The Dark Lord already does many fun things to the BGS.

I would say though that there are a fair few non PP types who would hate the idea. The Topic I control system only BGS is probably a decent compromise.

 

[Alshain]

I would argue that option 1 passes Criteria C with flying colors. Grabbing secondary assets is easier now as you don't have to wait on other conflicts in other systems. This is also more engaging because if one war is easily victorious you can move on to another and feel like contributions still matter (assuming no bugs of course). best of all, going to war in one system doesn't leave you with absolutely no choice but to have your influence tank in every other system. (because nobody like bounty hunting for transactions, it's just as bad as the old war for transactions was). I don't know how big your group is but if you have an mid to large faction like mine you would realize the wisdom in this design.

For item 2 I disagree, you don't smash them to dust, they retreat and in most cases it dies off without mass genocide. The static length is less realistic but in order for C to happen it has to have some predictable nature.

For item 3 I completely agree.

Items 4 and 5 are too bugged to provide an analysis. So I can't agree with yours nor can I provide a better one. We just don't know how it is meant to work

 

[Greybeard_LXI]

Lets start with a premise that all the bugs are fixed, will be fixed, working as intended, or our own stupid fault due to the Fog of Willful Obfuscation. What we are seeing is pretty much what FD intended.

While I appreciate that our faction, with 40+ systems out on the edge of the bubble, with low pop (5m is a biggy to us) and virtually no opposition may not be the norm or FDs main target audience, I have thought reasonably long and hard considering other situations, but cant for the life of me see what the point of the 3.3 BGS is. Given the not insignificant development effort required, and the very obvious high risk of opening this particular can of spaghetti, I would have thought that "those who decide" would have put some considerable thought into the planning and be wanting a pretty major improvement to the game in at least one of these areas:
a) Be more realistic - Or at least make more logical sense
b) Be faster and more reliable or robust
c) Be more fun and/or engaging
d) Disadvantage some (vocal) disadvantaged group of players less

So what did FD do for us :
Lets exclude the new CZs and Megaships from this as while they are good, they could have been done without changing anything else.

1) Local instead of System wide states.

• Sure, on the face of it, especially for someone who doesnt play the BGS, it sounds like a no-brainer. More Realistic AND gives the bigger factions more to do. However, I would argue that a faction wide state, is MORE realistic than multiple. Look at the real world, nations at war and corporations competing for market share specifically avoid multiple conflicts and would rather lose a little influence and position. They know dividing their efforts is not cost effective. They may find alternate ways to control the situation, but they are not stupid enough to throw the might of their arms or marketing budget at it. Certainly arguable that it does not meet criteria a)

I think system and station states is more realistic than faction wide states.

Pre-3.3 I think I saw agricultural stations in famine because the controlling faction was in famine in another system. Possible, but unlikely.

I think that when an outbreak occurs in one station it would affect all the factions in the station and be slower getting to other stations where patient zero's faction is present. (Patient zero is the first personto get the infection.)

Each division of a corporation has its own goals for making money and they will beggar another division to meet and exceed their goals. With the corporations being in many star systems, the leader in each system will only care about his promotions and how much he can rake off for his own retirement fund.

Countries do start multiple conflicts at the same time. Two examples:
1) Germany attacked Russia in World War II before resolving the conflict with Britain. They also declared war on the US in 1941.
2) The US invaded Iraq before stabilizing Afghanistan. Trump did a lot of saber rattling at Iran while we were still fighting in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

You also do not get to choose your conflicts. When your competitor sees you occupied they see their opportunity. The Irish Republicans launched the Easter Rising while Britain was engaged in World War I. The Islamic state started its big offensive when Syria was defending itself from other freedom fighters and the US was still in combat mode in Afghanistan and Iraq.

2) Conflict by Days Won over a Week.

Your point about realism is valid. And when just working against non-player minor factions things are much slower.

Where this is an improvement is when one side is a player minor faction that can't get in every day. This gives them a chance to work around real life.

If people can justify any of these changes, please chime in. If it made ANY sense to me, I might fell less like jacking the entire thing in.

CORRECTION: The Easter Rising was in 1916 during WWI, not WWII.

 

[FrogsFriend]

I can certainly see how the combination of changes would make life difficult for a large faction with lots of low-population systems and a wealth of exploration data.

1. I'm enjoying the change to a more dynamic system where we're not chained to a single state across multiple systems, regardless of local activity. We're now free to pursue multiple goals for our faction simultaneously, even within a single system.
2. Wars are now about the war itself rather than just a meta-tool to jump from 9% to system control or to protect your faction from outside influence. And let's face it, 'victory' was usually accomplished using trade, passengers or exploration data; in fact everything except fighting.
3. See No2 above.
4. I think that's just a consequence of owning lots of low-population systems. The effect of player activity on influence and state changes appears to have increased in low-populations and reduced in high-population systems.
5. It'll be interesting to see how the proposed happiness-expansion mechanic works out if it does get implemented. But from your description it sounds like you're suffering from a common player group problem where your players just keep boosting your faction everywhere, regardless of whether it's actually helping you or not. It's not easy to persuade them that a light touch is often required, especially in low-pop systems.

Overall I'm enjoying the changes. It's made the BGS more dynamic and even more interesting to meddle with.

 

[starman]

Without 3.3 there will be no 3.4 and beyond.

 

[Jane Turner]

We have adapted to the new norm... but it has indeed, as expected, sucked most of the strategic fun out of the game.

 

[Jmanis]

I find the new BGS to be, if the various bugs were fixed, to be great.

I won't write much as I'm on phone at lunch, but i think a lot of the grievances are only valid if you think the BGS is about the individual player, which i disagree with.

I also think there's still a lot of strategic aspects... it's just not the same as the old strategy.

 

[Marra Morgan]

I can certainly see how the combination of changes would make life difficult for a large faction with lots of low-population systems and a wealth of exploration data.

1. I'm enjoying the change to a more dynamic system where we're not chained to a single state across multiple systems, regardless of local activity. We're now free to pursue multiple goals for our faction simultaneously, even within a single system.
2. Wars are now about the war itself rather than just a meta-tool to jump from 9% to system control or to protect your faction from outside influence. And let's face it, 'victory' was usually accomplished using trade, passengers or exploration data; in fact everything except fighting.
3. See No2 above.
4. I think that's just a consequence of owning lots of low-population systems. The effect of player activity on influence and state changes appears to have increased in low-populations and reduced in high-population systems.
5. It'll be interesting to see how the proposed happiness-expansion mechanic works out if it does get implemented. But from your description it sounds like you're suffering from a common player group problem where your players just keep boosting your faction everywhere, regardless of whether it's actually helping you or not. It's not easy to persuade them that a light touch is often required, especially in low-pop systems.

Overall I'm enjoying the changes. It's made the BGS more dynamic and even more interesting to meddle with.

Good points that echo my feelings on it too.

It's definitely a step in the right direction and I'm not missing the dull, easily-gamed system of pre-3.3 in the slightest.