A bit of BGS INF confusion...

[Alone Wulff]

Ok, so I'm working in a system with no other player traffic. There are six factions, four of them are at war, one other faction is in 3rd place and my own PMF is last. My plan was to work both mine and the other faction to get them both above the four at war, so I only have to go to Election state with this one other faction to take control.

I earned equal + INF with both factions. I expected both factions to increase in INF equally, but that hasn't happened. My faction has increased by (only) 1% and the other has decreased by 1%. What??

What other factor could I be missing to determine that equal +INF earned would cause a decrease for one faction but an increase for the other? I'm Allied with my own PMF and Cordial with the other - does relationship affect % earned per +INF?

None of the missions I took affected each other, target factions were all non-related factions in other systems.

 

[Retropolitan]

If your faction's influence was much lower than the one in third place, an equal number of increases would have more effect on yours than the other.

A faction can only gain a fraction of the influence it doesn't own on a day's tick, and what that amounts to depends on how much influence it doesn't own.

 

[Retropolitan]

More here.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

There are six factions, four of them are at war, one other faction is in 3rd place and my own PMF is last.

Factions in a war can't change influence, so the only influence that can move in the system is between you and the 3rd-place faction. Influence actions are more effective for factions on low influence to start with (and less effective at high influence) so doing an equal amount for both will transfer influence from the 3rd-place to you.

My plan was to work both mine and the other faction to get them both above the four at war, so I only have to go to Election state with this one other faction to take control.

Best you can do here is to swap places with the third place faction (work for yourself only) before the lower war ends, so you don't have to fight them (and maybe can skip fighting the third-place one if they don't have any assets to contest).

Note that to win the system you have to fight the system controller regardless of where they currently are in influence: if you go past them while they're tied up in a war that doesn't count. Of course, if any of the lower-down factions have stations, it might be worth fighting them anyway on your way up, because owning a station or two will give you more options when it comes to fighting for control of the system.

 

[Alone Wulff]

Influence actions are more effective for factions on low influence to start with (and less effective at high influence) so doing an equal amount for both will transfer influence from the 3rd-place to you.

This explains it. I thought I knew enough about BGS and INF but I guess it's a lot more detailed than I've experienced so far. I've read tons of stuff and I still thought in the back of my mind that influence gain is equal for each + earned. I get it now, makes sense really.

Best you can do here is to swap places with the third place faction (work for yourself only) before the lower war ends, so you don't have to fight them (and maybe can skip fighting the third-place one if they don't have any assets to contest).

This is my new plan. The other non-warring faction is the controlling faction which is why I wanted to get us both up above the wars before they end. I guess I'll aim straight for that faction to get control and just have to take the wars with the two higher factions (I wanted to avoid combat, it's getting tedious, wars every week...). Although at the rate I now know they drop compared to my PMF rising, they'll drop below the lower war before I get above it, so I may end up battling for control from 5th and 6th place... I don't think I can earn enough +INF for both factions again (me gain 1%, they lose 1% etc) before the lower war ends.

Oh well, the joys of BGS I suppose

 

[Jmanis]

This explains it. I thought I knew enough about BGS and INF but I guess it's a lot more detailed than I've experienced so far. I've read tons of stuff and I still thought in the back of my mind that influence gain is equal for each + earned. I get it now, makes sense really.

If you care about the theory behind it...

Spoiler

% influence represents the number of "points"[1] a faction owns from an available bucket of points allocated to that system. The size of that bucket is determined by the system's population, and is believed to be a logarithmic scale, e.g (sample numbers only) 1,000 pop = 100 points, 10,000 pop = 200 points, 100,000 pop = 400 points.... thus it's harder to make change in larger systems, because you need more points to make a change. So in a system of, say, 10,000, a faction with 20% influence owns 40 "points" for that system, using those examples.

So thinking of a system with no wars, let's pretend there's just two factions in a system with pop 1,000. Faction A has 80% inf, Faction B 20% inf. That means:
Faction A - 80% inf, 80 points.
Faction B - 20% inf, 20 points.
Total = 100 points.

Activities you do don't earn "% influence"... they earn points. So pretend you do 10 points of activities for Faction A, and 10 points for Faction B (Let's pretend that's a result of running one Assassination for +++++ inf for either side). You now get:
Faction A - 90 points
Faction B - 30 points
Total = 120 points.

But remember, the system only has 100 points allocated to it, which means Faction A has 90% inf and Faction B has 30%. A system must always add to 100%, so we need to normalise their points against the current total. So at the tick, we get:
Faction A = 90 points (of 120) = 75%, post-tick score = 75 points
Faction B = 30 points (of 120) = 25%, post-tick score = 25 points

So you can see, even if we did the same raw effort for both sides, it's not a balanced outcome; Faction B does better out of it.

If the maths is confusing, just pretend you instead did a massive amount of work for both sides (100,000 points each)... the original scores are too small to be significant, and so the result is a 50/50 split, instead of the factions staying in balance.

Of course, in a system where there's six active factions, you would get both A and B increasing (probably), and the other four factions decreasing. But as Ian pointed out, conflict locks influence; so in your case it's a calculation involving the subset of points available to the factions not in war.

It's worth noting, due to rounding, these calculations don't always add up to 100%; there can be very fractional variances which plausibly even shift factions at in conflict by very small amounts as the BGS renormalises each tick.

[1] what constitute a "point" is is anyone's guess.

Hope that helps!

 

[FrogsFriend]

I'd say boost your Inf as fast as possible while four factions are all tied up in conflicts, so you can trigger your election with the controlling faction as soon as possible. Winning that will make you the controlling faction and boost you another 4% which may get you past another faction or two. Then you'll just have an easy conflict or two at most to get to the top. Remember, if nobody fights for the other side in a conflict you only need to do one positive action to win one day and then wait for it to be over.