**this is draft #1, and I would appreciate any corrections/input that will make the guide more accurate and helpful. Post them, and I'll add them to this first post. Also, if you have any faction tracking spreadsheets/tools that you are willing to share, please add a link here or in the BGS thread.
A Guide on steering the expansion of your minor faction.
First, you need to know what actions impact the Background Sim (BGS), and have an understanding of the BGS states and how they interact. The best place to learn that is this thread A Guide to Minor Factions and the Background Sim.
Next, you need to know how expansion is handled. What happens is your faction reaches >75% influence in a system, and you enter expansion. You expand to the nearest system with the least factions…that also has less than 10 factions, and is within 50 LY. That part is predictable. If those requirements can’t be met, your expansion may fail. This part is less predictable.
Steering where you expand to is, IMO, not at all "easy", and may not be worthwhile. Of course, if the system you want to expand to meets the requirements above, congrats, you won the lottery!
To control expansion, you have to force the conditions above, to put it simply. So...
Timing is everything. You want the events below to occur such that you are ready to expand exactly when the target system is ready for your expansion.
1. Work the system you want to expand to by forcing a retreat (<1% inf for 3 ticks) of one of the non-native factions, and thus causing it to have less than 10 factions.
2. Fill any other 'closest' systems with less than 10 factions by expanding other factions into those, because you don't want to expand there. Here, ‘closest’ means closer to you than your target expansion system. Note, it may actually be faster to just expand to the less desirable system, and then to your desired system, but now you have more systems with BGS states to deconflict, so…it’s up to you.
3. Increase your faction to expansion level (75%) in the system you want to expand from.
Not to be a Debbie Downer, but…
While that's only 3 steps, the amount of work to do that is huge. I would go beyond that and say it's a pita given we have little/no tools to monitor and search the gal map to try to figure out where a faction might expand to and where a particular faction exists. Heck, we can't even bring up a X LY bubble on the gal map like the power play display can already do. I know some folks have great tracking spreadsheets to help, but nada in game. I would go even beyond that and say it's a massive time sink to work those other systems. Not to mention you'll have other players fussing about causing changes to the BGS you can't do much about, and they may not even realize what they're doing impacts the BGS.
So, it's possible to steer expansion, but it takes a lot of work. Also, doing it on the fringes where there is less commander traffic is helpful and almost required.
A Guide on steering the expansion of your minor faction.
First, you need to know what actions impact the Background Sim (BGS), and have an understanding of the BGS states and how they interact. The best place to learn that is this thread A Guide to Minor Factions and the Background Sim.
Next, you need to know how expansion is handled. What happens is your faction reaches >75% influence in a system, and you enter expansion. You expand to the nearest system with the least factions…that also has less than 10 factions, and is within 50 LY. That part is predictable. If those requirements can’t be met, your expansion may fail. This part is less predictable.
Steering where you expand to is, IMO, not at all "easy", and may not be worthwhile. Of course, if the system you want to expand to meets the requirements above, congrats, you won the lottery!
To control expansion, you have to force the conditions above, to put it simply. So...
Timing is everything. You want the events below to occur such that you are ready to expand exactly when the target system is ready for your expansion.
1. Work the system you want to expand to by forcing a retreat (<1% inf for 3 ticks) of one of the non-native factions, and thus causing it to have less than 10 factions.
2. Fill any other 'closest' systems with less than 10 factions by expanding other factions into those, because you don't want to expand there. Here, ‘closest’ means closer to you than your target expansion system. Note, it may actually be faster to just expand to the less desirable system, and then to your desired system, but now you have more systems with BGS states to deconflict, so…it’s up to you.
3. Increase your faction to expansion level (75%) in the system you want to expand from.
Not to be a Debbie Downer, but…
While that's only 3 steps, the amount of work to do that is huge. I would go beyond that and say it's a pita given we have little/no tools to monitor and search the gal map to try to figure out where a faction might expand to and where a particular faction exists. Heck, we can't even bring up a X LY bubble on the gal map like the power play display can already do. I know some folks have great tracking spreadsheets to help, but nada in game. I would go even beyond that and say it's a massive time sink to work those other systems. Not to mention you'll have other players fussing about causing changes to the BGS you can't do much about, and they may not even realize what they're doing impacts the BGS.
So, it's possible to steer expansion, but it takes a lot of work. Also, doing it on the fringes where there is less commander traffic is helpful and almost required.