A Guide to Minor Factions and the Background Sim

[Szyslak22]

So we know Conflict states (War/Civil War/Election) remove Economic states (Boom/Bust), and these in turn prevent Expansion but what of the Security states (Lockdown/Civil Unrest) and the Living Standard states (Famine). How do they fit into the chain of hierarchy?

The reason I ask is that over the last few days I have been passing through a system while running courier missions, and one system (leading faction that is) in question is in Boom. But it also has Lockdown and Civil Unrest as pending. These only have a 1 day pending state clock, but it has been this way for 3 days. Which I thought would have taken it out of Boom. Any ideas?

There is currently no distinction between Economic states, Security states, Living standard states. They are all considered Economic states. They all have the same priority. One must be cleared as the active state before the next in the queue will go active.

iirc, in the early parts of the BGS live stream, you can hear the devs list them all off as "Economic states". In practice, they are treated with equal priority, so they should go active in the same order they were added to the pending queue. Conflict ends all of them. All of them prevent expansion from going active (but allow expansion to go pending).

 

[jimbeau1571]

There is currently no distinction between Economic states, Security states, Living standard states. They are all considered Economic states. They all have the same priority. One must be cleared as the active state before the next in the queue will go active.

iirc, in the early parts of the BGS live stream, you can hear the devs list them all off as "Economic states". In practice, they are treated with equal priority, so they should go active in the same order they were added to the pending queue. Conflict ends all of them. All of them prevent expansion from going active (but allow expansion to go pending).

+1rep (least I would if it would let me)

Thanks for the explanation, I hope they change this slightly with the additional states coming in 2.1. I feel they have missed a trick here by differentiating between those groups (Living Standards was my naming convention by the way not anything official, it was the best way I could think to describe them).

I assumed that Lockdown would be the master of all states as this one cannot be affected by any actions as described in MB's table. We all know assuming does though .... makes an ass out of you.

 

[MONTItheRed]

Is there a hierarchy of positive influence actions?
Maybe something like (in descending order)
Missions
Bounties
Exploration data
Trade


For negative actions it would be
Killing system security
Smuggling


Not sure the best metric here. Credits? Time?

 

[goemon]

best metric here. Credits? Time?

if, it isn't CR, it is time.

if the minor faction is in no state: high influence missions -> medium influence missions -> all other actions.

if the minor faction is in a state doubling the effect of an action: high influence missions -> "double effective actions" -> medium missions.

but even this isn't true under certain circumstances, for exampel if you have only 1 outpost in system 50 k ls from entry, and have to fly there everytime to hand in missions.

all other actions, assuming same skill and fun/motivation, highly depend on circumstances in terms of "effectiveness". if you have a pristine metallic ring close by, and the next import system generating good profit some jumps away, mining will trump trade.

if you have a comp nav and no res in system, and your stations rarely spawn system sec, but a source of illegal goods close by, smuggling trumps shooting system security. etc.

CR nowhere play a major role in BGS influencing, beside profits if trading, having the tools (ships), and having the money to loose money (negative trading).

you can play the BGS with a cobra mkIII - like everything else.

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

One thing to keep in mind when messing about with the BGS, is that missions often have an effect in another system. You will raise or lower the influence of one or more factions in the systems you do the missions in. Our recent campaign in Borasetani has left a sphere of destruction in the nearby systems. At least 4 systems (that I know of, probably much more) are in civil war as well as civil unrest, lockdown and bust states.

 

[Muetdhiver]

I have a question for you guys : did you ever encounter a "coup d'état" state ?

 

[dunnykin]

I have a question for you guys : did you ever encounter a "coup d'état" state ?

No but guess that's what civil wars in French could show as.

 

[Szyslak22]

I have a question for you guys : did you ever encounter a "coup d'état" state ?

Is this about the comment from the BGS live stream? Because I think that's what they called the scenario where a conflict for control would be initiated when a non-controlling faction gets over 60% influence. The actual conflict type would follow the normal rules for Election, Civil War, or War. It's just a special way to trigger them.

 

[Muetdhiver]

No but guess that's what civil wars in French could show as.

No, it is not the same as the civil war state. It's a war that doubles down as a civil war, but you get no warning.

 

[goemon]

No, it is not the same as the civil war state. It's a war that doubles down as a civil war, but you get no warning.

can you share details? a little bit more context? no civil war pending, but a civil war suddeny breaking out? i don't understand... :-/

 

[Muetdhiver]

a friend made a detailed recount of the events :

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=252638&p=3922935#post3922935

 

[the100thmonkey]

There are three states which result in change of control: election, civil war and war. War and civil war are different - wars occur when one (or both) of the factions are not native to the system. Civil wars only happen when the two factions are native to the system. They have different criteria for settling the outcome - the influence difference has to be bigger to win a war. I think it's currently 15%, unless it changed in the last patch.

I've never seen the state "coup," although that doesn't mean there isn't one. The Liberal of 31 Arietis would logically go to war for the Jotun system as they are not a native faction. I also don't understand the reasoning as to why the second conflict is impossible - it's almost a month after the first one, so the maximum length of the conflict and a cooldown wouldn't block it (21 + 3 days, or thereabouts, IIRC.)

The station ownership changes the tick before the war concludes.

Honestly, your friend is pretty difficult to understand, and I don't see anything in the post that constitutes a bug.

*edit*

and take anything the customer support team say with a very large grain of salt. They've been very wrong on the BGS before.

 

[Szyslak22]

Honestly, your friend is pretty difficult to understand, and I don't see anything in the post that constitutes a bug.

Makes it a pretty weird response from support though, doesn't it?

We've never seen an actual "Coup" state. I think it's just a reference to the challenge for control scenario. Maybe someone in support is reading their notes wrong on that one

Or maybe it's just so rare that we've never seen it. But then it would need to be a pretty crazy scenario.

 

[DeltaMG]

For me it is not a state if it does not appear in game.

 

[Muetdhiver]

So, the coup is something confirmed by the support :

"There is actually a third state that may help to clear up some of the confusion here.

The third state is a brief moment called a 'Coup' (coups d'état) whereby an overwhelming difference of influence such as in the Jotun system may cause there to be no need for a civil war as the controlling minor faction can simply be out-done by the currently winning minor faction. This can only happen in certain circumstances where the factions were unable to get into a civil war with each other previously and is quite rare.

It does however, judging by the difference in influence, look incredibly likely that this is the case here and the Liberals of 31 Arietis indeed claimed ownership of the system outright"

We find this quite hard to swallow, since we worked to support/expand the dukes for more than a year now. (with a lot of success, expansion to 8 systems or so).
A war is not supposed to lead to a loss of control of the system. Yet it happend, and there is no defense against it*. In the case of a civil war, you know that the system control can
be lost, but you can prevent it by fighting.

This really suckered punched us, as we where busy elsewhere and planed to act when a civil war would erupt. What we'd like to know is wether any of you have seen such thing before.

*well, now we know. But it's a tad too late.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Makes it a pretty weird response from support though, doesn't it?

Yes, but I've recently been helping another group. They emailed support and got a nonsensical reply from them as to why the faction entered election and not civil war, to the effect of "the influence difference is too high."

The actual reason they entered election was that they were in the same category of factions, which means elections not conflict.

We've never seen an actual "Coup" state. I think it's just a reference to the challenge for control scenario. Maybe someone in support is reading their notes wrong on that one

I concur, especially given the incorrect information they gave regarding conflicts to another group just a few days ago.

Or maybe it's just so rare that we've never seen it. But then it would need to be a pretty crazy scenario.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, yes. But we do have evidence that the support team, in this instance, don't seem to know what they're talking about!

So, the coup is something confirmed by the support :

"There is actually a third state that may help to clear up some of the confusion here.

And I've seen confirmation that support don't know what they're talking about!

The third state is a brief moment called a 'Coup' (coups d'état) whereby an overwhelming difference of influence such as in the Jotun system may cause there to be no need for a civil war as the controlling minor faction can simply be out-done by the currently winning minor faction. This can only happen in certain circumstances where the factions were unable to get into a civil war with each other previously and is quite rare.

It does however, judging by the difference in influence, look incredibly likely that this is the case here and the Liberals of 31 Arietis indeed claimed ownership of the system outright"

Like I said, don't believe it just because support wrote it. They have questionable knowledge of the mechanics. If they actually had access to the logs, they would have been able to see the coup state in them, and wouldn't have speculated.

We find this quite hard to swallow, since we worked to support/expand the dukes for more than a year now. (with a lot of success, expansion to 8 systems or so).
A war is not supposed to lead to a loss of control of the system. Yet it happend, and there is no defense against it*. In the case of a civil war, you know that the system control can
be lost, but you can prevent it by fighting.

Where do you get this idea that a war doesn't lead to the loss of a system? It does, all the time, provided the difference in the influence gets large enough.

This really suckered punched us, as we where busy elsewhere and planed to act when a civil war would erupt. What we'd like to know is wether any of you have seen such thing before.

No, we haven't. From the information you've given here, you just lost the war, pure and simple.

 

[goemon]

a friend made a detailed recount of the events :

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=252638&p=3922935#post3922935

very. very interesting.

i'll comment on your friends post in here:

In your game, there is only two state for change the controling faction : election, and civil war. And, apparently, this is not the case here.

that is not correct. war, civil war and election are all conflict states, and can change assets, station and system control.

Support: There is actually a third state that may help to clear up some of the confusion here.

The third state is a brief moment called a 'Coup' (coups d'état) whereby an overwhelming difference of influence such as in the Jotun system may cause there to be no need for a civil war as the controlling minor faction can simply be out-done by the currently winning minor faction. This can only happen in certain circumstances where the factions were unable to get into a civil war with each other previously and is quite rare.

It does however, judging by the difference in influence, look incredibly likely that this is the case here and the Liberals of 31 Arietis indeed claimed ownership of the system outright.

this would be totally new to me. because support is known to not-be-always-knowledgeable about the BGS (shown in many bug reports about expansion, which all got different answers, for exampel on expansion range), I'm hesitating, that this is true.

what the understanding of the term "coup d'etat" has been in this thread till now: a minor faction, that gets to 60%+ influence in a system, will always challenge the system controlling faction for a war/civil on system control.

this has been seen often. very often this war is won as soon as it gets active, and you can go to the CZ or not...

a scenario like support describes is unknown to me.

so, my understanding of the events in your friends post is:

1. Liberals of Arietis is a faction, that expanded into Jotun. Therefore they will get wars, not civil wars, if getting into conflict with local minor faction (or they get an election).

2. First war (25 march - 7 april), if it has been with the system controlling faction, wasn't won.

3. after some time, Liberals of Arietis challenged the Dukes of Jotun a second time - war got pending.

4. Liberals of Arietis won that second war and station/system control. But due to a known bug, which shows conflict zones and war active one day longer (and you can still hand in bonds), while the war is already won, it looked to you, like the war still went on. a tick later, CZ should be gone.


... little bit sorry for the dukes of jotun, but hey - i hope the liberals accept my old permit!

 

[Imeraxes]

so, my understanding of the events in your friends post is:

1. Liberals of Arietis is a faction, that expanded into Jotun. Therefore they will get wars, not civil wars, if getting into conflict with local minor faction (or they get an election).

2. First war (25 march - 7 april), if it has been with the system controlling faction, wasn't won.

3. after some time, Liberals of Arietis challenged the Dukes of Jotun a second time - war got pending.

4. Liberals of Arietis won that second war and station/system control. But due to a known bug, which shows conflict zones and war active one day longer (and you can still hand in bonds), while the war is already won, it looked to you, like the war still went on. a tick later, CZ should be gone.

Yeah, yeah, but the war lasted more than a day, ant the response from the support has confirmed that the change of control was not the result of war...

 

[goemon]

Yeah, yeah, but the war lasted more than a day, ant the response from the support has confirmed that the change of control was not the result of war...

one day longer = one day after asset/station/system changed control, combat zones are still shown (but taking part in them has no effect on the outcome). does this meet the situation?

as the100thmonkey i'm very sceptical about support answers on BGS questions see above. those are probably not questions they get everyday.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Wars have a minimum as well as maximum duration. How long did yours last?

Actually, I'm really confused - how can you have had eight expansions and not learned how wars work?

And one more thing - "coup d'etat" has a rather specific meaning (apologies for missing the accent, I don't have French input on my phone) - a coup involves embers of the establishment of a polity seizing power, such as the military or, in the recent case of Brazil, a right-wing hardman who couldn't get elected... not an invading force.