Interesting. I have not seen influence swings that big when working solo - is that the max the faction can move on its own in total with all the players, or per player?
Perhaps I need to retry a max of missions test...
A Guide to Minor Factions and the Background Sim
- Thread starter Walt Kerman
- Start date
Interesting. I have not seen influence swings that big when working solo - is that the max the faction can move on its own in total with all the players, or per player?
Perhaps I need to retry a max of missions test...
Rewind to Feb 3302 - SDC did an 'invasion' of the Mobius Private Group.
Some 'Friends of Mobius' decided to give SDC a kicking right in the BGS.
There was a bit of a pile on and there was CMDR traffic in the several hundreds in Wolfberg.
SDC dropped influence by 14% per day.
So I've always thought of that as a kind of maxed out test, but it's more than a year old.
Pollycough got his first real taste of BGS manipulation there, he might remember details better.
Interesting. It does make sense, otherwise influence swings would be insane with a good team.
Mission templates simply have a state effect coded into them, and it's unrelated to the content.
In other words, yes, doing "Transport biowaste" missions increases the chance of outbreak, but that's because it's an effect of doing that mission, and *not* an effect of having brought biowaste to that station.
I posted about this a while back, but basically nobody has actually proven beyond inconclusive anecdotal evidence that selling biowaste on the commodity market induces an outbreak. It's a few pages back, but I'm just heading out the door atm.
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I've induced swings of =~ 30% on my own on some low pop (10k-ish) systems spamming black market trading against one faction, and positive effects for a chosen other faction.
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is that since the single trade patch? I could probably induce similar with murder for sure, but since that patch black market trades have been less than ideal.
Not since then no, however I have also induced a similar increase with exploration data more recently on a 20k system.
BTW: Dunno if people have beta rules here or anything, but it looks like donation missions (as far as rep goes, nfi about influence) scale rewards based off the amount donated. Tested this with two factions at an equal rep level, did one donation for 50,000cr, took me halfway from my current level towards cordial. Did another for 750,000cr for the other faction, took me quite a bit over cordial.
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The confirmed things (that I know about) that increase outbreak/famine are:
- Missions
- A "small, regular" contribution to the buckets for increasing outbreak/famine, usually outstripped by player activity*. This was confirmed in the most recent livestream where Dav talked about the BGS.
Prior to that entering the game, outbreaks/famines were all but non-existent. (e.g https://community.elitedangerous.com/galnet/uid/55dd7fa99657ba6e7b5b8fda)
... as opposed to now: https://community.elitedangerous.com/galnet/uid/58bfe54c15ac1c701494899c
Delivering food/medicines *during* a famine/outbreak is an entirely different bag though, though I note the wording has changed in that most recent health report that "Food/medicine *missions* help", and not just the raw commodity trade.
* For whatever that means.
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I don't suppose anyone has made a kind of flowchart with all the various buckets and what can positively and negatively impact them?
People have tried to map the missions in the past, though the missions do regularly change and there's lots of permutations.
Other things, well, there's a rough idea, but the jury is out on a lot of specifics. Suffice to say, overwhelmingly^
- Trading for profit causes an economic boom
- Trading on black market causes economic bust
- General unlawfulness can cause civil unrest/lockdown %
- Missions can contribute to almost any state (except conflict/expansion/investment)
^ This doesn't mean it's the only effect. Goemon made suggestion on how other things like legal weapons dealing may contribute overwhelmingly to boom, but also cause civil unrest, though you'd never see that. Just coz I don't agree with that doesn't mean it's incorrect
% I've always contended that destroying law enforcement ships causes lockdown, and destroying civilians without bounties causes civil unrest, but there's arguments that killing causes lockdown, while committing crimes and receiving fines/bounties is what causes civil unrest. I've been loathe to try and verify this since the last time I checked was before the (stupid knee-jerk) changes locking you out of stations if you're hostile.
My own experience is based on early after Powerplay's release, I took lots of missions to kill (lots of) civilians during a neighbouring system's economic bust. This usually spiralled into civil unrest, but not lockdown. For the purposes of the missions, authorities, pirates, bounty hunters didn't count as civilians.
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I would think that if a Dev truly in the deep know re the BGS were to create a very clear yet detailed player friendly flow chart for that covered all the angles re buckets etc and left very little to be desired re questions for FD store purchase, that it would sell as well as any paint job.
Those that want mystery need not buy it
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They don't want you to know, they want you to guess for two reasons.
1. Full knowledge of the BGS could lead to full scale exploitation by the BGS gurus.
2. They provide direct inputs into the BGS to change it on a regular basis, think CG and what not.....
Well three, if you were able to see the flow of things and adjust to it you could really make a killing off it and know when to go to another system for making money etc......
1. Full knowledge of the BGS could lead to full scale exploitation by the BGS gurus.
2. They provide direct inputs into the BGS to change it on a regular basis, think CG and what not.....
Well three, if you were able to see the flow of things and adjust to it you could really make a killing off it and know when to go to another system for making money etc......
FDev may not want to reveal, and that's fine; however it's actually kind of fun to propose theories and test them. It doesn't mean we can't make a flowchart that reflects what's known about the BGS and then tweak it as more information comes to light. It's all very scientific. I suggest that if a flowchart is made that there be a list of references to various tests that have been performed so we know why we've come to those conclusions. Dating the tests and linking them to versions of the game would be ideal too so that if we get unexpected results it can be tied to game updates and stale tests.
I suggest that if a flowchart is made that there be a list of references to various tests that have been performed so we know why we've come to those conclusions. Dating the tests and linking them to versions of the game would be ideal too so that if we get unexpected results it can be tied to game updates and stale tests.A friend and I went into a system where our faction was not the controlling faction and we wanted the controlling factions influence to drop. Our faction was in war in a different system so we killed all the leading factions ships we could find. We did this for two days. We never killed any system ships. They are now pending lockdown. We thought our actions would put them into civil unrest. We were wrong. Ill take the lock down though.
CZ massacre missions also cause lockdown, which are a the farming FOTM at the moment... are you sure nobody else could have been running them?
This happened to my faction a little while back, local traffic spiked by 20 combat ships a day when we went into war.
PS: Not trying to outright say "You're wrong", just that there's a lot of other factors to consider... basically it's why nobody has ever put together a complete chart of action-consequence, it's a pretty fraught path.
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FDEV have explicitely stated in the first livestream, that there is no single-commander-cap. so any cap (whether it is a hard- or softcap) applies to groups and single players as well. that 15% was 3 hardcore BGS players taking on a 60k population system .... around 100 missions between two ticks.
which is why i tried carefully wording... my impression is, that there is a (soft or hard-) cap for positive influence gain directly for a faction in place.... for exampel by running missions for them, or trading with profit at their market, selling exploration data and cashin in their bounties etc.
on top of that you can raise their influence by lowering other factions influence, to make much bigger swings possible.
Goemon made suggestion on how other things like legal weapons dealing may contribute overwhelmingly to boom, but also cause civil unrest, though you'd never see that. Just coz I don't agree with that doesn't mean it's incorrect
and the other way round...
the problem with providing a flowchart of states above those provided by FDEV in their dev update and the BGS livestream is, that you can't see the state buckets, till you filled one succesfully (and the state goes pending). you can't see emptying a bucket at all.
and somewhere in this thread Jmanis did an excellent calculation on diminuishing returns in relation to population size (bigger population = harder to move) and influence (more influence=harder to gain influence), which is another problem.
so the standard test is always, to take a no-traffic system low-pop, and repeat one kind of action, till you trigger a state. i have triggered bust by black market trade, and reduced a controlling factions influence as many.... so we know that this works. but we are far from knowing how much BM-trade triggers bust exactly, whether it really counters boom, whether that bucket is system specific or faction wide... the no-traffic provides the problem of only a small number of transactions, while a lot of transactions (there is a dev quote on activity i system somewhere) might provide more or less effect of a a single action... and the small population provides another problem, that you might hit soft-caps or hard-caps much to early, in which it looks as if your actions have no further effect.
and then, there are bugs. like from the 2.3. patch-notes: "Fixed faction influence change from smuggling weapons". i'm not sure what this is referring to (currently no negative influence by BM weapon trade? currently positive influence from BM weapon trade? too much negative influence from BM weapon tarde?) - but anyone testing the effect of illegal weapons trade in the current live game would get a bugged effect out of the testing.
i personally try to keep things simple, aka: do this - trigger that. combine as many of the things that trigger this at once.
I have to agree, there is no hard "cap" on influence changes. There is a practical limit on the amount of activity a single cmdr, (or small group) can undertake in a tick. There is plenty evidence of 20-30% single tick swings - it just takes a hell of lot of activity.
I also have a strong suspicion that the amount of effort required to effect ever greater changes within one tick gets progressively greater. Far easier to make a 1% change than to make a 10% change. The precise formula eludes us for the moment.
I also have a strong suspicion that the amount of effort required to effect ever greater changes within one tick gets progressively greater. Far easier to make a 1% change than to make a 10% change. The precise formula eludes us for the moment.