Probably a 1.4 change on what type of missions they offer. Otherwise they should offer the same stuff. If they still own the station you will have to explore if you dont want to do the other stuff.
A Guide to Minor Factions and the Background Sim
- Thread starter Walt Kerman
- Start date
Probably a 1.4 change on what type of missions they offer. Otherwise they should offer the same stuff. If they still own the station you will have to explore if you dont want to do the other stuff.
Thank you Walt Kerman. I think shining a light on the BGS - worts and all can only make it more popular, it is one of EDs hidden gems. I tried repping you, but I have repp'd you too recently have a virtual one instead.
Word of advise for people, charity missions increase influence a bit, but seem to promote negative states such as lock down and civil disorder for us in 1.4, we are ignoring them at the moment.
Leads on to the meat of my post. I think the Wiki has some basic information about missions and what they do, but I see a lot of different results for similarly worded missions. I think source and target faction states affect the outcome, and indeed allegiance and government type of the source and destination faction. I would like to map this. I run a lot of missions anyway, so documenting the outcome of each would not be so hard. We have 5 systems at the moment, most are low population refinery/extraction systems so it would great to work with others to see if we can make what seems random outcomes of missions more predictable.
Most people ignore the mission outcome, and observe that all missions are the same. I think, documenting how what is the same mission can have different affects would encourage people to take a look at missions in a different way.
One change is 1.4, is the state change affects of missions seems to be dependent on the population size of the faction. In 1.3 we only really looked at influence and starting conflicts. In 1.4, we are having to look at pending states a lot more, and state changes from missions.
anyone fancy helping catalogue mission and results?
Simon
Word of advise for people, charity missions increase influence a bit, but seem to promote negative states such as lock down and civil disorder for us in 1.4, we are ignoring them at the moment.
Leads on to the meat of my post. I think the Wiki has some basic information about missions and what they do, but I see a lot of different results for similarly worded missions. I think source and target faction states affect the outcome, and indeed allegiance and government type of the source and destination faction. I would like to map this. I run a lot of missions anyway, so documenting the outcome of each would not be so hard. We have 5 systems at the moment, most are low population refinery/extraction systems so it would great to work with others to see if we can make what seems random outcomes of missions more predictable.
Most people ignore the mission outcome, and observe that all missions are the same. I think, documenting how what is the same mission can have different affects would encourage people to take a look at missions in a different way.
One change is 1.4, is the state change affects of missions seems to be dependent on the population size of the faction. In 1.3 we only really looked at influence and starting conflicts. In 1.4, we are having to look at pending states a lot more, and state changes from missions.
anyone fancy helping catalogue mission and results?
Simon
Ok. And what about trading? If i try just to sell stuff from other systems to markets in LHS 3447, which owns the opposite-controlling faction? This should lower its influence, right?
Yes, but with LHS 3447, you have to remember that there can be more than 10,000 players through the system every day. You won't be able to effect any significant changes with that many players running missions and trading.
If you want to impact the background simulation on your own, I suggest you head out to the edges of populated space and find yourself a low population system with very little player traffic. If you head out towards the Manite/Mikunn region, I'll quite happily help you find a system and help you work it.
The thing is that the contextual effects of many missions make managing the data quite difficult: Hauling Cobalt from Irens Dock, Manite to Norgay Hub, Obambori has a boom effect under normal circumstances, whereas if the system is in lockdown it contributes to the lifting of that state. The missions are spawned based on a dataset that is unique to each system at that particular time. It would take extensive work on all economy types under all states to be able to say definitively which categories of missions have which effects under which circumstances.smiths121 said:
That's not to say that it can't, or shouldn't, be done, just that it's a metric ass-ton of work.
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Thank you once again for you and your group's fine work at teasing out the details of the background sim. Rep for you!
What a wonderful post Walt!! Thank you for articulating it so well and putting all the updated information in one place!
Repped!!
I've been playing -suffering- the BGS ever since January when I became allied to the Social Eleu Progressive Party. We've since expanded and controlled, fallen and risen, and are now stuck due to bugs.
I am not sure this is a hard truth right now. There's a bug that really swings the influence up and down erratically and it is still an issue. We can attest to this because we are certain and sure there are no other human players affecting our system. Even if they do visit and do trade, there is no way our influence would go from 87% to 13% keeping the same low traffic. Is bugged right now.
Conversely, we just expanded into a tiny system and yes, it seems like influence there is more static, stable. We don't visit much and it's remained basically the same for days, whereas main system gets daily "tick".
Not only the traffic it gets is crazy, it is also an amount of people that have no idea whatsoever of what they are doing as they are figuring out the game yet. They are too busy to focus on landing and lowering the gear than to realize there are families dying under their docking pad because no one has brought them any food in weeks.
You definitely want to pick another system with a different traffic. As long as all new people keep starting in there, LHS 3447 will never be a stable system.
Repped!!
I've been playing -suffering- the BGS ever since January when I became allied to the Social Eleu Progressive Party. We've since expanded and controlled, fallen and risen, and are now stuck due to bugs.
I am not sure this is a hard truth right now. There's a bug that really swings the influence up and down erratically and it is still an issue. We can attest to this because we are certain and sure there are no other human players affecting our system. Even if they do visit and do trade, there is no way our influence would go from 87% to 13% keeping the same low traffic. Is bugged right now.
Conversely, we just expanded into a tiny system and yes, it seems like influence there is more static, stable. We don't visit much and it's remained basically the same for days, whereas main system gets daily "tick".
Just said before by my monkey fellow, but will repeat it: LHS 3447 is probably the worst system in the Galaxy to affect the BGS. Last time I went there -like 4 months ago- the system was a mess!! Factions are starving, i war, lockdown, unrest, etc. There is every single obstacle that you can imagine, is present. The reason: well, is where all the new people start!
Not only the traffic it gets is crazy, it is also an amount of people that have no idea whatsoever of what they are doing as they are figuring out the game yet. They are too busy to focus on landing and lowering the gear than to realize there are families dying under their docking pad because no one has brought them any food in weeks.
You definitely want to pick another system with a different traffic. As long as all new people keep starting in there, LHS 3447 will never be a stable system.
The influence and states won't update if the system isn't forced to update itself, which is achieved by jumping into the system. Think about it - processing updates for 400,000,000,000 star systems is a gargantuan processing task. If the systems are only updated when a player visits them, it's much more manageable.
There are bugs for sure, but they only affect systems with players visiting them.
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BGS should have its own forum...
Ok, got it. The erratic influence is affecting only those systems that are getting traffic.
I had interpreted that if it moved up or down only because of players manipulating. Eg. We know there are no players affecting influence for our enemy faction. However, we do transit our system daily and that keeps the system alive and getting its daily "tick" which brings up the bug of erratic influence, in which many times that faction is above us.
Yes, thanks!
BTW, Walt, is your avatar connected with Silicon Valley TV series?
BTW, Walt, is your avatar connected with Silicon Valley TV series?
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I've been to a system today and it said in the system map info it was a democracy. I clicked on the only station in the system and it said it was a dictatorship. I was confused. I went to the system and checked the left and right panels. The left said democracy. The right said dictatorship faction in charge. I entered that station It was ran by the dictatorship. This has me very confused. The system is a democracy. The only station in the system is a full size one and is ran by a dictatorship which has more influence than the other factions. There were no wars etc in progress and nothing pending.
Can some one explain what is happening in this situation?
Can some one explain what is happening in this situation?
wrong info in system map. if you want to have fun, check the commodity market, too... to me, it looks as if a) galaxy map is outdated most of the time b) if change happens, system map get's outdated and needs x-of time to update c) commodity market is even longer outdated...
and believe the HUD ;-)
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The system's information concerning government and allegiance to major factions (even the color: blue, green, red, yellow) in the galaxy map doesn't update automatically. I believe FD have to change it manually. So the info displayed was accurate when they last updated it. Since then probably hundreds of systems have been flipped and the galaxy map still displays the old data.
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BGS is very confusing/complex/unintuitive. It's things like that, and the image below that kind of make it seem like some kind of dark art...; Walt's post helps immensely. +1 Rep.
Out of interest, is there a (maintained) list anywhere of "things to be tested" for influence effects?
I've got a whole range of things which may-or-may-not work, and rather than wall-of-text them into here, I thought I'd try and verify them against the observations of others (with no luck googling so far), or outright test them myself.
The biggest one I want to try is determining if there's different influence "buckets", and actions in each bucket get diminishing returns. Also want to try and determine what those buckets are.
I've got a whole range of things which may-or-may-not work, and rather than wall-of-text them into here, I thought I'd try and verify them against the observations of others (with no luck googling so far), or outright test them myself.
The biggest one I want to try is determining if there's different influence "buckets", and actions in each bucket get diminishing returns. Also want to try and determine what those buckets are.
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As far as we (CSG/Lugh) could tell...there is only one bucket of influence that is split amongst all factions. There IS diminishing returns on influence...at the top and a faction can never hold 100% of a system...it has to share a minimum % of influence with all other factions at best...IIRC CSG had held 95-97% of faction at it's highest.
There are secondary effects on factions within systems...although they are small...they are verifiable. In 1.2, any exploration data was shared with the recording station/faction owner AND the #2 faction in the system. The recording station received x% and the number 2 faction received x/2% (so a 10% rise in the recording faction who owned the station, also provided a 5% rise to the number 2 faction within the system.
Don't disagree with any of that, but it's not quite what I meant.
As a general case in the systems I've played around in, if I run about 6 missions before a tick I can get 6-9% influence shift. This shift for the effort I put in was consistent all the way from 30% to 70% influence for my chosen faction, when War kicked in and I flipped the system. If I run about 15 missions I can get 12% influence shift e.g for a 150% increase in qty of missions run, I only get a net 25% increase in influence shift. Watching the lugh stuff go on, that's reflected in the dozens (hundreds?) of players doing missions and getting a large increase, but far from proportional to the amount of effort being put in by players. That's the diminishing rewards I was talking about i.e the diminishing amount of influence gain for a single mission, when many have been run.
So what I wonder is if, during a given cycle, running missions for a faction has been "saturated", will you get better gross gains from an activity which hasn't been undertaken much (like selling explo data, trading, killing civvies etc).
As you push past 70% anything that affects influence has smaller and smaller outcomes. Changing the way you increase the faction % will not matter...you will get a smaller responses across the board...until there is no response. In 1.4 the size of the system (population wise) is supposed to require more missions to be run than in the past for larger systems...and smaller systems should work similarly to past performance.
What is odd in Lugh, currently is, the two factions that have entered war do not have a station...so the war is 'useless'. If it was run by players to test the BGS without harm...no one has claimed it...and we are trying to let things right themselves before we start pushing things around seriously again. However, we did push certain 'tricks' we know to use over the weekend and were not been able to move CSG out of 1%.
For me, the diminishing returns with higher influence shares seem quite logical, mathematically speaking. I assume the algorithm works like this:
- add all influence changes during one tick to the outcome of the last tick (hidden variable per faction per system, absolute number)
- during a 'tick': derive influence shares in a system by calculating the share from the sum of all faction variables
(sorry, I'm no coder, somebody might explain better).
That means, when going from 70% influence to 80% influence, you have to double your faction's absolute 'influence' variable. Which will be quite a chore.
That could also explain why it's faster to get higher influence by reducing the opposing faction's influence, e.g. by killing their ships. I single handedly (I think) increased our faction's influence from 71 to 82% in a day, just with 1 hour of killing ships.
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