A Guide to Minor Factions and the Background Sim
- Thread starter Walt Kerman
- Start date
Elections only occur between two factions of the same type, e.g. two Democrat factions. I've also seen election states between two dictatorships, as though the people in will vote ton decide who rules over them with an iron fist.
Thanks.
(And lol - democratic dictatorships!)
Yes. Our feudal factions hold elections on the regular.
I like to think its like the Holy Roman Empire with Electors.
rootsrat
Volunteer Moderator
This is extremely useful information, thanks OP! I'm just planning a strategy for our newly created group (well, waiting for it to appear in game first...) and this thread covers most of what I planned to do research on.
Big rep for all of you and thanks for your efforts guys!
Big rep for all of you and thanks for your efforts guys!
Question: I am under the impression that picking missions for the enemy factions and then dropping them or not running them, it actually undermines said faction. Did that changes -supposedly it was- or is it still true?
(I've been doing this before 1.3 and I like to think it was working but maybe I am wrong)
(I've been doing this before 1.3 and I like to think it was working but maybe I am wrong)
Questions:
The only effective missions during a civil war are combat missions?
Are there ways to influence elections?
The only effective missions during a civil war are combat missions?
Are there ways to influence elections?
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It was removed in 1.3 after players started abusing the feature to tank other players factions' economies and send them into famine, etc. The Mercs of Mikunn had this happen to them.
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I think the only limit is the amount of time it takes to do the missions. As was indicated above, as a faction gets stronger, it gets harder to buff its influence as the mission effects have diminisihing returns. When 1.4 went live, many factions (including CI) saw huge influence swings in the order of 70% in a day. This is due to a seeming bug in the BGS, which we're not going to publicise the mechanism for.
Do what you always do and report back! As far as I know, there are no multiplier or nullifier effects during that state, so it should just be mission grinding as usual.
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OK, so smuggling goods into a station controlled by a faction you want to support is detrimental to the cause, but is taking their smuggling missions to neighboring systems of benefit, or at least neutral in effect?
Most other guides claim that only combat missions work during a civil war. As for elections, some other guides say that all missions help win an election. At PZN we've noticed that you will not gain influence during a civil war by doing smuggling missions where the destination is in the same system as the civil war (it might be that way for all states). Something else we have noticed was that missions were far more effective than bounty hunting or CZ vouchers. We started to mess with system security levels before abandoning BGS to the bugs. We found that bounty hunting near a RES or nav point was the fastest way to change security. We were unsure if lockdown left any permanent increase on security, but we doubted it because the effects of a boom are not long lasting.
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IS there a maximum influence that a faction can gain or lose in a day?
I've seen swings of 40% under different circumstances
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A few of us at PZN working on a system have done more than 40% in a day. Then again we've also seen the wrong faction receive all the influence we did the previous day, which was also more than 40%. We've also seen our factions not receive influence gains from an entire day's work from several commanders. As for losses, we have not seen any limits. Our BGS was halted when we watched most of our systems drop from 80% to 1 or 0% overnight, while traffic reports do not suggest player activity. I would like to see some kind of BGS reset for 1.5 based on what I've seen.
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Are civil wars still working sometimes or most of the time? Or not at all?
I've only taken part in a single civil war to try and flip a system: at Eleu with Kancro and friends for SEPP.
We'd just figured out that balancing the factions was the way to go at the end of 1.3, and so we had a civil war pending which started as soon as 1.4 dropped.
Like a lot of other minor factions, our influence dropped immediately to 1% and the controlling faction got a boost! By the time the civil war had ended though, we had 80% influence and the other faction had 0%, queue victory celebrations and half a dizen very happy CMDRs.
We waited until the next day and.... nothing! The Eleu Energy Corporation still controlled Eleu, we hadn't even gained a station and EEC had even gone into Boom on 1% influence!
This had left some of my fellow conspirators a little down about the BGS until it gets patched. Is anyone have luck with civil wars? Were we just unlucky? I get the impression that Walt and the Mercs are still doing okay in 1.4, so I fancy having another go now that we at least know we can start a war easily.
I've only taken part in a single civil war to try and flip a system: at Eleu with Kancro and friends for SEPP.
We'd just figured out that balancing the factions was the way to go at the end of 1.3, and so we had a civil war pending which started as soon as 1.4 dropped.
Like a lot of other minor factions, our influence dropped immediately to 1% and the controlling faction got a boost! By the time the civil war had ended though, we had 80% influence and the other faction had 0%, queue victory celebrations and half a dizen very happy CMDRs.
We waited until the next day and.... nothing! The Eleu Energy Corporation still controlled Eleu, we hadn't even gained a station and EEC had even gone into Boom on 1% influence!
This had left some of my fellow conspirators a little down about the BGS until it gets patched. Is anyone have luck with civil wars? Were we just unlucky? I get the impression that Walt and the Mercs are still doing okay in 1.4, so I fancy having another go now that we at least know we can start a war easily.
Like a lot of other minor factions, our influence dropped immediately to 1% and the controlling faction got a boost! By the time the civil war had ended though, we had 80% influence and the other faction had 0%, queue victory celebrations and half a dizen very happy CMDRs.
We waited until the next day and.... nothing! The Eleu Energy Corporation still controlled Eleu, we hadn't even gained a station and EEC had even gone into Boom on 1% influence!
This had left some of my fellow conspirators a little down about the BGS until it gets patched. Is anyone have luck with civil wars? Were we just unlucky? I get the impression that Walt and the Mercs are still doing okay in 1.4, so I fancy having another go now that we at least know we can start a war easily.
We are having the same issue but with an Election. Won the election 83% to 0%, but no station transfer. Very frustrating.
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Nice post!
I think this is a good idea. And I'd get my faction on board with testing some concepts to help sort out what is working after 1.4 and what is not. I planned to do some of my own focused testing anyway. Of course, no matter what you do, you always have that unknown variable of not knowing what other people are doing in your test system.
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FDEV said they will be adding a bucket to show player actions. They didn't say if we can see it though.
Edit: I think I recalled the information incorrectly. This came from the 1.4 patch notes
"- Retune influence and faction state bucket values from all player actions"
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=188174
That does say that there is a bucket for influence and faction states for player actions. It sounds like the player actions are recorded. Or the buckets may just store the results, and not record the players actions. It could be made to store the players actions if it doesn't already.
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rootsrat
Volunteer Moderator
As soon as our faction is in game I'm happy to do some testing aselike well