A Guide to Minor Factions and the Background Sim

Adhock

A
Okay. Update on the latest from my corner of the Galaxy.

Values finally updated to correct values and I'm starting to see a pattern forming.

Each time I've engaged in a Civil War since Mid-November, and I'm coming up on three, whenever my faction has been on the verge of victory, it somehow resets to equalizing and locks it until the War ends. At which point, my faction is declared the loser and the influence corrects to a 7% difference in favor of my opponent a day later.

ALWAYS a 7%. PERFECTLY. WITHOUT FAIL.

Even with the amount of player traffic in my system going up and down. It should not be perfectly hitting 7%. That kind of coordination simply isn't possible as far as I'm aware since we don't have up to date real time information on influence.

Not to mention it always seems to fail to include my efforts to continue to push even in spite of influence values not moving.

Three times I've been denied due to this glitch. That is not a conincidence.

I'm gonna try moving things around and see what happens. Keep an eye on the other Civil War in my system and see what the outcome is as long as I don't touch the factions.
 

Deleted member 115407

D
Well, I made it back to base OK...

I didn't realize that when I logged out some number of months ago I was just sitting in a ring.... neither here nor there.

What surprised me is that not only has my minor faction held its own, and even expanded into a new system, but that one of the solitary backwater colonies has grown. What used to be just a refuel spot and commodities market is now listed on the system map as having every service available.

Are colonies actually "growing" now?
 

Adhock

A
anonymousanarchist123 said:
Why not give the methods detailed in here a go to move influences around in the system to aid you're progress: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ation-Large-Faction-Influence-Swing-Mechanics
Click to expand...

Because I'm about to be locked yet another Civil War and that means everything you've outlined will have no effect.

During certain states, some means of influence on the BGS will effectively be locked out. In the case of Civil or War. All trade and exploration influences are suspended and will not affect the influence values. Even most of the missions unless they're combat related will not have any effect.

Only two things will have effect in a Civil War to affect Influence values. Killing Ships for Combat Vouchers, and massacre missions.

Lockdown effectively renders everything useless. Only bounty hunting can end a Lockdown sooner.

Plus the controlling faction has control of all the stations and is a Dictatorship meaning Black Markets are locked out.

Those methods will not have any effect during a Civil War and they will not help factions that do not have control of a station.

So in truth, your observations are very much limited to controlling factions and factions with owned assets.
 

Limoncello Lizard

Limoncello Lizard
Adhock said:
Plus the controlling faction has control of all the stations and is a Dictatorship meaning Black Markets are locked out.
Click to expand...
This is something I have never understood in ED. The more oppressive a government, the more the demand will be for blackmarket goods. Governments don't condone blackmarkets, that's kind of their point.

I think ED has it all backwards. Blackmarkets should be controlled by the local anarchy faction, not the ruling faction.
 

Arka

Arka
Alright so here is myFaction progress so far after playing around with BGS.

RNy6y4F.png


The highlighted row is myFaction, and the first row is the current controlling faction.
And on the Day 4 tick, is where "Civil War" states added to the pending states of controlling faction (33.4) and myFaction (33.4).

Day 6 tick is the latest tick, which is around 12 hours ago, so when do I expect to see Civil War start spawning on my System?
All I know Civil War countdown is 3 days, so it will happen on Day 7 tick? (Which is the upcoming tick)

Or in Day 9 Tick? Because controlling faction state were on retreat back then


I'm confused on how the countdown started.
Thx
 
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Limoncello Lizard

Limoncello Lizard
elliv said:
Or in Day 9 Tick? Because controlling faction state were on retreat back then
Click to expand...
You have already won the war, so you will get the system. The retreat must be in another system. It's likely your war stopped it from happening. But if their influence is still about 2% there, they should go pending retreat as soon as the war ends.
 

Arka

Arka
Limoncello Lizard said:
You have already won the war, so you will get the system. The retreat must be in another system. It's likely your war stopped it from happening. But if their influence is still about 2% there, they should go pending retreat as soon as the war ends.
Click to expand...

Yes, since the start of myFaction injection to the system. The controlling faction (native) already have "Retreat" state from another system 14ly away. [knocked out]
 

Limoncello Lizard

Limoncello Lizard
elliv said:
Yes, since the start of myFaction injection to the system. The controlling faction (native) already have "Retreat" state from another system 14ly away. [knocked out]
Click to expand...

It's in your interest to force them to retreat there. It's likely your faction will want to expand there, and the less factions there the easier it will be to control. The exception is if you don't want that system at all and there are 7 factions there now, in this case keep them there.
 

Schlack

S
All in all 2.2 has been the worst update in BGS terms since 1.3 (and perhaps including it). The main difficulties can be summarized as follows:

It is unquestionable now following our own experience, this thread and various bug threads that 2.2 has borked something in relation to conflict state change resulting in chains of conflicts resetting to pending.

The faction-wide state effects coupled with mission destination effects is not working well - leading to unmanageable situations.

Due to the triviality (and profitability) of certain missions a game wrecking imbalance has been introduced. Planetary settlements (and to a lesser extent stations and outposts) are now liabilities rather than assets from a BGS mechanics perspective. This also makes clean testing quite difficult as one sidewinder can now account for 20 missions. Traffic reports have been rendered largely useless in providing game information.

The apparent removal of the influence cap appears to have reintroduced the single selling exploit as a viable mechanism (it was severely curtailed by the cap but not eliminated). Personally I was never convinced that this was a hard cap or that it as simple as some have suggested that it is only transaction count that is effective (our testing indicates more complexity but we don't have enough information to present a formula).

On top of this the mission generation system appears to be significantly broken, resulting in zero missions meaning BGS powerlessness in certain situations (e.g. election where no asset is held) or else there are factors that impact on mission generations severely that the game does a terrible job of communicating.

The BGS needs some serious tweaking and rebalancing. Its a pity as the BGS had been working relatively well during season 2 after a lot of growing pains in season 1. I haven't seen a response to date from the Devs, but not surprising as they are quite tight lipped when it comes to the BGS.
 
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Adhock

A
Schlack said:
It is unquestionable now following our own experience, this thread and various bug threads that 2.2 has borked something in relation to conflict state change resulting in chains of conflicts resetting to pending.
Click to expand...

In English, you're saying it's impossible to change the controlling faction due to a bug in the system. It prevents the challenging faction from winning the war. The controlling faction will cause some kind of a system glitch where when the challenging faction should have won, the system will equalize the influence levels and declare the challenger the loser generating no news reports, and then a day later after locking the influence levels to equal causing another civil war to pend, display an imbalance in favor of the controlling faction.

Yeah that sounds about right.

Schlack said:
(e.g. election where no asset is held)
Click to expand...

I fail to see where this is a bug. I see conflicts all the time even when two factions do not hold an asset and Elections are a type of conflict albeit peaceful ones meaning I'm pretty sure they can occur even if both factions do not hold real estate.
 

SaliVader

SaliVader
This is weird... I haven't experienced any of those bugs you guys are talking about, except on the day 2.2 went live. I suppose they only affect a handful of factions.
 

Schlack

S
In relation to the first point, we did seem to escape a chain of elections by going war pending with a 3rd faction. (went war pending while still in active election). What the mechanism was is not apparent. I do think its broken or states are now interacting in an untended fashion. Perhaps it is something to do with cooldowns.

Regarding the second point. The bug is in the mission generation system and it has a BGS breaking effect in some situations - the best example being: if no missions are being generated for a faction in election in a system where they hold no assets there is no way of directly effecting the influence level of that faction. Combat actions are negated by the election state, you cannot trade or sell explo data, and no missions (of any kind) are generated. In this situation you are essentially powerless which cannot be intended behaviour from the BGS.

- - - Updated - - -

SaliVader said:
This is weird... I haven't experienced any of those bugs you guys are talking about, except on the day 2.2 went live. I suppose they only affect a handful of factions.
Click to expand...

You lucky sod! :p
 
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goemon

goemon
SaliVader said:
This is weird... I haven't experienced any of those bugs you guys are talking about, except on the day 2.2 went live. I suppose they only affect a handful of factions.
Click to expand...

bit the same here.

i guess it has mainly to do with concrete circumstances in systems you are working at.

Schlack said:
All in all 2.2 has been the worst update in BGS terms since 1.3 (and perhaps including it). The main difficulties can be summarized as follows:

It is unquestionable now following our own experience, this thread and various bug threads that 2.2 has borked something in relation to conflict state change resulting in chains of conflicts resetting to pending.

The faction-wide state effects coupled with mission destination effects is not working well - leading to unmanageable situations.

Due to the triviality (and profitability) of certain missions a game wrecking imbalance has been introduced. Planetary settlements (and to a lesser extent stations and outposts) are now liabilities rather than assets from a BGS mechanics perspective. This also makes clean testing quite difficult as one sidewinder can now account for 20 missions. Traffic reports have been rendered largely useless in providing game information.

The apparent removal of the influence cap appears to have reintroduced the single selling exploit as a viable mechanism (it was severely curtailed by the cap but not eliminated). Personally I was never convinced that this was a hard cap or that it as simple as some have suggested that it is only transaction count that is effective (our testing indicates more complexity but we don't have enough information to present a formula).

On top of this the mission generation system appears to be significantly broken, resulting in zero missions meaning BGS powerlessness in certain situations (e.g. election where no asset is held) or else there are factors that impact on mission generations severely that the game does a terrible job of communicating.

The BGS needs some serious tweaking and rebalancing. Its a pity as the BGS had been working relatively well during season 2 after a lot of growing pains in season 1. I haven't seen a response to date from the Devs, but not surprising as they are quite tight lipped when it comes to the BGS.
Click to expand...

- we had elections, wars, civil wars, retreats, expansions and no single chaining. maybe we have to work out what is exactly triggering the bug for some?

- in no/low traffic systems obviously no problem with traffic report/ mission stackers etc. furthermore, the locked mission availability works in our favour where systems are under attacked or otherwise stressed - sandbox activities allow us to keep and push influence levels.

- even in a system under attack with players racking up bounties probably via system security mass shootings: nothing that looked like "no downwards influence cap".
 

_Flin_

_Flin_
goemon said:
- even in a system under attack with players racking up bounties probably via system security mass shootings: nothing that looked like "no downwards influence cap".
Click to expand...

The system we encounter this sees about 1000 traffic and many of it is traffic targeted against one faction with missions. This leads to regular influence losses of about 25% (absolute), e.g. from 32.9% to 8.2% influence. But, as always, you have to bend in the wind of the BGS, not fight it and break.
 

Gemai

Gemai
_Flin_ said:
you have to bend in the wind of the BGS, not fight it and break.
Click to expand...

In the current case with mass exploits, this would mean: Nuke them harder.

If BGS is reduced to who can accumulate the most ash in a day instead of building, the game is broken beyond repair. Which effectively it is right now. Anything but attack against mass exploiters is currently worthless. The state right now is mutually assured destruction, but many are willing to press the red button, as they got no real assets to lose, especially griefers and revengers.
 

Schlack

S
goemon said:
bit the same here.

i guess it has mainly to do with concrete circumstances in systems you are working at.



- we had elections, wars, civil wars, retreats, expansions and no single chaining. maybe we have to work out what is exactly triggering the bug for some?

- in no/low traffic systems obviously no problem with traffic report/ mission stackers etc. furthermore, the locked mission availability works in our favour where systems are under attacked or otherwise stressed - sandbox activities allow us to keep and push influence levels.

- even in a system under attack with players racking up bounties probably via system security mass shootings: nothing that looked like "no downwards influence cap".
Click to expand...

re chain conflicts. I've been following the bug threads etc. and have not been able to determine a pattern. In one case we had both factions in election surge by approx. 10% and re-equalize and go pending again.

re mission availability. There are situations were missions are the only option, and if missions are generated for some factions and not others it is a definite imbalance in the system - if nothing else the random cmdrs will take the available missions

re influence drops, we have seen drops of over 20-25% (from 50 to 25%) and rises of approx. 15-20% over one tick. Others have noted such extremes since 2.2 too. Something has been changed, intentionally or not we don't know.
 
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