A Guide to Minor Factions and the Background Sim

[Limoncello Lizard]

Update about the Crom Silver Boys. They are currently in Boom, probably were a few days ago when I was last here. Pending Civil Unrest, Lockdown and Retreat (in Un Narraya - heading there now to prevent this).
Commodity market still vanilla extraction, no rare good.

 

[Jmanis]

We have seen 2nd hand reports of a significantly above cap rise twice (>20% in a 6 million pop) when a faction were defending their arses off against a BGS attack of murder/piracy. They ran missions and traded for their lives, so hard to know what the cause was. We are currently musing as to how. One theory was because the -ve cap was breached it also removed the +ve one. Wild speculation at present but the observation stands. On refection it might have been a deliberate quid quo pro for making trading harder to use as a defence... or a mistake.

We tend to do just enough effort to hit the cap so of course have not seen an effect!

It's worth noting that on several occasions in the various livestreams, FD have (suggested) the size of the influence cap is also determined by the amount of player traffic. If there was a lot of players in and out of a system, even for a 6 mil pop system (which is still fairly small) then the cap could've increased significantly.

 

[Schlack]

It's worth noting that on several occasions in the various livestreams, FD have (suggested) the size of the influence cap is also determined by the amount of player traffic. If there was a lot of players in and out of a system, even for a 6 mil pop system (which is still fairly small) then the cap could've increased significantly.

Traffic or activity? I've learned the hard way to parse FD statements carefully and accurately! My recollection is activity.

 

[Jmanis]

Traffic or activity? I've learned the hard way to parse FD statements carefully and accurately! My recollection is activity.

At least in this instance, it doesn't really matter.

If two sides are going hell for leather as Jane's suggesting, there's going to be a lot of traffic *and* a lot of activity... unless Jane clarifies it was only a small amount of people doing it?

 

[Jane Turner]

I suspect and it can only be suspect that it was a lot of activity from a few players

 

[Sitoutumaton]

Crom Silver Boys sounds too common to be a player minor faction, which are known to be bugged.

Maybe the bugged factions issue is wider and can affect procedurally generated ones too, and correspondingly takes more effort to locate and correct.

 

[_trent_]

Update about the Crom Silver Boys. They are currently in Boom, probably were a few days ago when I was last here. Pending Civil Unrest, Lockdown and Retreat (in Un Narraya - heading there now to prevent this).
Commodity market still vanilla extraction, no rare good.

Oh no. To think of the amount of 300k LS trips and teabagging we had to do to get that rare into the game in the first place.

Hope it is just a bug. Wouldn't like to think it was gone permanently.

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

Crom Silver Boys sounds too common to be a player minor faction, which are known to be bugged.

Maybe the bugged factions issue is wider and can affect procedurally generated ones too, and correspondingly takes more effort to locate and correct.

They are definitely a NPC faction, as they wre around before player factions were a thing.

- - - Updated - - -

Oh no. To think of the amount of 300k LS trips and teabagging we had to do to get that rare into the game in the first place.

Hope it is just a bug. Wouldn't like to think it was gone permanently.

It's a bizare bug, if it is a bug. All of their markets act as if they aren't anarchy at all. The missions are fine, they are offering snakey type missions like anarchy factions do. I'll take some drugs, guns and slaves with me there tonight to see if any of them are illegal. If not, we'll have a party

 

[Jmanis]

I've been to the Crom system a few times lately and I think the commodity market is completly screwed up. It's an anarchy controlled outpost, but looking at the commodity market you couldn't tell. There used to be a large supply of slaves for sale, plus a demand for narcotics. It should also have a rare good, Crom Silver Fesh. However, none of these are mentioned in the market at all. It might as well be a normal extraction outpost controlled by a bunch of carebears, not a pirate faction base.

Checking a station in another system controlled by the Crom Silver Boys, it too is borked. Just shows as a vanilla agricultural station. No supply or narcotics, no demand for slaves.

I've raised a bug report, but no answers as yet.

When I first noticed, Crom was recovering from an outbreak. A couple of days ago, Crom was pending lockdown. AFAIK these states (at least while pending or recovery) shouldn't affect the market. The rare good dissapeared a couple of months ago when the Silver Boys were also pending lockdown. I raised a bug report then as well, the rare good was reinstated and the lockdown pending removed.

An observation (I've not actually tried to verify this yet) I've made is that "economic wellbeing" is a faction-wide attribute. I don't want to call economic wellbeing a good thing or a bad thing, because different effects have different impacts. Economic variances can make some items appear/disappear off the market these days, and make some items come back. For example, I used to be able to sell Narcotics at a HT station because there was low demand and no supply at the station... was like this for weeks, but nowadays it's medium demand.

Other observations are:
- States like Expansion, Outbreak, War and other drains on the economy tend to result fairly quickly in normally-demand items becoming high-demand, and normally-supply items going into low-supply or even 0-demand.
- Boom states result in the opposite... the initial state will be whatever it was before, high demand for demand items, low supply for supply items, but gradually that goes the other direction and results in most demand items having low demand, and supply items having high supply (while prices are good, 'typical' trading from a boom system to a boom system actually seems like a bad idea on some occasions.
- When no such states are affecting a faction, concentrated trading can help shift this "wellbeing" towards one end or the other, but usually very quickly results in a state (such as boom) to quickly draw it to one of the extremes.

While that's the trend, within this it seems like individual commodities are allowed to fluctuate as needed, so larger-scale issues like commodities becoming no-supply may maintain that state until it's corrected <somehow>.

I think rare goods are meant to fluctuate the same way, simply because there was a patch (recently?) which meant engineer-requisite rare goods were always available.

 

[Deleted member 115407]

Other observations are:
- States like Expansion, Outbreak, War and other drains on the economy tend to result fairly quickly in normally-demand items becoming high-demand, and normally-supply items going into low-supply or even 0-demand.
- Boom states result in the opposite... the initial state will be whatever it was before, high demand for demand items, low supply for supply items, but gradually that goes the other direction and results in most demand items having low demand, and supply items having high supply (while prices are good, 'typical' trading from a boom system to a boom system actually seems like a bad idea on some occasions.
- When no such states are affecting a faction, concentrated trading can help shift this "wellbeing" towards one end or the other, but usually very quickly results in a state (such as boom) to quickly draw it to one of the extremes.

I recently (about a month ago) was looking for conductive ceramics for a mission. Despite them being for sale on inara at a number of surface ports, and in large quantities, when I visited those ports there wasn't even a listing. This was right after 2.2.0.3, so I scratched my head, thinking maybe a bug or something, and went on.

About two nights ago I was asked to source non-lethal weapons. Again, found them on inara, market updated just a day or two prior. When I went to the surface port, there were no NLWs or Reactive Armor listed. This time I checked the faction state - controller of the market was in CIVIL WAR. I figured maybe the CIVIL WAR was the cause for the disappearance, as it is supposed to have an adverse economic impact on factions. Next time I'm out and about and conditions are right, I'll see if that's a trend.

 

[goemon]

About two nights ago I was asked to source non-lethal weapons. Again, found them on inara, market updated just a day or two prior. When I went to the surface port, there were no NLWs or Reactive Armor listed. This time I checked the faction state - controller of the market was in CIVIL WAR. I figured maybe the CIVIL WAR was the cause for the disappearance, as it is supposed to have an adverse economic impact on factions. Next time I'm out and about and conditions are right, I'll see if that's a trend.

something interesting about todays CG ... as soon as FDEV inserted that "magic" 999999 demand, tantalum was gone from the local surface extraction station (same system, same faction). they had 30000 supply 2 hours ago (when eddb.io was updated the last time).

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

I think rare goods are meant to fluctuate the same way, simply because there was a patch (recently?) which meant engineer-requisite rare goods were always available.

That worries me. Mostly because Sandro thinks that dissapearing rare goods is "fun". Maybe it is. But I'm a tad worried now about going to Hutton Orbital. After all the excitement of a 1 hour trip, finding that there weren't any rare goods for sale there would be a little too much "fun" for me to handle.

 

[DMaster]

Does war or civil war always have a minimum duration of 3 days? Or could a war end up earlier? For example when a faction was lowered to an absolut influence of 0 percent?

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

Does war or civil war always have a minimum duration of 3 days? Or could a war end up earlier? For example when a faction was lowered to an absolut influence of 0 percent?

Sorry, but you are stuck with the 3 days minimum. What happens now, I think, is that your faction can suck influence from the other faction in the system and not just the one you are fighting.

 

[goemon]

Does war or civil war always have a minimum duration of 3 days? Or could a war end up earlier? For example when a faction was lowered to an absolut influence of 0 percent?

actually you are even stuck longer. assets change hands earliest on the 4th tick of active war, and the war will go recovering on the fifth.

 

[KoteBR]

Hello Everyone. I have a question about States and Election.My faction is in a pending state of election, and the second faction with the second highest influence is also in a pending state of election. We are both Corrporations. this means we will be in elections soon. My question is: how long does it take to this election start?

Also, My faction has 41,4% and the other one has 26%. Is the election going to happen anyways, even if we have higher influence in the system?

 

[Schlack]

Hello Everyone. I have qeustion about States and Election.My faction is in a pending state of election, and the second faction with the second highest influence is also in a pending state of election. We are both Corrporations. this means we will be in elections soon. My question is: how long does it take to this election start?

The pending period for conflict (election is a "conflict" state) is 3 days.

 

[goemon]

Hello Everyone. I have qeustion about States and Election.My faction is in a pending state of election, and the second faction with the second highest influence is also in a pending state of election. We are both Corrporations. this means we will be in elections soon. My question is: how long does it take to this election start?

that's the full cycle of a conflict in its shortest duration - in case of election without CZ, ofc:

t1 war pending
t2 war pending
t3 war pending
t4 war active, cz spawn
t5 war active
t6 war active
t7 war active, assets change hands
t8 war recovering
t9 war cleared, no state or new conflict or expansion can go pending

 

[Schlack]

^^^^^ +1 for the above more complete answer!

 

[Jane Turner]

Perhaps worth adding the elections also differ from wars in being fixed duration