A Guide to Minor Factions and the Background Sim

Adam Bourke-Waite

Principal Designer - E:D
Frontier
In the vast majority of cases we've seen, starports outweigh outposts, which outweigh planetary installations. Beyond that things are less clear. There were some dev comments that market value plays a part, presumably if they're the same sort of place.

Now the caveat: We've witnessed several exceptions. In at least one case an outpost was taken before a starport - and the outpost doesn't even have a market, so as with your example, that isn't it. That's more extreme than other examples, where for instance a starport with a busier and more valuable market in every way imaginable was not chosen over another. We bat theories around about hidden values, like the old tiny/small/large/very large/huge asset markers and what they might represent, but...well they're hidden.

As always there's two reasonable broad assumptions: 1) the rule is complex and we don't know all the factors clearly enough, or 2) the rule is simple but noticeably-often doesn't work as expected/intended.

/shrug.

Edit: I'd report what happened in your case as a bug I guess, and see what they say. Even "this is working as intended" will teach us something, albeit frustratingly unhelpful.

That doesn't sound right to me. Would be worth dropping a report on the bug forum.
 

Adam Bourke-Waite

Principal Designer - E:D
Frontier
Ignore/Delete

Never mind, original reporter, and me for not realising, is a numpty. I didn't NEED repairs or restock, only fuel, when I checked.
 
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Honestly, it pleases me in this weird way (probably my appendix) that there's things about the BGS that are unusual or interesting even to the devs :D

We had one about a year ago. We expanded into a test system (called testrender) near Sol that looks like it may have been used for early alpha and beta testing.... of course no one could actually see it or go there but we were listed in the local news reports etc.

Properly broke the local BGS.

Every now and again you come across a strange edge case like this.
 
Question regarding lowering influence of system controlling faction :
1. By killing ship system defense : at the end it will generates a lockdown. Do we know the ratio "system population / system ship defense " before it triggers a lockdown ? For instance, in a system of 10 people, killing 5 system defense ship will trigger the lockdown.
Then, if i have a lockdown, i know that the influence will not change meanwhile. But when i bring bounties to stop the lockdown, would it not affect anyway the influence ?

2. Does boom state affect black market for negative influence ? For instance, if i use black market to lower influence, the fact that controlling faction or mine are in boom state will double the effect ?


Thank you for your answers.
 
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It's quite as you say, though some would simply call that realistic. More CMDRs doing the same amount per-CMDR will always outpace the competition. Less realistic: There's limits placed on e.g. one person simply doing more than 2 combined (diminishing returns). If you can't outmaneuver them (e.g. hitting in a place or manner they don't expect/aren't prepared to contend with) and simply try to match them at the same activities (given the same time & effort per CMDR), you'll lose. You can maximize the influence-effect of the time you spend, but if they're doing the same then it's really just a numbers game.

CMDRs do not belong to factions in any BGS-relevant sense. There's no concept of one faction murdering another, only players murdering X faction. Most activities function in this one-way sense (trade, smuggling, etc). Missions are the main exception, commonly having both origin and destination effects.

Edit: And indeed I tend to agree. Outright murder is not normally IRL hugely (or at all) harmful to a political entity's influence. They'll get sympathy from outside, and outrage + hardened resolve + "martyr" figures inside. Maybe if the faction only consists of 100 people would killing 5 at random have any real negative impact in a political sense. Factions in game can be that small but are more typically thousands, millions, or billions strong. There are - especially now - exceedingly few ways to directly lower a faction's influence at peace though, so they'd have to dream up new alternatives.

I appreciate your inputs, this validates my observations and thoughts. My problem is that this; Since ED is modeled after real life as we know it, the concept that a group of people would be able to go into a system and kill authority ships and unwanted ships without any swift and harsh justice extracted on them is beyond belief. If anything the controlling faction's support and strength would grow since the populace would demand it. This part of the BGS mechanic goes against our very nature. It further supports the mentality that if I can do it, its ok. Just being wanted is a waste. In the recent attacks on a system on of the Cmdrs had a $7M bounty!!

I personally believe that if you are part of an official player minor faction then you should have to join it in a similar fashion to power play.
 
Question regarding lowering influence of system controlling faction :
1. By killing ship system defense : at the end it will generates a lockdown. Do we know the ratio "system population / system ship defense " before it triggers a lockdown ? For instance, in a system of 10 people, killing 5 system defense ship will trigger the lockdown.
Then, if i have a lockdown, i know that the influence will not change meanwhile. But when i bring bounties to stop the lockdown, would it not affect anyway the influence ?

2. Does boom state affect black market for negative influence ? For instance, if i use black market to lower influence, the fact that controlling faction or mine are in boom state will double the effect ?


Thank you for your answers.

1. a) the size of a state bucket (which needs to be filled for a state trigegring according to dev comments) is unknown - it is even unclear, whether a state bucket is system or faction wide. the problem here is: it is hard to test.

a test could look like this: trigger a state in a no-traffic system, as a state going active empties all state buckets. shoot system security ships as long till lockdown goes pending. repeat with a different population sized system, or the same one, to find the number. have in mind, dimishing returns per tick will liely apply. do it with a faction present in more than one no traffic systems, to find out whether you hit lockdown at the same number of system security shootings in all systems etc. imho much to much effort for something which "generally" works. i can only name some numbers from own experience: in a 2 mio system killing 50 system security ships per day got lockdown pending in 3-4 days pre 2.3. while being countered by a wing of bounty hunters.

b) cashing in bounties during lockdown will have no influence effect, but the faction will gain some influence via the very low influence effect of shipkills of wanted ships other factions in system, as their losses are distributed as gains.

2. untested. i assume it does, but i have not seen a clean test on it. if it does, it should apply to the black market "owning" faction, the faction that controls the station with the black market. as black market trade had a bug in 2.2. (influence gains from smuggling weapons, patched out with 2.3.) as well as 2.3. (influence gains from low profit black market trade, patched out yesterday), i'd look at any experiences with a very, very sharp eye - there is a good chance for more bugs concerning illegal trade.

influence loss of black market trade fully depend on tonnage a year ago, not profit, so it might be a good idea to get your transactions up by smuggling in various illegal goods, if possible. look as if the fix for the 1T trading exploit was to collect all market transactions during a docking or instance, so bringing in a variety of commodities is the only way to up the transactions per docking when trading or smuggling.
 
1. a) the size of a state bucket (which needs to be filled for a state trigegring according to dev comments) is unknown - it is even unclear, whether a state bucket is system or faction wide. the problem here is: it is hard to test.

a test could look like this: trigger a state in a no-traffic system, as a state going active empties all state buckets. shoot system security ships as long till lockdown goes pending. repeat with a different population sized system, or the same one, to find the number. have in mind, dimishing returns per tick will liely apply. do it with a faction present in more than one no traffic systems, to find out whether you hit lockdown at the same number of system security shootings in all systems etc. imho much to much effort for something which "generally" works. i can only name some numbers from own experience: in a 2 mio system killing 50 system security ships per day got lockdown pending in 3-4 days pre 2.3. while being countered by a wing of bounty hunters.

b) cashing in bounties during lockdown will have no influence effect, but the faction will gain some influence via the very low influence effect of shipkills of wanted ships other factions in system, as their losses are distributed as gains.

2. untested. i assume it does, but i have not seen a clean test on it. if it does, it should apply to the black market "owning" faction, the faction that controls the station with the black market. as black market trade had a bug in 2.2. (influence gains from smuggling weapons, patched out with 2.3.) as well as 2.3. (influence gains from low profit black market trade, patched out yesterday), i'd look at any experiences with a very, very sharp eye - there is a good chance for more bugs concerning illegal trade.

influence loss of black market trade fully depend on tonnage a year ago, not profit, so it might be a good idea to get your transactions up by smuggling in various illegal goods, if possible. look as if the fix for the 1T trading exploit was to collect all market transactions during a docking or instance, so bringing in a variety of commodities is the only way to up the transactions per docking when trading or smuggling.

First at all, thank you for the detailed answer. Very clear and helpful.
For the rest, i will do the test after today's tick and see how it goes.
 
Will killing PP ships affect influence and security change in minor faction that control the system ? at least those are seen clean ships and police is called if shoot or destroy them. Someone told that in past those actions affect as normally, but it had been changed and killing them and getting boynty for it wont affect anymore, neither security or influence, Iam pretty skeptical at that. anyone can confirm do those actions affect or not ?
 
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I personally believe that if you are part of an official player minor faction then you should have to join it in a similar fashion to power play.
Change 'have to' to 'be allowed to' and you've summed up probably the most common desire/complaint among groups generally. Genuine affiliation, be it with NPC factions or player, seems a giant rabbit hole of potential content unopened as yet. Issues there are, specifically regarding player groups desiring a way to gate affiliation for fear of false-flagging (not a concern I share, but it's an argument occasionally made soundly), but to me they seem minor. The murky depths that meta-gaming can reach continually surprise me though.

Will killing PP ships affect influence and security change in minor faction that control the system ?
Occasionally there's hints that states are impacted in a minor way, but it's impossible to filter out the potential of, say, people killing the cops that come after them or doing other things in a given control system. Influence is certainly not affected in our sphere of interest. We monitor control systems closely and the correlation between undermining and controlling faction drop was blatant when that was in place (removed in 1.4.x somewhere). You could've made a calendar watching the controlling faction in "grinder" undermining systems drop like a stone during the busiest times of the week for that activity ;)
 
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Hi @Adam_Waite,

Regarding the Minor Factions, do you know when will the new batch be added?
We've been told: For beta 2.3, for the 2.3, shortly after, "this week" 3 weeks ago, and we are still not implemented in-game.
Would be super cool if we were to obtain a REAL date, something we can COUNT on :)

Thank you very much for this.
 
I appreciate your inputs, this validates my observations and thoughts. My problem is that this; Since ED is modeled after real life as we know it, the concept that a group of people would be able to go into a system and kill authority ships and unwanted ships without any swift and harsh justice extracted on them is beyond belief. If anything the controlling faction's support and strength would grow since the populace would demand it. This part of the BGS mechanic goes against our very nature. It further supports the mentality that if I can do it, its ok. Just being wanted is a waste. In the recent attacks on a system on of the Cmdrs had a $7M bounty!!

I personally believe that if you are part of an official player minor faction then you should have to join it in a similar fashion to power play.

I kinda agree that I'd love for the system authority levels to increase based on how wanted you are, like in GTA. Once you hit the levels you're talking about I want to be chased by capital ships the moment I enter the system... but then again I am a sadist
 
Hi @Adam_Waite,

Regarding the Minor Factions, do you know when will the new batch be added?
We've been told: For beta 2.3, for the 2.3, shortly after, "this week" 3 weeks ago, and we are still not implemented in-game.
Would be super cool if we were to obtain a REAL date, something we can COUNT on :)

Thank you very much for this.

there is a thread dedicated to those submissions here:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ctions-Submission-Form-and-Information/page71

see BrettC last post in this thread, who is dealing with those submissions.

bit of offtopic in this thread ;-)
 
To all of you out there who have Player Factions: As far as I can tell, with the current BGS mechanics, the BGS game is OVER. The largest player group always wins with the current mechanics. There is nothing in the current BGS mechanics that allows a smaller player group to win against a larger player group because it always comes down to a single war for control which you can't win against a larger player group. There is nothing in the BGS mechanics that allows any way around this. The BGS currently is like a game of Risk, except that the guy with the largest number of armies is able to employ all of his forces in every battle, every time, and always win. And his forces are not weakened at all from engaging in a war. The fundamental problem is that multiple player groups, no matter how many, attacking a large player group are forced to engage in one battle at a time and the Large player group is able to bring the full extent of his forces to every battle. The BGS as currently implemented does not permit more than one war for a faction at a time. So, barring a change to the BGS, the BGS game is already over...prepare to be conquered by the largest player group. I posted a suggestion about this here...

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ars-for-minor-factions-(in-different-systems)
 
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Why is this a reason the bgs is over? It's the same thing as it's always been since launch and a bigger group has more resources to throw around. If anything this says that a player group should not be taking actions against a larger known force without being aware that it may go nowhere. Fdev has stated this will not change and there's no easy or simple way to code multiple factions states if it is even possible.

If a smaller faction wants to take on a larger faction it needs to be aware that it may not go the way they want and will have repercussions of the larger group is actually active and paying attention. It's been like this since day one and likely will forever.
 
prepare to be conquered by the largest player group
the BGS game is OVER

If they overrun all >20,000 inhabited systems I'll be thoroughly impressed.

Seriously, there's nothing about this game that indicates PG vs. PG conflict was something planned/designed for, let alone ever balanced to make "fair" in the particular RTSish way you're suggesting.
It's a bit flabbergasting to see so many with the position that not being able to win vs. X player group is the End of Times.

Nvm. I'm sorry the gameplay you want doesn't exist, and that the goals you want to achieve are not achievable.
Many groups and individuals, however, are playing the BGS now as well or better than ever (with occasional patch hiccups, to be sure). FDev has been quite responsive in moving groups who find themselves in untenable positions (high-population trade hubs for example). There's always options.
 
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