Interesting point about taking from the market pool. I will look into that when i get home. I will agree that a pirate nuisance should be the same nuicance for a faction in ANY system. I could go along with that.
Amalgamate the Missions Board into a unified system wide list where applicable. Discuss the benefits to this?
- Thread starter Miko
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- grind optimising
Missions shouldn't take into consideration the pilot's preferences at all, in my opinion. They are generated based on local state, factions, etc. (i.e. what is required locally). The pilot has nothing to do with it - they simply rock up and see what is available. There may not be any missions at a particular station that you want to take - that isn't an issue, you just need to go somewhere else. If missions take into account a user's preference for the generation of them, then it will make travelling pointless (you can just use a single station to get all your missions), and I suspect it would adversely affect the BGS.
If you go to a job centre, they don't make up jobs based on what you want. They have a list of jobs that are available, and you get to choose from them. It may be that none of them are suitable.
This is such an obvious thing, I can only assume it's a deliberate decision - probably a legacy of the "loach" era and it's petty spitefulness.
And, needless to say, it really needs fixing.
This is often cited, and totally inaccurate.
Before I go on, "Mission Type" is the base type of the mission; that is:
- Delivering Food and Delivering Weapons are the same base type (Both Delivery missions)
- Delivering Weapons and Sourcing Weapons are different base types (Delivery in the former, Sourcing in the latter)
- Flavour text (which bears no impact on the actual mission)
- (Criminal) Anarchy factions, which have their own set of missions they generate from
- In Famine, you have the following mission types: Assassination, Massacre, Source, Deliver, Courier, Salvage, Skimmer Destruction, Powerplant Destruction, Donation, etc
- In Investment, you have the following mission types: Assassination, Massacre, Source, Deliver, Courier, Salvage, Skimmer Destruction, Powerplant Destruction, Donation, etc
- In War, you have the following mission types: Assassination, Massacre, Source, Deliver, Courier, Salvage, Skimmer Destruction, Powerplant Destruction, Donation, etc
- Corporate factions in Famine should not be offering combat missions at all, but should be offering plentiful trade missions to purchase food.
- Conversely, a Dictatorship should not be offering Trade missions in Famine, but should be offering missions to hijack trade ships for food, under the pretense of "seizing it for the state"
I disagree. Having worked a faction for quite some time in 15 systems. I DO see the effects of states om stations. We have also seen the effects of the cargo available for trade. Now to be fair most of our observations are on the trade aspect but we do see them. Daily.
Not what I was saying.
States/Factions do affect:
- Available cargoes on market (legalities and stuff)
- Price of various goods on the market
- Availability of goods (whether through demand or legality)
For fundamental types of missions available, there is barely any difference. Famine and Outbreak do preference generation of source missions, as does War favour Massacre missions, but it doesn't fundamentally change any of the available mission types. For example, War state, compared to state:
- Source Weapons (Source mission)
- Deliver Weapons (Deliver Mission)
- Wartime scan of surface installation (Surface Scan)
- Donate to the cause (donation)
- Assassinate deserter (Pirate Assassination)
- Massacre Deserterd (Massacre Pirates)
- Destroy Skimmers (virtually the same)
- Steal military intelligence (Hijack mission)
- Recover Military Plans (Salvage)
- Source goods (Source mission)
- Deliver goods (Deliver Mission)
- Economic scan of surface installation (Surface Scan)
- Donate to the cause (donation)
- Assassinate Pirate Lord (Pirate Assassination)
- Massacre Pirates (Massacre Pirates)
- Destroy Skimmers (virtually the same)
- Steal gems (Hijack mission)
- Recover Trading Data (Salvage)
Just for clarity: You might go "Deserters aren't pirates!".... but those missions are always targeting a wanted ship, belonging to an anarchy/criminal faction. It's functionally identical.
But couldn't you also say that there is a much larger pool of jobs available, but your terminal is filtering them for you based on the type of employ you are searching for?
That is true but even so you listed 9 different mission types (not including mining missions or skimmer missions and AX missions). Thats a nice number for variety though i wouldnt argue against more, more is always better. Often though you wont see all of these on the mission boards. More often than not a faction will only have a couple of these at a time and just one type. Only in investment do i see many different types. Alot of stations dont offer mining missions and are mostly on terraforming stations. I see extraction systems demanding explosives and offering gold palladium or silver for mega money if a trade route is maintained steadily and being allied. We work systems that i imagine many dont visit (small stations and small pop) and make 9-12 million per mission making 1 jump of 6-12 ly. We then haul goods back to the industrial stations to keep the explosives missions paying well. My point is that there is a lot to do om the mission boards of you are working systems....not so much if you limit yourself to one type of gameplay
That's a whole other issue around mission board "blobbiness" that I'm not going to go into now... tl;dr if a mission board is going to generate missions, it has a natural tendency to favour generating heaps of the one type of mission (thus; why there's still often complaints about "too many wing missions"... or this old issue I raised way back in another beta. For the record, FD never fixed this problem. They just made long-range missions only occur at Tourist economies.). Unfortunately, even Investment suffers from this.
What actually has a much more significant impact on the type of missions available is economy type and the different types of economies/systems around, which is what I think you were getting at with your post. I was specifically addressing the impact of State/Faction (Government Type) on missions, which is almost zero.
Economy and surrounding systems have a much bigger impact on the types of mission available, but it's equally flawed and prone to errors. For an example, there's a good volume of systems in the area i operate in... approximately 40 within a 20LY radius. Any one of them offers assassinate pirate lord missions to any number of neighbour systems... except one. That one in particular will only generate missions to a single target system, always targeting the same faction. Other issues exist too:
- Some facilities are never the target of Surface Scan missions (for the targeted template type), or Powerplant sabotage missions.
- Because Mining missions spawn in stations where there's no organic mineral/metal production, counterintuitivelyt that makes Colony/Agriculture/Terraforming economies the best stations to find mining missions, despite those sorts of economy types having minimal practical use for raw materials like that,
OP's problem is that for larger systems, they want more missions delivered to them, probably so they can have more missions of the type they want available to while still stuck behind the 20-mission limit. Without knowing why there's a cap of =~ 100-120 missions, the fix may not be simple. Instead, what we do know is 80-95% of missionboard generation is wasted effort, and the primary cause of boardflipping is because given enough RNG spinning (because that's the primary determining factor of what missions are offered) you'll get what you're after. So given that, the only way around that is to pre-empt mission generation with some preferences for the player.
At the very least, if people can't see at eye-level on being able to pre-empt mission board generation based on Catgory of mission, pre-empting for faction would still be highly effective.
PS:
- Availability of mining missions is based on whether there's materials available for that economy or not, not state or faction
- Skimmer missions are also available regardless of state or faction.
- AX missions are situational and specific to the megaships which spawn in that system. Go to any bog-standard station in an infested system and be surprised by the lack of AX missions.
What I wrote is 100% accurate - you're arguing against something I didn't write. I didn't get into specifics, but the local states/environment (which includes far more than I mentioned, I'm not simply referring to faction states) are what defines the missions available. Faction types, system types, world types. These all affect it.
You could say a lot of things! I should add, I wouldn't object to more missions. Just so long as missions aren't created for the commander personally (I would not like that at all).
Everyone looking at the mission board at the same station at the same time should see the same missions. The only exception to this would be if some missions were only available to allies or similar (but again, they'd be available to all allies).
Why stop there? Sort by anything. Destination, type, legal status, influence/rep reward,reward, reward per item (be it kill or cargo), etc etc. Any and all.
True what you say !
I don’t see any advantage to me of spending more time at a mission board and less time flying around especially as I usually only use the mission board to sign on to CGs or when I occasionally want to find a an acceptable rank up mission.
Having mission boards sortable would be advantageous even for such rare users of them as myself.
Having mission boards sortable would be advantageous even for such rare users of them as myself.