Your best bet? Don't try to bring the other faction down... bring the faction you want to fight with up.
Black Market Influence, countermeasures and balancing
- Thread starter Macchiavelli
- Start date
Your options are negative actions for the faction you want to reduce, or positive actions for the faction you want to increase.
If it's a fairly quiet system you should be able to do this just by increasing the other faction (which will decrease the top faction at the same time) by running missions for the faction you want to increase, trading and handing in data at their remaining stations, and using a KWS to find bounties for them (save any bounties for your controlling faction to hand in once the war starts)
In a busy system where background player traffic is propping your faction up quite a lot, you might also need to do some negative actions against your own faction.
- smuggling, if you have a black market, or loss-making trades if you don't
- fail (not abandon) missions for your own faction
- assault or murder system authority and other ships belonging to the controlling faction
Of course, those negative actions (apart from the smuggling) have a problem that they'll hurt your reputation with your own faction, which may cause trouble later. So long as you don't get down to Hostile, you'll not get hurt too badly by this.
I've been trying to keep it as legal as possible, with planetary scans being the exception.
I don't want to murder my factions ship as it will be a negative reputation.
I managed to get it within 10%, completing Source and Return, Mining, Data Runs etc that all had Inf+++ or more but since then, that gap has increased to 13%.
So would you say to only do missions within the stations that the faction I'm wanting to increase, controls?
I know it won't be an instant thing as this game shows with every other aspect being a bit of a grind but just needed to know that I'm doing the right things.
2 other factions are in an Election right now too so was thinking this is having an impact also.
I don't want to murder my factions ship as it will be a negative reputation.
I managed to get it within 10%, completing Source and Return, Mining, Data Runs etc that all had Inf+++ or more but since then, that gap has increased to 13%.
So would you say to only do missions within the stations that the faction I'm wanting to increase, controls?
I know it won't be an instant thing as this game shows with every other aspect being a bit of a grind but just needed to know that I'm doing the right things.
2 other factions are in an Election right now too so was thinking this is having an impact also.
Just do missions offered by that faction. They don't have to be taken in that station, they can be taken from anywhere in the system, as long as they're offered by that faction. Missions boost the mission giver, not the station owner.
That was what was confusing me a bit. If I hand in data or bounties though, that would benefit the station owner?
Short version
Things that help the station owner: Exploration data, trade for profit
Things that help the issuing faction: Missions, bounties
So if faction A gives you bounties, and you hand them in at a station owned by faction B (In a system where Faction A is present), it benefits faction A.
And just for completeness
Things that hurt a station owner: Black market trading (unless owner is Anarchy), trading for a loss.
Things that hurt an issuing faction: Failing missions (note: this is not the same as abandoning them)
by buying expensive and selling cheap. (how else?)
I am struggling to understand how that affects the faction if it was me buying the goods and selling them hence the question.
same as profit - why does it raise the market controlling factions influence if you make a profit selling to them? but it does - for game reasons.
(probably because fdev wanted to give commanders a way to influence systems by normal gameplay, and a trader would run a route with profit).
Thanks. I couldn't get my head around it.
So on the right in the Commodities Market, it lists systems that pay more or less.
So selling to one of the red ones would affect the influence?
I read one of your thread earlier about BGS and there was a link I clicked on which was very informative yet detailed.
- trading at a market affects the market controlling factions influence.
- if you want to raise influence of faction A, controlling station and market in A, you import for profit from market B.
- if you want to lower influence of faction A, controlling station and market in A, you import for a loss from market B.
a good idicator to find something to import for loss is setting your market to compare with galactic average and look for those thingies selling for a loss. right hand you'll find "produced by" - every source listed in red will sell for a loss.
Thank you so much.
- trading at a market affects the market controlling factions influence.
- if you want to raise influence of faction A, controlling station and market in A, you import for profit from market B.
- if you want to lower influence of faction A, controlling station and market in A, you import for a loss from market B.
a good idicator to find something to import for loss is setting your market to compare with galactic average and look for those thingies selling for a loss. right hand you'll find "produced by" - every source listed in red will sell for a loss.
That makes so much more sense now.
Yeah, don't look for a reason why you personally making a profit off a sale increases the influence of the faction who you made the profit off.... where more profit = better profit. It makes no sense whatsoever.... it implies you could buy 1t of biowaste for 1cr and sell it to some faction for 1,000,000cr, and that would be a great influence spinner for them. Conversely, selling those medicines that the faction desperately needs in an outbreak for 1cr, a massive loss for you, would actually hurt that faction more than it helps... go figure.
It probably comes back to FD's idea that player success = positive things happen to a faction, player failure = negative things happen to a player.... there's a lot of aspects of the BGS which don't make sense like that.
Yeh, it's a weird and confusing mechanic but now I have a grasp of it.
I started looking at it yesterday and the 3rd party apps are confusing.
I looked at Aquaponic something that my system uses and needs. I went to the High Tech system that sells them but the BUY price was different than that in the 3rd party app and was still at a lower price in game than the higher price in the app.
It'll take a bit of getting used to before I master it.
Short version, never trust the price in the external apps. Always use in-game verification for planning.
Does demand of the black market have any effect on how much influence is gained/lossed? So 2-3 t9 runs when demand for the commodity is only 150t, for instance, as opposed to 3000t??
Not directly.