That sounds interesting. Should be an absolute number instead of getting into a top% bracket.
CG predictions...
- Thread starter CMDR Serra
- Start date
Na the correct number will be the number to keep you in the correct % tier the wording is the same as before in galnet.
Oh, was hoping for some new mechanic.
CGs live https://www.elitedangerous.com/community/goals @Flossy 
The CG does not list the tier needed so expect CG forum topic is delayed untill thats fixed @Flossy
@Kietrax
The CG does not list the tier needed so expect CG forum topic is delayed untill thats fixed @Flossy
@Kietrax
Last edited:
No definition of "adequate"? :/
Also no CG topic here -- yet
Also no CG topic here -- yet
Great job....the description doesn't even say which level of contribution is required to get the heatsink.
Flossy
Volunteer Moderator
Sorry looks like Kietrax has been delayed so have now posted. Apologies for the delay.
topics up and fixes the errors in game..~
- The top 75% of contributors will receive one pre-engineered high capacity heatsink module
- The top 50% of contributors will receive two pre-engineered high capacity heatsink modules
As with the three previous systems, nothing obvious as to why the Thargoids might be there:
- very low population
- no Ammonia Worlds (or much else) interesting
- sure, Azimuth might have hidden a pile of Guardian relics there, who knows
It's one of the nearest main-bubble Alliance systems to HIP 22460, and that's about it. It's not - I'll add it to the table next time anyway - particularly near the tracks of any anomaly either.
Seems very much a "what happens if we move a fleet into Alliance space for a week" probe - especially if they've already been there two days without obviously attacking anything - rather than anything else. Might we expect the same in Imperial space next week? (or Federal, but they probably got enough of an idea out of the last three)
- very low population
- no Ammonia Worlds (or much else) interesting
- sure, Azimuth might have hidden a pile of Guardian relics there, who knows
It's one of the nearest main-bubble Alliance systems to HIP 22460, and that's about it. It's not - I'll add it to the table next time anyway - particularly near the tracks of any anomaly either.
Seems very much a "what happens if we move a fleet into Alliance space for a week" probe - especially if they've already been there two days without obviously attacking anything - rather than anything else. Might we expect the same in Imperial space next week? (or Federal, but they probably got enough of an idea out of the last three)
Interesting outcome of last week's CG: normally in a competitive CG the losing side also has lower tier thresholds throughout. In this case, this wasn't true - the top ~15-20% of the True Chapters contributors were fighting harder than their Federal equivalents, pushing both the top 10% tier threshold and the mean contribution per player a little above the Federal figures (while for top 25%, 50% and 75% the Federal side had the higher thresholds)
Nowhere near enough to overcome the 5:2 numeric disadvantage, of course - but potentially some interesting implications nevertheless.
Nowhere near enough to overcome the 5:2 numeric disadvantage, of course - but potentially some interesting implications nevertheless.
I look forward to the complints when the Feds inevitably put their proverbial in the provebial..
"Oh FD is so biased and their story on rails, why aren't we given an opportunity to oppose"... at the 11th hour when dozens of opportunities to oppose have literally gone by.
Last edited:
Sometimes that's true but it's unfair to blanket apply such a judgement across the board.
Often when you do take the opportunity you get simply outnumbered by people who don't care about the outcome but just join whichever side is ahead by Friday night and will therefore be paying the most, or whoever is offering the shinies. There are usually a lot more "casual" participants than there are "invested" ones who care about the actual consequences and look beyond the immediate rewards. That's when it would be nice to take into account player effort vs numbers. How, I don't know, just would be nice. Blaming those who participated for those who didn't is pretty crass.
Then too there have been situations where there has been good participation from the more thoughtful players but the situation is not as cut and dried as it's later claimed to be, like Tanner against Salvation. The automatic assumption afterwards was that those who didn't support Tanner must be on Salvation's side, when to many players that wasn't the issue at all but Tanner's desire to kick someone else's door down on suspicion alone and without due process. Especially after the same thing being done to the Marlinists, many were not prepared to support that behaviour again. That part was conveniently forgotten though, in order to condemn them as Salvation groupies.
If they're going to set up binary situations without nuance, or with other factors involved but then pretend they weren't there afterwards so they may as well have been truly binary to begin with, that's on nobody else.
Azimuth: ‘We Can Help D-2’
Azimuth Biotech has publicly offered assistance to Subject D-2, the Project Seraph survivor who gate-crashed the recent Aegis symposium.
The woman, now identified as Seo Jin-ae, unexpectedly arrived at the event on Tuesday. She claimed to possess knowledge of the ‘Thargoid roar’ that was heard at HIP 22460 following the Proteus Wave’s activation. There is speculation that this relates to her inclusion in experiments to create human pilots for Thargoid vessels.
Professor Alba Tesreau has since issued a brief statement:
“Along with other former members of Aegis, I have provided sanctuary to Seo Jin-ae. She is currently receiving medical treatment at a private facility. Ms Seo’s safety and welfare is now my responsibility.”
Torben Rademaker, CEO of Azimuth Biotech, made the following declaration on public channels:
“We extend our heartfelt sympathies to the individual known as D-2, and would like to extend an offer of assistance. This tragically mistreated individual will receive little help from a random assortment of ex-Aegis personnel. With our decades of research and xenological specialists, Azimuth Biotech is far better suited to assess both her physical and mental health.”
“Her wellbeing would be our main concern, of course, but the possibility that D-2 can somehow interpret Thargoid communications should not be dismissed. We can help her to explore this ability, which may grant important insights into the Thargoid species.”
“I must also clarify that the Project Seraph facilities in HIP 22460 and HIP 26176 were under Salvation’s direct control, and were kept hidden from the wider corporation. The discovery of these sites was as much a shock to me as anybody else. It’s a matter of personal regret that Azimuth’s long history includes examples of such misguided operations. We are eager to make amends for Salvation’s mistakes.”
There's always a pretty general mix of both "casual" and "invested" players on both sides, with the winning side usually having significantly more of both: a mid-range "top 10%" player is outfighting about 20 casual "top 75%" players; it's the top 10% players on the other side that stop them walking over the competition. If you had a CG which was genuinely split so that the top 25% of high-performance players were almost all on one side and the bottom 75% were almost all on the other side, the minority would win and it wouldn't even be close. Top 10% versus bottom 90% would still be a close win for the top 10% in most CGs. If you lose by more than 2:1 (and almost all losses are!) which side the casual players picked was utterly irrelevant.
This CG was highly unusual in that the more invested players fought slightly harder on the losing side - but even then, a top 10% Chapters player was only a few million better than a top 10% Federal player, and the Federation had a lot more players working at that top 10% level.
I don't think Frontier are pretending that the other factors aren't there at all. They're very definitely setting up situations where there's not an obvious good option: do you back the creepy scientist who is very definitely not telling us something important, or the loose cannon military officer taking it upon himself to be judge, jury and executioner? Do you back the self-avowed terrorist group blowing up starports in the name of democracy, or the totalitarian but stylish dictatorship they're fighting against? Can you make a decision without having the full information, based on hints and subtext?
It's not likely that the alternative they had sketched out if Tanner had won would have been a good outcome - it would just have e.g. led to a different crisis where something else goes wrong, the Thargoids set fire to Sol to stop Aegis collecting artifacts there, and a dying Salvation says "if you'd just let me build the superweapon I could have stopped this!"
In last week's CG, of course, Hudson is playing the role of the hot-headed militarist launching an illegal [1] attack based purely on suspicion, and the Far God Cult are playing the role of the weird but harmless defenders. So who knows where people think the nuance is pointing here?
(As an aside on the nuance, I think the ability of players to generate large amounts of tinfoil often gets in the way of spotting the actual subtexts Frontier are putting in. Blaming everything on The Club, especially...)
[1] Well, probably not technically illegal by 3308 laws.
Hmm, I'm not sure how much story investment can be assumed from all that but I see where you are coming from and appreciate the insight as always. I realise there's no way to ultimately balance it with the structure we have, just find it a shame that when there is a clear effort on the part of a smaller group it can be so easily dismissed. I do think that sometimes Frontier pretend other factors didn't exist, as do players, and present a choice later on as more binary than it was at the time. There have been comments in their streams to that effect before.
On Tanner my point wasn't to suggest that going the other way would result in a more moral outcome, just that it's wrong to spin it later as if those complexities of right and wrong didn't exist. That was my only point there.
In answer to the question "Can you make a decision without having the full information, based on hints and subtext?" I can but I find that unsatisfying if the process doesn't at least inform a little. Clues and hints are one thing but there could be more balance there, having a bit more to make a judgement with so it feels less like being led by the nose and trying to decide what is genuine in the first place, only to have to jump to conclusions in any event which makes such an exercise feel a bit pointless. There's a middle ground between drip feeding the bare minimum and spoon feeding. It could use some work.
I don't know how much tinfoil gets in the way but it's an interesting point. I can only say that for me if The Club is still around then they haven't exactly had a lot of success in the current narrative, especially if we assume they are behind Sirius particularly. On the contrary has anything Sirius done worked out for them lately?
- They host a superpower conference to thrash out a common AX strategy and it gets put on hold after the NMLA attack and never resumed, leaving the superpowers as useless as they were without the effort the players made to deliver goods and fight pirates to make the conference happen. Sirius also fought tooth and nail to hold the conference instead of anyone else doing it, and it all came to nothing in the end. Since then almost the diametric opposite has happened with one superpower going full on isolationist, another helplessly lashing out at its own citizens in a tacit admission that they have no answers for the bigger problems and the third in a partnership with a company whose CV is a catalogue of plans that came to nothing. None of which inspires me that any of them have a clue. If that's the point consider it received loud and clear.
- Delaine is also at the conference and there are hints that he and Sirius have some kind of business arrangement but if they do it doesn't appear to benefit either of them. Sirius seem to do little if anything to help him grow and his best chance is undercut by a pharmaceutical company and his own people.
- The terraforming of ammonia worlds in the Coalsack sector was an unmitigated failure, whether we believe the aim really was terraforming or if it was a smokescreen for capturing a live Thargoid/other Thargoid stuff. Either way it was another project that went nowhere and again was well supported by players.
- Sirius have yet to prove themselves with their AX partnership, I suppose this week will be the first step to seeing how well it works out for them, but even if they can repel the odd Interceptor fleet they have nothing that independent AX pilots cannot already do. On that note I find it ironic that we have gone from the admission that megaships were not the best thing to fight Thargoids with a few years ago to 2 of the superpowers pinning their hopes on them now, apparently without a hint of self awareness.
So unless I am missing something it would seem that the entirety of The Club's achievements, and by extension those of Sirius, in the last few years can be summed up as "much ado about nothing."
Yes - it'd be nice if there were more competitive CGs with graded outcomes, so it wasn't just a case of picking the winner but the losing side also having a chance to make the difference between a narrow loss and a major one. The Federal defection CGs are the only recent example and unfortunately weren't close enough for it to work that well.
Of course, there's more than CGs to supporting a side - one of the FGC's weaknesses is that no-one particularly likes them, even if plenty will defend them on principle against a more dangerous aggressor.
It's not massively clear that they had much actual success before then either, of course - their Dynasty plan has turned out to be an incredibly expensive failure too, with hindsight, and a lot of their actions during Premonition were somewhere between pointless and counterproductive in terms of outcome.
Though, are we talking "success" in terms of "the project was successful" or in terms of "we got paid"? Because in the latter, Sirius have been very successful lately at extracting money from the Alliance, and the Federation is probably paying Core Dynamics plenty of money to supply Hudson's regular doses of violence. They didn't get the joint-superpower moneypit treaty they wanted thanks to the NMLA, but it still worked out okay for them.
(I'm a lot less clear what Sirius is getting out of supporting Delaine: possibly just propping up a rival to the Consortium on enemy-of-my-enemy principles?)
I think you are assuming that the Club's first and foremost purpose is to do a "good job" of governing humanity. It's not. They think it is, but they have a rather massive conflict of interest given their secretive position. First and foremost they want power, and money, and they already had a lot of both. It's certainly not a lot of progress in actually solving the issues currently facing humanity, but they can profit off those issues instead to increase their own control.
For example, Sirius's plan is only a failure/useless when compared with its publicly stated goal. In terms of increasing Sirius's influence over the Alliance and making them a massive amount of money, it's been incredibly successful. Guess which part they really care about.
Same goes for the terraforming. They weren't doing it because they didn't fancy settling on any of the millions of existing ELWs. They wanted to provoke the Thargoids to justify the defence pact, which now sees Sirius having almost direct control over the Alliance. It was a success. The "good plan" here would be to ...not do that? Maybe just share the information you have so that humanity doesn't throw itself into a needless war? But then the Club would lose their priviledged position.
The Summit was a failure though, and the NMLA largely was (though we still don't know if they did anything to Arissa while she was in the freezer, and there are fewer Duvals now to get in their way). Jupiter Rochester got caught, but the rest of his family and Hudson got away with it, their goal was still achieved even if he took the fall. Delaine got backstabbed over the Onionhead, but I doubt the Club care too much about that.
Barring the Summit, I think this is simply because there have been far more CGs that can influence Club storylines. They have vastly increased their control over the Alliance, but suffered setbacks elsewhere. They're not omnipotent anymore, which is nice. But they are still extremely successful, with their "setbacks" amounting to a few fall guys going down while they maintain their extremely influential original position. I hope that the Empire's new position will prove to be a more substantial roadblock, but that is unlikely.
Also interesting to note that it seemed a lot easier to get bonds when playing on the cultist side vs playing in the Feds side. Doing the same amount of combat zones (high intensity) for both sides I ended up with 65% more bonds defending cultists than helping the Feds.