Does population or wealth influence the mission board?

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Just about to go do a bit of (futile) research, but was just wondering if anyone could confirm whether or not population and wealth in 2019 influence what missions spawn from mission boards.

In the past it certainly did. There were many stations where zero missions spawned in non active states, but as soon as a boom etc happened they were flooded with missions (of the same type). I would like it to still be so, but i suspect this has been removed for new player comfort reasons.

If it does still have an effect, it would be great to know any cutoff levels (or if its a scale) to add another permutation.

Probably just doing this to prove or disprove to myself how homogenized the mission boards are in practice... and also of course to find any unplugged holes for mission stacking (which i believe to be dead...). Any expansive opinions anyone is willing to share are always welcome, thanks in advance.

EDIT: Also does system economy itself mean anything or is it just an aggregate of the stations within?

From long observation it seems that the primary criteria is base economy and minor faction goverment type for choice of mission.. but in the past it hasn't always been this way.. its been more weighted to just the controlling faction of the station than each minor faction. I don't think its like this now.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

System economy is the largest two economy types of the stations in the system, including non-dockable settlements. (This is largest by economy size, not number of assets, and many assets contribute two economies, or occasionally more)

States do have a small effect on missions - mainly observable on passenger missions with the type of passengers being transported, and goods transport missions will depend on the markets at both ends - e.g. outbreak systems get very high medicine demand, and therefore attract many medicine transport missions from nearby HT/Industrial economies. (And obviously War generates the wartime massacre missions which don't otherwise appear) The effect is indeed smaller than it was a few years back, however - a little disappointing, but if balancing one set of mission generation rules across the galaxy is tough, balancing fifteen or more would be worse...

Population has no direct effect on missions that I know of, but as in general low-population systems have smaller markets then in theory it could have a marginal indirect effect via supply/demand on what types of transport missions were generated.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Yeah thanks for that. Was going to do this casually, but almost immediately ran into same same problems.. and depth problems.. remembered and confirmed again that ship size also triggers a different set of missions from the same station as well (rough guess they include some sort of padding for "ship size too large", for noobs who can't handle it again i guess).

Im getting a gut feeling currently its so much dumber than imagined... ie, simply look for the minor faction government type and the economy of the station, and expect a set of choices from that permutation and that will be guaranteed to be there. There are very minor variations definitely, but thats probably the most correct way to look at it. Hopefully im wrong

EDIT: Doing a double take on this post you could image that's how it should work.. but it used to be much, much more complicated, see original question. I miss 2.1 - 2.3.

 

[Jmanis]

States do have a small effect on missions - mainly observable on passenger missions with the type of passengers being transported, and goods transport missions will depend on the markets at both ends - e.g. outbreak systems get very high medicine demand, and therefore attract many medicine transport missions from nearby HT/Industrial economies. (And obviously War generates the wartime massacre missions which don't otherwise appear) The effect is indeed smaller than it was a few years back, however - a little disappointing, but if balancing one set of mission generation rules across the galaxy is tough, balancing fifteen or more would be worse...

I think FD thinks States have a significant effect on missions, in that they consider "Assassinate Pirate Lord" distinct from the more stateful "Assassinate Deserter" from a war-themed state... same same economy seems to be considered a significant effect, but that seems to be more around the ideas you mentioned... "Colony" economies will have missions to ship Biowaste to Agricultural economies, while Ag economies will have significantly more food transport missions to a nearby famine (lol...). But fundamentally, whether you're shipping weapons or biowaste, transport missions are transport missions, regardless of state or economy.

Apparently, government also has an effect on what missions are available. I've only ever seen this arise in the flavour text of a mission (compare for example Communist assassination vs dictatorship assassinations), and Anarchies, which have an entirely different mission generation algorithm to other faction types. As far as I'm concerned, while democracies still offer political assassinations during Election, and Dictatorships offer "courier poll data" during Elections, this difference simply is not stark enough to be of any consequence.

Just note.. these are my readings of a response from (an FD dev, I forget who, one of the mission guys) who corrected me when saying "States, governments and economic type have almost no impact on the fundamental type of missions available", and asserted that these had the most impact on the type of mission available... but I got radio silence when I asked for more info, given the comparisons I made above.

I did start collecting data on mission availability based on state, government, economy etc.. and while I did find some patterns, it still showed that the base mission types (e.g salvage) would be available from any gov/state/eco combination. I also started to find:

• Government, Economy and State had the least impact on what mission types were available.
• Proximity of other populated systems, availability of goods on markets and presence of nearby settlements/landable planets have the most impact on what mission types are available.

State does seem to affect the quantity of missions available; factions with state will be have missions preferentially generated for them over None states, but def not the type.

The sort of stark difference I'd prefer to see based on, say, government/state combinations would base off the underlying government ethos; taking the outbreak state as an example:

• Authoritarians send you out to destroy plague ships and hijack medical supplies (seized for the state) only
• Corporates purchase/transport medical supplies and take medical donations only
• Social have you ferry around research data/do surface scans/salvage medical goods and take donations only
• Criminal have you steal drugs, and smuggle food (becomes illegal in outbreak, remember?) only

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Apparently, government also has an effect on what missions are available.

The only really obvious ones I've seen of this are
- Criminal ethos offers a lot of illegal missions
- Theocracies seem to generate a lot of donation missions
But there may well be more subtle distinctions as well.

 

[Jmanis]

But there may well be more subtle distinctions as well.

Yeah, and that was kinda my point at the time of that discussion with whatever dev it was.

If there is a distinction, it's subtle and not obvious, where it really needs to be more stark.

Here's an example of a specifically-communist assassination:

I accepted one, and it's functionally identical to an Assassinate Known Pirate mission.

Meanwhile, a cooperative-specific delivery:

Again, specific flavour for a cooperative, but functionally identical to any other cargo delivery mission.... so I consider these "the same", but I don't think FD does.