Elite Dangerous | Trailblazers Update 3 | Now Live!
- Thread starter Phil W
- Start date
That's a crucial comma.
It's from star catalogue, I think it's right to use the real star names, but it would be better if Frontier explained or gave more information about these in-game catalogs.
"Col" maybe for "Collins (double stars)" ?
it was (supposed to be) patched this last patch? the patch before? its working well for me now...
Places like Col Sector AA-A 1 are procedural. Places like Sol or HIP XXXX/ HR XXXX are from catalogues. The vast majority of stars are just generated names and all the game already supports multiple names per system because you can search for systems by their catalogue names if they're in multiple catalogues even if the one displayed in game isn't that catalogue name. This is a particularly useful feature when you're not sure how they spelt a system name you can just use the HIP catalogue number.
I suspect that part of the reason it's a 35% reduction/5% increase and not simply a 40% increase to undermining/acquisition merits is specifically to try to shake people out of doing reinforcing and into the other two activities.
With the exception of exobio/exploration (both of which are getting an increased merit reward rate in this patch anyway) and ship scans, all of the other reinforcement activities are also available in at least one of undermining or acquisition systems, so you don't necessarily have to change what you do, just where.
Either way, it does feel that removing those NPCs was a mistake brought about by bad feedback.Some streamers*
Don't lie, Ian. We both know the very second servers come back Powerplay will go from placid wind kissed fields to this:
As fun as that would be i think it's just going to increase acquisition rates as undermining is still mechanically penalized in a multitude of ways
And Trailblazers has made the number of valid Acquisition targets more than double, from just under 6000 to just over 12500, which makes contesting of acquistions also less likely.
Names include:
Carling
Heineken
Coors
Budweiser
Stella Artois
Oh geat, yet another ship that can mass lock a Type 9.
It's a start at least. Wholesale changes aren't always a good idea, so a tweak to encourage things away from reinforcement is probably a good scope to work to this time around.
They did say they'd be keeping an eye on this, so potentially we could see more changes further on.
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Lets hope so. I would love to actually see a link between effort and PvE pushback via NPCs. Currently other powers are just a nebulous concept rather than an immediate threat- so you can mindlessly grind and see the same level of resistance regardless.
If I mash up a powers systems and rack up tens of thousands of merits I want them to get angry and trigger incrementally more dangerous NPCs. That way you then actually feel as if rival powers are tangible entities.
Although if so they probably also need to do this for people heavily reinforcing systems near the border with another Power's space, or it just becomes another reason not to attack.
And once you run out of large players, you can draw on the list of ~1500 brewer(ie)s in Germany
Indeed. In the end its shaking the belief Powerplay can be 'safe'.
But again it can allow nuance to hauling- if you haul in these dangerous border areas you could get more merits as you face more enemies. Eventually you'll get shot down but then rebuys are free and the system resets. To me thats better than monotone hauling across the territory.
I wonder if with sufficient undermining from a single opposition power, you could have conflict zones activated to highlight the activity in the system.
I spent yesterday evening doing some Power signal work. The sysauth ships showed up in several Power Weapons Fire and higher threat Wreckage signals (ones that show up as A vs. B on the upper right info panel). But it took several minutes in the low security system and by then the fights generally had spread out over a 10+ km area—another factor why they might go unnoticed
To be fair, the PP NPC-s at wreckage/weapon fire and many convoy signals know mighty well how to shoot back
It's the general "drop out of SC" spawns that are pushovers. IMO, these SC drop spawns are weird, anyway—I can understand if immediately hostile PP NPC-s (conditionally) spawned* when in an opforce system, but why does a bunch of NPC-s (a mix of friendly/opforce cargo ships plus random non-PP ships, some of them wanted) drop in when you're playing in your own backyard? Seems like the behaviour was copied from the thargoid war scout/interceptor spawns, but it IMO is a bit half-baked in the PP context.*Ideally only if you have undermined the power over the ongoing cycle, and with higher likelyhood/difficulty the more you've done that. Otherwise going into another power's system for engineering, CG or sourcing commodities for colony building would get somewhat annoying