Elite Dangerous | Trailblazers Update 3 | Now Live!
- Thread starter Phil W
- Start date
You'd get fairly quick extra protection from Beyond Frontline Penalty once the actual frontlines started to split apart from each other. 35% penalty sounds big, but it's only about the same as you'd get from trying to undermine against Moderate BFP or High SSP. And a lot of the Fortified/Stronghold systems, especially those inherited from PP1, have High SSP or stronger, so in that respect it's just levelling things off.
There's certainly a big question about how to maintain a situation where Powers are incentivised to (successfully!) attack each other while keeping overall numbers of systems stable that this particular change (explicitly) doesn't address - and also how to handle the potential for a Power to be almost wiped out in a way that doesn't just lead to the "shell depth" stalemates of the Thargoid War. But the first step is to get the sides to attack each other at all a bit more.
Delaine's strike on Patreus was effective locally, certainly, congratulations to them for that - but many powers don't even have that sort of vulnerability any more (you couldn't attack LYR like that without a lot more effort), and it's only the 3rd or 4th time in half a year of Powerplay that collapsing a fortified bubble has happened at all despite its high on-paper effectiveness for undermining and the long-standing availability of this tactic.
Part of the problem of course:
- you don't actually gain anything from another Power being smaller (it's not as if there's a shortage of space to expand to)
- you still have to go through the effort of acquiring and reinforcing all those systems for yourself if you want them for yourself for some reason
The 'naive' figure would be about 7-10:1 if it doesn't change any behaviour, down from 10-15:1 now. So it'll definitely be interesting to see how much further down (if any) it shifts the ratio. There are still a lot of incentives to reinforce rather than undermine even with this cutback.
And more interesting to see what Frontier have coming up next, too...
...might actually be the most significant change here!
Ahhhh good catch.
I'm not sure I even understand what they mean by that one?
That asteroid boost might've been interesting in the system with just a brown dwarf where I had the option to build an asteroid base primary around the star... alas, it is just a waypoint for me so a high tech outpost it will be.
It's one of those things where Elite Dangerous has immense depth, all of which is (was?) carefully partitioned off from mechanical impact so that players never need to worry about it.
The question "how much Clothing will station A produce?" is not at all a straightforward one to answer - even the data I've been able to collect so far is the result of the effects on hidden data by a bunch of hidden variables, so a completely blank slate prediction is impossible. (Though with certain bits of info about station A I can give a reasonable estimate)
The question "how much Clothing is currently in stock at station A?" is easy to answer, and with crowdsourced tools that answer can be rapidly shared. This is also the question which has more than once-a-decade in-game application.
You don't need to know that the range of Clothing production caps per economic unit varies between at least 1.23t and 15.72t. You don't need to know what an economic unit is, either [1]. And even with Trailblazers there's not much you can actually do with that information beyond noting that a 50% Industrial should produce Clothing, unless you get unlucky. And maybe that's not "unlucky", it's "the balance of your various
[1] They probably don't exist as such, but it's a useful modelling tool.
I think it implies that previously "Kaine has a reinforcement ethos for scanning ships" (so gives a +50% merit bonus) was a client-side definition, so required a patch to change, so they didn't. Now it's a server-side definition, so next week Kaine gets a reinforcement ethos bonus for bounty hunting and Mahon gets the scan one, if Frontier feel like it.
It'll be interesting to see what actual change scrapping escape pods for generic "salvage" will mean in the UI - will it mean that there is just a single "hand in salvage", which will include everything scooped up from wreckage POI (including any escape pods) or that there will be more of the wreckage parts and less escape pods - etc. Or that escape pods are simply ignored (as currently) and no longer listed in the UI (the worst outcome IMO - I enjoy the wreckage salvage sites as quick activities)
Without more details I think I'd have preferred it if only the Power Wreckage POI escape pods were still relevant (i.e. just not just farming them elsewhere nefariously as an exploit - which I think was the original reason for halting handing them in), but maybe this change will work, need to see it in action.
Very excited for the stutter fix. Will be watching that like a hawk to confirm.
Next another general QOL and longstanding bug fixes patch too please...
Without more details I think I'd have preferred it if only the Power Wreckage POI escape pods were still relevant (i.e. just not just farming them elsewhere nefariously as an exploit - which I think was the original reason for halting handing them in), but maybe this change will work, need to see it in action.
Very excited for the stutter fix. Will be watching that like a hawk to confirm.
Next another general QOL and longstanding bug fixes patch too please...
<cough cough>shadow flicker, FC QOL, etc.</cough cough>
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I would love the choice, as the system architect to be able to disable planetary influence if I don't want it. The current changes are likely to ruin my current refinery coriolis as it is orbiting an icy body that has two slots that contains two refinery hubs. These were built and completed before the initial planet based economy change hit. We're still not sure exactly what the weak links will do but I have a feeling that the strong links will have a direct effect on the market proportions while the weak links may just be boosts to available stocks in the stations. I had been seeing and recording these effects before the planet influence thing got switched on a while back. When the planet thing got switched on I stopped seeing any boosts from building other buildings in my system so this feature may have been turned off at that time. I was really confused for a bit when I stopped seeing boosts to my markets when building more stuff but this makes more sense now. At first I chalked it up to my system being in Boom because I stopped seeing the boosts when it went back to a none state but this also coincided with the planet influence change.
I'm going to assume my current refinery will become useless when this patch hits though so maybe I'll do my best to stock up my carrier before then.
I'm going to assume my current refinery will become useless when this patch hits though so maybe I'll do my best to stock up my carrier before then.
Oh my word. Now THAT'S how you do release notes!
I can't remember the last time FDev publicly wrote out the mechanics of a feature in such details. It's always been just obscure hints dropped over a brief moment of a live stream. And with examples??? Wow. This is really, really great work. Thank you!
On the Powerplay part:
I'm concerned about the negativity aspect being given to PowerPlay. I'm a law-abiding CMDR and most undermining activities available to me (read: fun) are illegal and incur fines and bounties. The few tools we have to raise system scores have been chopped off by 35%. This is on top of the 4:1+ ratio of system score we get from the merits we see in game.
If I'm reading it correctly, for example, scanning a wake gives me 20 merit points. That is divided by 4 which yields 5 system score gained. After this change that will be further reduced by 35% = 3.25 score points. Transporting 100 Power commodities to reinforce / 4 - 35% = 16.25 system score points (and these are reduced so it's not 100 to start with).
I know you guys want us to fight but this is getting crazy. This will make it dead easy for the larger Powers to obliterate smaller ones. Also, it doesn't seem you fixed the completely unbalanced mined minerals merits/system score we currently have. Yes, it's dropped by 35% but so does every other positive action (ie: trading rares) which would keep things unbalanced.
Alright, ready to be corrected if I messed something up above. Go!
I can't remember the last time FDev publicly wrote out the mechanics of a feature in such details. It's always been just obscure hints dropped over a brief moment of a live stream. And with examples??? Wow. This is really, really great work. Thank you!
On the Powerplay part:
I'm concerned about the negativity aspect being given to PowerPlay. I'm a law-abiding CMDR and most undermining activities available to me (read: fun) are illegal and incur fines and bounties. The few tools we have to raise system scores have been chopped off by 35%. This is on top of the 4:1+ ratio of system score we get from the merits we see in game.
If I'm reading it correctly, for example, scanning a wake gives me 20 merit points. That is divided by 4 which yields 5 system score gained. After this change that will be further reduced by 35% = 3.25 score points. Transporting 100 Power commodities to reinforce / 4 - 35% = 16.25 system score points (and these are reduced so it's not 100 to start with).
I know you guys want us to fight but this is getting crazy. This will make it dead easy for the larger Powers to obliterate smaller ones. Also, it doesn't seem you fixed the completely unbalanced mined minerals merits/system score we currently have. Yes, it's dropped by 35% but so does every other positive action (ie: trading rares) which would keep things unbalanced.
Alright, ready to be corrected if I messed something up above. Go!
I guess, too bad?
You said it yourself. You don't play a lot, and you don't want to work toward a carrier. That means you don't get to have the advantages that come with those things.
It's a beta, they've said that hundreds of times.
Yep we knew what we were getting into when Trailblazer's launched in beta, there was going to be changes, review, and more changes, and no refundsies (and we also all know the FDev pace of things). This is precisely why I did not OVER invest, I have only one system with half a dozen constructions. Will wait for the update and add a few more, re-assess, and then wait to see how the dust settles again.
People rushing to daisy chain or build massive systems were a bit bonkers and have no-one to blame but themselves for unintended outcomes. Even if Fdev explicitly said at launch "do not over invest during beta" people would have done it anyway, and if they had put a cap on individuals colonies there'd have been uproar too.
Almost getting the vibe that these Links can be adjusted by the Architect.
Such a verbose explanation of strong and weak links as well as ports and supporting facilities, combined with sentences like "Both types of link can be present" really only would make sense if you provide additional Architectural gameplay.
Especially if you preface that with "changes are designed to allow significantly more flexibility in building out systems to create any desired economy, and to significantly boost the economic output of colonised systems".
If that's going to be a thing, then you can concentrate the flow of goods within a system into a single port? -To a certain degree...
Will have to see, but this next patch'll be interesting, that's for sure.
Such a verbose explanation of strong and weak links as well as ports and supporting facilities, combined with sentences like "Both types of link can be present" really only would make sense if you provide additional Architectural gameplay.
Especially if you preface that with "changes are designed to allow significantly more flexibility in building out systems to create any desired economy, and to significantly boost the economic output of colonised systems".
If that's going to be a thing, then you can concentrate the flow of goods within a system into a single port? -To a certain degree...
Will have to see, but this next patch'll be interesting, that's for sure.
Yeah, my squadron and I ran ourselves about 500LY away to a nice like private Bubble and basically just grabbed systems and put down a single outpost in the vast majority to wait out the first couple rounds of changes. I JUST started building a few installations and surface sites in one of them. If FDev comes in later and takes a wrecking ball to it, I'll be annoyed and frustrated to be sure, but then I take a breath and move on.
The colonisation linking infographic is a good start, but is there link differences with a planet with moons, or a binary planets? Or same links apply to all?
Could probably just be cleared up with an explanatory asterisk below.
Could probably just be cleared up with an explanatory asterisk below.
Can't believe I'm praising a patch by fdev, but wow, actually good changes? I'm beyond impressed.