Ethos Clusters

[Ian Doncaster]

Some entirely non-strategic pictures for the weekend - this time showing the Power ethos (in the standard Acquisition, Reinforcement, Undermining order) and drawing lines between Powers with matching ethos.

Spoiler: Ethos Links

Some interesting points from this graph.

• There is no such thing as a Social Reinforcement ethos. Whether that's intentional or there just isn't a Power that fits that yet?
• Every other ethos+position combination has at least two Powers using it, with the exception of Covert Acquisition, which is the speciality of Yuri Grom alone. The most popular combinations are Social Acquisition (6) and Combat Reinforcement (5)
• There are two pairs of Powers with absolutely identical ethos: Pranav Antal and Nakato Kaine, and Li Yong-Rui and Felicia Winters, which seems slightly surprising given all the unused combinations out there, though the Social Acquisition space is more crowded.
• Likely deliberately, the two Federal and two Alliance powers don't overlap in ethos at all; within the Empire, four Powers guarantee some overlap (since there are only three Reinforcement ethos) but it is a loose chain from Aisling Duval - ALD - Denton Patreus - Zemina Torval (with Torval's Reinforcement and Undermining ethoses then looping back via the non-Imperial pairs to Aisling Duval)
• No Power is more than two steps from any other - even those who have no ethos in common at all. A lot of this is due to ALD who has at least one ethos in common with everyone except Zemina Torval

Spoiler: Strong Ethos Links

Adjusting the chart slightly to only show strongly-linked powers (those with two or three ethos in common) breaks it into three distinct clusters

• The six Combat powers. Mahon might feel a bit uneasy about being on this side of things, while Grom is only hanging on via his good friend (?) Archer's shared interest in surveillance, but it's pretty clear.
• The five Social powers, where Aisling Duval is acting as the intermediate step between the two identical pairs. (ALD's Acquisition ethos makes the name slightly inaccurate, but there doesn't seem to be a better one)
• Zemina Torval. Too slow to resort for violence for the Combat powers, yet without any Social concern either, she sits uneasily between the two.

Ethos seems very much about "means" rather than "ends" when it comes to reconciling Powerplay with the lore.

 

[Danieros]

A bit surprising for there not to be "pure" covert, finance or social powers. Pretty sure many of these are VERY different from PP1 ethos, and it doesn't make much sense for ethos to have changed.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Though it's also unclear what ethos actually does any more anyway, since it no longer affects interactions with faction government types, and it doesn't appear at all correlated with most of the "preferred" activities (which seem to be picked more to line up with Powers' rank bonuses, if anything).

 

[DemiserofD]

Indeed, I was struggling to find something that would qualify as covert for reinforcement purposes. When you control the system, there doesn't seem to be very many things you can do that actually require being covert. Even taking data from settlements is not technically a crime, even though you may need to trespass in order to get there.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

It's certainly an odd thing. In terms of what the Covert-Reinforcement powers have as preferred activites:

• All three have Exploration Data, though so do 3/4 of the Finance Reinforcers
• All three have Collect Salvage, though so do over half of the others (and most of the Combat Reinforcers)
• Two have Scan Ships, which makes sense at least in terms of "surveillance", though all the Combat Reinforcers have that so it's not really especially associated with Covert
• Two have Complete Support Missions, though again, so do 3/4 of the Finance Reinforcers

Covert shows up pretty rarely in general - only six cases, compared with 9, 10 or 11 for the other three types - and then three of them are Reinforcement which as you say is the least obvious type to do "sneakily".

I might try linking the activities together based on which ones share a Power next, and see if there's any obvious clusters coming out of that.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Though it's also unclear what ethos actually does any more anyway

I think when the devs were looking at this they got a flipchart, wrote out what BGS activities there are and mapped them to powers rather than actually create new ones to fit powers. I suppose FD were constrained by trying to limit the variation possible to aid balance rather than having one spy power, one mining power etc.

It also does not help that a lot of secondary effects have been taken away (for example Pranav has gone from a controlling cult leader who has bounty bonuses and penalties to basic tech leader).

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Looking at the activities is interesting ... among other things, I suspect at least one misclassification of ethos has occurred.

So, these next three charts link together activities. Each line is one Power which gets a bonus for both of those activities, in that system type. The colour of the line is the Power's ethos for that type - Social is green, Finance is cyan, Combat is red and Covert is purple. Activities favoured by either everyone or no-one are omitted.

Spoiler: Acquisition

Acquisition is a bit skewed by a full half of the Powers picking Social ... but there's clear strong overlap here between Social and Finance, and between Combat and Covert. Some activities - scans, hacks, bounty hunting, some of the Odyssey data - aren't really associated with any ethos.

Spoiler: Reinforcement

Reinforcement of course doesn't have Social as an option. Here, Covert and Finance are together overlapping, and opposed to Combat - though Finance goes a little further into the shared space with Combat. Looking at the activities actually in "Covert", it's clear that this is really "Social" with an edgy label, though.

Spoiler: Undermining

Back in a four-ethos set, we're back to Social+Finance versus Covert+Combat ... except for that little red triangle of Salvage+S&R+AP Data. That's Eddie "Tough Guy" Mahon, trying desperately to pretend that his Undermining ethos isn't Social.

Really, this mainly suggests that there isn't enough distinction at the activity level to have four Ethos - there's really only two for Acquisition and Undermining: Combat/Covert and Social/Finance. For Reinforcement, all the "Covert" ethos should be "Social" instead to keep the same pairings.

So this final graph puts the above three together - is "Bounty Hunting (Acquisition)" different to "Bounty Hunting (Reinforcement)" and so on. I've applied the suggested "two ethos" scheme where everything gets mapped to Combat (red) or Social (green), but kept Mahon's Undermining as red (but dashed lines) and shown the slightly more hybrid Finance Reinforcement lines in their original cyan.

Spoiler

Shown this way the greater affinity for Finance Reinforcement for Covert (really, of course, Social) Reinforcement is clear - the blue lines connect things also connected by green lines on the other activities, and Mahon's position away from the main cluster - admittedly, more on the combat side of the Social area - becomes clearer.

So this gives the following simplified ethos table, which does tie-in reasonably well with the activities they'll ask you to do.

Power

ADu

ADe

ALD

DP

EM

FW

JA

LYR

NK

PA

YG

ZT

Acquisition

Social

Combat

Social

Social

Social

Social

Combat

Social

Social

Social

Combat

Social

Reinforcement

Social

Combat

Combat

Combat

Social

Social

Combat

Social

Social

Social

Combat

Social

Undermining

Social

Combat

Combat

Combat

(Social)

Social

Combat

Social

Social

Social

Combat

Social

Despite there being eight possible combinations, once Mahon is reclassified by his preferred activities, only three of them are actually in use:
- pure social-finance, for 7 of the powers
- pure combat-covert for 3 of the powers
- Social Acquisition then Combat Reinforcement/Undermining for ALD and DP.

That does fit reasonably well with their in-story styles, too.

 

[Mystler]

It's quite weird how this was implemented. As if Ethos is just a flavor entry on the power page rather than an actual mechanical concept - or at the very least not much more than an inspiration since power-specific coding seems to exist and take priority.

To add further funny special quirks: Undermining activities are not just determined by the Power doing the activity but also by the victim power. Archon Delaine can be UMed with Bounty Hunting (and can also UM others with Bounty Hunting, which is the biggest exception compared to ALL other powers as well as the codex never listing Bounty Hunting as a valid UM activity). Other cases I've seen are combat powers adding committing crimes to the preferred UM activities if they are the target. Except Kumo who adds Power Kills. Torval adds Mining from what I've seen. Antal added a repeated second entry of Flood Markets for me as an AD pilot. The general trend I saw was that the first few entries are based on source power and then there are up to two more based on target power.
Not sure what other differences pop up for other powers but it was entertaining to see that people making charts of preferred activities for their own power have to either make them "three-dimensional" or add footnotes to differentiate by target power.

 

[zimms]

It's quite weird how this was implemented. As if Ethos is just a flavor entry on the power page rather than an actual mechanical concept - or at the very least not much more than an inspiration since power-specific coding seems to exist and take priority.
[...]

Most of all it's a leftover from PP1.0 where ethos did matter.