Factions having trouble with water supplies can now sometimes suffer a Drought, causing an economic cost as they have to import significant amounts of water. This can be countered by selling water and other emergency supplies.
Infrastructure Failure disrupts a faction's operations and reduces both security and economic standards. The increased demands on infrastructure elsewhere in the star system may lead to similar failures for other factions. Food and machinery deliveries can speed up repairs.
Terrorism. Terrorists can target prosperous factions, causing a significant security and influence cost. This can be countered by legally selling weapons to the authorities and assisting with bounty hunting efforts, or by the faction entering a Lockdown.
Natural Disasters have a significant economic and security cost for a faction. A natural disaster puts extra strain on the star system's infrastructure, increasing the chance of Drought or Infrastructure Failure for other factions in that system.
Public Holidays increase a faction's influence and standard of living for their duration, however that comes at small economic and security cost.
With the beta going live soon and the patch coming in January, I'm really looking forward to those new states. Drought, Infrastructure Failure, Terrorism, Natural Disasters and Public Holidays. Please post your experience with the states along with any tips to trigger or avoid them.
Its triggered by prolonged murder + RNG, and is a way to speed up the decline of the security slider (as murder has been nerfed several times and is easy to reverse). Once a faction is spanked hard the lockdown cancels the negative bonus.
Wait... Drought? So what about Blight? RIP? (EDIT: Oh, I see it's still there...)
A lot of these sound like their cause will be random in nature... which... I dunno... I've got mixed feelings about. I'm actually just happy for some new states though, so I'll wait and see.
Wait... Drought? So what about Blight? RIP? (EDIT: Oh, I see it's still there...)
A lot of these sound like their cause will be random in nature... which... I dunno... I've got mixed feelings about. I'm actually just happy for some new states though, so I'll wait and see.
Yeah... that's kinda where I'm going about my mixed feelings. I'm happy to see a bunch of "bad states" which might occur randomly... my hope is:
These states are actually able to be deliberately caused via sane gaming mechanics (e.g I can cause bust by selling goods for a loss, but that's not sane)
They facilitate further actions that players can take to worsen the situation.
My real desire is that they actually rebalance and make available more sane activities for commanders to cause negative effects, but provided these states occur often enough, and are equally cause-able, then if it's functionally the same, it'll do.
Yeah... that's kinda where I'm going about my mixed feelings. I'm happy to see a bunch of "bad states" which might occur randomly... my hope is:
These states are actually able to be deliberately caused via sane gaming mechanics (e.g I can cause bust by selling goods for a loss, but that's not sane)
They facilitate further actions that players can take to worsen the situation.
My real desire is that they actually rebalance and make available more sane activities for commanders to cause negative effects, but provided these states occur often enough, and are equally cause-able, then if it's functionally the same, it'll do.
The drought is interesting, mainly as I thought I remembered someone saying each system has hidden stats re food and other commodities. Maybe its tied to this?
Yes, I'm hoping there's ways to actively encourage these new 'negative' states and hopefully not things like 'push the economy really high to cause a drought'.
Public Holiday sounds interesting, I wonder how that works for increasing influence?
It is, but does it make for fun, compelling gameplay? Not really. There's potentially an argument that, when I restock/repair after a war, that's the cost of improving (security) conditions for that faction during the war, and that the "loss" on selling goods to a faction for a loss is the comparable cost... but from a game mechanic perspective, the idea of being a successful trader is to find the most profitable routes, and to fail at trading is to suffer a trading loss. Deliberately failing feels like a fairly daft mechanic[1].
To degrade economic conditions, I'd rather see things like, say, tertiary effects of delivery missions, where, say, delivering Gold from Faction A, System A to Faction B, System B, where the target station is owned by Faction C, cause +econ/Inf for Fac A in sys A, Fac B in Sys B (like normal), and -econ/Inf for Fac C, Sys B, as the direct delivery is circumventing Faction C's business operations.
Or heck, let's go whole-hog... anarchies smuggling drugs in to a target station could have a negative economic impact on all factions in the system except them... actually give anarchies a fighting chance for once... likewise smuggling weapons could negatively impact security for all other factions.
Current missions and other operations on behalf of lawful factions simply do not have sufficient negative impact on other lawful factions.
[1] Conversely, if you really want to talk about the effects of that sort of thing, that's where something like EVE with it's hyper-capitalistic and robust market system allows skilled market manipulators to hurt other traders, while making huge profits themselves, mimicking exactly what you've mentioned. ED simply isn't in that ballpark though (nor is that a suggestion that it should be).
These states are actually able to be deliberately caused via sane gaming mechanics (e.g I can cause bust by selling goods for a loss, but that's not sane)
It is, but does it make for fun, compelling gameplay? Not really. There's potentially an argument that, when I restock/repair after a war, that's the cost of improving (security) conditions for that faction during the war, and that the "loss" on selling goods to a faction for a loss is the comparable cost... but from a game mechanic perspective, the idea of being a successful trader is to find the most profitable routes, and to fail at trading is to suffer a trading loss. Deliberately failing feels like a fairly daft mechanic[1].
Speaking personally, when I was doing BGS work, my purpose wasn't to be a successful trader. My purpose was to win a covert war against my enemies, by driving them out of power and putting others in their place. I did that by attacking a faction economically: selling at a loss* to destabilize their economy, deliberately failing (not abandoning) missions, or taking the low paying wrinkle if it showed up. Yes, I could've done things more efficiently by simply killing everything in sight, but I didn't want to attract bounty hunters to my system. I wanted to deter the successful traders, by making the system unattractive.
And more importantly, I had fun doing it.
As the old saying goes, "Winning a war may cost you most of your gold, but losing it will cost it all." ____
* Since we can't actually undercut local prices, buying high and selling low was a necessary workaround.
That's how I see it too. Not getting side tracked from your actual objective. There's plenty of ways to earn the money that you can then spend on your enemy's ruin.
So, the ones not in the beta are: Revolution, Cold War, Trade War, Technological Leap, Historic Event, Colonisation
If I had to take a guess at a series of events here, FD went "Let's introduce some new states to the BGS!", and they spitballed some ideas. As usual, some placeholder code gets added for these sorts of things while the core ideas get fleshed out.
If you look at the ones we're getting:
Blight
Drought
Infrastructure Failure
Natural Disaster
Terrorist Attack
Public Holiday
Terrorist Attack, well, we've already got stuff like that e.g Civil Unrest, Pirate Attack, so Terrorist Attack doesn't rock the boat much.
Drought and Blight might as well be functionally the same.
Infrastructure Failure and Natural Disaster are functionally Outbreak by a different name and slightly different effects.
Public Holiday, well, I couldn't exactly discern what if any effects were there for that one.
In other words, they don't rock the boat in terms of mechanics.
However, Revolution, Cold War and Trade War, they all sound like variations on a conflict state. I'd presume to think they're variations on a theme (Maybe, for example two Corporate-ethos have a Trade war, rather than an Election... maybe Authoritarian-ethos go to Cold War rather than Election, and Revolution? Who knows... either way, they probably thought "Well, since the other states don't really do anything major for the mechanics, let's not rock the boat with these... why break what's working already?"
Meanwhile, Tech Leap, Historic Event and Colonisation (!) all sound like they'd rely on mechanics that simply don't exist in any form in the game yet.... so given it's all about bugfixes, these probably never left the "Good idea, but..." department.
EDIT: Split in two, because goddamn that was inadvertently huge.
Speaking personally, when I was doing BGS work, my purpose wasn't to be a successful trader. My purpose was to win a covert war against my enemies, by driving them out of power and putting others in their place. I did that by attacking a faction economically: selling at a loss* to destabilize their economy, deliberately failing (not abandoning) missions, or taking the low paying wrinkle if it showed up. Yes, I could've done things more efficiently by simply killing everything in sight, but I didn't want to attract bounty hunters to my system. I wanted to deter the successful traders, by making the system unattractive.
And more importantly, I had fun doing it.
As the old saying goes, "Winning a war may cost you most of your gold, but losing it will cost it all." ____
* Since we can't actually undercut local prices, buying high and selling low was a necessary workaround.
I get your point, but I still disagree that they're sane mechanics.
By "sane mechanics" I don't mean you're insane for doing them, rather from a game design and mechanics perspective, they don't make logical sense.
My canonical example here is pre-FSS discovery techniques for things like Barnacles, Guardian Cities, Thargoid Structures and the like. If you're exploring the surface of the planet, the game essentially teaches you "If you want to find points of interest, fly around at 2km and look for blue circles on your radar. Touch down, follow the radar signals in your SRV and you'll find the point of interest."
How did you find these Barnies, Guardian/Thargoid sites? You ignore that teaching and just fly around trying to MK-1 eyeball stuff. That's not a sane mechanic; it follows no logical process that the game sets out for you.
As for the trading example... I draw this back to a (self-defined[1]) concept that missions are there to teach you core game mechanics in a structured way, leading you to undertake unstructured gameplay in a similar vein.
E.g
Salvage Missions - You go to a degraded emission and scoop up mission cargo; Unstructured: You go to degraded/encoded/high grade emissions and scoop salvage
Assassinations/Massacres - You go to a USS/RES/NBs and kill targets for bounties to satisfy the mission; Unstructured: You go about these areas and kill wanted ships for bounties
Mining - Pretty self-explanatory
Surface scanning/Powerplant - You go to base and interact with a specific thing for a reward; Unstructured: You go down and interact with the various elements of a base for rewards.
Hijack/Piracy missions - You steal mission cargo from a target ship and return it for a reward; Unstructured: You can pirate NPC ships for cargo.
Then there's Source/Delivery missions, both legal and illegal.
What do these teach us?
Legal Source/Delivery missions: Move around in-demand goods for a reward, positive influence, reputation and economic effects and a reward.
Illegal Source/Delivery missions: Move around illegal goods, cause negative influence, reputation and economic effects for victim factions, for a reward
So the game teaches: You want to help a faction and it's economy? Trade on the open market. You want to hurt a faction and it's economy? Trade on the black market. That's the mechanics the game pushes to the forefront of our mind; positive reinforcement both for "standard" trade and black market trade.
Meanwhile, for the commodity markets themselves, you trade for a profit, it's in big, green text. You trade for a loss, it's in big, red text. You don't need to be a UX master to know this is reinforcing the idea of "Trading for a profit is correct/winning, trading for a loss is incorrect/losing". Of course, the BGS is meant to react to our actions. FD themselves say (words to the effect of) "Positive states come about when players succeed and do good things, and negative states come about when players fail and do bad things. Players don't generally fail, so we see more positive states than negative".
Putting that all together, I firmly believe FD see trading for a loss as "player failure". As such, it causes negative effects, which makes sense, but I don't believe the intent of that effect by FD was ever for players to run around deliberately trading for a loss, which is why I don't think that mechanic is sane.
Even take this table from the recent BGS livestream
It just says "Trade" makes economy and influence go up, and Smuggling causes economy/influence go down[2]. It doesn't distinguish (in either case of trade or smuggle) trading for a loss or profit; ostensibly, you should read into that that "Trade", even for a loss, should cause economy and influence to increase. But as we all know, it doesn't.
So that's why I don't really see this as a sane mechanic. I think FD's intent behind the mechanic is purely as a consequence of "failing to trade correctly" rather than a mechanic intended to be used for deliberately harming a faction; they see smuggling as that mechanic, though since that's not available against all factions[3] it has it's own problems.
Just to clarify; I don't see a problem using it to achieve that effect... it's not exploitative or anything like that. I just don't see it as a sane gameplay loop in the context of everything else. I throw deliberate failure of missions into the same boat, for pretty similar reasons too; FD likely intended that as a consequence of failure, not as something directly used by players.
On the point of "not finding it fun"... I guess I'd just rather have activities which can be meaningfully undertaken to hurt my target faction, rather than just deliberately potato-ing activities in their name.
(Coincidentally and a bit of a tangent; I find it funny every time I ask for missions to deliberately target factions with negative effects to be more readily available, a common response is one of blind panic that I just want to make the galaxy burn... when the mechanics to do that are already there... but I guess more people don't do that because as mentioned, they aren't sane)
[1] Emphasis on this, just so I'm asked to provide some non-existent citation.
[2] Except for Anarchy-owners.
[3] Which is why black markets should be available at all stations regardless, with different profit margins and greater degrees of risk depending on the government ethos and system security.. but that's a whole other bag.
That's how I see it too. Not getting side tracked from your actual objective. There's plenty of ways to earn the money that you can then spend on your enemy's ruin.
As an example of this, I'd rather see mechanics to do things like finance disruptive militias or donating goods to illegal causes, rather than just selling Palladium to somewhere Palladium is in supply.
But eh, that's just turning this into my tired old debate that there's a major under-investment in antagonistic behaviours in the game, which is why we still don't see much natural Lockdown/zero natural famine; there's just no sane mechanics there to support it.
I do see your point, but I guess my tendency to contextualize game mechanics in universe makes it seem sane to me. Subtly sabotaging your enemy, by making them seem ineffective, out of touch buffoons, seems more elegant than just blowing up ships.
(Coincidentally and a bit of a tangent; I find it funny every time I ask for missions to deliberately target factions with negative effects to be more readily available, a common response is one of blind panic that I just want to make the galaxy burn... when the mechanics to do that are already there... but I guess more people don't do that because as mentioned, they aren't sane)
