"Fixing Negative States" Discussion & Suggestion Thread

[Jmanis]

TL;DR: In Dav's recent BGS livestream (Which was fantastic, go watch it if you haven't), he mentioned FD were "... hearing the feedback and considering their options..." on the current issues around the absence of negative states and actions. Let's consolidate discussion and suggestions to fix that into a single thread which FD can hopefully refer to.

We all know the problem; states that are currently "too hard to achieve" in the BGS are currently:

• Retreat
• Famine
• Bust
• Civil Unrest
• Lockdown

This is evidenced by the great stats @Mangal Oemie produces every month, and how the number of concurrent positive states dwarfs the number of concurrent negative states (see below). The lack of ability to successfully achieve a retreat is also well evidenced by increasing concerns about the populated bubble becoming "full".

There's a multitude of threads discussing the issues which I'll link at the bottom for reference. I'll try and keep a list of one-liner suggestions in this OP, but use the rest of this thread to make suggestions and discuss their merits or otherwise. These might be small-scale tweaks, or large, overarching changes... let's not keep anything off the table.

To get the ball rolling I'll add some at the front of my mind, categorised as appropriate, though there could be other categories as more suggestions come in. (TODO: Follow up these initial suggestions with more detail in a secondary post)

Fixing ability to achieve Retreat

• Invasion mechanics bug (8-faction situation) where the losing side is meant to retreat needs to be fixed.
• (Contingent on better ability to achieve Lockdown) The Lockdown state, as implied by it's name, results in Influence for the faction becoming locked, which could be used defensively to hold off an assault, or pin a retreating faction at 1%

Fixing negative states

• Overall revision of activities available to cause states, with a focus on increasing number of activities which cause negative effects e.g Handing in combat bonds could cause negative economic effects, trading "Legal Drugs" on the standard market could cause -ve security effects.
• New "Criminal" mission board, which groups missions by faction like current mission board, but offers (usually illegal) missions which target that faction with negative effects. The worse your rep with the target faction, the better missions you get offered.
• Introduce negative economic effects for over-saturated trading (e.g Void Opal rushes)
• Make the Pirate Attack state more broadly damaging to a faction's Economic/Security states if left unchecked. (Also; make the Pirate Attack state more visible, currently mininal observable effects such as missions/scenarios)
• Outbreak, famine, pirate attack should all be disruptive across a faction's space (not just in a specific system) until resolved. [4]

Hostile Rep Effects
- Hostile Rep to a faction affords benefits for causing further negative effects towards that faction

Links

Negative States

Spoiler

Does anyone know how to trigger a famine
A question about negative influence actions
How to trigger a lockdown
Outbreak blocks negative security and economy effects against a faction? (Possibly a bug)
Famine and Outbreak: Are they possible now?
Time to Buff Antagonistic PvE?
Famine systems
Trying to cause famine state
Famine
How does one cripple civil liberty and boom
Wake farming when no famine systems
Is there really no Anarchy Outbreak systems

Retreat

Spoiler

Invasion Discussion
Does anyone notice how crowded it's getting around here?
No retreat bug in invasion support ticket
Retreat BGS Guide Best Current Thinking
Yet another failed retreat
Retreat tried several times in vain

Hostile Rep / Notoriety

Spoiler

How to land on a hostile station
Hostile from fighting in CZs
Is notoriety useful for something?

Misc

Spoiler

Beyond Happiness
The action rebalance: How are we feeling?
Medicine worse than the disease?

 

[Marcus Machiavelli]

I like your retreat-lockdown idea as at the moment it is crazy hard work to retreat a faction in a busy system with high traffic

 

[DNA-Decay]

This is Mangal Oemie's chart I think you are looking for.
It's the one that clearly indicates the lack of negative states.

 

[Misaniovent]

No faction should ever be "pinned" at a set influence level outside of conflict, especially not in retreat (actually, I don't think they should even have locked influence during wars, but that's a whole separate thread). Assuming prior state pending and active durations for lockdowns hold, a mechanic like this could effectively guarantee retreats — guarantees are not, I think, desirable. Which is part of my problem with 3.3, where you are guaranteed to go pending with an asset-holding faction if you push up, or you're guaranteed to expand if you hit the trigger and have no other expansion pending, active, or in cooldown. No more of that, please!

Retreats are entirely possible but I agree that in high-traffic areas they are possibly a little bit too labor-intensive, considering that local traffic is probably not trying to stop the retreat but is instead reacting to the mission board. The best fix for this would be to change how missions with destinations set their destination targets.

Beyond that, I agree most of your ideas. Some of these states are incredibly rare, and some are beneficial or operationally borderline meaningless. Outbreak, famine, pirate attack should all be disruptive across a faction's space (not just in a specific system) until resolved.

Presumably, if we had a working happiness mechanic, they would be. But we don't. So they're not.

 

[teje3]

My main concern right now is the topics with the retreats.
The faction in retreat is strongly pushed to go out retreat, to make it more difficult.
It makes almost impossible then that a retreat occurs without player interaction. I think that this was not the intention of FDev.
Negative state and relaxing this push would help a lot to make movement in the bubble.

Another possibility would be to remove the "native" property of the player factions, with the possibility to make them disappear if nobody takes care.

About other negative effects, I agree with the first post.

 

[drty]

Retreats are entirely possible but I agree that in high-traffic areas they are possibly a little bit too labor-intensive, considering that local traffic is probably not trying to stop the retreat but is instead reacting to the mission board. The best fix for this would be to change how missions with destinations set their destination targets.

Retreats are almost impossible if retreating faction has no assets in the system. You have to spend entire day trying to catch their ships in this case.

 

[Jmanis]

Have updated most of the things in the Op. As suggestions come up, I'll add them in to the Op, with a link to the relevant post.

 

[Old Duck]

I said this elsewhere, but I think the destruction or pirating of cargo ships (either at nav beacons or pulled from the shipping lanes) should have a negative effect on the economy, eventually leading to famine. This mechanic reminds me of a castle siege of days past. I realize it lowers security, but you're also cutting off a system's supply chain. Since this state is tied to factions, make it based on the faction of the specific cargo ship(s) being targeted.

Such behavior should also trigger a Pirate Attack state (I always thought it did until recently), since players are literally the pirates. Speaking of pirates, I don't know if this is in game or not, but it makes sense to me that NPC cargo ships should actually be carrying items of high demand in that system. That way pirates have a better idea of what they are getting before they interdict a cargo ship. This could also lead to double negative-state gameplay, in that you could pirate a ship and then sell its goods on the black market, thus further driving down the economy.

 

[Misaniovent]

Retreats are almost impossible if retreating faction has no assets in the system. You have to spend entire day trying to catch their ships in this case.

This is a pretty solvable problem.

 

[drty]

This is a pretty solvable problem.

Please elaborate.

 

[Kissamies]

...Another possibility would be to remove the "native" property of the player factions, with the possibility to make them disappear if nobody takes care...

I think I understand why you'd want this, to tell active and possibly antagonistic PMFs apart from the "zombies", but I would argue that even the "dead" player minor factions are better local color than those [place] [adjective] [noun] procgen ones.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Make murder much more effective than its neutered state currently, but also make ATR random once you get to the top end. Once you get a power to lockdown, the fun really begins if you know where to look- its just getting there thats the difficulty.

 

[Misaniovent]

Please elaborate.

I agree that retreats are almost impossible if the retreating faction has no assets in the system. The solution is to transfer an asset to the target faction. Retreats require more work and more advanced planning — as it should be, in my opinion.