Newcomer / Intro How much impact do players have in the galaxy?

[AzureSun]

Hi everyone,

I am new to the game and wondered if player actions impact the galaxy as a whole. Do new bases open up or do new systems become colonized if you repeatedly do missions for certain factions? Can you sponsor a base or faction fleet by investing into it? For example, if you ran enough missions at a small outpost would it eventually turn into a large base with more amenities? If you ran supplies for a pirate faction would they start having NPC pilots with greater skill and better ships making trading lanes more dangerous? Could you do the opposite and reinforce a system's defense force by doing more than just shooting down pirates? With the size of the game it seems like every player could have their own solar system to develop and not crowd anyone else.

 

[Chris Simon]

The answer to most of your questions is "Kind of"

I'd recommend you to read an overview or guide on how the background simulation works (Like this one, but there are other ones going into more detail)

Players can influence quite a lot in a system, but it's almost always indirect. You can definitely help your faction of choice to grow in influence, take over stations, even expand to other nearby systems.
But there are caveats. The system population, for example. If the system is too large, a single person will have a hard time influencing anything, only a synchronized effort of a group of people can.
etc...

 

[AzureSun]

That guide was really good, thanks. I guess I'll have to find a small system with a population of 20K or less and see if I can bring about a noticable difference.

 

[Dommarraa]

That guide was really good, thanks. I guess I'll have to find a small system with a population of 20K or less and see if I can bring about a noticable difference.

Traffic (number of other CMDR visits) is more important than size. Even a 10m+ system can be controlled by a single player really easilly (just a little slower), but high population systems tend to also have a high traffic, so the original advice is correct, but for the wrong reason
Look at the traffic report in station services, if there are more than about 20 ships visiting the system, it can be hard work to go against the controlling faction You would not neccessarily be knowingly fighting against anyone, more like swimming against the current.

 

[AzureSun]

I found a system with a population of 14K and it ended up having a lot of well paid missions between the two stations within the system as well as the neighboring systems. The population is now 44K after a day and I wonder if it had anything to do with bringing food, medicine, and clothing to the two refineries that were offering large payouts for those cargo types. I even saw a patrol ship sticking around one of the bases that was not around the day before. However, the nav beacon is still compromised. It is patrolled by a pack of six pirates ranked elite and dangerous.

 

[the100thmonkey]

I found a system with a population of 14K and it ended up having a lot of well paid missions between the two stations within the system as well as the neighboring systems. The population is now 44K after a day

I suspect you misread the population size - it doesn't change.

 

[Sapyx]

No, population never changes. Well, by "never" we mean "it stays the same until every time they make an Update, then they might run the population though an incrementer", so the population might change when they do the Fleet Carriers update in June. It won't change until then. Either the "14k" or the "44k" was a mis-read.

You can change which faction is in charge and how much "influence" each faction has in the system. You can also be the cause or cure of special states like Lockdown, Outbreak etc. But most of the more complex things you mention in the OP - founding new colonies, expanding base size or adding facilities, selling guns to the pirates to make them deadlier... these things are all impossible.

There are 400 billion star systems in the galaxy, but most of them are uninhabited and there is no way to automate the colonization process; every newly colonized star system has to be hand-created by the Devs, which is a laborious process. There are, currently, only 20625 inhabited star systems, and there are a lot more than 20625 players in the game; most parts of the inhabited bubble are kind of crowded now. I've been tracking the numbers; since the start of the year, only 11 new star systems were colonized.