Newcomer / Intro How to find dual-aligned stations?

sinisalo

sinisalo
I recently returned from a two week trip to Colonia to my home station of Fowler Orbital in Dvorsi. Deep in the heart of the Empire, you know it.

I've been based here for two years. It was always in boom, high-tech, industrial and always served up a good selection of the sorts of missions I want to run, namely boom-time deliveries and VIP, bulk and sightseeing transport missions. It also has 37 landables for all the raws I need. After coming back from Colonia I found things have changed. The controlling faction flipped to independent, which is fine, and a state of war exists, and only that controlling faction is now in boom.

So the mission boards are filled with lots of war-related mission types and I need a new home. I know how to filter by all of the citeria I use for a home. This time though I would like to find a station that is dual-aligned, where the factions there are aligned to both the Federation and the Empire. Searching EDDB can tell me the controlling alignment, but I'd need to check each one to see the factions. Is there anyway to do this? Does anyone know of a good dual station in boom?
 

sinisalo

sinisalo
Well, I don't think there is a way to filter or search by minor faction allegiance, so I just did it the old fashioned way, using EDDB and checking out the filtered results one by one. I found a number of suitable stations. The key really is not only dual-aligned, but to have as many of the factions not be independent. So that any missions I run will gain one superpower rep or the other.

I filtered by distance from Dvorsi, with Empire control allegience, and boom state. I ran searches for both Ocellus and Orbis stations and included mat trader. Very few Orbis stations in the results but plenty of Ocellus. Just a personal preference as I don't like Coriolis stations. I looked for stations with short arrival times in systems with names that are easy to type, with landables and rings for bounty hunting. I also checked the states of the minor factions to be sure they were all happy and not at war.

I'll check out a few of the candidates. The one that looks most promising is Barnwell Station in UGP 145, pop 16 mil, industrial refinery. It's about 66 light years 'up' from my current home, and closer to Shinrarta and more engineers. So it's in a good location if it proves suitable. The worst thing is starting from scratch with faction rep, but hopefully I've done some work for the factions there in the past.
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
sinisalo said:
I would like to find a station that is dual-aligned, where the factions there are aligned to both the Federation and the Empire. Searching EDDB can tell me the controlling alignment, but I'd need to check each one to see the factions. Is there anyway to do this?
Click to expand...
sinisalo said:
Well, I don't think there is a way to filter or search by minor faction allegiance, so I just did it the old fashioned way, using EDDB and checking out the filtered results one by one...
Click to expand...

As you surmised, there is no easy way to attain this specific information in-game, and I'm not aware of any third-party tools that can do a quick search using such guidelines. It's really only the sort of thin you pick up from experience, by flying about the bubble a lot.

Finding a station with few or no Indie factions present is difficult, for two reasons:
  • Most of the "opposition" factions originally added to the game in Superpower-aligned systems are Indies; the default pattern is one or two Superpower-aligned factions, and several Indie factions. Virtually every system therefore has at least one, usually more than one, Indie native faction.
  • Since the advent of PMFs, the Indies have proliferated. More than half of the new player-made factions are Indie-aligned, and most of the largest, most expansionary factions are Indie-aligned. So if anyone is going to be invading your star system, chances are they're Indie.

In short, a star system that managed to not acquire any Indie factions via the BGS procedural generator, and also managed to not be invaded by an Indie PMF, is a rare star system indeed. However, there are some exceptions.

The star systems recently founded in the Witch Head Nebula region were all colonized byt he superpowers; it's virtually an Indie-Free Zone. Sadly for an Empire backer such as yourself, the Imperial factions are not doing well there. And of course it's infested with Alliance factions who have largely taken over the place; I assume the Alliance holds no interest for you as they have no ranks nor locked ships.

The systems immediately surrounding Achenar are usually good for being Empire-exclusive zones. Cemiess is my personal go-to system for Imp ranking; the Cemiess-Vequess run is usually quite lucrative. It's been a long time since I've been down there so I'm not sure what it's like these days, but Inara shows Cemiess still with a full deck of six Imp factions and just one Indie, the local anarchy. Achenar itself is within easy range of Cemiess, though with the huge travel distance out to Capitol and the fact that the game never gives you missions into a permit-locked system any more, the pure blueness of Achenar is somewhat wasted.

Another good system you might want to try is my lore-homeworld of Arexack. Four Imp factions, one Fed faction, and three Indie factions, those aren't too bad odds.
 

sinisalo

sinisalo
Thanks Dave, that's just the sort. Any "O" stations there? The one I settled in, UGP 145, is Imperial controlling faction, four Fed factions and two independents. But I'm still interested in knowing of more qualifying stations.

Sapyx, great post man, and bang on what I am talking about. One of the things I wanted to test is whether a system with dual-alignment will generate both types of HGEs. Do you know the answer? All of the ones I found so far have been tied to the Imperial controlling faction. Do some HGEs spawn from minor factions? If so it will give more variety to the HGE goods available in system.

The station I am in, Barnwell Station, is popping good missions and I've gotten faction rep up about halfway across the board. Plenty of boom time deliveries and assassinations, and a great selection of passenger missions since there are a few neighboring systems with long arrival times to the station, meaning higher pay and stackable options.
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
Chnumandr has lots of both sides, but the population is smalllll. Ok, tiny.

Teleut is bigger, though it has non-aligned factions

Tiangchi is about the biggest, unless you really only care about 1 faction for either side, then maybe Ra?

How to work it out? Build your own copy of either the eddb / edsm data in a database and write a sql query :)
 

sinisalo

sinisalo
The minor factions do spawn HGEs. But so, far in about 24 found there, they have all been tied to the Imperial controlling faction, or to the two independent factions. I've seen none so far for the four Fed factions. So maybe because it's an 'Imperial' system, despite the dual-alignment, it's looking like no Fed HGEs spawn.

The independent ones give the standard Imperial Shielding since the system is Empire. But that's a small sample so I'll keep looking.

Soon after arriving in UGP 145 war broke out like it's following me around. To be fair I had noticed war as a pending state for two minor factions when I was running the searches, I just didn't know how impending it was.
 
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