In-System Deliveries Working as Expected ?
- Thread starter Dommarraa
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There is a limit to how much influence a faction can gain solely through positive actions for it, which is lower as population increases and lower at higher starting influence.
There are diminishing returns in effectiveness of actions as you approach that limit.
Well, as I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong) on each day, a certain amount of influence is up for grabs, and this amount depends on the population of the system. Every day, each faction puts some of their influence in, then takes some amount of influence out. I've heard it described as a wine analogy, but I prefer to think of it as the ante in a poker game.
By default, barring any other actions in the system, every faction puts influence into the pot in proportion to their starting influence. At the end of the day, they take it out in proportion to their influence. If no actions take place in the system, then everyone takes out exactly what they put in and there is no net change.
Positive transactions such as trade, bounty hunting, missions, and so on, increase the proportion that the faction gets to take out of the pot.
So, for instance, let's say we've got a system where there's 10% up for grabs (just to make the maths easier). There's 7 factions present. The controlling faction at 55%, two factions in an election at 12% each, one at 10%, one at 7%, and one at 4%.
When the tick happens, the controlling faction puts in 5.5%. The two in election don't participate as they're inf-locked, and the remaining factions put in 1%, 0.7%, and 0.4%.
Because 24% of the influence in the system is tied up in a conflict and they already control most of the remainder, the controlling faction could at best hope to gain 2.4% if they managed to take all of the influence on the table. On the other hand, the little faction at the bottom stands to make some pretty impressive gains, maybe even enough to overtake the faction above them, and most of their gains will come out of the controller. They're also safe from being pushed into a retreat by purely positive actions for the other factions - the lowest they can drop to is 3.6%. (this is part of the reason why retreats were so difficult to accomplish before the retreat tax was implemented - a single tick by someone doing a modest amount of work for them could easily boost them past 2.5%, while a faction at such a low level of influence was difficult to push down further by simply working for other people!)
"But Scree", I hear you cry, "I've seen factions drop into retreat from low influence! What about murder?"
That's where negative actions come in. Negative actions, such as missions being carried out against a faction, or someone doing a ton of murders in their jurisdiction, can cause a faction to lose influence faster. I'm not entirely sure of the mechanism, but as I understand it, rather than causing a faction to lose influence directly (they used to, and it was uncapped, leading to some crazy incidents like SDC tanking Mobius's PMF down to 1% from a controlling position in a single day - this wild imbalance is what lead to ATR being implemented in an attempt to stop people doing it) negative actions instead appear to cause a faction to contribute a larger amount of their influence to the initial pot.
So let's take the system from earlier and assume that someone committed frankly unholy amounts of violence upon the weakest faction, causing them to contribute 3% of their influence to the pool instead of the measly 0.4 from before. The controlling faction puts in 5.3%, the other two put in 0.9% and 0.65%.
Assuming positive work is carried out in the system to claim all that influence, the competing factions could snap up all the smallest faction's influence and leave them on 1%, easily triggering a retreat if they're not a native faction! On the other hand, though, if no work is carried out other than the ton-o-murders, then the pool is just given back proportionally. There's a few details I'm still not entirely clear on, such as whether the extra contributions from negative actions are split up proportionally to the initial influence or just returned to the original owner. I think it's the former to some degree at least.
Of course, this doesn't even begin to go into the softcaps for different actions, the effect of states on the effectiveness of certain actions, diminishing returns (per player and overall) and the effect of certain states like retreat and blight causing hard influence shifts per day regardless of actions, and so on and so forth, and I have no idea how it calculates where the rest of the influence ends up when a war causes two factions to get locked together. It's a whole massive black box.
short version: it becomes harder to make gains the more influence you have, and harder for positive actions for everyone else to make you losses the less influence you have, eventually it becomes easier to drop a faction's influence by attacking them directly than it is by pushing everyone else up, also BGS is really really complicated by intentional design precisely because they don't want people strategizing exactly what actions to take.
even shorter version: do good things for people you like, do bad things to people you don't like. Really. Don't overthink it.
By default, barring any other actions in the system, every faction puts influence into the pot in proportion to their starting influence. At the end of the day, they take it out in proportion to their influence. If no actions take place in the system, then everyone takes out exactly what they put in and there is no net change.
Positive transactions such as trade, bounty hunting, missions, and so on, increase the proportion that the faction gets to take out of the pot.
So, for instance, let's say we've got a system where there's 10% up for grabs (just to make the maths easier). There's 7 factions present. The controlling faction at 55%, two factions in an election at 12% each, one at 10%, one at 7%, and one at 4%.
When the tick happens, the controlling faction puts in 5.5%. The two in election don't participate as they're inf-locked, and the remaining factions put in 1%, 0.7%, and 0.4%.
Because 24% of the influence in the system is tied up in a conflict and they already control most of the remainder, the controlling faction could at best hope to gain 2.4% if they managed to take all of the influence on the table. On the other hand, the little faction at the bottom stands to make some pretty impressive gains, maybe even enough to overtake the faction above them, and most of their gains will come out of the controller. They're also safe from being pushed into a retreat by purely positive actions for the other factions - the lowest they can drop to is 3.6%. (this is part of the reason why retreats were so difficult to accomplish before the retreat tax was implemented - a single tick by someone doing a modest amount of work for them could easily boost them past 2.5%, while a faction at such a low level of influence was difficult to push down further by simply working for other people!)
"But Scree", I hear you cry, "I've seen factions drop into retreat from low influence! What about murder?"
That's where negative actions come in. Negative actions, such as missions being carried out against a faction, or someone doing a ton of murders in their jurisdiction, can cause a faction to lose influence faster. I'm not entirely sure of the mechanism, but as I understand it, rather than causing a faction to lose influence directly (they used to, and it was uncapped, leading to some crazy incidents like SDC tanking Mobius's PMF down to 1% from a controlling position in a single day - this wild imbalance is what lead to ATR being implemented in an attempt to stop people doing it) negative actions instead appear to cause a faction to contribute a larger amount of their influence to the initial pot.
So let's take the system from earlier and assume that someone committed frankly unholy amounts of violence upon the weakest faction, causing them to contribute 3% of their influence to the pool instead of the measly 0.4 from before. The controlling faction puts in 5.3%, the other two put in 0.9% and 0.65%.
Assuming positive work is carried out in the system to claim all that influence, the competing factions could snap up all the smallest faction's influence and leave them on 1%, easily triggering a retreat if they're not a native faction! On the other hand, though, if no work is carried out other than the ton-o-murders, then the pool is just given back proportionally. There's a few details I'm still not entirely clear on, such as whether the extra contributions from negative actions are split up proportionally to the initial influence or just returned to the original owner. I think it's the former to some degree at least.
Of course, this doesn't even begin to go into the softcaps for different actions, the effect of states on the effectiveness of certain actions, diminishing returns (per player and overall) and the effect of certain states like retreat and blight causing hard influence shifts per day regardless of actions, and so on and so forth, and I have no idea how it calculates where the rest of the influence ends up when a war causes two factions to get locked together. It's a whole massive black box.
short version: it becomes harder to make gains the more influence you have, and harder for positive actions for everyone else to make you losses the less influence you have, eventually it becomes easier to drop a faction's influence by attacking them directly than it is by pushing everyone else up, also BGS is really really complicated by intentional design precisely because they don't want people strategizing exactly what actions to take.
even shorter version: do good things for people you like, do bad things to people you don't like. Really. Don't overthink it.
TL;DR the amount of influence that can be gain is based on system population and current influence level.
Ian Phillips
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Closed at OP's request.
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