Straight off the bat though for
@Daniel Cloudsifter
Assassinations & Pirate Massacres: Will be offered by any lawful faction where there is an anarchy faction 10Ly away. If you want to stack them or minimise the amount of systems you need to visit, try to ensure there's only one anarchy faction within 10Ly, then all missions will target them.
Note: States will change the flavour of these missions, and War/Civil War will generally favour missions for CZ targets, but all states have an analogue of this which still follows the same rules as normal pirate missions... e.g in Outbreak, a "Biohazard Target" mission is synonymous with an "Assassinate Known Pirate" mission... likewise "Assassinate Deserter" during wartime.
Avoid expansion states though. All assassination missions
except wing missions then become "Expansion support by killing known terrorist" which have you needing to scan a beacon at a surface installation (if a suitable one exists within 10Ly) and then flying off to a random system within (10 or 20, I'm not sure) Ly of that system; they're a pain.
Wetwork and Spec Ops: Honestly, not sure about the rules for these except that a lawful faction needs to be within 10Ly. It's hard to stack these because you don't get the targets in advance, and unlike pirate massacres, there's almost always at least five or six lawful factions nearby, so you simply can't stack them well. Authoritarians
may favour these, unsure though.
There's a
massive amount of variance in missions and how they spawn, but ultimately, they all spawn in any state, for any government, with different flavours. Without going through an exhaustive post of my knowledge about states and missions though, here's some extra things I know.
Hijacking missions: There seems to be a strange location-specific aspect to these which I don't understand completely. My usual faction rarely gives these out, except in
one particular system, which is indiscernable from any other system in the region. It's odd. However,
Election will spawn a lot of these, usually to hijack diplomatic bags/political prisoners.
Government Effects: By and large, government doesn't have a massive impact
except for "collective" type governments within the four main "flavours" of Corporate, Authoritarian and Social. Anecdotally, Confederate and Cooperative have flavoured delivery missions, and seem to spawn these more than other government types, e.g:
There may be other similar effects like Communism and Assassinations (which have special flavour too) but I've not looked into them.
Source and Delivery: Delivery missions will spawn in any station where export goods in that station are an import in another station (usually within 20Ly). Likewise Source missions will spawn for any import goods that are an export from a system within (X? 40?) Ly. There
may be specific templates for goods which only occur in certain regions of space, but I've not been able to discern that.
Note: Some states such as Famine/Outbreak will override normal behaviours by favouring source food/medicine missions as relevant, but standard missions can still occur (just far less likely). Boom state seems to increase the amount of trade related missions as well
Note 2: If you're in, say, an Agricultural system, and a nearby system is in Famine, you'll get more missions to deliver food to that system than usual. Not as many missions as you'd get source missions directly from that system, but the boards have awareness of what's going on in nearby systems.
Space Salvage: There's the Legal and Illegal variants... but what determines the difference here is unknown. I might be back to front, but I think there's a 10-20Ly range for legal salvage, and <10Ly range for illegal... but what controls what you get I'm unsure.... only that you'll generally only get one type. Generally... it doesn't mean you won't. Mission boards are blobby.
Installation Scans/Powerplant Destruction: These obviously need a relevant installtion within 20Ly... but interestingly, not all installations are part of the pool. In one example, I know of a system where there's only one valid system for these sorts of missions (and you can get a lot... easily stack 20 missions with one board generation) but multiple suitable target installations... the missions will only ever target one of those facilities, not the others. It's very weird.
Mining: Missions will be for items that are imports; so counterintuitively, you don't go to Extraction economies for mining missions; Industrial and Agricultural are your best bet, and sometimes Refinery (it depends)... In a None state, mining missions will be for mining-only commodities (e.g Osmium)
or market purchasable (e.g Gold).... but in Boom or Investment, they will exclusively be for mining-only commodities, unless they are wing missions.
That's a non-exhaustive dump of some knowledge. I have other observations, but they're even more tenuous... just when you think you've got the mission board worked out, it behaves in a completely different way, so if I listed them, someone would (rightly) have a counter-example. Robigo tourist missions are a great example of this.... if you go anywhere else in the bubble you can start to get a ruleset for how tourism missions work. If you look at robigo, there's more tourist destinations than Sothis Mines which are in-range... yet you only ever get tourist missions to Sothis mines. It's weird.
