Has the main list been updated, I'm still having trouble finding famine systems and I'm curious if there would be ways to help push it along, like buying out all the food and water from a war time system. Any ideas? or is BGS just borked?
Not broken, just totally imbalanced. Famine State is now the far-negative state of the economy slider and is achievable, but you've got better luck punching God in the face.
tl;dr BGS is functioning just fine, only it is incredibly easy to target positive economic effects to any given faction, and nigh on impossible to target (non-anarchy) factions with enough negative economic effects to outweigh positive effects from other commanders, or the natural decay back to a None state.
Known ways to increase economic strength:
- Running relevant missions which provide +ve economy effects
- Selling goods for profit at a station controlled by the faction you want to give +ve economy to
Known ways to decrease economic strength:
- Run relevant missions which provide -ve economy effects
Suspected ways to decrease economic strength (may need testing, could be broken):
- Trading for a loss at a station controlled by the faction you want to give -ve economy to
- Selling at a black market owned by a non-anarchy faction.
Missions
Both positive effects are easily targetable to the faction you want to support, and the vast majority of missions will give +ve economic effects to the mission provider.
Missions which provide -ve economy effects against non-anarchy, offered by non-anarchy, factions are very rare. They're more commonly offered by Anarchy, but you need to prostrate yourself before the altar of the RNG and hope for missions which target the specific faction you want to put into anarchy. Based on how mission targets are picked, this could be a <1% chance to get the specific faction you're targeting.
If you want to target a particular faction, in a particular system for Famine, be prepared to board-flip
a lot to get a full roster of missions targeting that faction in that system with -ve effects. You literally could be there all day.
Trading
Meanwhile, based on how +ve economic effects work for market trading, you can presume any negative effect needs a trade with >1,000cr loss on a single unit per visit to that station. Finding items which sell for a loss isn't difficult... finding many things that sell for a loss without tanking your own bank account is very difficult. Additionally, there's no proof this even works at the moment.
Black Markets
You're SOL if your target faction shuts down black markets (e.g Dictatorships), so this is situational, and also Anarchies are unaffected. Last report I heard as well was that this was broken, and non-anarchy factions actually experienced economic benefits from BM sales in their stations.
So, if imbalanced gameplay is your idea of broken, yes, the BGS is broken, but realistically everything's working just fine, it's just a total absence of activities to target and cause negative effects which form part of standard gameplay, compared to the abundance of positive effects available and undertaken as a matter of course for standard gameplay.