Minor Faction Expantion

[squibert]

Greetings fellow commanders,

A minor faction that I have been working with for several months now has finally made it to expansion state. I am now trying to find out where this faction is expanding in order to try and help the cause. However when I go to the system that all the missions I have been doing sent me to, I don't see anything stating that the said faction is trying to expand into that system. Maybe I don't understand how the system works. I am hoping that someone could explain to me what needs to happen in order for a minor faction to expand into the sounding systems.

Also, sense the faction I am working with is in "Expansion State" is there a way to find out which system they are expanding into, if they are indeed doing this,?

 

[FrogsFriend]

It could be any populated system within (I think) 15 or so LY. You'll need to scout about in the Galaxy/System maps to find them.

Next step... support them through missions in their new system and try to increase their percentage enough to start a civil war and take over a station. Good luck

 

[squibert]

Thank for the response FrogsFriend. I took your advice and started looking through the Galaxy map to see if I could locate where they expanded to. I finly found them about 10LY away. I was expecting them to try and expand into the system they kept sending me to with previous missions, so I was surprised when I didn't find them there.

Now back to doing some more missions.

 

[Johnny Cyclops]

Thank for the response FrogsFriend. I took your advice and started looking through the Galaxy map to see if I could locate where they expanded to. I finly found them about 10LY away. I was expecting them to try and expand into the system they kept sending me to with previous missions, so I was surprised when I didn't find them there.

Now back to doing some more missions.

squibert - there's a lack of logic to how it's done. I typically see a leading minor faction focus most of its missions to a single close-by system (e.g. courier runs, bounty hunting, cargo runs), so one might expect all this is to "soften them up" ripe for expansion. But ED isn't that logical.

Recently "my" minor faction had a second expansion and I located the new system. However, this was at a point in early June when there was a problem with rate of change in influence which the Devs did a rollback by about six days. This removed the expansion system, although a few days later the minor faction re-expanded again BUT this time it went to a different nearby system. I take from this that the system being expanded into is pretty random.

As FrogsFriend say, now you've found the expanded system, you can do missions there to boost your minor faction. An invading faction will cause a War (not a Civil War) but they are seemingly the same in game play. Or, as with my minor faction which is a democracy, it forces an Election not a War. To trigger a State I believe (vague recollection of reading a post about it!) that the two influence percentages need to pass each other. E.g. if your faction starts at 5% and the next nearest is 25%, if you can boost yours to 25% (or get them both to be 15%, or any other percentage) then that triggers a "State" (War, Civil War, Election, etc) and at that point the successful outcome will be the minor faction that gets at least 5% ahead of its rival (i.e. if you both start at 25%, then your faction needs to rise to 30% vs 25%, or 25% vs 20%, or any other combination). In Wars/Civil Wars, what seems to move influence is taking combat missions from the Bulletin Board. Actually flying to a 'combat zone' and picking a side and taking out the enemy seems to achieve little or nothing.

If your minor faction takes on the controlling faction, then the winner (war or election) gets control of the entire system. The winner of any war/election gets control of one of its opponent's stations/outposts (the most valuable one I believe, but only gets ONE of them not all of them). There's a cool down after a war/civil war of 3 days and after an election of 5 days (so I've read here).

The bind here is that it's very hard for a minor faction to grab more than one station, and if you propel its influence above 50% (and certainly 60%+) there's zero chance of another minor faction pulling level on influence percentage to trigger another state change. This potentially leads to the perverse situation of deliberately harming your minor faction to lower its influence (or boosting the other minor factions) to trigger another war/election, and then hit reverse and boost the influence of your chosen minor faction. To my mind, once a minor faction gets a substantial influence lead and system control there should be a chance per day to trigger a state change to consolidate in the system and attempt to take control of a further station.