On the surface you'd think it's "pick random commodity that i have in demand, create a random mission", it's actually not what happens, and there's heaps of examples... it's where the BGS has been almost over-engineered to the point of creating. It fundamentally comes down to creating achievable and fun activities, not random games of chance.
So the simple, fast way would be: Pick a random in-demand commodity and build a mission for a random amount of that commodity. The problem is you could be asking for items that are:
- Not market available;
- Not available within range the trade data in-game makes available (i.e not Inara); or
- Require you to do an activity that isn't simple sourcing of goods (maybe it relies on a rare USS)
Some of these are more of an issue for new players, but it's that new-player experience that is also most crucial to retain new players (in order to sell ARX)... whereas salty olds will just go "Well that's just how the game works".
So instead, what I understand the BGS to do is instead go:
- What do i have in demand
- What systems are in range of my current location^
- What stations are available in each of those systems^
- What commodities are in supply for those stations^; and
- Apply stateful and government-specific flavours and typing
- What is the intersect between those supply commodities and my demand commodities; then
- Pick a commodity
The ^'s indicate what could be a multiple-entity search across data holdings. And that blows out fast. To factor in Odyssey settlements[2], the usual case for a reasonably populated bubble looks like:
- 50 populated systems within 20Ly,
- each with 10-30 ports
- each with, what, 60 odd commodities
So that's up to 90,000 commodity statuses reviewed
just to generate one mission... if you throw in the fact there's 100 missions per board generation... the worst-case scenario here is you have to pull back and work through up to 9 million commodity records, just to generate a single mission board's "Source" missions.
That's actually a lot of work. And that's
just source missions.... every other mission type will likely have a similar generation process.
So... it's doesn't work like that per-se. I always wondered why the mission board was blobby... when there's 40 different anarchy factions in range which could be targeted by a massacre mission, why is a typical board generation always 4-5 missions each, targeting just 2-3 of those potential 40 factions, or same-same for delivery missions, to a particular station... the odds of that are very slim.
The simple answer is because, as above,
it's a lot of effort to get the info to generate this stuff. So rather than repeat that query for N number of missions to generate... generate a random number of missions, modified for stateful effects. It's
very likely that if I have demand for, say, Gold, that because 30 odd systems will supply gold... I have good chances of randomly serving that up again, so just use the same result set to generate more missions. This is
less noticable with source missions, and
more noticable with end-target missions... assassinations, massacres and deliveries, which will target the same faction or system statistically more than other systems... and yet you'll rarely get the odd mission here or there with a very different target; that's where it's run more than once, in order to get some variation, but not once for every mission you generate.
tl;dr it's all for efficiency of the BGS, so that you can get reasonable missions generated that are actually achievable.
So... the consequence of further than 20Ly, is suddenly all these factors are zeroed out. Sure, there are missions that aren't affected by this, such as Mining, Long-range Tourism and Charity... but are FD
really going to punch out colonisation with more than 20Ly and just leave it as "These will always be mining, tourism or pure charity cases" regardless of the factors of the system, planets, etc.? That it doesn't matter if an ELW is in the system or not, because you're just too far out?
I'd be
very confident that's not what people want from long-range colonisation. People who want this clearly care about the various factors of a remote system and picking a specific spot... to just flick that switch though and say "Here you go, a colony on it's own within a 5,000 Ly radius, but it's no different from any other at range because those factors don't matter thanks to how the BGS works" I suspect is going to
considerably cheapen the experience for people who put effort into siting a colony.
There's a place people might say "well, colonies should have different rules", but that's a bad path... since you've now got two different logic sets needed for the BGS. That's already the case with many alternate mission generations such as in-flight missions, chain missions etc.. which all use different logic, and often get overlooked for general bugfixes. Two sets of logic would be a bad way to go.
The better path would be to re-engineer the BGS and it's mechanics... but do FD really want to chew that off for colonisation as well? Seems like a dangerous gambit to hit them both... even though it would make sense... the BGS is almost a rube-goldberg machine at this point, in that it's mechanations don't really create a hugely dynamic world... rather... just a very static one.
