Please....for the love of David Braben..... Get rid of the +5%/-35% undermining and reinforcement!!! The fact that one person can now undermine a group of commanders is really really dumb.
Power Play reinforcement nerf
- Thread starter Lordsetesh1985
- Start date
That's only affecting personal merits tho... not the CPs generated for the system.
I'd get rid of the current way of DISPLAYING MERITS instead, as a UI/message showing both (personal merits and CPs) should be used, instead of these redundant percentages and the need of dividing by 4/6/etc the personal merits obtained by the various activities.
The current ratio of reinforcement to undermining is about 8:1 at time of writing, so while it might be possible for one (very active) person to undermine a (less active) group, no-one (to within margin of error) is actually doing that. Powers suffering even marginal local defeats in their quest to put Strongholds everywhere is newsworthy, not routine. Every week sees the total system set get stronger by 40-50 million net control points.
Your own ALD has consistently gained total systems every single week of Powerplay except one (where they still successfully reinforced 11 systems to stronger states, but lost one more exploited system than they acquired) and is currently over 300 systems up on their starting position, with the third largest gain in total systems, the largest gain in total Strongholds, and the largest gain in total Fortified+Stronghold systems. You do not need to worry about undermining.
Ultimately Frontier needs to decide:
- is Powerplay a game where Powers peacefully and separately build up their own territories, with Trailblazers ensuring they'll never run out of space to do that? If so, Undermining doesn't need nerfing, it needs to go entirely as a distraction from the real gameplay.
- is Powerplay a game where Powers compete for territory and it's as common for Powers to lose systems over the course of a week as it is to gain them? If so, Undermining needs to be about eight to ten times as effective as it currently is (which doesn't mean just giving a 10x boost to the effect of existing undermining actions - there are bigger issues) so that the overall strength of the Powerplay map stays roughly constant from week to week.
(Their stated aim is the second one, though to be clear I won't judge them if they give up and just do the first one instead, because that would be way easier)
FD needs to provide sharper knives- if murder of non-aligned NPCs (which is already triple punished) was upped from its current pathetic state to x10 times merit / CP wise you'd have a perfect balanced mechanic.