Question about Thargoid restore settlement power-up Missions

[Cmdr Venport]

Does anyone know how many times a settlement has to be powered-up for it to register as being back on-line or do we just keep powering up the same settlements until they are back on-line to know?

I know there's been a bug where people are picking up power-on settlement missions and they are already on-line but do we know how many times it needs powering up to remain "powered"?

This is important since powering-up all the settlements in a recovery system can reduce the system recovery by a week, player groups working on recovery I assume would welcome knowing how many times it takes to recover power in a settlement when planning their recovery efforts.

Or am I missing something about this game loop?

 

[OmegaPaladin]

This is definitely odd. Missions will generate for restoring power at a settlement even if that settlement is completely active. I can't imagine you only need to run one restoration mission per settlement - otherwise the game mechanic would be irrelevant. It's like having a community goal with an extremely low cap.

 

[Cmdr Venport]

This is definitely odd. Missions will generate for restoring power at a settlement even if that settlement is completely active. I can't imagine you only need to run one restoration mission per settlement - otherwise the game mechanic would be irrelevant. It's like having a community goal with an extremely low cap.

Agreed hence my question - It's most definitely more than one, sometimes the mission board will generate 10+ missions to power-on the same settlement, but how many actually is it?

The missions just continue to spawn regardless of if the settlement is back on-line or not, it's as if FDev cut & pasted the existing settlement re-start missions into the Thargoid narrative and forgot to update the relevant spawn mechanics to a "Magic" trigger number to indicate that players had re-started the settlement the required number of times, hence the number of posts on the already restored topic.

There needs to be an indicator of some description, maybe like the one for systems with a task completion bar, but it's needed for each settlement to know the progress that settlement has achieved to powered status, then the community would be able to see which settlements to focus their attention on to reduce the recovery by the stipulated week, otherwise without any indication of which settlements are powered and each settlements progress you could easily miss one by a single power-up and thus not hit the target. Without a target power-up indicator we are just working blind, the only indicator we have at present is people reporting in the forums that they can't restart a settlement because its already on-line....

An ideal solution would be to put an indicator bar over the settlement in the system map or next to the settlement name in the system list - this would be an ideal way to stop the missions spawning when the settlement is back on-line.

Whoever @ FDev came up with the idea to copy the power-up missions into the Thargoid war recovery systems (as the only Odyssey content we got) really done a half A**''d job of it....

 

[DaggaRoosta]

I agree that this is confusing and immersion-breaking, but FWIW it's in line with how these settlement restoration systems have always worked. Settlements shut down due to the economic state of the settlement owner; once down, they're never actually restored until the system faction gets out of that negative state. While settlements are down the Restore/Reactivate/Salvage/Massacre Scavenger missions will continually spawn but their only effect on the actual occupied status of the settlement is if the outcome helps move the faction into a different, non-negative state.

Hence people have learned to farm these missions by activating power, cleaning out the settlement, taking back the regulator before completing the mission, jumping to supercruise and returning back to the same site. When you do this the mission will still be active and the settlement will be restored to its original state, including restocked data ports/containers (and building fires, and a random chance of scavengers).

I agree that they should handle this differently but it's not entirely clear to me what that difference should be. If the devs made one successful restore mission turn the facility back on for everyone permanently, hardly anyone would ever see the restore missions. Requiring the whole community to run it a hundred times (or whatever) is doable but gamey and janky. Restoring the site operations only for the player who turned it on makes sense in solo, but not in open.

 

[Cmdr Venport]

but FWIW it's in line with how these settlement restoration systems have always worked. Settlements shut down due to the economic state of the settlement owner; once down, they're never actually restored until the system faction gets out of that negative state. While settlements are down the Restore/Reactivate/Salvage/Massacre Scavenger missions will continually spawn but their only effect on the actual occupied status of the settlement is if the outcome helps move the faction into a different, non-negative state.

Hence people have learned to farm these missions by activating power, cleaning out the settlement,

Yeah they sort of worked (although a bit janky) when tied to faction state, yes it meant you could pick up the same settlement restore mission many times while the faction state remained but there was a clear on/off switch for the missions to spawn, yes it meant there was a way to exploit the mechanic (Cmdr's are innovative and very creative when it comes to grind avoidance) but hey that's not the players fault

The problem with the cut/paste method used here to transpose these missions into the Thargoid context and tie it to reducing the recovery time WITHOUT having any clear (or any simple means) of knowing which settlements have been recovered however many times its required per settlement means its a total lottery if the players reduce the recovery time. You could easily power-up every settlement except one and miss the deadline.

The only way to tell is a lot of digging into the system map to fathom if a settlement is already restored (mentioned by players as a work-around for the missions still spawning when a settlement is restored). The fact that the missions continue to spawn when a settlement is on-line coupled with the shear number of settlements in some systems it would take a very dedicated commander or player group to tell where to focus effort, especially if you need to find one mission out of the shear number of repeat missions for each settlement (even though they would all be powered-up except the elusive one that's missing) plus without any indication of number of restores needed to power-up a settlement to restore it (or progress bar) you don't know how much time its going to take to complete.

There needs to be a clear means of indicating progression to completed power-up for each settlement AND the mission boards not spawning already active settlements for this to work properly

As it stands it fails badly as indicated by the number of posts on the forum about settlements being back on-line.

 

[photomankc]

LOL.... wait. So it has to be every settlement in the system powered up X number of times to get the perk?

Wait. Let me laugh harder.

 

[Cmdr Venport]

LOL.... wait. So it has to be every settlement in the system powered up X number of times to get the perk?

Wait. Let me laugh harder.

I have not seen any definitive answer to that question from FDev (hence my original question about the mechanics of the missions) but it is a logical assumption (how can a system be restored without all the settlements being on-line?) - does anyone have an any actual clarifications on this from FDev along with the elephant in the room question about number of times a settlement needs to be restored to become "restored"? - It's clearly more than one...

Not only is it a broken game-loop (missions spawning for active settlements) it also lacks answers to the fundamental questions outlined - or have I missed something as I originally asked?

 

[Thandco]

what is really anoyi is i check in system to make sure staions are powered down first then i get the mission and they are instantly Powered up (

 

[Cmdr Venport]

what is really anoyi is i check in system to make sure staions are powered down first then i get the mission and they are instantly Powered up (

This is a good example of why we need a progress bar.....

 

[Landorin]

LOL.... wait. So it has to be every settlement in the system powered up X number of times to get the perk?

Wait. Let me laugh harder.

I also wondered how it works since patch notes say "till the last settlement is powered up". On the other hand, it is not really to laugh for. Imagine if every settlement just had to be powered up once. In a single player game that would work fine. In an MMORPG people would rightfully complain that they did not even get the chance to restore power anywhere as someone was already faster. That is the nature of such games.

For now I simply assume it works like any other mission or action in Thargoid space: each adds a tiny bit to the total progress bar. That would allow anyone to participate and everyone to see and understand the progress / how much is left to be done.

 

[Cmdr Venport]

I also wondered how it works since patch notes say "till the last settlement is powered up". On the other hand, it is not really to laugh for. Imagine if every settlement just had to be powered up once. In a single player game that would work fine. In an MMORPG people would rightfully complain that they did not even get the chance to restore power anywhere as someone was already faster. That is the nature of such games.

For now I simply assume it works like any other mission or action in Thargoid space: each adds a tiny bit to the total progress bar. That would allow anyone to participate and everyone to see and understand the progress / how much is left to be done.

Yes I agree, this is how I read the release notes hence why I originally posted looking for clarification, your assumptions and comments follow mine, the lack of a means to see progress for each settlement (besides the issue with completed settlement missions still spawning) is the biggest issue I think since without knowing progress for each settlement nobody knows where to focus efforts within the timeframe to restore them for it to count, its just a complete lottery....

 

[Jerre Havaardt]

IMO all of the missions to reboot or what-have-you SHOULD be doable until the next server tick or the progress bar is full.

 

[BDelacroix]

I have not seen any definitive answer to that question from FDev (hence my original question about the mechanics of the missions) but it is a logical assumption (how can a system be restored without all the settlements being on-line?) - does anyone have an any actual clarifications on this from FDev along with the elephant in the room question about number of times a settlement needs to be restored to become "restored"? - It's clearly more than one...

Not only is it a broken game-loop (missions spawning for active settlements) it also lacks answers to the fundamental questions outlined - or have I missed something as I originally asked?

It could be just some counter toward state regardless of each and every one being turned on.
In a game such as this, having it doable by one and only one player would be terrible. First one in wins and everyone else can pound sand.

What I'm saying about the counter is that you could have a system with 10 settlements or 1. You still have to do say, 100 of them to get the state to change. Be that doing 1 of them 100 times or each of the 10 10 times or some combination. Not necessary to find that 1 that was missed.

I've only run into the "already on" problem 1 time since these came out. It was surely annoying as I had little time and this was going to be the one thing I had time to do but it was wasted and nobody likes having their time wasted.

Would be nice that the missions stop appearing if the magic state is already set and nobody would have their time wasted.

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

Would be nice that the missions stop appearing if the magic state is already set and nobody would have their time wasted.

It should be doing this, plus: if someone with a mission to power up a settlement drops into a new instance at that location, the settlement should be loaded into the game in an unpowered state.
Otherwise there is still a race condition of "Person A" accepting a mission followed by "Person B" completing a mission at the same location and triggering the threshold for the settlement to be permanently powered, leaving Person A unable to complete their mission.

 

[Alec Turner]

It should be doing this, plus: if someone with a mission to power up a settlement drops into a new instance at that location, the settlement should be loaded into the game in an unpowered state.
Otherwise there is still a race condition of "Person A" accepting a mission followed by "Person B" completing a mission at the same location and triggering the threshold for the settlement to be permanently powered, leaving Person A unable to complete their mission.

I completely agree with this, it seems like a good and necessary concession to the trade off between realism and good gameplay. As another, completely different example ... if you land at an outpost (or better example yet, THE large landing pad on a rescue megaship) and then log out to main menu ... when you log back in again the game NEVER says you can't because that pad is occupied, it just spawns you in a separate instance.

 

[Cmdr Venport]

The way I see it is that we need the following from Fdev at a bare minimum.

1. Clarity of exactly how the power-up missions are supposed to work, what triggers them to spawn and what triggers them as completed and powered on - If they spawn based on system state (as they do outside the Thargoid context) then this is never going to work in the context of the Thargoid war and reduced time to restore, simply because all the settlements could be on-line and the mission boards will still continue to spawn multiple power-up missions for settlements that are already online, in a system with many settlements its going to be very time consuming to identify if there are any not powered on and very few if anyone will go to the trouble of looking (especially since its such a time consuming and frustrating task). If this is the case FDev need a re-think, along the lines of the any of the sensible ideas discussed above for consideration or any other sensible method they can think of.

2. Whatever method for triggering a settlement being online the issue of already powered-on settlements still spawning missions needs a resolution, its frustrating people, wasting time and leading to people not doing the missions and eventually no-one will do the missions and thus we will not be achieving the aimed objective of reducing the recovery time.

3. Whatever method (beyond system state which I believe it is currently and why we have all these issues) an easier way of identifying which settlements and how much progress each has left to complete needs to be included in any resolution and completed settlements need to stop spawning on mission boards, even without any progress bars or the like just stopping powered-up settlements spawning on mission boards would go a long way to improving the situation (since only incomplete settlements would spawn on the boards).

Without some acknowledgement of the issue and clarity from FDev were just speculating about the problem and have no clue how it was intended to work, which it clearly doesn't.

 

[Pville_Piper]

Ok, if the settlements are powered up, power them down, pocket the power supply, put the mission power supply in... Profit.
If that doesn't work power the mission one down, pocket it and leave, profit.

 

[Cmdr Venport]

Ok, if the settlements are powered up, power them down, pocket the power supply, put the mission power supply in... Profit.
If that doesn't work power the mission one down, pocket it and leave, profit.

I think someone's tried that and it didn't work so your profits are diminished by the abandonment fines.

 

[Pville_Piper]

Free power supplies!!!