Quick question about INF
- Thread starter SlickPBW
- Start date
is that a code lol
Theoretically, no.
Practically, yes.
If you had two factions on, say, 50 influence each (ignore conflict state) and you earned 10 influence, for one of those factions, the new inf gets calculated at the tick as
Faction A: 60/110
Faction B: 50/110
Let's assume someone else earned 20 points for the other faction, that becomes:
A: 60/130
B: 70/130
so more generally:
(original influence + new influence effects) / (original influence pool + total of new influence effects)
So the overall effect of your actions gets less and less as the total pool grows bigger and bigger, and will approach a limit, but never hit it.
Thanks. Just to be clear, there's no daily or weekly cap, correct?
"No"
Some actions potentially have internal throttles or other internal scaling factors as well e.g trade, but I'm not aware of any hard-caps.
Who said there was no philosophical basis to ED? This is Xeno's Paradox in action.
System Influence is a zero sum game with the total always being 100%, divided among the existing factions in the system.
When a faction holds 75% or more of the influence, it triggers Expansion.
If you don't want to expand, stay under 75%.
I know you say "more generally", but how accurate is this calculation?
For example, if I had a four faction system, faction #1 is at 63.1% and faction #4 is at 4.9%, and I did +10 INF for #1 which also directly 'attacked' #4 (presumably negative the same amount of INF), this calculation would put #4 straight to the lower cap of 1% and #1 to 67% (presuming #4's lower cap limit directly affects the portion of +INF granted to #1? Assuming, theoretically, no other traffic or actions from any other sources. Would that be right?
I've always struggled to guess how much INF to 'earn' to affect faction INF, even taking into account other traffic and only keeping to missions so I can keep an accurate count of what INF I'm earning etc. I've never come across a calculation, never mind one that might be reasonably accurate, if not 100% accurate.
Faction 1 would generally end up somewhat higher than 67% in this case, since their additional positive Inf would also come out of #2 and #3's shares once #4 was at the floor of where negative Inf could take them.
Some people have tried to work this out, but because of the various diminishing return factors the answer depends on the system population, the current faction influence, and so on. And then the answer only applies in systems without any other BGS activity for any side of any type.
Generally the advice I've seen is "do X amount of effort, see what happens, if it's not enough do more the next day" and that probably gets you an idea of the requirements for any individual system a lot faster than messing round with and calibrating formulae would do.
The calculation, under controlled conditions, i would argue is completely accurate.
What can't be accounted for is how those inputs are formed, which @Ian Doncaster talks to.
If you do 20 points of trade for a faction that is in a system where the total influence pool comprises 1000 points, then that calculation will hold.
What you will never know though is:
- what is the total pool of points for a system? We know it's based on population size, but it's nonlinear, suspected logarithmic
- what is the value of a given, profitable trade? What makes a 20- point trade? Again there's evidence it's nonlinear, if only thanks to observations of 1t trading in the past
- the whole picture. Every claim about the bgs is based off a flawed source of information... nobody can guarantee "only they were doing things"... but they can guess.
A good example of how this works is the effects of positive and negative actions. If you did a positive action for one faction, their gain will result in a corresponding drop in other faction influences, not because they got hurt, but because the supported faction gains a larger proportion of the whole pool, while everyone else stays the same.
But if you do a roughly equivalent negative action for a different faction in that system as the faction you did a positive effect for because the total pool stays the same, but the other factions are already normalized, so this corresponds to am almost direct transfer of influence (logically speaking, there's no "transfer", it's just the maths of it)
i only say generally because there's always edge cases which can usually be explained, but i can't do that exhaustively.