It's less the faction offering retreat missions, but the rather the numbers of missions from factions in neighbouring systems to deliver to them which from my experience does go up in the same way they do when a faction is in boom or outbreak and everybody in the neighbourhood with relevant trades to them starts offering missions to them. With those now rising their BGS and being first on the list for the player getting there they get some traction, and not much is needed as they only need more than 1 other faction in system to start to rise
Retreat tried several times in vain - your ideas?
- Thread starter Starman 1966
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It is still the same problem. Well maybe because it longs several months not problem just feature but I really don't understand why gamemasters did it. I checked yesterday one randomly selected system in retreat state where I know influence history. It looks exactly the same as retreats I checked few months ago .. well not the same it is worse after there is now no conflict of factions when there are no assets to compete for ... so influence of faction in retreat state continue with high rate grow.
That red one is faction in retreat state. There are only NPC factions.
I checked mission board and the faction in retreat state offered high number of cargo delivery and cargo need missions - many INF+++ but some with very high influence too - or well paid but still with INF++ effect. The faction had the best offer of missions from all factions. I support idea it is all just about independent pilots doing such missions. But I have some doubts too. It is not first time I see influence continue grow so rapidly next days - I expect such grow only when influence is ultra low. Is there some black ops group specialized to search for retreat state factions and pushing them rapidly? Well I can't exclude it. We are blind without detailed report of all players actions (at least anonymized and few days postponed).
Updated: I checked some more systems and trends are similar there. Retreat for the growth
That red one is faction in retreat state. There are only NPC factions.
I checked mission board and the faction in retreat state offered high number of cargo delivery and cargo need missions - many INF+++ but some with very high influence too - or well paid but still with INF++ effect. The faction had the best offer of missions from all factions. I support idea it is all just about independent pilots doing such missions. But I have some doubts too. It is not first time I see influence continue grow so rapidly next days - I expect such grow only when influence is ultra low. Is there some black ops group specialized to search for retreat state factions and pushing them rapidly? Well I can't exclude it. We are blind without detailed report of all players actions (at least anonymized and few days postponed).
Updated: I checked some more systems and trends are similar there. Retreat for the growth
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My squadron has observed at least a dozen minor factions go into retreat. It never actually results in a retreat. Instead, every single time the minor faction's influence suddenly balloons up to 20-30%, usually growing about 7% per day and entering a boom state just to rub salt in the wound. This is in some pretty quiet systems.
We tried actively depressing a minor faction's influence in a relatively quiet system (easily crushing it to 1% in a single day) and managed to get the aggressive influence increase limited to around 8-9% total but it still always grew every day of the retreat no matter what we did.
This is beyond being irritating since it results in us suddenly having NPC factions balloon in influence in systems we control if we do well (like as we push to expand) and it prevents us from freeing up space in systems without player factions. We've been banging our heads against the wall for months because of this single bug/feature. We're almost ready to give up on BGS play because of it.
We tried actively depressing a minor faction's influence in a relatively quiet system (easily crushing it to 1% in a single day) and managed to get the aggressive influence increase limited to around 8-9% total but it still always grew every day of the retreat no matter what we did.
This is beyond being irritating since it results in us suddenly having NPC factions balloon in influence in systems we control if we do well (like as we push to expand) and it prevents us from freeing up space in systems without player factions. We've been banging our heads against the wall for months because of this single bug/feature. We're almost ready to give up on BGS play because of it.
Having just retreated two more NPC factions (totalling about 8 or 9 retreats done in the last couple of months) the only way that works is to support the lead faction (if they are not the one being retreated) and fail missions for / murder ships from the faction in retreat.
Of course what works for one does not always work for everyone. It might be that the BGS has quirks where you are, or you are opposed directly. As an experiment I induced a faction into retreat by beating it down to 1% and left it while I helped retreat another. Currently after the retreat ended its at 9.3% from passing traffic and BGS Voodoo. From that I concluded that its either an endpoint of missions, missions offered themselves (which themselves are illogical- the mission blurb says we need to retreat, do xyz that adds influence to keep you in the system) or the BGS has a mechanism that adds upward pressure when INF is rock bottom thats causing this.
Of course what works for one does not always work for everyone. It might be that the BGS has quirks where you are, or you are opposed directly. As an experiment I induced a faction into retreat by beating it down to 1% and left it while I helped retreat another. Currently after the retreat ended its at 9.3% from passing traffic and BGS Voodoo. From that I concluded that its either an endpoint of missions, missions offered themselves (which themselves are illogical- the mission blurb says we need to retreat, do xyz that adds influence to keep you in the system) or the BGS has a mechanism that adds upward pressure when INF is rock bottom thats causing this.
I don't think there's any intrinsic pressure - I've got plenty of low-traffic examples where the retreating faction just hangs around on 1.0-1.5% for the entire period then leaves - but the mission effects are very plausible, and positive influence effects are slightly more effective at lower influence levels anyway.
As an aside (it would be fiendishly complex), I wonder if there could ever be a map of areas that are hard to retreat from due to the configuration of systems in relation to the BGS and how it calculates things?
Long-term, I think you can approximate this by how many (non-native?) factions are still in the systems, certainly for regional trends.
For Colonia, https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/map#XY~C:factions~C:off~X~1~0~0 is a map of current faction counts in the systems, but is also a pretty good approximation of the "retreat difficulty" (green/yellow=easy, orange=difficult, red=very difficult) - ignoring Colonia and Ratraii as locked systems.
It'd be interesting to see a similar visualisation for the bubble.
Jane Turner
Volunteer Moderator
We were just caught out by a retreat with 5 days of being active, not the usual 6.
Jane Turner
Volunteer Moderator
but the good news is it went active again without a cooldown
Eventually we managed to achieve a retreat with a dedicated group of some five or six players. Key to success was to harass ships of the MF to be retreated. Harassing means shooting these ships e.g. at the nav beacon or pull them out of supercruise, but not killing them. You only incur bounties without gaining notoriety which greatly facilitate things! Every CMDR tried to harass at least 10 ships of the targeted MF each tick and this worked out.
Jane Turner
Volunteer Moderator
This might indirectly be the first confirmation that fines have a BGS impact still
Hi Jane, for the sake of precision: It's bounties although without notoriety, but not fines.
Jane Turner
Volunteer Moderator
ok
Assaults are 1/4 the BGS influence of murders.
Jane Turner
Volunteer Moderator
Interesting!
I did testing in a very isolated system by shooting a sec NPC once that cycle, the next killing a sec NPC. From that I worked out it was roughly 1/4 influence in a 10k system.
It was two point updates ago so it might be slightly different, but if you are murder bingeing it also helps to gain assaults at the same time if ammo or time is short.
Jane Turner
Volunteer Moderator
Being a pacifist I am very attracted to a non-fatal expulsion method.
In larger systems the effect is obviously less, but if you do it enough it will save you a lot of cash (and notoriety). Fines do nothing though.
It opens up a lot of attack vectors on small factions as well.
what testing have you done on fines Rubbernuke? I haven't checked for some time, but when I did there seemed to be a threshold for effect. <1000 had no impact but >10,000 did. That was a long time ago though, so likely all changed
All my fines have been quite low, so I imagine that a threshold might be in force. In that test I told you about a tresspass fine of 800 credits did not do anything INF wise.