And just for the record, absolutely no difference here. Democracy in Investment/Terror Attack has mining/donate goods, Dictatorship in None has Donate Credits.
Rev-Enging Mission Boards
- Thread starter Jmanis
- Start date
So, interesting observation while I'm out here in Sadr Sector... and by that I mean when I hightailed down to California Sector. There's only the one dictatorship down here, but I noticed trade routes between the Extraction and High Tech, which makes sense, and figured "Hey, less than 20LY between them, should have lots of delivery missions right?
Wrong.
Despite the favourable economic conditions, nothing but donate cargo and mining missions. A common complaint[1] of mine is that there's rarely any delivery missions that go to my own faction. Anywhere else with multiple factions, this would be prime delivery territory... but it isn't here where there's just the one faction.
There's a lot you can speculate on with this, though, after roaming around and checking out these edge-cases such as here/Conven, I've come to a couple mental assertions, but I don't know how to quantify it other than "Cooperative Factions tend to have lots of trade missions for with other factions. Dictatorships (and actually, just other factions in general), don't. In particular, factions tend not to do deliveries to themselves... which makes sense.. though it does happen.
More study needed.
[1] Complaint in the general sense; it's not an actual complaint about the game.
Wrong.
Despite the favourable economic conditions, nothing but donate cargo and mining missions. A common complaint[1] of mine is that there's rarely any delivery missions that go to my own faction. Anywhere else with multiple factions, this would be prime delivery territory... but it isn't here where there's just the one faction.
There's a lot you can speculate on with this, though, after roaming around and checking out these edge-cases such as here/Conven, I've come to a couple mental assertions, but I don't know how to quantify it other than "Cooperative Factions tend to have lots of trade missions for with other factions. Dictatorships (and actually, just other factions in general), don't. In particular, factions tend not to do deliveries to themselves... which makes sense.. though it does happen.
More study needed.
[1] Complaint in the general sense; it's not an actual complaint about the game.
And just to quote this again, I just went to Shenve in WHN, which has scores of Planetary Scan missions to Siniang. I was Neutral to all the Fed factions there, so I decided to tally the credit rewards for them all.
$473,771.00
$483,134.00
$484,489.00
$486,460.00
$486,476.00
$635,442.00
$865,993.00
$870,534.00
$876,157.00
$1,118,206.00
$1,519,068.00
$1,540,232.00
$1,546,744.00
$1,551,232.00
$1,576,092.00
$1,580,580.00
$1,599,192.00
$1,626,208.00
$1,630,124.00
$1,639,056.00
$1,669,548.00
$1,673,332.00
$1,717,112.00
$1,723,800.00
$1,733,744.00
$483,134.00
$484,489.00
$486,460.00
$486,476.00
$635,442.00
$865,993.00
$870,534.00
$876,157.00
$1,118,206.00
$1,519,068.00
$1,540,232.00
$1,546,744.00
$1,551,232.00
$1,576,092.00
$1,580,580.00
$1,599,192.00
$1,626,208.00
$1,630,124.00
$1,639,056.00
$1,669,548.00
$1,673,332.00
$1,717,112.00
$1,723,800.00
$1,733,744.00
I forgot to check ranks, but I couldn't accept any of them without bumping my relationship to cordial, so I did that, and then took
- 5 missions around 600k; and
- 5 missions around 480k
Scanned the nav beacon and got the following scan targets:
Unfortunately, the correlation of Risk-Reward wasn't great either
$641,976.00 B5
$624,671.00 B7
$624,275.00 A4A
$628,611.00 B6
$627,878.00 B3A
$485,367.00 B9
$485,890.00 B6
$482,841.00 A3A
$486,460.00 A4
$482,071.00 B5
$624,671.00 B7
$624,275.00 A4A
$628,611.00 B6
$627,878.00 B3A
$485,367.00 B9
$485,890.00 B6
$482,841.00 A3A
$486,460.00 A4
$482,071.00 B5
Sadly I didn't record the rank for these missions... so maybe that has some bearing, since there does seem to be brackets, and sadly, none of the rewards overlap targets in the same bracket. I'm going to play with Beta for a quick minute, but I'll do some more playing here tomorrow as this is another good one.
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I think that's something that was commented on recently. You need to 'prime the pump' so to speak by doing trade activities to get trade missions to generate.
Are the trade routes you can see Players-only, NPC-only or both?
Those ones are all NPC. There's actually only one player-route which shows.
I'll be frank... I'm not convinced by that theory, though I have zero evidence to back my counter-theory, which is basically: The mission board is blobby, and actually doesn't generate all the mission varieties it can and should, for reasons unknown.
I'm actually not convinced players running missions have any impact on the missions subsequently generated, beyond an anectodal relation or two which are more artefacts of the procedural generation, rather than any actual dedicated logic. But again, I don't have any evidence to back that claim, so I'm not going to try and argue; it's a valid theory and I have nothing to argue against it with other than gut and intuition.
Thanks. Based on that, and having collected a bit more data here I think the planetary scan formula might be extremely simple.
Coefficients are again somewhat approximate (I especially don't have enough Pioneer rank missions in the sample - unlike Courier missions these seem to bias very heavily towards Elite rank)
Payout = 200000 * e^(0.3*rank) * RAND(1.00,1.20)
(rank = 1 for Aimless, 9 for Elite)
If there is a dependency on the LY to the target system it's so trivial that the random factor overwhelms it.
The RAND() isn't a linear distribution either - ~50% chance of being < 1.05, ~50% of the rest are <1.10
Yeah, so an assumption I work with atm is that LY and Ls to target have no effect on the following mission type rewards:
- Assassination (all flavours, including Urgent Terror Kill missions)
- Massacre (all flavours including illegal variants)
- Salvage (legal and illegal)
- Hijack
- Surface Scan (planetary and installation)
- Destroy Powerplants
- Surface Salvage & Search and Rescue
Could be more, but I forget the exhaustive list. Basically, anything that generates a dynamic target on entry to the system... though that leaves a question over Anarchy Installation/Powerplant targets which are generally named (lawful factions title these "covert" and don't name the target, as they're "black" operations)
My rationale is that LY don't matter; all targets are within 10-20Ly, which is one jump for almost any ship, and Ls can't factor as the target can't be generated beforehand A) it would inform the target ahead of time, and B) it's potentially computationally expensive.
Delivery mission LY matter because the target is known, and anecdotally, the range of a hauling ship is as little as 10Ly in some cases, so it may be multiple jumps to a 20LY system.
Oh, one example of anecdotal evidence about my reply is, once again, Conven.
It's a nothing-activity system; only time any state occurs there is when I'm playing around. When I arrive to all factions in a None state:
- Almost all my delivery missions are sourced from the Corporate/Cooperative factions in the system; and
- Almost all the installation target/donation missions are from the Feudal/Dictatorships, and Anarchy, though the anarchy is a mixed bag.
In particular, the Cooperative delivery missions are flavoured. Coincidentally, I have some new suspicions which I might investigate later tonight about the nature of interfactional relationships and the missions on offer. Lastly, I might use Ian's figures from the courier missions to test some delivery rewards while I'm at it.
So, just a quick summary from Beta, where Conven is guaranteed clean of other players (not even a traffic report on local news!)
--- Conven Factions, Board 1 ---
Patronage 1: 4 x Donate Credits, 3 x Courier
Corporate 1: 8 x courier, 3 x donate goods
Cooperative: 1 x source, 1 x courier, 7 x delivery (flavoured), 2 x planetary scan
Confederacy: 3 x Delivery (flavoured)
Corporate 2: 7 x Source, 4 x Planetary Scan
Patronage 2: 6 x donate credits, 3 x donate cargo
Anarchy: 6 x Illegal Assassination, 3 x Disable Generator
--- Same Factions, Board 2, 30-60m Later ---
Patronage 1: 9 x Delivery, 2 x Donate Goods
Corporate 1: 2 x Source, 1 x Courier, 7 x Delivery, 1 x Planetary Scan
Cooperative: 5 x Donate credits, 2 x Covert Installation Scan, 2 x Delivery (flavoured)
Confederacy: 4 x Donate credits, 1 x Source, 5 x delivery (Flavoured)
Corporate 2: 1 x Donate credits, 3 x Donate Cargo, 7 x Delivery
Patronage 2: 2 x Donate Credits, 5 x Source, 1 x Courier, 2 x Delivery, 1 x Donate Cargo
Anarchy: 5 x Illegal Assassination, 2 x Installation Scan
This isn't an antithesis of the "priming" theory... but with such large discrepancy between the different boards in a system with almost certainly no player activity, it's hard for me to ascribe player activity on mission boards to what gets generated.
What I have observed in my time observing the boards is that many missions survive between 10m-board-refreshes. I very deliberately waited 30-60m (I don't know exactly how long, was getting toddler to bed) because I knew it'd give me what I call a "Full" refresh... I actually think each mission generated on the board has a random Time to Live (TTL) which designates when it disappears and gets replaced. In addition, any mission that despawns needs to generate a mission that wasn't the type that aged off (in order to continue generating a diverse range of missions).
More speculative, I think there's several factors which influence what missions get generated:
For me, this can give the effect of "priming" a system; you take a stack of delivery missions, and suddenly, you'd start seeing less of them generating, and if you come back just 10-20m later, a lot of the ones you left on the board would still be there.
--- Conven Factions, Board 1 ---
Patronage 1: 4 x Donate Credits, 3 x Courier
Corporate 1: 8 x courier, 3 x donate goods
Cooperative: 1 x source, 1 x courier, 7 x delivery (flavoured), 2 x planetary scan
Confederacy: 3 x Delivery (flavoured)
Corporate 2: 7 x Source, 4 x Planetary Scan
Patronage 2: 6 x donate credits, 3 x donate cargo
Anarchy: 6 x Illegal Assassination, 3 x Disable Generator
--- Same Factions, Board 2, 30-60m Later ---
Patronage 1: 9 x Delivery, 2 x Donate Goods
Corporate 1: 2 x Source, 1 x Courier, 7 x Delivery, 1 x Planetary Scan
Cooperative: 5 x Donate credits, 2 x Covert Installation Scan, 2 x Delivery (flavoured)
Confederacy: 4 x Donate credits, 1 x Source, 5 x delivery (Flavoured)
Corporate 2: 1 x Donate credits, 3 x Donate Cargo, 7 x Delivery
Patronage 2: 2 x Donate Credits, 5 x Source, 1 x Courier, 2 x Delivery, 1 x Donate Cargo
Anarchy: 5 x Illegal Assassination, 2 x Installation Scan
This isn't an antithesis of the "priming" theory... but with such large discrepancy between the different boards in a system with almost certainly no player activity, it's hard for me to ascribe player activity on mission boards to what gets generated.
What I have observed in my time observing the boards is that many missions survive between 10m-board-refreshes. I very deliberately waited 30-60m (I don't know exactly how long, was getting toddler to bed) because I knew it'd give me what I call a "Full" refresh... I actually think each mission generated on the board has a random Time to Live (TTL) which designates when it disappears and gets replaced. In addition, any mission that despawns needs to generate a mission that wasn't the type that aged off (in order to continue generating a diverse range of missions).
More speculative, I think there's several factors which influence what missions get generated:
- How many of that template has been generated across the whole board. (Fairly confident, 80% trust)... overriding this is whether there's any valid mission types remaining when the cap is hit (Reasonably Speculative, 50% trust)
- Factions like Confederacy and Cooperative have their own, special flavoured template, so these don't count against the common, shared templates. (Fairly confident, 80% trust)
- Stateful mission generation gets priority (Fairly confident, 80% trust)
- Government-level preferences for particular mission types do apply (Reasonably speculative, 50% trust)
- Your active missions which would populate the mission board normally, are applicable in that system for generation purposes (Very speculative, like, 20% trust)
For me, this can give the effect of "priming" a system; you take a stack of delivery missions, and suddenly, you'd start seeing less of them generating, and if you come back just 10-20m later, a lot of the ones you left on the board would still be there.
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I'm surprised with the mission spread that you got on first visit to the system. When I turn up at any system with little player traffic the board is always filled with a majority of assassination, salvage and massacre missions, with the remainder a spread of other types.
Perhaps it has some relation to faction types, economy or location... or maybe just some unconscious observational bias. I wish I had more free time to record these things properly.
My observations would be the opposite of this. The board starts with the usual murder & mayhem (MM) missions and if I pick off any trade missions (if there are any at all) or trade goods at the market, I see more trade missions appear. Keeping this up for a while with repeated visits results in a large majority of trade missions and very few MM. Then, having left it overnight the board goes back to a majority of MM.
Perhaps it has some relation to faction types, economy or location... or maybe just some unconscious observational bias. I wish I had more free time to record these things properly.
Certainly my experience in Colonia is that location is more important than traffic - high-traffic fringe systems and low-traffic fringe systems both have relatively samey missions, while ... well, there aren't really any low-traffic central systems, but there doesn't seem a big difference between mid- and high- traffic systems closer in.
On the other hand, possibly medium range missions working in Colonia other than on Thursday mornings has some effect there, too.
I wonder if the location part of it is related in any way to 'NPC traffic' as shown in the trade routes?
Not quite true. This system can't spawn:
- Assassinate pirate lord (limited to 10Ly); and
- Massacre Pirates (limited to 10Ly)
Perhaps if it's already starting with plenty of trade missions, and can't have the MM alternatives, then it can't really go anywhere from there?
It wouldn't really explain the condition I found in California Nebula which triggered this brainstorming, where there's no delivery missions at all, even though there's plenty of trade routes displayed between the two, since no combat missions can spawn there at all.
That could fit. There's no trade missions because no players are trading, there's no MM because of the range, so that just left donations, etc. If you did some trading there would it start to generate trade missions?
(back to work now, back later
)This one was a bit tougher, but I've got the formula for (non-follow-up, non-wing) allied cargo delivery missions.
Payout = 10000 + (Rank factor * (LY Part + Ls Part + CV Part + 1029500))
Rank factor = Rank / 9 (Elite = 1.0, Merchant = 5/9, etc.)
Ls Part = ROUND(Ls)*7.982
CV Part = 3.96 * tons of cargo * galactic average price of cargo
LY Part = Adjusted distance * 27720
Adjusted distance => take FLOOR(LY). If <10, subtract 1/7LY for every LY less than 10 (can go negative for same-system). If >25, subtract 1/7 LY for every LY greater than 25. Otherwise use it.
=10000+FLOOR(((A2/9))*(1029500+(3.96*K2)+(27720*J2))+(7.982*H2)))
EDIT: based on the conversation below about courier missions and assuming that Ls aren't rounded here (but continuing to model LY as rounded for now for convenience) I've adjusted a few parameters, differences highlighted:
C2 = raw unrounded Ls
=10000+FLOOR(((A2/9))*(1029570+(3.96*K2)+(27720*J2))+(7.925*C2)))
Still not perfect but it now gives within about 50 credits at all times and usually within 20
Payout = 10000 + (Rank factor * (LY Part + Ls Part + CV Part + 1029500))
Rank factor = Rank / 9 (Elite = 1.0, Merchant = 5/9, etc.)
Ls Part = ROUND(Ls)*7.982
CV Part = 3.96 * tons of cargo * galactic average price of cargo
LY Part = Adjusted distance * 27720
Adjusted distance => take FLOOR(LY). If <10, subtract 1/7LY for every LY less than 10 (can go negative for same-system). If >25, subtract 1/7 LY for every LY greater than 25. Otherwise use it.
- As with the courier missions, the numeric parameters are slightly approximated. It almost always gets within 100 credits and often a lot closer, though, so good enough for me.
- As with the courier missions, there's a distance adjustment at <10 or >25 LY ... unlike courier missions it bends the other way: courier missions get a bonus 1/4 per LY, cargo missions get a penalty of 1/7 per LY for being outside the normal range.
- Tons of cargo is itself affected by rank, of course, so Elite missions get two bonuses over Merchant ones. With follow-up missions having the rank but not the tonnage it'll be interesting to see if they do also use this formula or not.
- Unlike courier missions the rank factor is applied differently - rank gives 1/9 to cargo rather than 1/10 to courier. But like courier it's a linear relationship rather than surface scan's exponential.
- Again, this is not the complete formula for inter-bubble cargo missions. They're exceedingly rare anyway nowadays since Tourism economies don't produce anything except Biowaste, but the LY component alone would pay out half a billion. (And in the old days I did see ones going for close to 100 million for higher-value goods, but still!)
=10000+FLOOR(((A2/9))*(1029500+(3.96*K2)+(27720*J2))+(7.982*H2)))
EDIT: based on the conversation below about courier missions and assuming that Ls aren't rounded here (but continuing to model LY as rounded for now for convenience) I've adjusted a few parameters, differences highlighted:
C2 = raw unrounded Ls
=10000+FLOOR(((A2/9))*(1029570+(3.96*K2)+(27720*J2))+(7.925*C2)))
Still not perfect but it now gives within about 50 credits at all times and usually within 20
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Damnit, you beat me to the punch! Sorry, been dragging my knuckles...
Man, it's no wonder cargo value matters so much. In my opinion, cargo tonnage should form the lion's share of the reward[1], not the cargo value.
Under the current system, let's compare:
1. Elite mission to transport 180t of biowaste 10Ly, 100Ls
2. Merchant mission to transport 56t of Palladium 10Ly, 100Ly
We get
1. Biowaste Mission: 10,000 + (1 * (277200 +798.2 + 244,490.4 + 1029500))
= 1,561,988.6 cr
2. Palladium Mission: 10,000 + (5/9 * (277200 + 798.2 + 2,872,679.04 + 1029500))
= 2,332,320.69 cr
The reward might be nearly cut in half due to the rep, and 1/3rd less cargo, but that component of the reward is a whole order of magnitude larger than that of the biowaste; it's unreasonably disproportionate considering the biowaste mission is three times the effort.
If we split the CV part up, we'd get a far more reasonable reward comparison. I'd split the two, and cut the value part by 100, and multiply the tonnage part by 100, that way we get a comparable reward, favouring the cargo tonnage.
i.e CV Part = (.0396 * tons of cargo * galactic average price of cargo) + (396 * tons of cargo)
This way we get:
1. Biowaste Mission = 1,381,223 cr
2. Palladium Mission = 754,667.69 cr
And then to compare oranges to oranges, if both were 180t at Elite, we get:
1. Biowaste Mission = 1,381,223 cr
2. Palladium mission = 1,471,114.312 cr
Of course, 180t of palladium is 2.3m credits, so it suddenly becomes worth flogging it, but that's onerous in it's own right. That said, that's just a first pass... tweaking numbers is definitely on the table. I just think that's a much better comparison. Maybe dividing cargo value by 10 would work better, or just an end-reward multiple of 2 or 4?
[1] As context, my $1,000 wedding ring cost $80 to ship here internationally... meanwhile three hoodies cost me nearly $150 in shipping fees. Alternately, sending a $100 DVD cost me ~$5 shipping interstate, meanwhile 1kg of chocolates valued at $10 is ~$30 for the same shipping.
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Checking ... yes, they do. For cheap goods this of course doesn't change the payout very much.
So atm, I'm collecting data for working out the payouts for Hijack missions... but a curiosity that I've looked into in other missions with but turned up nothing is Rep and Influence. It's capped at around a 2 million deduction from the credit pool reward, but it's not always that amount, nor is it seemingly a whole figure. However, for a single mission, reputation and influence are valued the same.
Now, I recall someone from FD (Dom?) saying something along the lines of "Five plusses is the maximum that can be displayed, but the boost may be more than five +'s", but I tried iterating a few whole numbers and couldn't get a neat value-substitution like you can for Materials/Data/Cargo... although it's not clear if the initial ++ inf/rep needs to be included or not (likewise if the nonmajor inf/rep rewards need to be considered, but regardless, Inf and Rep seem to be valued the same, yet there's no whole-figure substitution which makes sense. It's kinda baffling...
Now, I recall someone from FD (Dom?) saying something along the lines of "Five plusses is the maximum that can be displayed, but the boost may be more than five +'s", but I tried iterating a few whole numbers and couldn't get a neat value-substitution like you can for Materials/Data/Cargo... although it's not clear if the initial ++ inf/rep needs to be included or not (likewise if the nonmajor inf/rep rewards need to be considered, but regardless, Inf and Rep seem to be valued the same, yet there's no whole-figure substitution which makes sense. It's kinda baffling...
Original Pay | 2375838 | 910781 | 1353723 |
Deduct 10k | 2365838 | 900781 | 1343723 |
Deduct remaining | 2159279 | 809787 | 841046 |
1 Plus | 2159279.00 | 809787.00 | 841046.00 |
2 Plus | 1079639.50 | 404893.50 | 420523.00 |
3 Plus | 719759.67 | 269929.00 | 280348.67 |
4 Plus | 539819.75 | 202446.75 | 210261.50 |
5 Plus | 431855.80 | 161957.40 | 168209.20 |
6 Plus | 359879.83 | 134964.50 | 140174.33 |
7 Plus | 308468.43 | 115683.86 | 120149.43 |
8 Plus | 269909.88 | 101223.38 | 105130.75 |
9 Plus | 239919.89 | 89976.33 | 93449.56 |
10 Plus | 215927.90 | 80978.70 | 84104.60 |
11 Plus | 196298.09 | 73617.00 | 76458.73 |
12 Plus | 179939.92 | 67482.25 | 70087.17 |