Setting Up Background Simulation

[BenRitason]

If it has more than 7 minor factions in
If has no starport
If it's lore important
If it's permit locked
Afaik, a fleet carrier can mess things up, but that's not been seen by me on official lists of things
If more than 500ly from Sol
If has any player minor faction or NPC minor faction that's been adopted by a player group

When applying, you must at one point choose Fed, Emp, All, Indy, then you choose government type, like Democracy, Dictator, Theocracy, Corporate. Then your up to 3 choices must match that. If you choose Empire Patronage, your 3 choices must be already controlled by Empire Patronage minor faction
It can't have a rare commodity either, like Fujin Tea, Xihe Alien Pets etc

I'd say get a list of 6 to 8 and rank them too.

We copied and pasted the relevant 2000 systems into excel, then looked up each one and deleted the row that had PMF in. That left 84 for our category of system. Then we went through the list on Inara, went by number of stations, how many PMF in neighbouring systems there were, distance from the star etc

Thanks again. Good information. I wasn't aware that you could adopt an NPC minor faction and I wasn't aware of the 7 minor faction limit. This will certainly help.

 

[Sapyx]

You cannot "adopt an NPC faction" now. Well, you can, in the sense of picking an NPC faction and just supporting it, Anyone can do that. I persoanlly have "Adopted" 56 of them. But "formal adoption" was only available for a short time, after player-made factions were first added to the game, to allow the big player groups that had been working their informally-adopted factions for years could gain recognition of their efforts.

The only difference between a formally adopted NPC faction and in informal one, is that formally adopted factions are "protected" from getting other PMFs dumped into their systems, while my 56 informally adopted factions have no such protections.

 

[Maolagin]

This might be useful for you - a list of all systems which EDDB doesn't think has a PMF in them.
Caveats:

1. I downloaded the EDDB dataset used for this on Sunday, so changes in the last few days aren't there
2. EDDB may occasionally be wrong about which factions are PMFs
3. Some fringe systems only get a player sending an update to EDDB every few weeks, so they're possibly also out of date.
4. I've not made any attempt to exclude systems which are ineligible for PMF addition for other reasons.

For the curious, the command to run on the EDDB export files factions.jsonl and systems_populated.jsonl to generate it.

grep -vf <(grep 'is_player_faction":true' factions.jsonl | cut -f2 -d:  | cut -f1 -d, | sed -e 's/^/minor_faction_id":/' | sed -e 's/$/,/') systems_populated.jsonl | grep -Eo '"name":"[^"]+","x"' | cut -d: -f2 | cut -d, -f1

A little more than 6000 systems in that file!

As it happens I have the EDDB dumps open in a Python session right now, so I can do one better. Applying the following criteria:

"has_player_faction == False and minor_faction_count < 7 and needs_permit == False and d_origin < 500"

I come up with about 1100 candidate systems. See attached CSV.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

A little more than 6000 systems in that file!

As it happens I have the EDDB dumps open in a Python session right now, so I can do one better. Applying the following criteria:

"has_player_faction == False and minor_faction_count < 7 and needs_permit == False and d_origin < 500"

I come up with about 1100 candidate systems. See attached CSV.

minor_faction_count <= 7 is what I went for, and seems to be what Frontier are using, which explains most of the difference in filesize, but <7 systems while still available are probably better choices for new PMFs due to their likely relative isolation from Powerplay and big BGS groups.

 

[Maolagin]

minor_faction_count <= 7 is what I went for, and seems to be what Frontier are using, which explains most of the difference in filesize, but <7 systems while still available are probably better choices for new PMFs due to their likely relative isolation from Powerplay and big BGS groups.

I don't think you constrained by MF count at all, or at least I don't see where in your shell pipeline that is happening. But yes, the vast majority of the difference in our lists (about 4500 systems) is candidates with 7 factions that otherwise meet the criteria. One point I'm unclear on - when you expand into a system with 7 factions already, it triggers an invasion war and the loser is evicted. But when Frontier places a PMF that results in an 8-faction system, I guess this doesn't happen?

 

[RisingPhoenics]

. One point I'm unclear on - when you expand into a system with 7 factions already, it triggers an invasion war and the loser is evicted. But when Frontier places a PMF that results in an 8-faction system, I guess this doesn't happen?

Pretty much yes. Our home system has 8 in. 5 native NPC, 2 non native NPC, 1 native Player

 

[DarkVoidBoy]

A little more than 6000 systems in that file!

As it happens I have the EDDB dumps open in a Python session right now, so I can do one better. Applying the following criteria:

"has_player_faction == False and minor_faction_count < 7 and needs_permit == False and d_origin < 500"

I come up with about 1100 candidate systems. See attached CSV.

Would you be willing to share the code you used for this? I am starting to learn Python and could use a nice project and dataset to apply it.

 

[Maolagin]

Would you be willing to share the code you used for this? I am starting to learn Python and could use a nice project and dataset to apply it.

Sure. I threw an example into a gist for you - https://gist.github.com/maolagin/3f15bd06ddce55713c16d738c5008219

 

[DarkVoidBoy]

Sure. I threw an example into a gist for you - https://gist.github.com/maolagin/3f15bd06ddce55713c16d738c5008219

You are amazing. Thank you very much!

 

[CptArcher]

We are currently going through this now and trying to get a pmf placed. I've seen PMFs inserted into systems with 7 mfs already. We believe we caused a few of our selected systems to become unavailable for pmfs. We chose a few systems that were previously available. We then did some work in those systems to prep for our arrival. I think we triggered the systems to be 'active' and now they are no longer available. Very sad about that because one of those systems were perfect for us.

 

[RisingPhoenics]

We are currently going through this now and trying to get a pmf placed. I've seen PMFs inserted into systems with 7 mfs already. We believe we caused a few of our selected systems to become unavailable for pmfs. We chose a few systems that were previously available. We then did some work in those systems to prep for our arrival. I think we triggered the systems to be 'active' and now they are no longer available. Very sad about that because one of those systems were perfect for us.

Ours was placed in a system with 7 NPC factions and was actively being used by a few of us

Some have said that the presence of fleet carriers can impact things as that seems to sometimes count as a faction. No systems in our top 10 choices that went green had a fleet carrier in. But some that didn't go green didn't have a fleet carrier in so, I'm not fully sure

 

[CptArcher]

We did bring in two fleet carriers there... That could be the reason unfortunately. Is there a wait timer where it could become available again?

 

[RisingPhoenics]

Hmm. I'm not aware. Relocate them, and maybe try after the tick which seems to be about 1600 in game time

Will say that a lot of this is inferred knowledge as they haven't explained some things in explicit detail

 

[CptArcher]

Hmm. I'm not aware. Relocate them, and maybe try after the tick which seems to be about 1600 in game time

Will say that a lot of this is inferred knowledge as they haven't explained some things in explicit detail

We did relocate them and waited a tick, next day it was still unavailable
What we did at that system was bring two carriers, brought a faction out of famine by doing food deliveries, started working on a faction in drought, and fought in a CZ for two days and purchased an Anaconda. Traffic report looked same throughout the entire time and it didn't look like we had any opposition at all in the war. Just wish we wouldn't have done anything there at all. So for anyone reading this and wanting to get a PMF in the game, stay out of that system as much as possible while the application is going through!