This is an Odyssey BGS thing, right? Or can I cause an "Infrastructure Failure" by doing something in Legacy? It seems like a great way to hurt a faction if it costs a percent per day INF.
* all my BGS questions are for Legacy
Some BGS questions
- Thread starter Yuri Gagarin Mendez
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* all my BGS questions are for Legacy
The only differences I'm aware of so far between Legacy (as in "pre-U14") and Live are that in Live the Thargoid War can freeze the Political BGS in a system for a small number of weeks, or suspend it entirely if the Thargoids capture the system. So far as I know there are no other meaningful differences between the two rulesets for now.
Infrastructure Failure is an "Event" state that was added way back in ED 3.6 (the others are Outbreak and Pirate Attack - which were added or converted to Event states in the major 3.3 rewrite - and Blight, Drought, Public Holiday, Terrorism and Natural Disaster which were added with Inf Failure in 3.6). The nature of event states makes them very difficult to determine exactly what causes them or to deliberately obtain a particular one. In general:
- positive trade and bounty actions for a faction => Public Holiday
- positive trade actions for a faction without bounties => Pirate Attack
- biowaste delivery missions to Agricultural settlements => Outbreak
- various combinations of negative actions (clean ship losses, black market trade, mission side effects, etc) => the other Event states, or maybe Outbreak or Pirate Attack again
- the more activity in general => more chance of an Event at all
Two of the Events also have "contagion" effects (no, not Outbreak...)
- Infrastructure Failures will increase the chance of other factions in the same system having Infrastructure Failures
- Natural Disasters will increase the chance of other factions in the same system having Infrastructure Failures or Droughts.
Usually the controlling faction will be getting enough transactions in any system busy enough to generate Event states on secondary factions to avoid contagion effects, but you can get a loop at particular levels and balances of system activity where the non-controlling factions end up passing around a "contagion" Infrastructure Failure between them.
Almost all Event states with the exception of Outbreak (no effect) and Public Holiday (minor positive effect) cost a small amount of influence each day ... in general, because the states are unpredictable, and have short durations and long cooldowns, it's usually masked by the effects of other transactions or passing traffic. -1 INF a day sounds a lot but in almost all systems you can move several times that yourself anyway.
Event states (except Outbreak) also tend to drain either or both of the economy and security state sliders at a phenomenal rate. Stabilising the influence loss they cause is trivial in all but the highest-population systems. Stabilising those sliders is much harder: un-countered they can easily push a faction to Famine+Lockdown, which is where most of the negative economic and security states come from nowadays.
I'm going to have to bookmark this post! I don't see you mention what actually causes Infrastructure Failures, however. I assumed it was sabotaging an installation in Odyssey, but what if I attack space installations owned by the faction I'm fighting, would that cause an IF?
Of course I used to think that pirating cargo ships would trigger Pirate Attack events, but somebody told me it doesn't work that way. It sounds like "common sense" often does not apply to the BGS.
No-one knows. The way Event states happen is hard to track and very slow to analyse, and because they're not directly useful for taking over systems and crushing your enemies, no-one with a research team has gone to look at them. The best we have is this old snapshot from an official Frontier stream
which says a few of the things which cause / deter Pirate Attack and Outbreak (the other Events didn't exist at the time, so aren't mentioned)
Beyond "various combinations of negative actions => the other event states" (which includes Inf Failure) I don't think there's a lot to go on. Lots of people think that they're random - I disagree, there's too much consistency in which ones do or don't show up in particular systems or factions, but I think they are meant to feel random and unpredictable even if they're just as deterministic as the rest of the BGS in principle.
It'll give you stolen goods, which if you sell them at a black market should count as smuggling, which that table says is "Pirate Attack Up".
Whether it does that faster than the assaults on the ships being pirated and/or the kills of system authority/bounty hunter ships defending them causes a different state like Terrorism is hard to say and probably depends on your exact piracy style, of course.
That's one of the big problems with trying to cause particular Event states - you can easily get a different one instead, and they all have a 14-day cooldown before you can get the next one, by which time whatever you were trying to do with it has passed.
tl;dr "supporting a faction" typically looks like either trade/exploration (station owner dependant), which hurts nobody, or running missions such as massacre/ assassination/ salvage/ hijack... which hurt only anarchy factions. So if your goal is to support everyone except a target lawful faction, that overwhelmingly looks like beating on pirates.
...
As mentioned, the best way to "hurt" a faction is not to attack it (as there's no practical ways to do that), but to instead support other factions.
While that support can look like trade and exploration data, they hinge on conditions like station ownership and such... the things that work regardless of station ownership (and are therefore much more accessible) are:
- bounty hunting (Which almost always is sourced from killing pirates, which all
are almost universally from anarchy factions); and
- running missions
The former obviously targets Anarchy factions. The latter is more complicated when considering mission types, but the skinny of it is outside of the war state, most missions will:
- always give positive effects for the faction offering the mission, and either:
- have positive effects for a secondary lawful faction (in the case of trade, delivery etc); or
- have negative effects for an anarchy faction (massacre, assassination, black box recovery).
Last i did some numbers on this, outside of a war state, a typical 100- mission board broke down as
- 20-35 with no target
- 15-25 with positive effects for a lawful target
- 40-odd with adverse effects for an anarchy faction; and
- 10 or so which target lawful factions, though approx 7 were offered exclusively by anarchy factions.
So what? If you crunch the numbers further on this, you come to this conclusion.... any generated mission is about 20-30 times more likely to have negative effects on an anarchy faction than a lawful faction. [1]
[1] a typical mission board means any given anarchy faction within 20ly will have 3-4 missions targeting it while a lawful faction has a 1-in-6 chance of having a single mission targeting it
This is a useful refresher thread on some of the BGS concepts. Thanks, CMDRs.
I've been working a system where the #3 (highest INF) faction is to be suppressed. I presumed that running missions for the #1 and #2 factions would be the most time-efficient (while being effective) manner to pressure that #3 faction. The reason is that there's not much INF to steal from the #4 thru #7 factions given their low INFs and because it's easier to steal INF from higher-INF factions than from lower ones.
Just for reference, the INF numbers for the factions are approx: 48%, 21%, 15%, 7.x%, 7.x%, 1.x% & 1%
I've been working a system where the #3 (highest INF) faction is to be suppressed. I presumed that running missions for the #1 and #2 factions would be the most time-efficient (while being effective) manner to pressure that #3 faction. The reason is that there's not much INF to steal from the #4 thru #7 factions given their low INFs and because it's easier to steal INF from higher-INF factions than from lower ones.
Just for reference, the INF numbers for the factions are approx: 48%, 21%, 15%, 7.x%, 7.x%, 1.x% & 1%
Marginally after. There has been some attempt to incorporate the new stuff, but it was early on when no-one really knew how it worked (including in terms of emergent behaviour, Frontier, who were desperately trying to stabilise it after it started showing some incredibly counter-intuitive behaviour) and they didn't take out the old stuff.
The problem with having a guide in one place is that someone has to take responsibility for keeping it up-to-date and you don't have any way to know how reliable they are - it's a lot of work to do properly, even for a relatively narrow aspect, never mind the extra work of making a guide which is both understandable by non-experts but doesn't dangerously over-simplify, which is why no-one has tried since 3.3 released. At least with a forum message you can tell instantly whether it was posted last week or six years ago and get some indication that way, and you can also tell from the replies to their post whether what they said was reasonably representative of current consensus or a "fringe theory" at the time.
As far as obvious mistakes in that guide go:
- It says there are three ways to increase faction influence (there are at least four distinct positive groups of actions - trade, bounties, exploration and missions)
- It says there are 12 types of government, then goes on to list 13, one of which doesn't exist, and one of which is an economy rather than a government. (There is a 12th: "Engineer" - all factions of that type are hidden non-influence factions)
- It says Democracies have no War but Elections. All factions except Criminal ones can have Elections, but only with other "similar" factions.
- It says Cooperatives are low population and security; they can have any population and security
- It says Confederacies can change states quickly; they change states at the same rate as anyone else
- It says a lot of other fanfic stuff about various government types too but you get the idea...
- The missions and actions section mostly suffers from being extremely out-of-date, but is so old that none of the information can be relied on anyway.
- The states section is mostly pre-3.3 (one state per system, state priorities) with an attempt made to update it post-3.3 with the new states and sliders. Unfortunately they didn't take out the obsoleted information in the process, so this section now just contradicts itself wildly and is wrong more often than it's right where it doesn't. It looks like most of the pre-3.3 information was reasonably good, but that won't help you now
- The "managing your minor faction" section is more qualitative and even has reasonably good advice to start with, though its estimate of the tick time is of course only ever right by coincidence. However, the section on conflicts seems again to be a merger of pre- and post-3.3 content and is extremely misleading about how you win elections and incomplete about wars. The expansions section is an (uncredited) copy of a list I put together some years back so was right at the time (honest!) but is now out-of-date in a few key aspects, and then after that it has very out-of-date information on amounts of actions required.
This statement confuses me. I thought the faction owning the station that rewards the bounty is the faction that gets the bump in INF. I get missions, because those are offered by the individual factions, but how do I use bounty hunting to strengthen my own faction (no an Anarchy) and / or hurt the current ruling faction (also not an Anarchy)?
I don't quite get what you're saying... so let me rephrase slightly.
Handing in bounty vouchers benefits the faction who issued the bounty, within the system you hand it in.
Just to set the scene:
Faction A is present in System X and Y, and owns some stations in System X
Faction B is present in System X and Y, and owns some stations in System Y
Let's say i earn bounty vouchers for Faction A in System X.
If i cash them in System X at a station X owns, Faction A benefits with INF in System X
If i cash them in System Y at a station B owns, Faction A benefits with INF in System Y.
So if I cash bounties for A in System Y, A will gain influence (and as usual, all other factions lose a small amount of influence).
Station ownership doesn't change who gets INF for bounties handed in... only who issued the bounty.
Edit: unlike trade, where profit selling on the market generates influence for the station owner.
Okay... If I'm reading this right, my faction has to be the ruling faction in some system somewhere to issue bounties. But if it doesn't, them I'm out of luck?
I guess I'll just keep running boring missions until I can eventually take possession of a station.
Basically, yes. They don't need to own a system... they just need jurisdiction, which extends out a certain radius from any owned station... but most bounty farming spots essentially require system jurisdiction.
If a faction owns no assets, they won't have jurisdiction anywhere. I'm unsure how kws work these days, and whether you could get an extrajurisdictional bounty for your faction with that, but it would be horribly unreliable. Missions are best when you own no assets.
note that this means that once you've taken control of a system with a haz-res, once you expand you can just dump those bounty vouchers in any system where you want to boost your influence and security, regardless of where you actually killed the pirates.
A way I find easy to remember this is:
- labelled influence goes to the labelled faction (bounties, combat bonds and missions are labelled with their issuer; some missions and crimes are labelled with a target)
- unlabelled influence goes to the station controller (trade goods and exploration data don't have factional labels)
(and not that it's an issue for you in Legacy, but exobiology just does nothing to influence)
Ah, yes, i didn't want to get into unlabelled bounties...
That one is peculiar since I imagine exobiology leading to advances in medicines and crops. My problem is that I try to apply common sense to the BGS, so I think, "If I pirate cargo ships in this system, well of course that will cause the system to report Pirate Attacks as the state of things."
I might be in luck with my own BGS adventures, because I believe the space-based installations are owned by my adopted faction. I say this because all the ships milling about those installations belong to my faction. I have yet to witness an "defend the installation" event triggered which would allow me to see the two sides, perhaps because my faction is currently in elections, but shouldn't there be a way to know who owns space installations? If so, where is it displayed?
If you drop to normal space and target it as a navigation target (rather than as a short-range target), you'll get the faction ownership shown in the targeting panel on the left of the main HUD.
Doesn't quite work if the installation is owned by an Anarchy faction, but unless there's multiple Anarchy factions in the system you still get enough information.
Seeing who owns the ships around it also works.
Thanks for the in depth response - the site was useful to me in the past, but maybe I was lucky not to tread on the mines, hence why I suggested it.
Wow, wasn´t expecting that many replies, this topic has become a BGS compendium! Thank you for your replies!
One more question: when two factions have their influence locked because of a war, how does influence work for the other factions?
One more question: when two factions have their influence locked because of a war, how does influence work for the other factions?
Mostly the same as normal, but with a reduced pool.
So if two factions lock on 10% each, the remaining five factions are now just moving 80% around rather than 100% around, so their "shares" are taken out of that smaller denominator.
Changes as side effects of states aren't affected by the lock and still use the full 100% pool; this can be weaponised to force a retreat to succeed by setting up a conflict at a very high influence level (two 40%+ factions, say) so that the remaining pool is very small and gets the 2% daily retreat tax taken out of it, leaving insufficient influence for the retreating faction to even get theoretically above 2.5% by the end of the process.
A famous example of this was during the Anarchy Wars to force The Nameless out of the Union system
You can see The Nameless (bright green line) avoid a conventional retreat with a last-minute influence boost around 25 July ... which the other side then responded to by locking Explorers' Nation and Societas Eruditorum in repeated control conflicts in the 40-50% range and trying again. It took three goes even then for the anti-anarchist side to get the timing of the retreat and the control conflict lined up properly to guarantee the retreat was unbreakable - it's not a magic bullet - but it was a very powerful way to break a stalemate in this case.
(Also on that graph on 6 August you can see the effects of the Explorer's Nation faction paying the 15% expansion tax while locked in a conflict - quite dramatic, and looks like it must surely be a bug if you don't realise what's happened)
So while my adopted faction (the one I want to win) is locked in election, I can push another faction forward to continue to pull the "colonizers" (PMF) down in INF while I wait for the election to play out?