While playing, I've noticed that for the most part, NPC's and their respective factions don't seem to have any sort of goals, resources or purposeful behavior behind them. You jump into a USS and there is a funeral procession, traveling at the snails pace of ~110m/s in the middle of nowhere, going nowhere, and for no reason. They're not actually moving to a destination, or trying to accomplish something of their own. They are simply placed there, purely for the players benefit, and operate almost identically to random encounters in games such as Pokemon.
It honestly feels still very heavily WIP, factions don't seem to have any sort of resources, or real A.I behind them. You do missions and raise a % bar until conflict zones appear. We're not providing warring factions with actual resources that they need. We could be delivering cupcakes or 30 ton crates of anime and it would still have the same affect as delivering 50 tons of battle armor, or food. It's arbitrary, abstract, illogical, and as far as I can tell, pretty shallow at this point, and things only work because the system decides that it works. The system decides that ample supplies of cupcakes and anime are a substantial boost to their political and military might, the system decides that therefor conflict zones should appear, and the system decides that whoever has players running the most missions delivering cupcakes will win that war and eventually expand.
The faction system/interaction just boils down to me grinding missions for an arbitrary result that makes no sense. Why on earth is the ruling faction telling me to destroy system authority vessels? Why can't I interact with this faction beyond grinding mission to raise an arbitrary percentage of influence with end results that make no sense?
The A.I factions either need vastly more sophisticated A.I, with limited resources, personalities, and motives of their own. An example I've collected was posted by the user FoxTwo, and it hasn't seemed to have changed:
and another one by user Fergal:
In short, this means that players actions are essentially meaningless since they have no potential for significant chain effects or results. For example, running missions has no logical or real results, but instead just gives an arbitrary "+1% influence", no matter what that mission is. It could be the ruling government in the system asking you to kill their own law enforcement, and it would still give +1% influence for no logical reason.
In a truly dynamic simulation, there could be a hypothetical civil war with a hypothetical under-equipped faction in need of arms and armor and this would be reflected in that they're flying crappy sidewinders with like 1 pulse laser. They could put out a mission for a player to run guns for them, and if the player accepts and successfully runs those guns, the underdog faction now has a stockpile of weapons to arm their ships with, such. The visible effect is that their sidewinders now have railguns. But that's not where it ends. It continues on in that, since their sidewinders now outgun the enemy, they start winning fights, and gaining ground in their system until eventually, they're not the underdog anymore. They take control of resource extraction zones, and reassign some of their fighters or recruit other npcs/players to mine for them. They start making more and more money. The visible effect is that those sidewinders are now replaced with Vipers and Cobras since they can now buy more ships.
X is a good example of a game that has a dynamic PVE game world (although very poorly optimized and kind of clumsy in ways) and grand strategy games such as CK2, victoria 2, etc, manage thousands of a.i factions doing all sorts of things.
Should we individually manage each specific ship and tiny hauler? No, probably not. But I do think that if you kill a factions hauler that should deduct from their total resources. Similar to how in EUIV, when I have 1 unit made up of a thousand men, that takes 1000 men out of my manpower pool, and when 1 of them dies in the simulation, I have to pour more manpower into the unit to replenish it. That's something that ED seems to lack: proper resource tracking and an abstract or a tangible grand A.I of any sort.
Also take a look at Limit Theory, which is similar in a lot of ways in that it's a vast procedurally generated game with A.I factions and NPC's with agendas. Miners are mining to make a profit. They go to the station and sell, the station gets stock. In ED, it just doesn't work that way. Minerals and ore are available at a station due to magic, seemingly. Killing miners does not reduce the level of available stock. I think at the moment, there are currently around 3000 populated systems, correct? I don't think that's out of the realm of possibility to simulate to a complicated enough level to make it truly dynamic.
Instead of a single abstract percentage representing a factions power, why not have things such as money, personnel, material resources, popular support, all with limited quantities that can be organically diminished or consolidated (such as destroying a ship means that faction has one less ship available to them) with which the A.I tries its best to further its agenda with? Here's just the basic jist of something more in depth that I'd like to see
Or something along those lines. The point is, you can either support or hurt a faction in a lot of ways. They could lose an important fight that actually happened in game, losing their anacondas and being significantly less capable, which would actually show in gameplay instead of on just the newsfeed.
But instead, it seems that what we currently have is
It honestly feels still very heavily WIP, factions don't seem to have any sort of resources, or real A.I behind them. You do missions and raise a % bar until conflict zones appear. We're not providing warring factions with actual resources that they need. We could be delivering cupcakes or 30 ton crates of anime and it would still have the same affect as delivering 50 tons of battle armor, or food. It's arbitrary, abstract, illogical, and as far as I can tell, pretty shallow at this point, and things only work because the system decides that it works. The system decides that ample supplies of cupcakes and anime are a substantial boost to their political and military might, the system decides that therefor conflict zones should appear, and the system decides that whoever has players running the most missions delivering cupcakes will win that war and eventually expand.
The faction system/interaction just boils down to me grinding missions for an arbitrary result that makes no sense. Why on earth is the ruling faction telling me to destroy system authority vessels? Why can't I interact with this faction beyond grinding mission to raise an arbitrary percentage of influence with end results that make no sense?
The A.I factions either need vastly more sophisticated A.I, with limited resources, personalities, and motives of their own. An example I've collected was posted by the user FoxTwo, and it hasn't seemed to have changed:
and another one by user Fergal:
In short, this means that players actions are essentially meaningless since they have no potential for significant chain effects or results. For example, running missions has no logical or real results, but instead just gives an arbitrary "+1% influence", no matter what that mission is. It could be the ruling government in the system asking you to kill their own law enforcement, and it would still give +1% influence for no logical reason.
In a truly dynamic simulation, there could be a hypothetical civil war with a hypothetical under-equipped faction in need of arms and armor and this would be reflected in that they're flying crappy sidewinders with like 1 pulse laser. They could put out a mission for a player to run guns for them, and if the player accepts and successfully runs those guns, the underdog faction now has a stockpile of weapons to arm their ships with, such. The visible effect is that their sidewinders now have railguns. But that's not where it ends. It continues on in that, since their sidewinders now outgun the enemy, they start winning fights, and gaining ground in their system until eventually, they're not the underdog anymore. They take control of resource extraction zones, and reassign some of their fighters or recruit other npcs/players to mine for them. They start making more and more money. The visible effect is that those sidewinders are now replaced with Vipers and Cobras since they can now buy more ships.
X is a good example of a game that has a dynamic PVE game world (although very poorly optimized and kind of clumsy in ways) and grand strategy games such as CK2, victoria 2, etc, manage thousands of a.i factions doing all sorts of things.
Should we individually manage each specific ship and tiny hauler? No, probably not. But I do think that if you kill a factions hauler that should deduct from their total resources. Similar to how in EUIV, when I have 1 unit made up of a thousand men, that takes 1000 men out of my manpower pool, and when 1 of them dies in the simulation, I have to pour more manpower into the unit to replenish it. That's something that ED seems to lack: proper resource tracking and an abstract or a tangible grand A.I of any sort.
Also take a look at Limit Theory, which is similar in a lot of ways in that it's a vast procedurally generated game with A.I factions and NPC's with agendas. Miners are mining to make a profit. They go to the station and sell, the station gets stock. In ED, it just doesn't work that way. Minerals and ore are available at a station due to magic, seemingly. Killing miners does not reduce the level of available stock. I think at the moment, there are currently around 3000 populated systems, correct? I don't think that's out of the realm of possibility to simulate to a complicated enough level to make it truly dynamic.
Instead of a single abstract percentage representing a factions power, why not have things such as money, personnel, material resources, popular support, all with limited quantities that can be organically diminished or consolidated (such as destroying a ship means that faction has one less ship available to them) with which the A.I tries its best to further its agenda with? Here's just the basic jist of something more in depth that I'd like to see
Or something along those lines. The point is, you can either support or hurt a faction in a lot of ways. They could lose an important fight that actually happened in game, losing their anacondas and being significantly less capable, which would actually show in gameplay instead of on just the newsfeed.
But instead, it seems that what we currently have is
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