War and Civil War: BGS Guide - Best Current Thinking

Jane Turner

Volunteer Moderator
Jane Turner
Collected Wisdom of the BGS community on the War and Civil War state

  • Who: Wars can be triggered between factions long as they are from different >>Social Groups<< or are anarchies. Otherwise elections are triggered.
  • War or Civil War: A war occurs between factions from different home systems and Civil Wars occur between factions from the same home system, regardless of where the conflict occurs.
  • How to trigger?: There are two ways to trigger a conflict. (i) Equalisation: If the influence of two factions are the same and above 7%. There is no need to finesse the influence levels to get an exact match. If the influence of the two factions would have crossed, they "catch" at the cross-over point. There are now examples of catches being missed in low population systems with low influence factions - i.e. a faction is skipped. (ii) Coups: If a faction is not in control of a system, a coup war is triggered if they reach greater than 60% and either faction is not in cooldown.
  • Timings Following the "catch" or reaching the coup level, war or civil war will show as a pending state in the system that the conflict has triggered. It will not show as a pending state in other systems controlled by either faction apart from in the faction summaries or squadron overviews. Wars are pending for 1 day before they become active. Combat Zones will appear in the system usually close to a planet, though not always in the most obvious places. You can detect them with the FSS or by visiting and scanning the nav beacon. CZ's are detectable from 1000Ls away. Wars run for 7 days and you compete to dominate for each day. The war will end once victory is inevitable. Wars can retrigger the tick after they finish. but if the gain ot loss at the end of a war causes the influence to cross another faction, a new war will not trigger immeidately.
  • How to win To win a war and any assets associated with it, you need to win by at least one day [by two clear days], in which case you will gain 4% influence. [Currently some variations again 2/3/19] If you only win by one day you will gain 2%[?] and no asset. To dominate a day you need to do one more war action than the opposition. War actions include bond drops, bounty drops, combat mission [assainations, ground attacks, massacre etc] and completing war objectives and scenarios. It is likely that murder still has an effect but this has not been tested as yet.
  • Asset Transfer The highest value asset owned by the losing faction will be transferred to the winning faction. The highest value asset is predictable, but there are rare exceptions. Spaceports are rated higher than surface ports, surface ports with landing pads are rated higher than other installations, Large pad spaceports are rated higher than outposts, outposts with facilities are rated ahead of those without. It appears that a hidden value (population) may be the deciding factor between large space stations. Indirectly this can be assessed by the volume of biowaste/hydrogen fuel in the Commodity Market. Also, the age of the installation seems to play a part.
  • Capital Ships Conflicts involving a Federation or Empire faction may involve captial ships. They are only found in High-Intensity Zones.
  • Influence: When a war is active or pending, influence is locked for the duration of the war. At completion there will be 8, 4 or 0 difference in influence between the warring factions depending on days won. There is currently some variation in these numbers and it is not yet clear if this is intended or not.
*Influence figures that show in the game may be rounded up. The figure to 3 decimal places can be located in EDSM.

Back to >>STATES<<
Back to >>START<<
Back to >>TRANSACTIONS<<



As ever if there is anything to add/remove/improve - please shout!
 
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Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Social groups (aka ethos):

There are four social groups. For almost all factions, the government type of the faction determines which social group it is in, but there are some exceptions to this for both player and NPC factions, especially near Colonia.

Social:
- opens black markets
- elections with other Socials, wars with others
- usual group for Democracy, Cooperative, Confederacy or Communist governments, and some Theocracy governments

Corporate:
- closes black markets
- elections with other Corporates, wars with others
- usual group for Corporation government

Authoritarian:
- closes black markets
- elections with other Authoritarians, wars with others
- usual group for Dictatorship, Patronage, Feudal or Prison Colony governments, and some Theocracy governments

Criminal:
- opens black markets [1]
- offers wider range of illegal missions
- never has elections [2], always war/civil war
- usual group for Anarchy government

[1] The changelog states that black market transactions are positive for Anarchy factions. It's possible - but I know of no suitable test site - that they're actually positive for all Criminal group factions.

[2] I know of no non-Criminal Anarchy, and the only two Criminal non-Anarchies I know are positioned such that I'd have to fight a multiple front BGS war with several organised player groups to get them close enough together to see what sort of conflict they have. So this may be a property of Anarchies rather than Criminals.
 
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_trent_

Volunteer Moderator
_trent_
Ian Doncaster said:
(TODO: What's the default group for Theocracy? I've seen both Social and Authoritarian claimed.)
Click to expand...

Theocracy comes under Authoritarian. We have a few near us and they always go into Elections with Dictatorships/Patronages, and into wars with Democracies and Cooperatives.
 

Deleted member 38366

D
Note/Question on the Cooldown :

While the official Cooldown is 1 Day, IMHO due to the server-side technical requirements, to trigger on the day after the official Cooldown is over, it appears one would need a precision match since AFAIK passing of a Faction will not result in a "catch & match" event.
(same is technically valid for Elections from the looks of it)

While technically not making it 2 Days cooldown, in effect it often acts like it.

I believe this is due to the order of processing on the Server side of things.
It seems the Servers see and calculate i.e. a pass of a Faction after the 1 Day cooldown, but internally still see the Cooldown active at that moment (flag not removed yet due to processing order?).
So if a Faction is to trigger again (Elections/Conflict) at the earliest possible moment, AFAIK one can't rely on pushing beyond to catch for that BGS cycle. Faction would blow right by another candidate without triggering.

Source : V3.0 observations with Colonia BGS, when multiple qualifying Factions in multiple Systems passed on Day 2 after a Conflict formally ended - but didn't catch/trigger; don't have Bubble BGS Data to back these observations up

Would need others to confirm that though, since all I have are these observations (fully expected the Faction to trigger somewhere - but didn't).
Plus, I haven't tested if even a precision match would actually trigger or not on the earliest possible moment - if not, it'd mean 1 additional Day cooldown (that'd be similar to the "overtime Day" of Conflicts and Elections).
 
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Greybeard_LXI

G
I did not see anything about which transactions are effective for wars, which I expected.

Looking deeper, this links from the States post which has a table with the data. But lots of people (all right, at least one, me) see a table and quickly go to the next line of text.

I am confused by all the discussion on which BH and bond transactions affect influence based on where they are turned in. It seemed to be a pretty complex thing: Bonds earned in one system affect the faction when turned in in that system but not in others; Bountys earned in one system affect the BGS in the system turned in, but now I'm confusing myself because the bounty gives influence to the station owner. Please do not derail this thread to clarify -- I am not that deep into the BGS that I really need the details and can check the old posts when it's relevant to me.

I think it would at least help if this post pointed readers back to the table in the state post saying transaction effects are limited during war.

I think it would help to at least mention that the
 

MottiKhan

MottiKhan
Greybeard_LXI said:
I did not see anything about which transactions are effective for wars, which I expected.

Looking deeper, this links from the States post which has a table with the data. But lots of people (all right, at least one, me) see a table and quickly go to the next line of text.

I am confused by all the discussion on which BH and bond transactions affect influence based on where they are turned in. It seemed to be a pretty complex thing: Bonds earned in one system affect the faction when turned in in that system but not in others; Bountys earned in one system affect the BGS in the system turned in, but now I'm confusing myself because the bounty gives influence to the station owner. Please do not derail this thread to clarify -- I am not that deep into the BGS that I really need the details and can check the old posts when it's relevant to me.

I think it would at least help if this post pointed readers back to the table in the state post saying transaction effects are limited during war.

I think it would help to at least mention that the
Click to expand...

Bounties affect the faction that issued the bounty. Not the station owner. So if you turn in a bounty for faction A in system B, the influence will go to faction A in system B.

Unless that faction isn't present in system B. In that case, you can't turn the bounty in without an Interstellar Factor (IF). Bounties turned in at the IF don't affect influence.
 

Dommarraa

Dommarraa
Investment is unique and runs in parallel to other faction states. If either side are in investment, then all cz will be in ceasefire. Wars can still be won either by gaining influence in the war pending stage, or by handing in bounties to the relevant system during the war state.
 

Jane Turner

Volunteer Moderator
Jane Turner
added this

High and Low Intensity CZs: These vary in the number/rate of NPC ships which and how evenly matched the sides are. Paradoxically Low intensity CZs can be more intesnse than High Intensity ones if the side you are supporting are heavily outnumbered. CZs may relocate!

Capital Ships Conflicts involving a Federation or Empire faction may involve captial ships. They are only found in High Intensity Zones.
 

Greno Zee

Greno Zee
Jane Turner said:
  • System-Wide effects: Whilst a war is active, only combat activities will contribute to the influence of the faction in all systems. See the link to transactions.
Click to expand...
Until now I couldn't find the following mentioned anywhere and I believe it deserves a clarification:
Combat activities include Bounty Hunting (at least in other systems where the waring faction is in control, not sure about the system where the war takes place). So you can counter the global negative effects on a waring faction by destroying wanted ships.
 

MottiKhan

MottiKhan
Greno Zee said:
Until now I couldn't find the following mentioned anywhere and I believe it deserves a clarification:
Combat activities include Bounty Hunting (at least in other systems where the waring faction is in control, not sure about the system where the war takes place). So you can counter the global negative effects on a waring faction by destroying wanted ships.
Click to expand...

Killing wanted ships has no effect on influence. Turning in the bounties does.
 
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