Powerplay What are Ethos and how do they affect gameplay?

[Gavin Burke]

So I've looked though the wikia.com pages about PP and seen different Ethos like Finance, Social, Combat etc. but there wasn't a link anywhere to explain what they meant??

For example, I'm aligned with Li Yong-Rui whose ethos are I think Social, Finance, Finance - does that mean I can't gain merits by combat??

 

[SHEPR0N]

You can always gain combat merits by undermining control or expansion systems of hostile powers (going there and blow their native PP ships up). If it's an expansion of a combat power you can also earn combat merits by fighting in the PP conflict zones that spawn there. Powers expanding with combat usually have combat as their expansion ethos, with the exception of Antal who is also using combat expansions but has the social expansion ethos for some reason.

The preparation ethos has no actual gameplay effect, it's just there to be there really. The expansion & control ethoses affect expansion success and fortification triggers. Basically if you have enough favourable governments in an expansion/control bubble those triggers are halfed, if there are enough unfavourable ones they are doubled.

 

[Gavin Burke]

You can always gain combat merits by undermining control or expansion systems of hostile powers (going there and blow their native PP ships up). If it's an expansion of a combat power you can also earn combat merits by fighting in the PP conflict zones that spawn there. Powers expanding with combat usually have combat as their expansion ethos, with the exception of Antal who is also using combat expansions but has the social expansion ethos for some reason.

The preparation ethos has no actual gameplay effect, it's just there to be there really. The expansion & control ethoses affect expansion success and fortification triggers. Basically if you have enough favourable governments in an expansion/control bubble those triggers are halfed, if there are enough unfavourable ones they are doubled.

Cheers for the reply - I'll continue with super rich Li then and just go kill some NPC's somewhere