I've been doing Reactivation missions in order to get lotsa on-foot loot, and while doing them I noticed that there was some Powerplay related data and items I could loot, so I got to wondering how Powerplay fits in.
Turns out that for a newish CMDR, Powerplay offers a lot of rewards for doing the same stuff I'd be doing anyway, and it adds a layer of immersion I wasn't expecting.
I joined Aisling, because it's the shortest route to the Prismatics. I don't much care about the actual politics.
I found the initial Powerplay missions (or assignments as they call them) to be easy and even rather fun. You have to do 5 of these weekly mission thingies in order to be able to rank up in the Power you've chosen. After that, though, you can just do whatever you want.
So I'm still doing Reactivation missions, only now I get merits for completing them, and I can turn in certain loot and data for more merits.
Each time I gain a rank I get a care package with some credits and a bunch of mats (both ship and on-foot mats).
There's a sort of community goal type leader board each week, and you get a bunch of credits from that, just depending on where you fall in the percentages. I've already made it into the top 50% or whatever, and they will pay me 10,000,000 credits on Thursday. Or more if I go higher this week.
10 million for Codger is meaningless, but for Silvann it's a very nice chunk of change, for doing almost no extra work at all.
You can get merits for doing most things -- trading, exploration, missions, combat, etc. -- so I can just do what I feel like doing and get paid extra.
So color me surprised. I'm enjoying Powerplay. Who'd a thunk it?
I decided to buy a ship kit for the Mandalay, to help support FDEV and also to look cool in screenshots.
The Mandalay is turning out to be one of my favorite ships, ever. It flies great, and feels great. It jumps far, and lands easily.
I had to do a little combat in it for the Powerplay intro, and it worked just fine for that too.
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