Newcomer / Intro Winning wars

[Thwarptide]

I know that to simply jump into a CZ and picking a side is pointless in the grand scheme of winning a war. You won’t make a lot of money from the combat bonds alone either.
Grab a massacre mission a make with the Kabooms While supporting the side you chose (choose wisely, cmdrs).
Q1:
However even after a year point five of getting rich on CZs alone, I’m still curious about what wins a war?
Such as, is it the number of battles won, the number of ships destroyed, a combination of both?
Q2:
I’ve never lost a war, even when a fought with a #5 dog against the #2 dog in the system where I destroyed Sirius corp and ruined their influence putting em in the #5 spot for a week. Now they and the top controlling dog are at it. Well I’d like to see the system flip, even for a short time. Sothis has been in the hands of Federation Unite and the Federation for too long. They need a break from it all . So I’m trying and fighting for Sirius corp. Fighting against the federation navy ships are also a blast.
Yesterday I fought twice as hard as I ever have. With 154 kills and 3 massacre missions under my wings, we still lost the day. Seems rather odd Based on my experience. While I would hate to lose my first war (yeah I know, it happens) I was still wondering if sometimes these system control flip wars are predetermined and flips are not allowed to happen?

 

[Sapyx]

1. "Player activity" wins wars. Winning a CZ, handing in bounties or combat bonds, doing certain mission types all count as "Activity". Each activity is assigned a certain obscure number of "war points" (how many "points" each activity earns is still up for debate, as it's hidden and it's very difficult to test under controlled conditions). Whichever side earns the most number of war points in a day, wins the battle for that day and gains one victory point. Whichever side reaches 4 victory points first (or whichever side has the most victory points after 1 week) wins the war.

You can "win a battle" for the day and gain a victory point by killing one Eagle in a CZ and handing in the combat bond for it - and you can even win the resultant war with just that one action, assuming no-one else in the entire game does any fighting for the other side, for the entire duration of the war. You can also "lose a battle" for the day and not gain the victory point, even though you blow up a million enemy ships - if you're the only one doing the fighting for your side, and other players come along and blow up a million-plus-one of your side's ships. There is, unfortunately, no way to know for sure whether anyone else is opposing you in a conflict, or whether you've "done enough" to win the day - you can use traffic reports to gauge player activity, but you won't know who they're fighting for until the day is over and the results are tallied.

2. Wars are not "predetermined", with the possible exception of CG wars which are manually ended with results based on the CG activity. The only systems that are "not allowed to flip" are the systems where war and conflict are forbidden: the Superpower capital systems, Shin Dez, a couple of Colonia systems, and that's it. As a general rule, if you can start a war, you can win a war.

Sothis was founded as a Sirius Corp colony; if FDev were going to lock in any ownership of Sothis, it would be Sirius Corp. You may find Sothis a tough nut to crack though. There's a lot of vested interest in keeping Sothis-Ceos a good Federation rank-grind hotspot. I suspect that even if you did manage to flip it back to Sirius, it would flip back in a few weeks time.

 

[Thwarptide]

Thanks for taking the time for the detailed explanation. While I’ve read a couple small bits of it elsewhere, thats all I could find and didn’t make much sense. Now it does.
Sothis and Ceos are also new carrier pilot parking lots. They’re attracted to the easy money that goes with Sirius Astronomics tours. For lack of financial planning, they’ve developed no skills to make money elsewhere and are condemned as slaves to their FCs. They rarely participate in 99% of the wars. Thats why I’ve had a lot of success here.
The last time Sirius and Federation Unite duked it out here it ended up a draw (I was out of town for all but 3 hrs of it. No reason to find by then.) Obviously nobody was really participating then. So now they have to carry on for another week.

. I suspect that even if you did manage to flip it back to Sirius, it would flip back in a few weeks time.

Yeah, as I said, I’d never really expect the flip to last long at all unless the next round would be equally fruitful. I don’t think I have enough fortitude to put that much effort into anyway

 

[Thwarptide]

You got me interested in traffic though.
I was curious to see how much and what.
The obvious ones for participating are minimal. I’d like to rule out the pythons because they’re popular for Sirius Astronomics tour runs out of Robigo Mines. Maybe 1-2 are actually fighting. But conservatively This leaves the possibility that there are 50 other commanders participating. Likely less. Like you pointed out, if they’re fighting, you don’t know who or what. Some are killing pirates. The Krait MkII is me. I’m the only smart one out here
interesting stuff though.

 

[Sapyx]

One advantage of doing your fighting in Sothis is: it's well outside of the Powerplay bubble. Trying to solo-flip systems within the Powerplay Bubble is tough, because the Power cohorts hate it when the "wrong" governments get installed and you would encounter severe and organized opposition. Out in the Sothis Spur, nobody cares about Power stuff.

 

[d8veh]

You're only one player in one instance. Other players, sometimes in large groups, in other instances might be fighting the same battles or war where you can't see them. Different groups and players have different allegiances. If you go to some random unpopular system and help fight a war of two unheard of factions, the result will probably be down to you, but if you go to a popular place where well-known and important factions are fighting, your efforts would probably be insignificant regarding the outcome.

 

[Thwarptide]

You're only one player in one instance. Other players, sometimes in large groups, in other instances might be fighting the same battles or war where you can't see them. Different groups and players have different allegiances. If you go to some random unpopular system and help fight a war of two unheard of factions, the result will probably be down to you, but if you go to a popular place where well-known and important factions are fighting, your efforts would probably be insignificant regarding the outcome.

Well, I personally don’t really care if it flips here or not. I’ve knocked each faction (except the controlling Empire United) down to the bottom of the list, put em in the #2 spot (which starts more wars). With 5 factions here, there’s almost always a war and nice cash flow. Sometimes there is two wars Going on. Seems to me that most participants don’t care about those. Apparently this war they do.
I’m cool with it, as long as I get paid my contract $$ and my combat bonds.
The CG war between The miners and Sirius corp was fun too. Sirius needed a boot up their collective bums anyway.