In this week’s devlog Michi talks about the three sources of faction influence.
You can find the full issue of the development log here.
1 Like
When governor titles include some kind of influence generation, there is suddenly a new competing incentive to become governor. Currently, governors win their re-election if they fulfilled their basic duties (fill CogC etc). Challengers have a hard time to convince others on the planet that they would be a better governor if the current governor keeps up with their essential tasks. (There are only a few exceptions to this general rule, for example over controlling the finances of a planet).
If a governor title also generates influence for a faction, it is suboptimal for a faction to have one player govern multiple planets. This creates a conflict of interest: Players want reliable governors (a rare kind of player) but they also want to maximize influence generation for their faction. We would need many more good governors to give each planet their own governor.
While there are a few ways to solve this, my favorite would be to outsource the current governor tasks, like CogC and POPI filling, to a third party. This could reuse the systems for gateway upkeep. Another option would be government stores, where the govt decides on a price at which they buy upkeep materials and all players are compensated automatically for contributing materials. This “govt store” feature could also work for gateways. In particular, government storefronts would also increase participation of the general public in the government mechanics.
Once reliability is not the main focus of elections anymore, it opens the doors to elect based on maximal influence generation, regional projects (like gateways) etc. This would make elections more interesting.
6 Likes
The generation is dependent on the workforce size, its satisfaction and type.
Does that mean the consumable supply or the POPR satisfaction?
The POPR satisfaction would be interesting as it would add some more flavor to governing than 50% for stable and over 70% for growing.
1 Like
Currently we have governeurs often running one big planet and multiple small ones (me included) or even a full system or sector. I don’t think it would be a good idea to make their government “worth less” just because they run multiple planets.
1 Like
No, it refers to the base’s workforce, not the planet’s population.
I like the idea to let users ‘opt into’ being included in whichever faction most appeals to them, and not locking it to their starting faction.
I believe that this single choice should include not only receiving faction contracts, but also the players faction badge on their company page and their financial reporting currency
I think using the Gateway upkeep system for POPI and COGC upkeep makes sense. (with some improvements, currently it is a little buggy)
However, I also like this idea of a “government store”. Maybe the government could place orders for up to X amount of Y material at Z price per unit. That anyone could then fill and this would be automatically loaded into upkeep store. (So probably an order would have to be set up for each Gateway/COGC/POPI upkeep mat individually for the ones the government wants filled).
This could be in place of the existing POPI/COGC upkeep system for planets that have built whatever planetary project would unlock this storefront. Then it would be the existing POPI/COGC upkeep system for smaller planets that hasn’t built this project.
If that is out of scope, then simply moving POPI/COGC upkeep to use the gateway infrastructure system also works.
2 Likes
Both features would reduce the load and responsibility of governors significantly, and let other players contribute to their planets. This would free up elections to focus more on influence and politics rather than who is the best at doing chores.
1 Like
I am not sure about stores as it doesn’t create planable demand for individual players if everyone can fill it, I think having the ability to do conts like gateway fuel/upkeep would be better.
Not that I would count gov as one of the current bigger issues.
2 Likes
I have many concerns.
The first, is the conflict of interest for governor. It already has been described above,I won’t repeat it.
The second is the workforce influence generation. Could you please explain your reasoning on why a higher tier pops should generate more influence than lower tier ? Wouldn’t it make sense to reward profit rather than tier ?
For example, there are base that are extracting raw resource. Those are extremely profitable but require a huge amount of shipping, making them very late game, despite being pioneer. Why would a late player building this base be punished for it ?
Here, I would recommend the following as an improvement to the system you described : Let the faction sell influence. For example, the faction government could decide to sell 10k influence point, and then players could then put bids for them. The money earned would then be used as budget in the faction government.
Please reward profit and capital, and not just the amount of scientist one have.
The third is about faction contracts. Please allow the faction to send out faction contracts for things it wants to be done. Please make it interesting, no one like doing planet exploration on the most developed planet on the universe. The game has always been about community interactions and smart decisions. To send a ship to phobos and click a button on a generated contract is neither.
2 Likes
@Laaus
Just sharing my two cents on what you posted.
Going by population over profit ties into the existing government systems more (like COGC votes). Also since this is referring to the faction itself generating influence to be used primarily to ‘paint the map’, I don’t think this would be auctioned off to players. Rather it would be generated by the population of the faction over anything else. Also, those lucrative resource extraction planets are usually found outside of faction space.
Definitely agree that part of this update could be the faction level government essentially acting as a federal government and issuing faction contracts along with things like setting starting planets that have already been mentioned here before.
2 Likes
@ MartianEngineer
I’ve been re-reading the original post about influence points.
If influence points is only used to determine the faction affiliation of a system, then
-
Auctions make no sense
-
The proposed system is fine, even good.
So, my bad on that.
I still think auction for faction wide politics points, would make sense, but unless I’m missing a dev log, this is now out of context.
1 Like
Gotcha, that makes more sense in context, thanks for the clarification!
The ability for the faction gov to auction “something” off does seem like it could be an interesting mechanic though. Curious what it could be used for.
1 Like
Perhaps generating ECD? This is a small head cannon I’ve had, that this would be a good time in place to introduce them as a proper mechanic. It would especially make sense if factions had the ability to interact with each other, which would necessitate a common currency.
1 Like
I especially agree with the idea about faction contracts. I think it would be interesting If each of the people that they come from would be actual players, in charge of setting up the rate and where the contracts get delivered, as well as what specifically they entail. I think a really helpful part of this update could be taking some NPC level parts of the game and putting them in the control of the players, for example, with market makers. I think this is a really good place to put them, and it would make the game a lot more interesting, especially for long-term players who have an incentive To really try and help manage the game for the benefit of everyone, not just play it for profit.
2 Likes
our logs indicate that some actions still take quite some time to finish, for example, mission calculations sometimes take up to 1-2 seconds. That is not ideal, and we’ll continue to improve that in the future.
I would really appreciate a bit more time to dive into this - as the playercount has risen in recent months, I’ve really seen actions start to spiral and take quite a bit of time. 5, 10 seconds is not uncommon to see for individual actions to complete. Even simple things like canceling a cx order, which I do a LOT.
It feels like the system is hung up on some other task, because I am able to queue up several of these at once, they all sit in the yellow pending state… and then bam it all completes at once.
3 Likes
Also, one thing I have been struggling with in recent days is momentarily losing connection - which isn’t that bad EXCEPT that all the popups I have open all of a sudden disappear. Which for some things is really annoying because now I have to reopen alot of stuff to get back to what I was doing.
To be clear - my internet connection is fine through this time - other windows are not affected - it is just the Prun tab reloads and resets.
The approach mentioned in dev log would pretty much punish players doing mostly shipping and trading. They can have an equity value similar to players focus on production and with more bases and workforces, yet get little rewards under this mechanism, since they have most of their capital into ships and trading commodities rather than running bases. Myself is a good yet extreme example: I have more ships than amount of workforces, I can generate little faction influence based on the mechanism said in dev log, maybe less than a 20-days old new player. The play style of running a shipping company in PrUn is already punished so I’d like to have some love for those players.
In my opinion, faction influence is associated with involvement: running governments, completing contracts, production lines, shipping, faction contracts… you engage in game and with other players. Thinking this way, we can have much more ways to generate influence in addition to dev log have mentioned, such as:
- Trading at CX gives you faction influence local to that CX
e.g.: Trade at ANT gives some Antares points even if you’re from Insitor. - Posting/Taking LM ads gives you faction influence local to location of LM
e.g.: Taking a LM ad on Vallis gives some NEO points even if you’re from Antares. - Completing a contract with another player gains and exchanges faction influence
e.g.: Two Antares players both getting some Antares points on contract completion; Antares player with a Castillo player would be Antares player get some Castillo points and vice versa. - Doing contract with government gives more faction points (you’re building a gateway you certainly deserve more)
- Building/Upgrading ships gains influence local to location of shipyard
e.g.: Castillo player building a ship at Avalon gains Insitor points. - Sending ships to foreign factions gains native influence once returned to native faction region
e.g.: A Castillo player gains Castillo points when their ship returns to Castillo region, amount can be related to locations visited and time spent abroad. Points won’t be given when ship is abroad, think that as officials need to read flight log. (feat. fleet propaganda faction contract that asks you to repair ships) - Running ships in foreign faction region gains local influence once corresponding influence value is above a threshold
e.g.: An Insitor player with 300 Antares points gains some Antares point for every flight in Antares region (you’re a trusted partner despite being foreign), while another Insitor player with 10 Antares point would not.
1 Like
I’ve seen some of this, but my biggest pain point right now is the 30 seconds or so it takes to switch contexts since I govern a few planets.
1 Like
The huge amount of friction of operating in the context window is the single reason why I don’t run for any offices.
For example, issuing a cash payment to yourself for fulfilling popi and cogc
-
switch to govt context
-
issue contract
-
switch to your personal context
-
accept contract
-
switch back to govt context, issue payment
-
switch back to personal context, accept payment
1 Like