The Machiavellian space opera
05 Oct 2024P Jarenstad
I have been spending some time in the Trakath system, a few light years from Colonia. I once decided to "adopt" a minor faction out here, and found the best candidate in this system: Colonia Mining Enterprise. I wanted to help an underdog, but also avoid the more prominent and well known factions that already have a lot of support from other CMDRs. Another requirement was that they should have a sensible government type, ie one thas is democratic at its core.
Now I finally have managed to hand (or contributed to handing) them the control of this system back. At least for a while, these states tend to change fast. According to Inara, this faction still only has four supporters, although it had only one when I decided to support them a while back.
It has been a struggle, mostly because of an encroaching faction that was finally forced out of this system a few days ago. They never made much progress, but acted in a very disruptive way towards the BGS just by being in the system. It's a player faction with dictatorship as their government type. Due to how the BGS works (or rather how it's flawed, I'd say, I'll get to that later), those can be nearly impossible to get rid of if there is a native anarchy faction in the system.
But how do the BGS (background simulation) work then? There are more CMDRs than just me that spend a lot of time manipulating it, but I feel that the majority of the community don't. It's a bit disappointing, because that's the true powerplay, while the mechanics named powerplay is a lot more restricted. They work in similar ways though, with powers and factions gaining or losing influence and/or control of systems. But the BGS is more detailed, from influence and control over whole systems to specific assets (ports, installations, settlements, etc).
The more assets a faction control, the more wealth it will gain. And those are useful tools for manipulating the influence of a faction, either in a positive or a negative way. So while control of many assets means more wealth, it also means that the faction will be more vulnerable to outside attempts to manipulate its influence.
Besides assets, trade, missions and combat are ways to affect the influence of a faction. Increasing it is rather simple. Just accept missions - preferably with influence as a reward - and carry them out. Trade with a profit at faction-controlled ports. Or cash in bounties on NPCs that are wanted by this faction. It's pretty straightforward. If you want to lower their influence it works in a reverse fashion. Fail missions that you have accepted, trade with a loss at ports controlled by the faction, or destroy the faction's ships if they have a clean wanted status. The problem here is that it will lower your reputation, and you will eventually end up on hostile terms with the faction you're targeting. Try to land at their ports, and the will try to shoot you down. Attacking ships will also result in you being wanted for murder.
Besides the trade at regular markets, we also have black markets.
They work in a different way. First of all you can only sell illegal goods there, and you will not make much of a profit. But this will always hurt the influence of the faction controlling the port (or perhaps the system, not sure). And those actions will lower your reputation with this faction as well.
There are two exceptions to these rules - anarchy and factions with an autocratic government type. The ships of anarchy factions are usually wanted (because they're pirates), and lawless in systems that are under their control. And autocratic factions have no black markets at the stations they control. This means that there are unfair advantages as well as disadvantages for these exceptions, that is kind of disruptive for the BGS. I'll detail it out later.
Yes - now we are getting to the Machiavellian part of it all. The "hidden powerplay" within the BGS.
If you have a pet faction that you try to help gain influence, you must understand that it doesn't exist in some kind of vacuum (or, well, it does in the literal sense since it exists in space, but you get the figurative meaning I hope). There are other factions as well that you need to be aware of. Some are competitors for power, and thus your faction's enemies. But there are also a lot of other factions. Those should be considered tools or assets, that you can use to help your faction and hurt its enemies.
The sum of the influence of all factions in a system is always 100%. You can never have more than total control. And there can never be zero control over an inhabited system, although it can be fragmented and shared by multiple factions. That means that there will be conflicts.
One mistake that is easy to make is to ignore all conflicts in the system of your pet faction, and focus solely on helping it. But the ideal approach is to raise its influence, while also trying to even out the influence of the other factions, something that will force them into conflicts with each other and keep your faction a bit more "safe". That's how other factions becomes tools or assets that you can use. Let's say that there are four factions with about the same level of influence, That means you will have two conflicts in the system. And when those are settled, the winners will face off against each other while the losers will be doing the same, because they will have about the same influence.
So if you want to get rid of a faction, you shouldn't target it directly (because of the fallout from your actions). Instead you need to work on the influence of other factions, especially those that can challenge your target in a war or elections if they end up in a conflict. But my impression is that many make the mistake of focusing only on the faction they want to help, without understanding that they can help it by helping others.
When a faction drops to a very low influence level, it will face a retreat if it's not native to the system.
The retreat can be avoided by raising the influence of that faction. If it's a player faction, there will probably be a few CMDRs willing to do the work to maintain its foothold in the system. It doesn't really take that much. Cash in a few bounties, run a few missions, do some trading, and so on. Even if it has no assets left in the system it will remain as long as it can avoid a retreat. And it can keep challenging the factions that have assets, without having anything to lose in a conflict. This is why it's almost damn near impossible to get a player faction out of a system once it has gained a foothold. I would really like to see a mechanic that will expel a faction without assets and low influence as soon as it loses its next conflict.
This problem is amplified with the exceptions I mentioned earlier. Anarchies and autocratic factions. When you have both in one system, you have a problem. The anarchy faction will constantly be at a very low influence level because it gets targeted by bounty hunters for massacre and assassination missions. And since the influence is distributed between the factions, the autocrats will have the anarchists as a kind of "cushion". The absence of black markets with autocratic rule is another flaw, because it takes away one possibility to hurt them without outright violence.
And it's also completely illogical that they don't exist under autocratic rule. That's where we find black markets in real life.
You see, black markets exists as a result of a demand for something that's illegal. Autocrats prohibit everything, and that's why there are black markets. It's not about them "tolerating" them, since a black market exists outside the control of the law. But of course, dictatorships love to describe their utopian societies where there are no crime, no needs, and no unhappiness. Just look at North Korea. The happies country in the world, a cornucopia of everything anyone could possible want, according to their official sources. But in reality all those problems exists in dictatorships, and that's why I think the BGS should allow - and even amplify the effects of - black markets in them.
Equally illogical is the existence of black markets in anarchies.
Why? If there are no laws, how can anything be prohibited or illegal? The whole economy is essentially a huge black market where nobody would ask you about where you found the things you want to sell, and you will never ask what the buyer intends to use them for. That's how black markets work. I would love to see a Libertalia in space, a system being run by pirates where you can buy and sell practically anything. And I mean everything. Like rank-locked ships, although they will have bounties in every lawful system, and be impossible to "clean" - the price for buying stolen ships. ("Make piracy great again!")
So all this means that there are too many unfair advantages and disadvantages that disrupts the BGS. It's very hard for an anarchy faction to defend its system against an autocratic faction trying to expand into it. Their ships will be fair game, and they also have the black markets that will lower their influence.
There you have it, this is a Machiavellian guide to the BGS. No true friends nor enemies, just tools and assets with a varying degree of usefulness. It can be very fun as long as you don't have to deal with player factions with autocratic government types. And that's why I think it's a good idea for other player factions to work together in order to eliminate those. It makes the BGS a lot more fun for the rest of us.