Hi everyone,

In this week's dev update I'm going to follow up on the player supported minor factions and some changes coming to the background sim as part of the CQC update (1.4).

As part of Powerplay we stated that it would be possible for a minor faction in game to become a power. We've put together a process for how that will happen. It all starts with the minor faction, so in the next few weeks player groups can submit to add a minor faction to the game that will be used to represent that group in game. This registration process will be handled by the wonderful community team and they will gather the required information for adding the minor faction to the game. This will include the name of the faction, it's starting location, and type of government. Please note that to make things easier to manage there should only be one point of contact with each group. Zac and his team have already been in contact with many of the player groups so this will fold into his work there. This process will continue for the foreseeable future, so new player groups can form and stake their place in the game.

Now we know that some player groups have already supported specific minor factions already, so there will be a time limited period for player groups to register prior claims.

For the CQC update we're looking at making a few changes to the background simulation. One commonly raised issue is that minor factions don't always enter conflict states such as war, civil war and elections. This occurs when the other minor faction is in a state that cannot be overridden, so we are changing the rule so that conflict states can immediately override other states so that conflicts can be entered and completed. We'll also reduce the recovery periods so states can repeat more quickly. Expansion in particular will receive a substantial reduction in the recovery period.

The displayed information will receive some changes so that you know which minor faction is in conflict with whom. You will also see if minor faction is in a recovery period for a particular state. This communication aspect is certainly something we want to do more with beyond the CQC release.

Under the hood we'll also implement better population scaling so trying to influence a giga sized population is more difficult than a colony of thousands. This also allows for larger populations being more stable.

Periodically (or whenever we need to add a new player power) we'll take the top minor factions and they will duke it out to see which one will get the opportunity to become a power. We'll use combinations of community goals to determine the final winner. We're anticipating that the first run of this process will be early next year, but may well happen sooner depending on how the current powers play out.

The winning minor faction can then emerge, if they're not positioned within existing powers then they are created. If they are positioned within an existing power then this is more difficult and they will need to clear sufficient space to emerge. We're looking at various mechanism for minor factions to be able to tackle powers directly and these wouldn't be limited to just an emerging power. We'll reveal more details as we approach this phase.

Thanks!

Michael

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