Question: Murder, Wanted status, and influence

[don carnage1]

Hi all. I’m looking for advice from players who get their hands dirty.

I’m attempting to lower a faction’s influence and security by killing their clean ships.

But I’ve noticed that the murder bounties for this stack up really, really quickly. After about a dozen kills the price on my head has hit some 50 million credits. Each new murder adds an extra 5 million.

I’m not sure if that’s viable in the long term.

So my questions are: Do baddie players simply ignore the bounty size? If not, is there a way to balance the killing and bounties? Or is killing clean ships just not a very good strategy to lower influence/security?

*edited for clarity

 

[Rubbernuke]

Depends- what I do is to build cheap 'burn' ships that have minimal engineering, are cheap. A few G1 clicks, and you have a ship good enough to mow down targets...the important thing is that you choose your targets well and don't get overconfident since your ship is not top of the line.

When the time comes to ditch it, you can simply toss it in the bin knowing you are not losing much (while having billions in bounties).

50 million is nothing as well- have two Clippers ready for ditching with a billion+ bounty on each because BGS murder gets crazy real fast.

 

[don carnage1]

That’s a really interesting strategy, @Rubbernuke. Thanks.

I was afraid of overwhelming my bank account if an “accident” occurred after a few weeks. But with your method that shouldn’t be a problem.

 

[goemon]

i have a ship dedicted to that kind of game. i don't intend to pay the bounties on it.

that said - crime and murder is easily countered by bounty redeems. so if opposed, it isn't a viable option in my experience.

 

[Rubbernuke]

That’s a really interesting strategy, @Rubbernuke. Thanks.

I was afraid of overwhelming my bank account if an “accident” occurred after a few weeks. But with your method that shouldn’t be a problem.

Well the other aspect is being pin sharp professional with killing. Know your timings, and don't get suckered into staying if it goes wrong.

 

[goemon]

actually, if the system has a haz res and the faction spawns miners, it is one of the best places to do that kind of work. shoot the miners, kill a pirate or two, for a bounty redeem at an interstellar factor so you gain back access to their stations.

 

[Jmanis]

Hi all. I’m looking for advice from players who get their hands dirty.

I’m attempting to lower a faction’s influence and security by killing their clean ships.

@Rubbernuke and @goemon ,

Isn't it still the case that killing clean ships affects the faction whose jurisdiction the crime occurs in, not the owner of the ship?

I.e you're in A's jurisdiction, and kill B, C and D owned ships, only A suffers influence losses, not B, C or D?

 

[goemon]

@Rubbernuke and @goemon ,

Isn't it still the case that killing clean ships affects the faction whose jurisdiction the crime occurs in, not the owner of the ship?

I.e you're in A's jurisdiction, and kill B, C and D owned ships, only A suffers influence losses, not B, C or D?

there are still 2(3) different effects in place here:
1. shipkill -> affects the faction of the ship
2.(3.) fine, bounty: affects the jurisdictions faction.

in a haz res, shooting miners of the jurisdictions factions hits 1.+2.(3.).
shooting a pirate of the jurisdictions factions hits only 1, but still hits.
shooting a clean target, but not killing it, hits2.(3.), but not 1.

 

[Jmanis]

there are still 2(3) different effects in place here:
1. shipkill -> affects the faction of the ship
2.(3.) fine, bounty: affects the jurisdictions faction.

in a haz res, shooting miners of the jurisdictions factions hits 1.+2.(3.).
shooting a pirate of the jurisdictions factions hits only 1, but still hits.
shooting a clean target, but not killing it, hits2.(3.), but not 1.

Huh, interesting. That's a change back to how i used to think it worked.

 

[Screemonster]

The most effective way to lower a faction's influence is to fill buckets for the other factions in the system. Influence gains are taken out proportionally, so the controlling faction is always the one that's hurt the most.
Murders (and other negative influences) are worthless if they're not paired with positive actions as well, and all influence action types have a softcap so there's little point in overdoing it.

edit: if you don't want to have notoriety, and the faction you're attacking has a planetary settlement, you could do a lot worse than carpet bombing it over and over. Just fly low over it with a fast ship with as many mine launchers as you can fit on it, spam mines to rack up a ton of assaults on the skimmers/turrets/generators, then zip up into supercruise, turn around, and repeat. Assaults aren't worth as much as a bounty, but they still count.

 

[Jmanis]

The most effective way to lower a faction's influence is to fill buckets for the other factions in the system. Influence gains are taken out proportionally, so the controlling faction is always the one that's hurt the most.
Murders (and other negative influences) are worthless if they're not paired with positive actions as well, and all influence action types have a softcap so there's little point in overdoing it.

edit: if you don't want to have notoriety, and the faction you're attacking has a planetary settlement, you could do a lot worse than carpet bombing it over and over. Just fly low over it with a fast ship with as many mine launchers as you can fit on it, spam mines to rack up a ton of assaults on the skimmers/turrets/generators, then zip up into supercruise, turn around, and repeat. Assaults aren't worth as much as a bounty, but they still count.

And if you're in a pinch, either:

• Load up tourism missions where the passengers are afraid of damage, and scrape your paintwork on the station for a while; or
• Load up on bulk passengers before you go to bed, they'll have all failed when you wake up.

(Corrollary; more ways to actively fail missions would be great e.g selling passengers off as slaves, active theft of mission cargo/data, negotiating with assassination targets beyond the normal wrinkles etc.)

 

[Rubbernuke]

@Rubbernuke and @goemon ,

Isn't it still the case that killing clean ships affects the faction whose jurisdiction the crime occurs in, not the owner of the ship?

I.e you're in A's jurisdiction, and kill B, C and D owned ships, only A suffers influence losses, not B, C or D?

If you are after the faction who controls the system, you can mow down anyone (bar the faction you are supporting). However any asset thats owned by someone different the attack will affect them- for example surface bases-any assault or kill will register against the owner and not the system controller. Bases with patrols are great because they call more support in, and no ATR will spawn.

Fines have no effect, only assaults (which act like murders) and murders negative INF wise. An assault (i.e. just shooting but no kill) was worth 1/4 of a murder during some tests I ran ages ago.

The only time fines seem to annoy sec forces is interdictions. Each time you interdict it appears the game internally views that as a weird type of assault- several times during testing I 'chain interdicted' (i.e. I interdicted a sec ship who is interdicting someone else, resulting in a 'interdiction failed' warning and a small fine) ships about ten times in a row. Even though I was starting 'fresh' ATR appeared far sooner.

There are lots of loopholes killing too that I don't think FD thought about.

Killing is not as potent as it once was though, its far easier to game a BM if present or FC it to death. Its a shame as killing (and the skills that come from it) are really useful and fun. Executing an attack in a high sec system where a few seconds means ATR appearing are the only part of the game that dials up the precision.

 

[don carnage1]

There’s lots of good advice in this thread. Thanks, gents.

Just to address a few points:

Murders (and other negative influences) are worthless if they're not paired with positive actions as well, and all influence action types have a softcap so there's little point in overdoing it.

Yep. My wingmate and I are actually dividing and conquering this system. He is focusing on positive influence trade and missions, while I am focusing on negative for the “enemy” faction.

I have flipped systems before, but progress on this one has been particularly slow due to player traffic. I don’t believe we’re being actively opposed, but the ruling faction owns a refinery port that consistently pays high for mined commodities... so a lot of trade working against us.

And if you're in a pinch, either:

• Load up tourism missions where the passengers are afraid of damage, and scrape your paintwork on the station for a while; or
• Load up on bulk passengers before you go to bed, they'll have all failed when you wake up.

I thought that FDev patched out failed missions affecting influence ages ago? Did they forget to patch passenger missions? Typical.

Killing is not as potent as it once was though, its far easier to game a BM if present or FC it to death. Its a shame as killing (and the skills that come from it) are really useful and fun. Executing an attack in a high sec system where a few seconds means ATR appearing are the only part of the game that dials up the precision.

Yeah, sadly there is no black market here and trading for a loss is quite boring to me... hence why I’m turning to murder. But that’s good to know about surface installations. I’ll give that a whirl.

Also to be clear: I don’t really care about notoriety. My only concern was the bounty sizes... I’ve never trucked around a 1 billion bounty and hadn’t seen players talk about it in other threads or research.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I have flipped systems before, but progress on this one has been particularly slow due to player traffic. I don’t believe we’re being actively opposed, but the ruling faction owns a refinery port that consistently pays high for mined commodities... so a lot of trade working against us.

If you're lucky, the negative transactions might give them an Infrastructure Failure, and that'll knock out most passing import trade.

I thought that FDev patched out failed missions affecting influence ages ago? Did they forget to patch passenger missions? Typical.

Abandoning missions doesn't affect influence.
Actually failing them does - though it's a relatively small effect per failed mission.

 

[goemon]

but the ruling faction owns a refinery port that consistently pays high for mined commodities... so a lot of trade working against us.

plus most probably a number of bounty redeems from interdicting npc of those traders/mission runners.

 

[Jmanis]

I thought that FDev patched out failed missions affecting influence ages ago? Did they forget to patch passenger missions? Typical.

Abandoning missions doesn't affect influence.
Actually failing them does - though it's a relatively small effect per failed mission.

^^ This one... abandoning the mission only hurts your rep... but failing the mission whether via mission timeout or another mechanism will apply negative influence and relevant security/economic effects.

Though, I'd disagree with the small effect aspect... in my experience so far applying negative effects has the reverse rules for positive actions, i.e where doing positive actions for a faction with high influence has a reduced effect, doing negative actions against a faction with low influence has a reduced effect... so it's fairly good against a controlling faction. I once got pretty much a complete transfer of influence between my faction and the controlling faction by doing this.

However, my main argument for doing this is less for influence changing, and more for causing negative states;while it's difficult to do because only a select few missions can be deliberately failed (the rest you need to wait for the usually-minimum 24 hour timer to expire), it's one of the few ways to specifically target a faction with negative effects.

To cause negative economic effects, you need to hope they're a faction that allows black markets, and has a black market, or hope factions offer missions to cause negative economic effects against that faction in neighbouring systems... your chances there are highly unreliable at best. But, you can almost certainly guarantee that a faction will have source or mining missions, and have them time out for negative economic impact.

Spoiler: A segue

Of course, waiting 24 hours for the timer run down is a pretty weak way to do things. Your best bet is to accept VIP passenger missions with risk-averse passengers, then scrape your hull against the station so you go below 50% hull. That makes all the passengers miserable, and they'll depart your ship when you dock back up, failing all the missions. Meanwhile, bulk passengers have a short timer of up to around 5 hours, but usually more like 1-2 hours, making them suitable to have on the side or before bed.

Other ways to fail missions:

• Have someone besides you (e.g security) kill an assassination target.
• Destroy the ship carrying hijack cargo.

Scenarios have better prospects for deliberate failure, but not great, e.g

• Accept the "salvage black box" scenario, then destroy the black box
• Accept a scenario to defend a megaship or outpost, but destroy all the power generators instead (or just fight for the pirates)

But this is why I argue there should be more and better ways to deliberately fail a mission, and it should be an option 100% of the time.

An obvious one is cargo deliveries. You can't partial-complete them until all mission related cargo has been taken from the depot, and none is in your posession... a problem here being you can only jet the cargo, you can't sell it on a BM. But if you can't partial complete the mission due to inadequate delivery, your only option is to wait for the timeout, or abandon the mission (which has no effect). It would be better if at that point you could still "complete" the mission as a failure.

Realistically, it's straightforward to selectively and deliberately fail these missions, but they're all gamey and kludgy. It would be so much better if there was an "official" way to betray the mission giver for all missions, in a way that needs just as much effort as the mission itself... selling rescued hostages on a black market, handing a covertly-recovered black box to Search and Rescue, taking out the enemies of an assassination target instead of the target... just to name a few

 

[Riverside]

I generally don't do negative actions except as a final push to get a retreat through, or to start a conflict. Much like meaningful PvP, imo your time is better spent doing positive actions for all other factions than negative ones that usually seem to only generate more opportunities for the opposing faction to boost their own influence.

However spec ops missions can be very handy if the target faction is the one you want to attack, and to a lesser extent other missions that have a positive outcome for the mission issuing faction & a negative outcome at the other end.

The most useful reason to kill civvies or cops is to get yourself on a bounty board with an appropriately named ship as a means of communicating with other players. Plus sometimes it's fun to play the baddie of course

 

[Maolagin]

However spec ops missions can be very handy if the target faction is the one you want to attack, and to a lesser extent other missions that have a positive outcome for the mission issuing faction & a negative outcome at the other end.

Another nice thing about spec ops / massacre civilian missions, related to the OP's original question - the extreme murder bounties are caused by committing additional murders while notorious. If you pick up some of these missions and only kill mission targets, you get all the BGS effect of regular murder, plus the mission effect and rewards, but minuscule bounties and no ATR interference because you never increase notoriety.

 

[CunningStunt]

Not really done a lot of killing clean NPCs, but in my experience expiring missions against a faction is just as effective to harm influence and you only have to deal with fines and bounties, no notoriety.

Donations have 3 -4 hour timers so are great for damaging inf during the same tick.
Assassinate mission usually have 1 day timers so can be used to harm inf on the following tick.

Abandoning missions does not have the same effect as letting them expire.

 

[don carnage1]

Just to update:

Using some of the advice in this thread, I can confirm that killing system authority ships has been extremely effective.

The controlling faction has seen huge drops each day, despite being a high population system with large amounts of passive player traffic working in their favor.

Basically, I have accomplished in a few days what weeks of influence-mission and trade grinding could not, and with far less effort.

As to the massive bounty: I’m simply ignoring it for now. Once the system flips the bounty will be moot, although I may eventually use @Rubbernuke ’s strategy of selling off the hot ship just for safety.