published on March 09, 2026 in devlog
In this week's devlog Michi talks about the three sources of faction influence.
Michi (molp)
The work on performance-related issues in the last weeks has paid off: Today I checked the uptime of the Server pods again, and the last server restart has been 11 days ago. A single pod decided to restart 9 days ago. I am pretty happy with the result, as we had almost daily pod restarts only a few weeks ago. It's not perfect though: 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. If no breaking performance issues surface, I'll continue working on other topics for now.
This week I continued working on the faction influence (see also devlogs #517 and #519), especially the generation of faction influence. Right now we envision three major sources of influence generation:
Workforce satisfaction: The company's workforce generates a certain amount of influence each day. The generation is dependent on the workforce size, its satisfaction and type. Pioneers will create the least amount of influence, scientists the most. Once a day the generated influence is sent to the planet the base is located on.
Government participation: A player will also generate influence for participation in a government. The amount of influence depends on the type of office (governor / member of parliament) and the size of the governed planet's population. I am currently in the midst of implementing this type of generation. Each company/player can only generate influence for one specific office, and we want to allow players to choose which one it is. We also could generate influence for all offices a player has, but we feel that could potentially lead to players just trying to grab an office for the influence without intention to actually participate in the government. This type of influence is also sent to the planet once a day.
You might be wondering for which faction this influence is being generated, the planet's or the player's? If the planet belongs to a faction, it is always the faction, no matter of the player's own faction affinity. If the planet doesn't belong to a faction, no influence is being generated at all.
Faction contracts: The last type of generated faction influence comes from the faction contracts. The higher the contract's faction reputation, the higher the generated faction influence. This influence is sent directly to the faction that sent the contract. We might allow players later to accept contracts from all factions, not only their starting faction.
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!