I'll be posting this elsewhere, but I thought this thread might be a good place to offer some results of a small sampling of OP D2 missions. These focus on the problems with defense value (DV) changes to hexes apparently due to the problems between the cartel and empire map interactions. In the test server, all cartels were either friendly/allied or at worst "distrusted" by the empires (meaning two enemy empires can have a common friendly cartel). Neutral space was considered "friendly" by the empires.
Feel free to add your own experiences (in the main thread for these results) for the benefit of any testers, developers, or ArticFire, who is supposed to be working on the D2 issues according to Taldren.
1. Neutral cartel under an empire hex still causes DV drops upon win. This happens even if neutral is considered "friendly" (and thus appears unfixable via the existing settings options). If you drop the hex all the way, instead of it going neutral on the empire map, you get a hex taken by your race message in news, which resets it to the default DV restore percentage. I can't be certain about PvP results, but it seems like a offense/defense battle in a cartel-neutral hex can only result in a loss for the defender.
2. Some missions appear to have no effect on the hex health as reflected by the News showing no post-battle hex notices. These tend to be missions against non-cartel Orions (why are they even IN the game anymore?), which frankly are more common than missions vs. empire AIs so far.
3. Under the current settings, where every empire considers all cartels as either friendly/allied or at worst distrusting (marginally on the enemy side of neutral), I could not cause a cartel to lose a hex by attacking it as an empire player (more testing would be helpful). However, I also could not BOOST my empire hexes even with a friendly cartel underneath, presumably because whoever I beat in the mission was also friendly with that cartel, or at least non-antagonistic. This means you can't get normal DV boosts (may be a couple missions that break the trend, but they aren't the standard
patrols/assaults/defenses) without having cartels you're allied to being enemies of your enemies. We're stuck with needing cartel players to capture the same hexes as their allied empires to help them boost their defenses in those hexes. They also need to have the same starting hexes to avoid having players hurt their own territory.
4. With an allied Prime cartel AI (map-based) on my wing while flying Klingon, I was able to flip a cartel-neutral hex to Prime control with a win against a monster. I'm not sure how the monsters relate politically, and with only one mission to go on, it is hard to make broader conclusions.
5. In an Ambush the Enemy mission as Klingon with a map-based Klingon AI ally vs. a map-based Fed AI, I was not able to boost my own hex that had a friendly cartel underneath. I'm not sure if this is the canceling-out of the politics of all factions involved, or a problem with the mission script.
So, I can see no improvements in the cartel/empire map DV interactions. That's to be expected since nobody has really worked on them. I had hoped the friendly cartels and neutrals would have helped the empires, but it doesn't seem to work any better than it did a year-plus ago when I did my more extensive tests for the Rook's Tavern 3 campaign. At this point, no matter how solid the client app is, the single-player campaigns and D2 will not allow for proper give-and-take of territory with DV boosting. This makes the game essentially a PvP match service in D2 and kills any serious attempt to run a strategic map conquest game.
Topic: OP Patch Status? (Read 37743 times)