Contracts, it has to be said, are bloody awkward things. We can only have three at a time and half of them rely on specific things we can’t control, such as the presence of Beacons, or a team that doesn’t screw you over. Wouldn’t it be so much better if we could get loyalty more easily, more consistently, and in a way that was not ship, mission or mode dependent? Well here it is!
Contractless Loyalty:
In this system, Loyalty is generated in battle the same way as Synergy, more or less. Players receive Loyalty equal to 20% of the Synergy they earn in battle. Done and done!
Well, not quite; there would be a few ways to boost your Loyalty gain, which also encourages players not to tier rush and instead to fly a wide range of ships.
Race Bonus: If the ship you are flying matches your faction’s race, you get +5% loyalty.
Faction Bonus: If the ship you are flying matches your faction, you get +15% loyalty. This stacks with the racial bonus above.
So, if you are leveling Techs, you would get a whopping 40% Loyalty if you flew in a Tech ship, such as the Machete Type S. Naturally, this means that the best way to grind Loyalty is to hop ships every time you move factions, which in turn means that you need to level all the races to maximise your earnings.
Yeah, the idea would be that you could either focus on a few ships, which would result in you getting enough Loyalty per tier to get your essential Mk III items, or you could level every ship tree and focus on using faction-specific ships so you can get enough Mk III gear to kit out entire ships in Mk III.
The beacon capture ones are annoying because so many frigates can’t get there fast enough before the interceptors complete the capture. The rest seem to require a specific weapon type of using a specific ship or module. I generally only pick the contracts that I know I’ll probably complete under normal play.
The beacon capture ones are annoying because so many frigates can’t get there fast enough before the interceptors complete the capture. The rest seem to require a specific weapon type of using a specific ship or module. I generally only pick the contracts that I know I’ll probably complete under normal play.
My thoughts exactly. I suspect that you could technically earn more Loyalty by the current contract system than my suggestion, but it is situational and requires you to hop through all the factions. This model is reliable loyalty income, which I suspect will be more popular with gamers.
As someone who actively seeks to have one ship from each faction, this will benefit me. I have a friend who insists on flying pure Jericho though because he doesn’t like the way Imperial and Fed ships look. Not that I fault him… I’ll rather fly space spiders (Jeri intys) than space forklifts.
On a different note, this would prevent some tier rushers from unlocking Mk3 variants of certain role-specific modules, and a ton of generic modules.
Is not that hard really. Except for beacons most contracts are easily done in any random game. And for beacons you can always do pve.
The only problem I see with contracts is that you can’t grind one faction non-stop. But that is supposed to be on purpose so whatever.
Perhaps, but it feels to me like we’re stuck between two systems; the current Contract system simply does not feel like it was meant to work with how Loyalty is used in game now.
One of the reasons I put forward this idea is it creates a nice progression system without excess grind. Take the Empire ship tree: You start with the Hercules and grind a faction. Say… Wardens. Then you unlock the Hercules Rage and you switch to the Legion so you can max out your Synergy. Now you have a choice of ships, the Warden “Hercules Arrow” or the neutral Deimos. If you fly each faction specific ship and cap it, that would produce a healthy amount of Loyalty to spend on kitting out your ships.
On a different note, this would prevent some tier rushers from unlocking Mk3 variants of certain role-specific modules, and a ton of generic modules.
As is, you can’t access the higher level contracts for the other factions unless you own ships of that faction, so they’d have to grind loyalty from loot.