The BGS Strategic Dossier

Sections are colour-coded by what they are about. A coloured left edge or section number tells you whether you are reading core concepts, positive actions, negative actions, or reference material. Thresholds and numbers throughout are the community's best current measurements — the BGS is deliberately undocumented by Frontier, so treat exact figures as well-tested estimates rather than published constants.

The Background Simulation is the simulation layer that makes populated space feel alive. It decides which faction governs each system and station, what state each faction is in, how secure a system is, what its markets buy and sell and at what prices, what's in the shipyard and outfitting, and even how NPCs behave. Crucially, it is player-driven: left alone it only drifts a little each day, but Commanders' actions are what actually move it.

You have been doing BGS since your first mission whether you meant to or not. The simulation quietly responds to almost every action you take in inhabited space, and in turn it shapes the conditions you fly in. The feedback loop is the whole point — Frontier designed the BGS to pull you through all four core game loops.

• Markets & prices bend to states. A faction in Boom or Investment pays more and demands more; Bust, Famine and Outbreak suppress supply and prices. The trade route that's lucrative today exists because some faction's economy slider is high.
• Mission boards are state-driven. Famine floods the board with food source-and-return jobs; outbreak with medicine runs; war with combat missions. Your reputation decides how many and how well-paid.
• Security & danger. The security slider sets how many authority ships patrol, how fast they answer crimes, and whether you'll be interdicted for cargo scans. Low-security systems mean more pirates but also interstellar factors for clearing bounties.
• What spawns. Signal sources (USS) inherit the state of the faction that generates them — including the high-grade emissions you farm for engineering materials. The faction's state literally controls which materials drop.
• Shipyard & outfitting stock depends on the controlling faction's economy and tech level.
• Who governs. The flags, laws, permitted goods and even the allegiance of the systems around your home base are an emergent result of BGS activity — yours and everyone else's.

"Why do BGS? Why build Lego?" — because it's there, and it ties together everything else in the game. But there are concrete reasons it earns a place in your routine even if you never join a squadron war.

To manipulate the BGS efficiently you have to understand three things: how effort is converted to influence (buckets and diminishing returns), the full menu of levers, and how system size changes the maths. Get these right and one player can hold a faction stable; get them wrong and you'll work twice as hard for half the result.

The bucket model & the yin-yang

The game internally fills "buckets" of activity. The community models them as four main buckets — combat, exploration, trade and missions — and the central lesson is that filling all four a little beats hammering one. Each bucket has steeply diminishing returns, so for the same play-time, spreading effort across buckets yields far more influence and state change than spamming a single activity.

The second principle is the yin-yang: influence is zero-sum, so the fastest way to move a system is to boost one faction and reduce another in concert, rather than only doing positives for your own. Influence flows most easily into low-influence factions — so reducing a 60% controller is often best done by nudging several sub-10% factions upward at the same time.

5 Levers

Positive vs negative levers, by activity

Diminishing returns & population

Post-4.0, the old hard "soft caps" became smooth diminishing returns on each bucket — your first contribution lands hard, each subsequent identical action lands softer. Community modelling ranks raw impact-per-effort roughly as combat bounties > exploration data > trade > missions, but because each curve flattens fast, the optimal play is a little of each rather than a lot of one.

Effort also scales with system population: shifting the same influence in a billion-population system takes roughly six times the effort of a thousand-population system. Small systems move with a feather; large contested systems need a team. The two exceptions to diminishing returns are wars and elections — there you simply want to do as much as possible, because the winner is whoever does more.

Figures from the sinc.science guide's community measurements. Each ship mission gives up to 5 influence; each on-foot Odyssey mission up to 4.

These are the levers that raise a faction's influence and push its sliders up. Mix them — and match the bucket to the active state (trade and exploration count more in Boom; combat in Civil Liberty; only combat in wars; only economic activity in elections).

Reducing a rival is the advanced toolkit — used to force a conflict, stymie an expansion, retreat a faction, or simply distract a busy enemy so they can't push you. The game documents these without judgement; some squadrons forbid them, so check your group's rules. The recurring theme: most negative actions cost reputation, which exobiology then cheaply repairs.

These are the state-level mechanics that actually transfer assets and territory. They override the normal diminishing-returns model and are where systems are won and lost.

Wars, civil wars & elections

Two factions above the ~7% threshold colliding in influence lock into a conflict. Government ethos decides which kind: matching ethos (e.g. two Social/Democracy factions) → election; different ethos, or any anarchy → war. A civil war is a war between two factions sharing a home system — identical rules. Conflicts run 4–7 days, ending the moment one side wins 4 days; ties are possible.

• In wars, only combat counts — win the most combat zones each day; tie-breakers are combat bonds, bounties and combat missions. Trade, exploration and economic missions do nothing.
• In elections, only economic activity counts — non-combat election missions, trade, exploration data, donations, even smuggling (to drop the rival). Combat does nothing; do not fire weapons on certain election missions or they won't count.
• CZ efficiency: low space CZs are the most win-condition per hour — roughly a high CZ ≈ 1.6 low CZs, and space CZs ≈ 4× ground CZs of the same tier. If a war is contested, switch to spamming low space CZs as a team.
• Spoils: the winner takes the asset-at-risk and ~1.5% influence; last-day tie-breaker work can swing it further — you can lose the war yet finish above the winner.
• Odyssey settlements transfer to whoever fought there most, regardless of who wins the war — a powerful tool for moving settlement ownership around.

A coup is a special case: any non-controlling faction that climbs past 60% forces a mandatory conflict with the controller. Useful as a fast (risky) way to seize a system.

Expansion

Hold a faction above 75% for a tick and it goes into expansion — the last remaining global state. Expansion runs 10–14 days, then the faction tries to seed into a nearby system and pays a ~15% influence "expansion tax" in the source system. You can only expand roughly once every two weeks, so make each one count.

• Range: a 20 ly cube (≈34 ly corner-to-corner), or 30 ly (≈52 ly) on an extended-range expansion. A failed normal expansion grants extended range next time; a failed extended expansion permanently blocks that system from ever expanding.
• Target rules: the algorithm prefers systems the faction has never visited with <7 factions; then 7-faction systems with a valid non-native target (an invasion war); then previously-retreated systems.
• Directing it: if multiple systems are above 75%, the highest-influence one is usually chosen — so keep only your intended source above 75% to control where you expand, and boost a "dud" system above a rival's source to misdirect their expansion.

Retreat

A non-native faction below 2.5% goes into retreat: 1 pending day, then up to 6 active days. The faction leaves only if it's still below 2.5% on the last day — so the decisive day is the fifth active day going into the sixth. If you know when it went pending, count forward; if not, you'll have to push hard every remaining day.

Retreat timetable — "the important day"

States are grouped by where they come from: the economy slider, the security slider, conflict, the movement (influence) layer, and random event states. Match your actions to the active state — many states change which buckets even work.

The states you'll actually meet, and how to move them. Conflicts last 4–7 days; expansion 10–14 (with a 2-day cooldown); retreat is 1 pending + 6 active. Exact durations are community measurements — see the sinc.science guide reference section for the full duration tables and the per-action effect chart.

Beyond the satisfaction of moving the galaxy's politics, BGS pays out in concrete, stackable ways — many of which feed directly into goals you already have.