Warp Route "difficulty" rating

[Sotanaht]

Does it do anything? It seems I can spend navigator insight points to reduce it, but so far I've seen nothing to suggest that it actually matters.

[Daliena]

I haven't exactly gone out of my way to test it since release, but in the beta at least, higher difficulty rating on a warp route meant higher chance of bad stuff (and possibility of much worse stuff on orange/red routes than would happen on green/yellow ones).

Green, nothing much happens. Yellow, narrative events, maybe a bit of hull damage. Orange, you're starting to risk needing to deal with the Gellar Field failing and having to drag your party over to fight a daemonic invasion or the like.

[Sotanaht]

So I think I figured it out. Each "difficulty" seems to have a pool of events in fixed order. It's possible that the event pools may change based on story advancement or some other factors (probably more difficult events are gated by story progression, and companion events probably supercede warp events in order) but it's clearly not random.

If you take an orange route you'll get a certain event. If you reload and take a green route, even if it's the same route (upgraded) you'll get something different or nothing. If you take an orange route after that you'll get the same event you would have.

I would assume that companion events interrupt the order, and the most difficult events are probably gated behind something to ensure you are strong enough when they happen (assuming that very difficult events exist)

[watcherzero]

Green route - Uneventful trip with maybe a flavor dialog
Yellow route - low chance of a bad event such as minor damage to ship or a tactical fight
Orange route - high chance of combat/damage to ship
Red Route - Guarenteed tactical combat or major damage to your ship

You can spend your exploration points to make routes safer lowering their colour difficulty and I highly reccomend you invest in making a green trunk route between your colonies with a yellow trunk route then branching out between major route hubs so you can quickly and safely about the sector without damaging your ship/time wasting events. There is no real point investing in improving routes to dead end systems, you want to prioritise the routes you will frequent.

[KîNG]

Originally posted by Sotanaht:

So I think I figured it out. Each "difficulty" seems to have a pool of events in fixed order. It's possible that the event pools may change based on story advancement or some other factors (probably more difficult events are gated by story progression, and companion events probably supercede warp events in order) but it's clearly not random.

If you take an orange route you'll get a certain event. If you reload and take a green route, even if it's the same route (upgraded) you'll get something different or nothing. If you take an orange route after that you'll get the same event you would have.

That doesn't mean there's a "fixed" order in the way that you're implying. How I would do it is I'd toss all the events in a queue then shuffle that queue once when the player starts the game. Any conditional events (which there definitely are, as some refer to companions) would simply be thrown back into the queue if the condition isn't met.

What you're suggesting implies that we're all experiencing these events in the same order, which I genuinely doubt is the case, since that would have a small but noticeable impact on replayability.