1. Cost is 50k c-bills per day remaining to break a contract. Permanent contracts cost 1.5 Million c-bills to break.
1a. 3 day cooldown period after breaking a contract before you can actually join another faction. You can't break a contract with less than 3 days remaining, because the cooldown period exceeds the contract time remaining.
1b.
Changed answer: Ok, I see what they're saying. When you are in a faction and attack another faction, you lose loyalty points with the faction you are attacking if you had any (not sure how many per battle). If you had gained rewards based on faction achievements in that faction before losing the points, you keep those, so you can't game the system by repeatedly achieving rank 2 somewhere, for example.
As an example, we took a tour with Davion in the distant past and I achieved Rank 3 (5,300 loyalty points) before we moved on. Since then we haven't been back and we have attacked Davion enough that my LP total with them is all the way back to 0. But I still show as Rank 3 in Davion. To make Rank 4, however, I would have to rejoin Davion and earn 10,600 MORE loyalty points. Essentially, I'd be starting over there, but I can't re-earn the rewards for levels 1, 2, and 3.
1c. If you do what you suggest, you would pay 50k per day for the remaining period of the contract but I'm not certain you still earn faction rewards after breaking (I would guess you do, however). So this "trick" amounts to playing enough CW to have the rewards portion of your earnings exceed the cost to break the contract during the 3-day cooldown period (including mechbays and other goodies, I guess). That sounds like a lot of work for a marginal benefit, but knock yourself out if it's something you want to try.
1d. You can usually achieve rank 6 within a 2 week window if you have a decent amount of skill and play CW pretty consistently. That would seem to be the most efficient way to gather up mech bays if you want to go on a tour. Staying for 2 solid weeks increases your faction rewards somewhat also and avoids the breakage fee and cooldown window. I think this is what most people do when the go on mechbay tour. After rank 6 it starts taking a lot longer to move up in rank. I would think it's more efficient to go through rank 6 (at most) in all factions to get 20 mechbays in 20 weeks and then settle on a faction to get the rest of the mechbays there before moving on.
1e. No real benefit to forming your own unit in the current state except it prevents other people from sending you unit invites. If that's happening and you find it annoying, then sure, form a unit. Once CW phase 3 launches (ETA April-ish) being in a unit will have you drop in the planned unit queue. Then being in a unit will matter a lot.
I'm not totally sure, but there may be an issue with the unit founder being able to leave the unit after it's created? I thought I heard that once formed there's really no mechanism to totally disband a unit. I'll let someone who's actually done this chime in as I've never founded a unit.
Edited by Khereg, 02 February 2016 - 08:08 AM.