Like said, I haven't ever really done the lakes run but for my civ points missions catalogue post and can fully agree its dreadful with all the swimming. The others however are incredibly fast to do once you know where the camps are and you have a mild sense of stealth (to sneak through aggro).
I don't understand your train of thought when you say working for a civilisation in order to gain civilisation points is going against RP/lore. It makes perfect sense to me, that if I work for matis, i get paid by matis, in this case with matis points.
Also, you don't have to swap back to karavan, since cult has no impact on civ point rewards from package runs and the respective prospector missions. And you don't even have to change your allegiance, since even at non-alligned states, rewards are decent (2255 points for running and 990 points for the highest prospector mission, which you can retake over and over and over and over, til you get tired of having easy points). Of course, if you want to be more effective at it, you "mechanically optimise" (allign) and get slightly more than twice rewards for the same effort. I fail to see how this encourages alt play?
If you are Ranger/Neutral you can still do these missions. In fact, if you have a points fever, you can do even an extra run/missions set compared to alligned toons who have one civilisation maxed to 0 fame, hence no possibility of doing it. Sadly, there is no way for marauders at the moment, but the great majority of people (at least judging based on forum posts) complaining about it isn't us.
I don't understand your train of thought when you say working for a civilisation in order to gain civilisation points is going against RP/lore. It makes perfect sense to me, that if I work for matis, i get paid by matis, in this case with matis points.
Also, you don't have to swap back to karavan, since cult has no impact on civ point rewards from package runs and the respective prospector missions. And you don't even have to change your allegiance, since even at non-alligned states, rewards are decent (2255 points for running and 990 points for the highest prospector mission, which you can retake over and over and over and over, til you get tired of having easy points). Of course, if you want to be more effective at it, you "mechanically optimise" (allign) and get slightly more than twice rewards for the same effort. I fail to see how this encourages alt play?
If you are Ranger/Neutral you can still do these missions. In fact, if you have a points fever, you can do even an extra run/missions set compared to alligned toons who have one civilisation maxed to 0 fame, hence no possibility of doing it. Sadly, there is no way for marauders at the moment, but the great majority of people (at least judging based on forum posts) complaining about it isn't us.