Why do I lose reputation when I retaliate for attack?

[user1679]

I was flying around and out of nowhere a few Scaleplate ships attacked me. So of course I defended myself and destroyed them but lost rep for each kill. Later, I was trying to claim an abandoned ship and a Godrealm laser tower shot my ship which retaliated, destroyed it and lost rep.

It seems there should be a flag in the reputation system if the attack was initiated by the player or the other faction.

[Alan Phipps]

You shouldn't lose any rep for SCA ship kills unless they are still flagged as another faction that is considered friendly or neutral by the local authority. Scanning one of their ships first will usually expose the whole group.

A lasertower will not attack you unless it was made hostile to you by a previous or contemporary action. Friendly/neutral stations and ships made temporarily hostile will usually eventually revert from being hostile towards you for a prior 'mistake'; unfortunately lasertowers from attacked ships or stations do not always revert. Killing the lasertower *may* have been your best course of action as hostile ones left around can trigger much larger incidents involving your passing ships and draw more forces into an escalating conflict. Rep penalties for killing single deployables are not that severe.

[jlehtone]

It seems there should be a flag in the reputation system if the attack was initiated by the player or the other faction.

The Terrans were not polite to Teladi. I consider Teladi a "friend", so that was an "attack". I should not have lost any reputation for slaughtering every last Terran in the Galaxy, because that was justified retaliation.


We kill NPC and we lose reputation.

NPC kill up and they lose reputation. (Those losses do not affect your actions?) We simply do not see the NPC-NPC rep loss, because NPC-NPC relations are locked.

It does not matter, who starts a fight. Kills do.

[user1679]

So I reloaded the save and I think I found the reason the laser tower attacked, I forgot to redesign one of my scout ships that still had a scatter gun. It was engaged with a Kha'ak fighter that was harrassing a miner in the asteroid belt so my ship probably accidentally hit the miner.

As for the SCA, I didn't notice if they were cloaked or not. I saw the alert in the console window that I lost rep for destroying one of their ships. This is all happening OOS and I don't have teleport researched yet so I can't see exactly what's happening. All I know is the faction information for SCA says they will plunder my ships...

[jlehtone]

As for the SCA, I didn't notice if they were cloaked or not. I saw the alert in the console window that I lost rep for destroying one of their ships. This is all happening OOS and I don't have teleport researched yet so I can't see exactly what's happening. All I know is the faction information for SCA says they will plunder my ships...

Some factions do plunder ships when your reputation is not high with them. Below +10 or something.

SCA is one of those factions and it does start with low enough reputation to plunder. However, the SCA reputation is fixed; it does not change. Not until you do certain terraforming, which you obviously have not done yet. Therefore, you cannot lose SCA reputation yet.

What you can lose, is reputation with particular SCA ship or station. That is not "faction reputation". That is "personal" to that ship and temporary. The NPC do revert to the faction reputation if you leave them alone for long enough.

The loss of "personal reputation" occurs when you damage someone enough; make them mad. (Police can get mad at you for hurting others or for smuggling.)
You can't make someone mad by killing them; the dead do not have any opinion about you.