Terran notoriety problem

[HathKull]

I want to buy a terran Kyoto. Apparently you need a notoriety/reputation of 9 for that and I cannot get past 8.
It seems that to go over 8 with one race, you must not be over 8 with one of of their rival races. I have exactly 8 with every of the major factions, except the neutral Teladi, where it is 10. Also i have 9 with OTAS and TerraCorp - but those shouldn't matter, should they?

What do I have to do to increase past 8 with the Terrans?

[blazenclaw]

OTAS and Terran are listed as enemies in the Encylopedia (whilst TerraCorp and Terran are not), so that could very well be the reason.

I'm also curious; I'm guessing your foes (deep into the negative, to get all the main factions that high) are Pirates, Yaki, Atreus, Duke's, and Strong Arms?

[HathKull]

Actually only StrongArm and pirates. I'm fine with Duke's and the Yaki - wanted to buy incendiary bomb factory from them until i realized they only offer disruptor missiles.

It seems missions shift the negative notoriety levels way more than alteration by diplomacy. I exclusively did Teladi missions (mostly defend factory) to get a buttload of agents. Then I let those dudes do their jobs. I even was fine with the pirates also, but then you have almost no missions left to do if you can't target Yaki AND pirates. Teladi anti-Xenon missions are rather rare.

btw. good to know about OTAS. I guess there will be a few accidents with their transports...


EDIT: YES! It worked. OTAS rep down to 8. Reps of most other factions took a serious dip in the process. Terran rep managed to go to 9. Say hello to my Kyoto. Oh, and on a sidenote... there are several jobs open for OTAS pilots. Must be a coincidence.

[blazenclaw]

It seems missions shift the negative notoriety levels way more than alteration by diplomacy. I exclusively did Teladi missions (mostly defend factory) to get a buttload of agents. Then I let those dudes do their jobs. I even was fine with the pirates also, but then you have almost no missions left to do if you can't target Yaki AND pirates. Teladi anti-Xenon missions are rather rare.

This is actually super interesting. I was under the impression that all rep gains were impacted equally by the dynamic rep system, but that must be false given your set of relations. This kinda smells like a bug or perhaps an unintended consequence of a change related to agents in 1.1; I think the devs did seem to indicate pretty strongly in the Dynamic Reputation thread that the player is not supposed to be able to get positive relations with all factions.

Under the assumption that Agents provide a -15% malus for enemies instead of -30%, the list of possible relationships is basically "pick one faction to be your enemy":

Show

Explanation
001. 01.1%: TerraCorp
002. 03.0%: Duke's
003. 06.9%: Atreus
004. 08.6%: OTAS
005. 28.0%: Yaki
006. 25.0%: Terran
007. 05.0%: Split
008. 09.1%: Pirates
009. 11.1%: Paranid
010. 02.1%: Boron
011. 04.9%: Argon - Strong Arms

If Agents provide even less malus (-10%, or additionally -8% instead of -15% for hostile) then the player can literally ally with every faction by doing the Teladi/NMMC agent route...

[HathKull]

Hm I just assumed, that the combined rep loss is smaller than the combined gain across all the factions, so you can indeed befriend almost all factions. I read about other people that did it too - one saying it was easier to have a good standing with everyone than to be neutral with everyone. Atleast that I can confirm.
My last action with the OTAS and the terrans led to a slightly different spread of relations. Additionally I did some missions leading to differences with Yaki and Duke's, but overall now I have just 4 enemy factions (Duke's, StrongArm, Yaki, Pirates). If i knew where to upload a screenshot, I'd provide one...

EDIT:
As you can see, Terrans are down again to 8, but I got my Kyoto and rather want the other races to go up now

sorry for german pic
https://i.ibb.co/Qdqppwm/20210526185914-1.jpg

Oh and with StrongArm there is the problem, that I cannot send agents to them. There is just no selectable station in their sector. I'm sure otherwise It'd be easy to just have the 3 "traditional" enemies - Pirate, Yaki and Duke.

[blazenclaw]

Quoting Cycrow here:

If you look in the encyclopedia race page it lists the notoriety levels to other races.
If they are listed as Ally then they gain 15%, or Friend they gain either 10 or 5%, hostile will lose 15% and enemy will lose 30%.

I then used this to calculate the combined rep loss or gain for all combinations of factions (assuming the worse case of friend is 5%); if the above is true, then only having Duke's - Strong Arms - Yaki - Pirates is actually sum negative. Pic here; the top bolded numbers are how many 'missions' or flat notoriety you gain for a race (e.g. here there's 2 notoriety gained for Argon and Boron for every 1 Goner and 5 Paranid), while the left column is the resulting notoriety change as a result of the combined missions (e.g. Argon is -0.25 as a result of 2*1 for argon + 0.15*2 for Boron - 5*0.3 for Paranid ...). As the image/math contradicts the dev explanation and your current rep, one of my core assumptions is wrong; I suspect that Agents don't provide as large a malus as missions do.

This can actually be tested if you have a bit of time; save your game and do a mission for some faction, writing down the gain/loss for each faction. Then reload the save, and instead of doing the mission send an agent to get the same gain you would've achieved for the mission, and upon completion compare the rep changes for all factions. If I'm right, the loss will be less when using the agent. If it's the same, then things get a bit more interesting, haha.

[Thandrall]

Quoting Cycrow here:

If you look in the encyclopedia race page it lists the notoriety levels to other races.
If they are listed as Ally then they gain 15%, or Friend they gain either 10 or 5%, hostile will lose 15% and enemy will lose 30%.

I then used this to calculate the combined rep loss or gain for all combinations of factions (assuming the worse case of friend is 5%); if the above is true, then only having Duke's - Strong Arms - Yaki - Pirates is actually sum negative. Pic here; the top bolded numbers are how many 'missions' or flat notoriety you gain for a race (e.g. here there's 2 notoriety gained for Argon and Boron for every 1 Goner and 5 Paranid), while the left column is the resulting notoriety change as a result of the combined missions (e.g. Argon is -0.25 as a result of 2*1 for argon + 0.15*2 for Boron - 5*0.3 for Paranid ...). As the image/math contradicts the dev explanation and your current rep, one of my core assumptions is wrong; I suspect that Agents don't provide as large a malus as missions do.

This can actually be tested if you have a bit of time; save your game and do a mission for some faction, writing down the gain/loss for each faction. Then reload the save, and instead of doing the mission send an agent to get the same gain you would've achieved for the mission, and upon completion compare the rep changes for all factions. If I'm right, the loss will be less when using the agent. If it's the same, then things get a bit more interesting, haha.

So if I read this right, if we stay away from missions (using teladi/NMMC to get agents) we should be able to get to rank 8 with all races, and we got to choose one to go further in?

[HathKull]

Hats off to your other (rather mathematical) thread. With me it's more of a "feelings"-approach .
My first assumption was also that agents and missions reward and punish you differently. Maybe I will test it in the way you proposed. But additionally I think it has to do with the different length of the positive and negative bars (10 positie levels vs 4 negative levels). So if a mission wants to give you a certain amount of negative reputation, in some cases it can't, because you're already maxed (or minned) out. The positie rep with other factions you get nonetheless, because you're not at maximum there. Was that understandable?
With that assumption everyone would have to get an overall more positive rep across all factions, because so many negative points cannot be added, since the negative bars are full already.

[blazenclaw]

So if I read this right, if we stay away from missions (using teladi/NMMC to get agents) we should be able to get to rank 8 with all races, and we got to choose one to go further in?

If the assumption about agents is correct. If you want to test and verify yourself (do a mission, record rep change, then reload and use agent for same rep change, comparing losses vs mission) this can be confirmed, and would be very welcome ^.^
Also, you can go further in not just one, but one of (Terran, TerraCorp) - (Argon, Boron, OTAS, Atreus) - (Paranid, Split, Strong Arms) - (Pirates, Split, Duke's, Strong Arms), etc; any set that doesn't include a foe of another, if the cap of +8 is correct.

Another option is what HathKull brought up, which is rather less stable. Given that there exists a negative cap, it is possible to temporarily gain positive relations with almost all if not entirely all factions, depending on the percentage of the negative cap in relation to the effective maximum cap. However, such a scenario is unstable; if you do so, inevitably your rep will change with factions as you do missions or trade with them, at which point you'll slowly lose relations with all factions until some start dipping negative, at which point you'll need to drive those initial few down to the negative cap once again to reset it.

If it's the agent answer, it's possible to be in a stable relationship with (potentially) all factions such that you can build bases in their territory without worry. However, the latter explanation would require making at least one of Pirates/Argon/Boron/Terran/Split/Paranid a deeply negative foe periodically (though this period may be measured in a largely variable number of player-hours, depending on how much you interact with any faction in a manner that adjusts rep with them).

[blazenclaw]

Bumping because I found some time and did the agent experiment myself, lol.

Turns out that agents work as I initially thought (in a game started in 1.0 and played some time in 1.1...), and are not exempt from alterations to Dynamic Rep; see here. Somewhere between 581 and 599 influence (spent the avg of 590) equaled a Very Hard mission for Argon, and had exactly the same change in all other faction relations. I also incidentally found that killing 2 Xenon N's in a sector had about 10% the effect of a Hard mission, so combat/police is absolutely worth your time if you have dedicated foes and the ability to take out larger vessels.

The next best explanation imo is that the current state that HathKull has (enemies of Pirate - Yaki - StrongArms - Duke's) is unstable, and will degrade over time (only temporarily achievable due to the lower cap being of less magnitude than the upper cap). I also tested faction stability assuming all friends are +10% instead of +5%, in which the Pirate/Yaki/Strong/Duke is still unstable, so it's not that.

I recall someone saying each rank corresponds to an order of magnitude, though I'm not sure that's quite right (because +10 would be 100,000 times greater magnitude than the lower cap of -5? And even +8 is still 1,000 times larger). Still, it will probably last quite some time even if not a full order of magnitude differential, though it could be confirmed by actively trying to increase rep with all selected factions. Do missions/agents for the lowest rep faction until it's no longer the lowest, and repeat until it's clear there's a sum negative trend or sum positive trend across all factions. There's not a great way to test this, so basically we'll just have to wait and see if HathKull starts losing more rep with races than they gain, though it may take some time to be noticeable if they're not actively aiming for it lol.

Note that it's also possible there are some effects that kick in to make missions/agents more effective when at negative rank than when at positive rank, but I'm not really concerning myself with that because I'd like to find the largest set of stable relations, not one that requires dipping into negatives in order to take advantage of some effect.

[chip56]

regarding the ranks: here is the list from x3:

10 333,333 (to 1,000,000)
9 100,000
8 33,333
7 10,000
6 3,333
5 1,000
4 333
3 100
2 33
1 10
0 -10
-1 -100
-2 -1,000
-3 -10,000
-4 -100,000
-5 -1,000,000

So for the negative ranks its indeed one order of magnitude per rank. For the higher ones its one order of magnitude every 2 ranks.

[HathKull]

My faction standings being unstable may well be the case, but if so they degrade veeery slowly. It is more or less the same for at least 30 ingame hours. I remember boosting my rep with Split or Paranids once in a blue moon. At the same time I have one uni trader with no sectors blacklisted aside from Xenon, Stronarm and recently Pirates and Yaki. And I have 6 factory complexes scattered across Argon, Boron and Teladi space making good profits.

So it may be technically an unstable state, but I really do not have to worry about my reps for days or even weeks - and then I send one agent to Split or Paranids and all is well again.

I fear the final stage of the Terran plot though, as I suppose that will severely mess up everything.

[blazenclaw]

Thanks for the info on ranks; that makes a fair bit more sense than a straight order of magnitude in both directions lol.

It is interesting though that the negative ranking, if uncapped, is effectively much greater than the positive cap (edit: as a result of dynamic rep capping positive rank at +8 for most factions). I would not have expected going from -1,000,000 to +10,000 with a faction to somehow avoid dropping that faction's enemies by the corresponding 30% (edit2: ~300,000) and thus making them negative as well, but I vaguely recall the devs saying somewhere that rep gain works differently when negative.

At any rate, the instability is indeed pretty slow; with Strong/Pirate/Yaki chosen, the loss is one part in four of rep gained. In other words, if you gain +100 notoriety per each faction (distributed optimally among lowest-rank first), the end result is only -25 notoriety per each faction (for reference, attempting to befriend all factions increases loss to 2 parts of 3). Of course, the instability hastens as it goes on if you need rep to be high to acquire something; each time you bump rep up to max with one faction, it'll take more and more to do each successive time, and similar for 'send one agent to make all well again'.

Honestly it's probably not that bad, but still more work than just "hey, pick these foes and don't worry" lol.

The thought also crossed my mind to check if the Agent mission to increase notoriety gains is impacted by Dynamic Reputation or not... presumably so, but if not, then that could very well be a mechanism to ensure positive relations with all factions, or at least significantly more. If the additional gains are impacted by Dyn Rep on the other hand... I don't know why anyone would ever use it compared to just using the influence for notoriety gain directly lol. Maybe the return is greater at higher ranks?

[chip56]

The lower cap is actually the same as the highest cap:
you can lose up to -1,000,000 to reach -5 0%.
you can gain up 1,000,000 to reach 10 100%. The 333,333 is 10 with 0%

[blazenclaw]

Right; I was referring to the Dynamic Rep rank cap of +8, my bad, not the notoriety max cap. Unless there's a similar negative cap (can't get to -5 unless also allied with foes or something?), then the upper cap is going to be 30k for most factions, and -1m for the chosen foes. That excess 1m from the highest ally will effectively get distributed to your other allies as you attempt to balance and fix relations which gives quite a bank of time before things really start getting unstable, but it will eventually do so.

Edit: Found in the survival guide there is an effective negative cap for the purpose of dynamic relations.

SG_DYNRACE_MIN_CAP | -10000 | The minimum of notoriety needed before dynamic relations start

This is what's causing the ability to be temp allies with all factions, as instead of going from -1m to +10k, only -10k to +10k is considered, meaning the +100k allies only drop by 7k instead of 300k.

Not entirely sure the purpose of this, tbh.