Listing sets of possible stable relationships (by foes) in 1.1

[Ketraar]

I posted a steam guide that has all of the relevant info from this thread

Added to the Guides Sticky.

MFG

Ketraar

[blazenclaw]

This is the best post ever WRT the new Dynamic Relations hate IMO!

More power to you, Blazenclaw, & I fully appreciate that your initial insomnia-inspired analysis project may have got a bit out of hand!

Thanks Snafu; yeah, it started as a little thing, but it really does seem people struggle with it lol. Appreciate the validation

So I can be highest rank with all by choosing

013. 17.4%: Pirates - Yaki - Atreus - Duke's - Strong Arms

as Enemies?

As chip56 said, having those as enemies will be stable with all allies at (at least) +8. However, you'll need to choose from the following, separate list which factions you can be +10 (highest rank) with:

001: Argon - Boron - Goner - Teladi - OTAS - NMMC
002: Argon - Boron - Goner - Teladi - Atreus - NMMC - TerraCorp
003: Goner - Paranid - Split - Teladi - NMMC
004: Goner - Teladi - Terran - NMMC - TerraCorp
005: Paranid - Split - Teladi - NMMC - Strong Arms
006: Pirates - Split - Teladi - NMMC - Strong Arms
007: Pirates - Teladi - Duke's - Strong Arms
008: Teladi - OTAS - Duke's
009: Teladi - Atreus - Duke's - TerraCorp
010: Yaki - NMMC - Strong Arms

For your case, you should probably choose from 1, 3, or 4 depending on which factions you like more. Also note that these are pretty easy to switch; even if you're max rank 10 with a faction, making one or two of their larger ships mysteriously fall "under new management" will cause rep to fall significantly with only them down to +8 or lower, at which point you can bump up a different one you want to +10.

Added to the Guides Sticky.

Thanks! I saw your steam comment, and edit: made a discussion topic for pinning. Once again, I'd like to express gratitude for the awesome work you and the team have done on this game

[piranhai aka Dragonslayer]

So I can be highest rank with all by choosing

013. 17.4%: Pirates - Yaki - Atreus - Duke's - Strong Arms

as Enemies?

No, you cant be the highest rank with all by chosing those as enemies. You be positive rank with all others, some of them up to 8 and some of those can be rank 10.
If you are rank 10 with argon it would lock you at rank 8 as maximum for all argon enemies. So argon +paranid rank 10 is impossible. Argon + Boron rank 10 is possible.

Ok I think I get it. Is a bit change if you are used since XT to be friend with everybody. Is it then possible to steal the technologies from who you are enemy with with agents like Yaki Atreus?

[chip56]

Yes you can steal from hostile enemies. However keep in mind that its gonna be very expensive in regards to influence. If you are always hostile and fighting a faction you probably are going to pay double influence, which means during times at which you have the "agressive" malus your costs might be over 1k influence for stealing something. Also stealing has rather low chances to succeed.

[Snafu_X3]

Yes you can steal from hostile enemies.

A minor caveat: you can only perform diplomatic/espionage actions on <race/corp> you have influence points for. Those influence points require an agent to be able to dock at a relevant station (plus time ofc), so if you're hostile with <race/corp> & have no IP with them, you may not be able to perform any actions via diplomacy until you improve relations

[Leech183]

Hi Blaze,

here is your requested Picture:
https://ibb.co/S712KNQ
Stopped all traders and forbid other races to land.
Then increased the Relations with the Terran Race via Diplomacy.

[blazenclaw]

Hi Blaze,

here is your requested Picture:
https://ibb.co/S712KNQ
Stopped all traders and forbid other races to land.
Then increased the Relations with the Terran Race via Diplomacy.

Many thanks! Analyzing the NR changes from the agent, I suspect that the agents are working as intended... most likely. Take a look here. Given the rank and percentage for each faction, their approximate Notoriety can be calculated from the left table.

Ex: Rank 7, 88% from the starting Argon reputation is calculated as +10,000 from rank 7, plus 0.88 * 23,332 representing 88% of the way to rank 8, for a total of 30,532 starting notoriety.

The starting and finishing notoriety was calculated for each faction, and linear difference obtained. These differences were compared to the largest difference (Terran/ATF), and for the most part things look as expected, with tolerances due to rounding errors when going from NR to percent; for instance, the -66% in Yaki is explained by 98% -> 96% actually being something like 97.5% -> 96.4%, thus halving the loss (and the remaining excess due to Terran gain similarly being a few percent larger than actually calculated). Again for OTAS, 4% could easily be 3.5%, thus dropping the shown 40% by a factor of ~1/8 down to 35%, remainder having same explanation as for Yaki.

The Argon however, is more interesting. There's no rank change and no applicable small-number difference; if anything, it's closer to -15% ("Hostile" relations with Terran rather than "Enemy"). A probable explanation in my mind is that there was some event during the agent's mission that caused a rep gain with the Argon, as evidenced by the upward tick next to Goner and TerraCorp. If, somehow, 4k NR were gained by the Argon, then Goner and TerraCorp would have gained 400-600 NR, which would show the green tick of gained rep but also be small enough to be potentially not be rounded up to the next percent... except that at TerraCorp's rank 5, 46 NR should be enough to show up as a percent change. Hmm. Maybe there is something after all?

Given the way how this system is implemented, any small systematic change from the expected output could easily add up over time to make a set stable that wasn't "intended" to be. I'm not sure Argon as Hostile instead of Enemies would be enough, but I wouldn't be surprised either, particularly if there were other similar errors with other faction interactions.

Edit: I did the same calculation for the stats from my earlier Very Hard mission / 500 influence numbers, and it does seem to generally corroborate with predicted gains, though the noise due to small-number rounding is significantly greater. Doesn't quite explain the larger-than-expected Paranid loss though, so... maybe there is a little bit of something else going on at play

[Snafu_X3]

Once again, v nice work in collating, analysing & presenting this data! (tho I'm puzzled as to why you used 500 as a metric when IIRC each agent task to increase rep gains 200 points, including the 'travelling to destination' task)

FWIW the rep gain/loss system is dynamic WRT agents: you'll potentially receive multiple messages as their mission progresses thru (lower-lvl) ranks (presumably as each task/rep stage is completed, indicating rep gain by 1 lvl) until their task is complete. Currently, agents won't notify <player> once they've returned to base if they have no more tasks available (ie 'retired'), but any other agent will do so if they still have >=1 task available (if you set the relevant 'Global Commands' setting to Yes; why this defaults to 'No' I've no idea )

[blazenclaw]

Once again, v nice work in collating, analysing & presenting this data! (tho I'm puzzled as to why you used 500 as a metric when IIRC each agent task to increase rep gains 200 points, including the 'travelling to destination' task)

FWIW the rep gain/loss system is dynamic WRT agents: you'll potentially receive multiple messages as their mission progresses thru (lower-lvl) ranks (presumably as each task/rep stage is completed, indicating rep gain by 1 lvl) until their task is complete. Currently, agents won't notify <player> once they've returned to base if they have no more tasks available (ie 'retired'), but any other agent will do so if they still have >=1 task available (if you set the relevant 'Global Commands' setting to Yes; why this defaults to 'No' I've no idea )

Thanks! Leech183's data was from 1,000 influence spent, whereas my numbers were from pulled from when I tested whether agents and missions are treated the same (hence the agent spending 583 influence or something); I just happened to have that data for another point of comparison, wasn't the original intention lol. If anyone else wants to help out and do something similar (save, stop all traders and player ship, disallow other races from all your stations, then spent 1,000 influence agent on gaining rep with lowest reputation faction and take screenshot of before/after) then please feel free to post data, it could help a fair bit; I'm not entirely convinced the system is working 100% as intended given the oddities in Argon rep change with Leech's data and Paranid in mine, but there's a fair amount of noise in this analysis due to the rounding, etc.

I also didn't realize that you gain multiple messages as the mission progresses, but I don't think that should impact it overmuch... and yeah, it absolutely should default to "Yes" notifying on mission completion lol.

[fireanddream]

I figure there's enough people complaining about the Dynamic Rep system (I can't be friends with anyone!) that don't understand it (because it actually is possible to be friends with literally everyone), so having a place to point them to for explanation might be useful. Anyway, constructive feedback appreciated, is all

As a huge dynamic relation hater I feel strongly misunderstood. Because if we utilize the system to its intended purpose, the game becomes literally unplayable.

Most players playing within the system are looking to achieve, like you, a stable combination and permanently blacklist some of the factions they don't want to befriend, which we can already do in AP without all the hassle. I have not met a single player who enjoys relation flip flopping at any given moment.

As for the stable combinations also, the entry with the largest percentage in your table is 30.7%: Pirates-Yaki-OTAS-Duke's-Strong Arms. What I see is that we need to grind 3X as hard to be hated by 3 out of the 5 corps as well as 2 pirates. And what do we have at the end of the day? Not a stable environment by a long stretch, because me and all my vessels are still two Uber missions away from being blown to pieces by whoever.

Still, all these extended grinds and micromanagement would have been somewhat tolerable if the factions flip back to friendly as cleanly as they flip to being your enemy. Who is going to replace the destroyed satellites? Who is going to emergency jump all the trade ships? Who is going to kamikaze into a bunch of red military ships and apologize? Who is going to hack red stations? Who is going to remove red laser towers? Yeah that's right, me, manually.

Again, to summarize my point, the "hated by some factions" feature has always been available in all previous games; in addition, and the "flip flopping" feature makes the game unbelievably exhausting. That's all the dynamic system is bring to the table.

[blazenclaw]

[snip]

There is some good feedback here. To clarify, I do agree with you and multiple other commenters that there exist some oddities with the system; but I've also seen a number of comments here and elsewhere that are because of players misunderstanding the system, to which the guide is more intended for.

One thing to note: In AP it's entirely possible to blacklist some factions, yes. In FL however, it's not optional but required; that's, from what I understand, the intended purpose of the system, to make it so that the player *has to* be foes with some factions, not *can choose to be foes* with some factions. A subtle, but quite important distinction. [Granted it is technically possible to be friends with all factions in FL as well, but it takes some Thinking to pull off without messing up the player's trading empire or to understand how/why it works, and I'm absolutely fine with that.]

Your comment about "two Uber missions away" is something that I agree is suboptimal about the current system; there are (apparently) missions whose rewards are too high, even when relations are at a relatively high rank, though this may be bugged behavior in some manner. In my personal gameplay I've yet to encounter a scenario where I've factions flip unexpectedly due to a larger-than expected reputation increase, once my lowest-rank friend is around rank +5. Before then of course, should still be fairly 'early game', I think, and flipping in the course of raising rank is an acceptable tradeoff. Bottom line, yes, we agree there are (likely) no players who enjoy relations flip-flopping; ideally, if one understands the (complicated) system, it shouldn't happen, but apparently still does, which is probably due to a bug or player misunderstanding.

And yes, when flipping does happen, it is currently fairly messy. That being said, if the system is working as designed, the player really shouldn't be frequently flipping once you have deployed satellites, or many trade ships. By that point, the player who plans ahead should already have decided (at least) one faction that they're going to be friends with, and be primarily in that faction's safe sectors, and slowly working outwards from there. If you're trying to build in everyone's space, or without much consideration of the factions, then yeah you will end up in trouble; FL is different than prior X3 games. Some won't like it, and that's fine; I like it more, that's just my opinion.

Regarding the percentages; all the values in the table are rather low, because they are quite literally the least-efficient sets, given they're optimizing for maximum number of stable allies. Adding a single additional faction as a foe increases the the efficiency by generally around 10-20%.

[fireanddream]

One thing to note: In AP it's entirely possible to blacklist some factions, yes. In FL however, it's not optional but required; that's, from what I understand, the intended purpose of the system, to make it so that the player *has to* be foes with some factions, not *can choose to be foes* with some factions. A subtle, but quite important distinction. [Granted it is technically possible to be friends with all factions in FL as well, but it takes some Thinking to pull off without messing up the player's trading empire or to understand how/why it works, and I'm absolutely fine with that.]

I personally would have been fine if the game straight up asks me to permanently set two factions to hostile at the start of a game. It would have been a very hard pill to swallow 'cause I like just about every race in the X3 universe especially the Yaki, but ultimately worth all the QoL and other improvements in FL.

However, that's not the case. The system gives us the "freedom" to switch alliance (with all the messy leftover problems) while taking away the stability and security. Can I really build in Argon space while there is a chance my Argon rep will drop below zero not from me attacking them but from shooting down Xenon capitals across the universe? Now there's always "quick mafhs" before every action I take and I need to worry about how everything (trading, mission, combat, even defending ships from Xenon) is going to affect my rep with not one but at least 4 factions. It's exhausting.

It would have been fine if it's like Mount and Blade: warband, where 2 factions take turn to declare war on you. In that game, trader player is not affected by war, they switch back to friendly without any leftover problems, and there aren't 300 small properties to become the targets of attack.

[birdtable]

Being a big fan of the Diplomacy aspects I have to ask blazenclaw why " would you build in argon space " if possibility of future aggression arises... The vast majority of my industry is along the Rhonkars Fire --- Cho's Defeat sectors .. I do have Argon produce factories (the few I need) set up in those sectors plus a few others in Teladi space... Sure I get a hissy fit when replacing satellites but at least I know my enemy is not some scripted confrontation spawned in... Regretfully I appear to represent a minority opinion, so blandness awaits.