Reputation swings, ship prices and reactions after claiming a ship

[Argent Valcendre]

I‘m playing the lost terracorp pilot scenario and encountered the following issues:

1) some ships are offered by their pilot with an incredibly high price tag. A M5 or a normal freighter for more than a million credits. It happens from time to time while most price tags seemed ok.

2) I experienced one huge reputation swing after transfering the data (from asteroid scanning) for the split. I was at 3 red picks with the split and went straight to 6 green picks, without another reputation going down very far. It was the only reputation swing so far.

3) After a M5 pilot bailed (station defense mission), I could repair the ship and claim it. this triggered a massive attack on the claimed M5 ship from several capital ships. This issue is repeatable and seems to occur every time.

[chip56]

1) Thats because some of those ships have equpiment like the mk1 turbo booster which adds about 2 million credits to the cost of the ship.

3) Known issue, you can avoid it currently by leaving and coming back later to grab the ship. However it is planned to be improved in the future.

[blazenclaw]

Lost TerraCorp pilot is the best start

1) The high price tag is almost universally because they have a Turbobooster Mk1 on it which sells for ~1m, and gets included in the price tag. I've yet to find a situation where a ship for sale with a damaged hull sells for less once repaired, though ships being offered at 100% hull are sold at a slight markup, I think.

2) Do you have a save for that? I've seen some other people saying similar things that missions/agents might be overtuned from negative ranks; there's no way that it should be actually easier to drop rep then raise it to reach high ranks, lol.

3) Known bug that will be fixed in next ver, workaround for the time being is to let bailed ships sit for a while before claiming them.

Edit: ninja'd by chip

[Argent Valcendre]

I‘m not familiar with the handling of savegames.

I might add the following observations to the list above:

4) A patrol mission for the Split in which I shot a few Xenon M5 lead to a reputation decrease with borons and argons and allies from neutral to 2 red picks. The Paranid increased from 2 red picks to one green pick. This seems to big for what was accomplished during the mission.

5) follow and meeting details missions sometimes fail because the ship I should follow doesn‘t move at all. Other situations arise when the ship I should follow just attacks ships of a faction it opposes, it will usually attack a capital ship and get destroyed in the process.

6) I noted (lost terracorp pilot) that when I use the advanced spacesuit (which I can keep since 1.1) my friend and foe selections in the command section are erased and the initial settings from the beginning of the game are reinstated. This happens every time I switch to the advanced spacesuit.

[chip56]

I‘m not familiar with the handling of savegames.

I might add the following observations to the list above:

4) A patrol mission for the Split in which I shot a few Xenon M5 lead to a reputation decrease with borons and argons and allies from neutral to 2 red picks. The Paranid increased from 2 red picks to one green pick. This seems to big for what was accomplished during the mission.

5) follow and meeting details missions sometimes fail because the ship I should follow doesn‘t move at all. Other situations arise when the ship I should follow just attacks ships of a faction it opposes, it will usually attack a capital ship and get destroyed in the process.

4) Thats actually a low jump if you are near neutral. Keep in mind that those levels are really, really close together:
From +1 rank down to -2 you only need to lose about 150 notority. To put that in relation: to get from +2 to +3 you need 667. From 8 to 9 you need 66,667 notoriety.

[Argent Valcendre]

4) Thats actually a low jump if you are near neutral. Keep in mind that those levels are really, really close together:
From +1 rank down to -2 you only need to lose about 150 notority. To put that in relation: to get from +2 to +3 you need 667. From 8 to 9 you need 66,667 notoriety.

I strongly disagree because the impact in the game is huge; I changed from welcome to hostile and from hostile to welcome with several factions, I had no contact during the mission. Also the mission was low level and my accomplishment small.

[Hwitvlf]

4) Thats actually a low jump if you are near neutral. Keep in mind that those levels are really, really close together:
From +1 rank down to -2 you only need to lose about 150 notority. To put that in relation: to get from +2 to +3 you need 667. From 8 to 9 you need 66,667 notoriety.

I strongly disagree because the impact in the game is huge; I changed from welcome to hostile and from hostile to welcome with several factions, I had no contact during the mission.

I suspect he meant 'that's a low jump for what you usually see in FL' as opposed to 'that's an insignificant jump'. Some people have been frustrated by the faction system, but it swings less when you reach higher positive or negative reputation levels. When your near neutral, you can lose rep levels quickly but you can gain them back just as quickly.

You pretty much have to choose a side. I picked Boron/Argon and am now at high ranks with them so I can kill some Xenon in Paranid/Split territory without the Boron/Argon becoming hostile. A fun aspect is that the Boron/Argon pay you for pirating Paranid/Split ships when you're licensed- like the privateers of history.

The Teladi are only at odds with Yaki so you can do missions for them without polarizing everyone else.

[Argent Valcendre]

You describe the reputation system how it should work. My point was only to announce observed bugs and not to discuss the reputation system itself.

Right now with low level missions I still experience huge reputation swings. Some low level missions giving low level rewards and insane reputation changes.

In a more advanced game, I experience frozen reputations with dozens of high level missions having no noticeable impact on reputation at all.

[chip56]

You describe the reputation system how it should work. My point was only to announce observed bugs and not to discuss the reputation system itself.

Right now with low level missions I still experience huge reputation swings. Some low level missions giving low level rewards and insane reputation changes.

In a more advanced game, I experience frozen reputations with dozens of high level missions having no noticeable impact on reputation at all.

A jump from +2 to -1 or +1 to -2 is while having a big impact NOT a big swing.

To explain take a look at this table:
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

You will note that between 0% rank -5 and the highest rank 100% there are 2 million notority points.
A jump from +3 to -1 however is a very minor jump of 200 points even though it looks big since its 4 ranks. But the closer to 0 you are the less points you actually need to go either direction.

So you did a minor quest and killed a few ships. You got about 450 points or so and about -150 malus for the others. Thats actually not a lot. When most people here complained in v 1.0 we had +5 to -3 in one mission which is depending on the exact percentage between 1-2 magnitudes of order higher.
And this also is the reason why if you are at rank 7 with two enemies you can do more missions since even losing 1k notority wont kick you down a rank

So in this case the issue is actually not that you had a big jump, but rather that x3 always had nonlinear ranks and FL uses the same ranks which makes it very hard to judge if you can afforct to take those missions. Might be actually better for FL to get the ranks a bit more linear and to move some equipment accordingly down for purchase.

[Argent Valcendre]

Thanks for the information.

The required points for a reputation change is one aspect, the points attributed for a given mission another. With an easy transport mission for the boron, 15’000 credits reward, I had a reputation change from two red picks (guess it was a -3) to four green picks (which I guess would be a +6) with the Boron. This is quite amazing!