Mark as Friendly

[Irushian]

When you accidently hit a friendly ship (or a station) and turn them hostile, I think it would be a nice addition if we can mark said object as friendly/non-hostile so we do not have to either run or turn our turrets off.

I'm currently sat in my Asgard, surrounded by about 30 Kha'ak and I've had to turn my turrets off due to a freighter flying too close to my flak turret target waiting for them to go away or eventually turn back to neutral. I do not want to destroy that freighter and take a reputation hit due to this accident.

[Duncaroos]

The issue with this is that marking as friendly is not a two-way street. If you accidentally strike an NPC more than what they tolerate as accidental, they'll hate you and marking them as friendly to not have your turrets blow them to smithereens will not prevent them from re-targeting you. Marking as hostile is a one-way street; the NPC has no choice but to declare you hostile since you marked them as a potential target.

I think you mean to be able to apologize for the attack (?), which as been quite a long sought-after request by many (some) players. So far there seems to be no intention to add this, but we can only hope the devs have already added this in their improvements and is just at a lower priority than other topics.

[Irushian]

The issue with this is that marking as friendly is not a two-way street. If you accidentally strike an NPC more than what they tolerate as accidental, they'll hate you and marking them as friendly to not have your turrets blow them to smithereens will not prevent them from re-targeting you. Marking as hostile is a one-way street; the NPC has no choice but to declare you hostile since you marked them as a potential target.

I think you mean to be able to apologize for the attack (?), which as been quite a long sought-after request by many (some) players. So far there seems to be no intention to add this, but we can only hope the devs have already added this in their improvements and is just at a lower priority than other topics.

I'm aware that they would still treat you as hostile (and rightly so), but this is just so my own ships do not engage them and give me a reputation loss. Most likely not the right use of wording from my part in the original post but I only wanted to show intent as I also believe we'll never see an apology option for friendly fire or having friendly fire from automated turrets removed (I believe to be the most popular request).

I just want to be able to mark an object as a "do not engage, no matter what" if they're hostile.

[Duncaroos]

Oh I see now. Ya that would be a good addition! Do you think an alternative option to add a new Fire Authorization Level (e.g., "Peaceful"), as to not target any factions that are set to this (even if they are hostile and the player doesn't notice in time) is feasible as well?

[adeine]

Yes please.

This has been suggested in the past and would be a great addition.

[Irushian]

Oh I see now. Ya that would be a good addition! Do you think an alternative option to add a new Fire Authorization Level (e.g., "Peaceful"), as to not target any factions that are set to this (even if they are hostile and the player doesn't notice in time) is feasible as well?

That would be awesome, a simple set and forget option! Hopefully it'll be trivial for them to implement if they're open for this (Any chance of a response, Devs?).

[CBJ]

The OP's suggestion is a nice idea, and in theory it should be relatively simple to implement technically, as it's just applying a temporary relation "boost" in the opposite direction to the existing Mark as Hostile option. However, I have a nasty feeling that it might not quite work as you hope it would in practice.

In the Mark as Hostile case, we're starting with a peaceful situation where no shots are being fired and we're boosting the relations in the negative direction to make your ships shoot at the marked ship. The result of those shots hitting the marked ship is that the marked ship will get its own boost against your ships and start shooting back, and the boosts from the incoming hits will ensure that the battle continues.

In the reverse situation, the shots are already flying and the resulting boosts are being applied to whichever ships get hit. It's quite likely that the manual positive boost applied by the player would quickly be overwhelmed by the negative ones caused by the incoming hits, resulting in the player's action having no practical effect.

I'll see if I can get someone to try an experiment to confirm or refute the above suspicion, but no promises.

Edit: The experiment did happen, and unfortunately it confirmed my suspicions. Marking a ship as friendly caused the player-owned ship to disengage immediately and turned the enemy ship blue. So far so good. But as you'd expect, the enemy ship carried on firing and as soon as its shots hit the player-owned ship it turned red again and the player-owned ship re-engaged. So sadly this method wouldn't work as it stands.

Edit: The fire authorisation override option is also more complicated than it sounds. Aside from it being rather inconvenient to try to apply in the heat of battle, we currently have no underlying "fight rule" for being completely passive in the face of attacks.

[Scoob]

I use a mod called "Apologise for Attack" which basically does this. In the case of accidental fire - not by me, but the AI-controlled Turrets of a ship of mine I was riding on in my case - a ship belonging to an otherwise friendly (over 10 IIRC) went hostile. I immediately comm'd that ship and, because I had otherwise good relations with their faction, the mod determined that reversing that temporary hostility was valid. Ship became neutral once more. Seemed pretty good. My understanding is that if I had poor relations with that ship's faction, they'd NOT accept my apology. So, it has limits.

It can be quite soul destroying to be involved in a FUN battle with your allies against a common foe, only to have it all ruined due to having to reload due to accidental fire. Speaking personally, it's not ME accidentally shooting an ally, rather it's usually the turrets one of my Faction's AI-controlled ships - I don't pilot things myself much, outside of the very early-game.

As mentioned, a "Don't EVER shoot at these, guys, they're our buddy" Fire Control Override option would be useful. It wouldn't solve the immediate hostility from accidental fire, but it would help prevent escalation. I consider it a major weakness that there's no vanilla way to get out of such incidents currently, bar turning off turrets and leaving the area.

I'd suggest that the features from this mod be considered for vanilla implementation. Perhaps it can be exploited, I don't know, I simply use it to fix a current missing feature. It's literally saved me hours by preventing the need to reload because one of my faction's ships AI turrets didn't care what was between it and the target lol.

I'd also suggest that genuinely accidental fire - i.e. a Turret that won't chose to shoot friends - be ignored. Period. The amount of hits MY ships takes from allies turrets during a fight is crazy at times. I've lost Destroyers where the turrets of a Friendly Destroyer seem totally unaware that my STATIONARY ship is between them and the actual enemy...

[PV_]

Edit: The fire authorisation override option is also more complicated than it sounds. Aside from it being rather inconvenient to apply in the heat of battle, we currently have no underlying "fight rule" for being completely passive in the face of attacks.

A feature to implement?

[CBJ]

A feature to implement?

Maybe. But the question being asked was whether it would be trivial to add the functionality requested by the OP, and the answer to that is "no".

[adeine]

Since there is already locked rep in the game, it certainly doesn't sound impossible to have the rep be locked to friendly.

[CBJ]

Locking the reputation doesn't help here. The reputation boosts from combat are not related to the underlying reputation.

[Duncaroos]

Edit: The experiment did happen, and unfortunately it confirmed my suspicions. Marking a ship as friendly caused the player-owned ship to disengage immediately and turned the enemy ship blue. So far so good. But as you'd expect, the enemy ship carried on firing and as soon as its shots hit the player-owned ship it turned red again and the player-owned ship re-engaged. So sadly this method wouldn't work as it stands.

Edit: The fire authorisation override option is also more complicated than it sounds. Aside from it being rather inconvenient to try to apply in the heat of battle, we currently have no underlying "fight rule" for being completely passive in the face of attacks.

Thanks CBJ (and other tester(s)) for checking. I figured there was some nuisances with adding a new Fire Authorization when I first suggested it as I too believed your same suspicions of OP's request. Another issue is players forgetting about this peaceful/passive fire authorization being turned on and assigned, then freaking out on forums that their ships are not defending themselves

I'm hopeful/dreaming for the new Fire Authorization work be put in the "maybe" pile to try and at least help OP / players that will use this more...appropriately

[Scoob]

Does the method used by the mod "Apologise for Attack" not fit the bill? I mean, I've been in OP's exact situation, sat in a turret heavy ship and a friendly goes by and gets hit. With the mod, I'd simply comm the now-hostile ship, select the "Sorry" option and, if their faction liked me reasonably well, they'd go blue again. Of course, there's a chance that ship might get hit again... however, this Mod has been so very appreciated.

I installed it due to some accidental fire - caused by one of my ship's Turrets, I was just a passenger - hitting an allies ship during a large battle. The fight had been on-going for a while at this point and was really fun. I did not want to reload to before the battle as we'd almost beaten the Xenon back. When the friendly went hostile, I caught it right away, paused and saved the game. Realising I couldn't really recover without turning off the Turrets on ALL my ships in the area and withdrawing the fleet - taking losses as a result - I decided to install the mod. It worked perfectly. Accidental fire forgiven, battle resumed, victory to the allies. Nice.

How the mod works exactly, I don't know, but it does effectively remove the hostile state from an aggro'd ship belonging to an otherwise friendly faction. Perfect for the OP's needs I'd have thought. So, if a fire authorisation option is tricky to implement, could not something similar to how this Mod does it work in vanilla? Of course, the player needs to realise there's a problem first, before things get crazy. However, the mod does allow for a player ship to automatically apologise to an ally, which took me by surprise.

[jlehtone]

Reputation is primarily symmetric. You hate Terrans exactly as much as they hate you. The fact that you hit someone makes you hate them. Formally, they become angry from being hit, but due to symmetry you become angry too. What we do to our foes? We mug 'em! In fact, we mug even our best friends for some purple and coin, so the player is not completely bound to the symmetry. Should we be bound? Would it require a declaration of war(s) before we can even fire our guns in presense of other ships?


Perhaps a "Hold Fire and ignore all damage" stance could be added to let NPC demolish your assets without any objections. It would be convenient when you call your fighters home; they would no longer react to attacks and instead would keep on flying (until at destination or dead.)

[adeine]

Edit: The experiment did happen, and unfortunately it confirmed my suspicions. Marking a ship as friendly caused the player-owned ship to disengage immediately and turned the enemy ship blue. So far so good. But as you'd expect, the enemy ship carried on firing and as soon as its shots hit the player-owned ship it turned red again and the player-owned ship re-engaged. So sadly this method wouldn't work as it stands.

Are you sure this is what is happening? I've had NPC ships outright destroy some of my assets due to stray fire and they never turned red or visibly lost reputation as far as I could tell. Perhaps there is some other part in the attack logic turning it hostile again (e.g. when the ship intentionally attacks the player it resets to hostile)?

Locking the reputation doesn't help here. The reputation boosts from combat are not related to the underlying reputation.

If the above is accurate and you can't/don't want to implement a way to stop temporary reputation from overriding locked reputation you could always just make it a temporary rep boost that is way out of bounds.

Set the temporary boost to +65000 or something equally ridiculous and all the negative rep hits from hitting the player won't make a difference.