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Author Topic: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change  (Read 4788 times)

SafariJohn

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Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« on: November 21, 2015, 02:47:12 PM »

The current way the game prevents you from being friends with everyone at the moment is... rather brutal. Admittedly, it is a placeholder — so here’s something to replace it!

Instead of relying on an investigation that dumps your reputation all at once, your reputation with a faction slowly changes based on your reputation with other factions and that faction’s reputation with those factions. This would be based on the nine reputation levels: Vengeful, Hostile, Inhospitable, Suspicious, Neutral, Favorable, Welcoming, Friendly, and Cooperative.

Each increment of a week or two, your reputation with each faction changes some number of points based on the following chart and key:
Chart:
Your reputation with Faction B is on the left, Faction A’s reputation with B is on the top, and where your reputation with A will stop changing at fills out the chart.


Key:
DC: no change (Don’t Care)
N+-: increases or decreases until Neutral
N+: increases until Neutral
N-: decreases until Neutral
F/S: increases/decreases until Favorable/Suspicious
W/I: increases/decreases until Welcoming/Inhospitable
Fr/H: increases/decreases until Friendly/Hostile
C/V: increases/decreases until Cooperative/Vengeful


To use the Hegemony and Tri-Tachyon as examples:
If you are Hostile with the Hegemony, Tri-Tachyon will slowly come to be Welcoming to you.
-The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

If you are Neutral with the Hegemony, then Tri-Tachyon’s opinion of you won’t change.
-You’re not supporting the Hegemony or opposing them, so what does Tri-Tachyon care?

If you are Cooperative with the Hegemony, Tri-Tachyon will eventually become Hostile with you. While you are Cooperative with the Hegemony, factions that are Suspicious or worse towards you but Neutral or better towards the Hegemony will increase their opinion of you to Neutral or better.
-Tri-Tachyon sees you as part of the Hegemony, and will rapidly start treating you like it, but, since the Hegemony trusts you with just about anything, other factions think you can’t be too bad.

If you are Vengeful with both Tri-Tachyon and the Hegemony, then both of their opinions of you will slowly return to Neutral, but while you are Vengeful with them all the factions who are Neutral or better towards them will lower their opinion of you towards Neutral or worse.
-Tri-Tachyon and the Hegemony approve of the damage you’re doing to the other side, even if they hate your guts, but if two factions that most people consider to be at least OK hate your guts, then how can anyone else trust you?


This system is powerful, flexible, and logical. It eliminates the need for awkwardly forced reputation investigations to keep the player from allying with everyone. Investigations wouldn't have to be trashed, either, just reduce their effects drastically. They could still be a big deal, but not "OMG, WTF just happened!"

In the future, such things as dynamic inter-faction relationships would be handled with no changes. Even if Alex implemented sub-factions like my old Faction Fractions suggestion this system would handle them with ease — going so far as a major faction splitting or forming would still cause no trouble.


From a player’s point of view, the effects of this system can be easily presented with event messages like “Word of your Friendly reputation with the Hegemony and Favorable reputation with the Luddic Church has reduced your standing with Tri-Tachyon.” Which might be followed by “Word of your Cooperative reputation with the Independents has improved your standing with Tri-Tachyon.”

For new players it wouldn’t be surprising that two factions that hate each other wouldn’t be okay with you being friends with both, and the slow, paced reputation changes of this system would give players plenty of time to notice and react.

Edit: noticed that I evidently can't count to nine. There are nine reputation levels, not seven.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2015, 11:10:48 AM by HartLord »
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Ranakastrasz

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Re: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« Reply #1 on: November 21, 2015, 03:58:47 PM »

Doesn't solve the problem. The problem is that as is, higher level reputations that cause point of no return are way too easy to get. What is needed is that you deliberately chose a side, ideally through a quest or com link, or else by blantent intentional action for/against a faction,
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Clockwork Owl

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Re: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« Reply #2 on: November 21, 2015, 04:22:00 PM »

Additional rules suggestions:
*Remove all 'increase reputation' part.
Reputation drop is OK to be automatic; improvement is not.
*Get the lowst threshold for reputation drop.
If your relationship with faction B cause your reputation of faction A to go down till inhospitable, and that with faction C cause your rep to drop till hostile, your relationship with faction A become worse until they become hostile to you.
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SafariJohn

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Re: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« Reply #3 on: November 21, 2015, 04:30:10 PM »

Doesn't solve the problem. The problem is that as is, higher level reputations that cause point of no return are way too easy to get. What is needed is that you deliberately chose a side, ideally through a quest or com link, or else by blantent intentional action for/against a faction,

Ease of getting reputation is a balance issue. That's not what this suggestion addresses. This system replaces the extreme rep drop from investigations, offers a potential way to get out of vengeful rep, and provides support for possible future features.

Additional rules suggestions:
*Remove all 'increase reputation' part.
Reputation drop is OK to be automatic; improvement is not.
*Get the lowst threshold for reputation drop.
If your relationship with faction B cause your reputation of faction A to go down till inhospitable, and that with faction C cause your rep to drop till hostile, your relationship with faction A become worse until they become hostile to you.

Reputation changes from this would be small and slow. A couple points every 10 minutes or so usually.

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying in the second part of your post, but being Hostile with a faction could only cause you to become Hostile with another faction if they were Cooperative with each other and nothing countered the rep loss. Currently, none of the factions in vanilla have reputations higher than Neutral with each other.
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Clockwork Owl

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Re: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« Reply #4 on: November 21, 2015, 04:37:35 PM »

But your suggestion considers future usage too, right? And there are mods.

Hostile thing was just an example. I was suggesting to make the player lose reputation until their relationship reaches the worst possible extent your rule indicates, in case standings with multiple factions are affecting a factions' relationship with player.
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SafariJohn

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Re: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« Reply #5 on: November 22, 2015, 07:49:40 AM »

But your suggestion considers future usage too, right? And there are mods.

Hostile thing was just an example. I was suggesting to make the player lose reputation until their relationship reaches the worst possible extent your rule indicates, in case standings with multiple factions are affecting a factions' relationship with player.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean ???
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Serenitis

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Re: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« Reply #6 on: November 22, 2015, 09:28:46 AM »

I like this.
It completely eliminates the silliness of factions convicting you for being friends with another faction they themselves are neutral to.

The "natural" rep movement I don't think would be a problem either if you make it slow enough. Like a couple of game months to get from one rank to the next, and add in some diminishing returns to make higher/lower tiers take longer still so you can't rely on it to gain access to things.

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SafariJohn

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Re: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« Reply #7 on: November 22, 2015, 12:22:04 PM »

The "natural" rep movement I don't think would be a problem either if you make it slow enough. Like a couple of game months to get from one rank to the next, and add in some diminishing returns to make higher/lower tiers take longer still so you can't rely on it to gain access to things.

Exactly. And I expect in practice (assuming factions had more reps with each other than just Hostile and Neutral) the player's rep movement would be even slower as some of it would cancel out.
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Clockwork Owl

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Re: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« Reply #8 on: November 22, 2015, 05:18:33 PM »

But your suggestion considers future usage too, right? And there are mods.

Hostile thing was just an example. I was suggesting to make the player lose reputation until their relationship reaches the worst possible extent your rule indicates, in case standings with multiple factions are affecting a factions' relationship with player.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean ???
In what format of explanation do you think you might understand?
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SafariJohn

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Re: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« Reply #9 on: November 22, 2015, 06:03:13 PM »

Actually, I think we're on the same page, your wording just threw me off.

To jump back to your first example:
A) You have Suspicious or better rep with A,
B) Your rep with B causes your rep with A to drop towards Inhospitable
C) Your rep with C causes your rep with A to drop towards Hostile

Barring outside influence, your rep with A will drop to Inhospitable, then drop at half the previous rate to Hostile since only your rep with C is affecting it then.

If that's the same way you interpreted it then we are on the same page.


Some side notes:
Your rep with B and C might be going up during this timespan if you started with a high enough rep with A, which could cause your rep loss to stop before you get down to Hostile.

Losing rep with A from this process will never cause your rep with B or C to drop.


Edit: Neutral or better -> Suspicious or better. Either one you'd still drop to Inhospitable and then Hostile.
« Last Edit: November 22, 2015, 07:47:48 PM by HartLord »
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Clockwork Owl

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Re: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« Reply #10 on: November 22, 2015, 07:27:03 PM »

Same page. Wasn't thinking about speed tho. I just thought it should drop till hostile in that case.
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Serenitis

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Re: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« Reply #11 on: November 23, 2015, 11:52:39 AM »

As I stepped off the Magtube On my way to work this morning it occured to me that a system like this is going to be essential if mod factions exist.
Because otherwise the game will turn into a huge dogpile.
Tbh some folk might enjoy that. But personally I think it would be much better and immersive if factions behaved according to thier natural game-start dispositions instead of ARBITRARY NUMERICAL LIMIT REACHED: COMMENCE PLAYER HATE IMMEDIATELY.

So in our hypothetical game you could be friends with Tri-Tach which means the Ludds and Hege are not going to like you much at all, but the Diktat won't care one way or the other unless you deliberately annoy them.
Or you could play with the Hege and be best enemies with Tri-Tach, while the Ludds (not the Path) will be mildly approving due to common enemies etc. and Sindria still gives nary a toss.

Granted with only the four vanilla factions it does look a little lopsided.
TT has 2 enemies + 1 Neutral
Ludd and Hege each have 1 enemy, 1 Neutral, and 1 Neutral with a smile
Diktat has 3 Neutrals

Imo The Hegemony and The Diktat should really have some degree of mutual distrust as the Diktat is essentially a "rogue" Hegemony outfit, and I can't see the H being at all happy about that.
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SafariJohn

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Re: Gradual Graduated Reputation Change
« Reply #12 on: December 03, 2015, 11:09:00 AM »

I was thinking about this a bit and it occurred to me that NPCs could use a similar system to help your rep with their faction.

Simply put, each NPC has one of five ranks in their faction based on their authority: from leaders to nobodies. Each one of these corresponds to one of the rep levels: Cooperative through Neutral. Being Friendly with a leader in a faction would slowly raise your rep with that faction as long as you were below Friendly. Being Hostile with a nobody wouldn't mean anything for your faction rep.

Here's some examples of the NPC at a Hegemony planet with a station:
The highest ranking NPC is the station commander. The second rank is occupied by very important people like base commanders, the highest ranking civilian leader (since the Hegemony favors military authority over civilian authority), and so on. The third rank is composed of people like patrol commanders – important but not high on the totem pole. In the fourth rank are people like convoy commanders. The fifth rank is composed of people who the player can interact with, but aren't important to the faction.


For this to do much it would have to be much easier to get rep with NPCs, whether through more interactions, higher rep change per interaction, or most likely a combination. If higher rep per interaction, I think higher ranking NPCs should be generally harder to sway – for or against you.

In another thread I mentioned NPCs could treat their effective reputation as a combination of their rep and their faction's. So if you were Hostile to a patrol commander but Neutral with the faction he might attack you anyway. The flip side of that is you could be Hostile with a faction, but if the patrol commander is even Favorable towards you he probably won't attack you.



Some have mentioned that the rep changes should slow down at the extremes and I fully agree, but I couldn't think of a simple way to calculate it, but now I have. The rep change would be:

Rep Change Rate = Target Rep Level Change Rate - Current Rep Level Change Rate

This also conveniently stops you from gaining rep once you hit the target rep without having to have specific exceptions for each combination. It would also need to be capped on either end to prevent excessive change rates from having a big difference in current and target rep, and to prevent reversed rep change from going over the target rep (unless that is decided to be desirable).
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