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Author Topic: About running a totally neutral faction  (Read 1442 times)

Zakaluka

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About running a totally neutral faction
« on: June 07, 2021, 05:19:34 PM »

In the real world, being totally neutral would only work if you didn't also engage in opportunistic trade.

Unforunately, in starsector it's totally sustainable to wait for conflicts and then supply both parties in the conflict. You lose a little bit of reputation, but gain more from the faction you're supplying. It's sustainable.

I suggest that this shouldn't be sustainable. Or, remaining neutral should be expensive. There are a lot of ways one could go about that in balancing:

- If two opposing factions are warring (not just at war) and they spot me trading with their enemies, I should lose more reputation with their enemies than the faction I'm supplying. That way,
- I can only make a few opportunistic trades, before being forced to butt out or have war declared.

Now, also, general supply lines from your colonies. If two factions are at war with each other, I'm neutral, AND I have a super high market share of some goods, I should get a lot more expeditions launched against me by both of them.

So, my specific suggestions aren't perfect. I'm more interested in the gap being discussed: it's too easy to remain neutral.
« Last Edit: June 07, 2021, 05:21:16 PM by Zakaluka »
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DownTheDrain

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Re: About running a totally neutral faction
« Reply #1 on: June 07, 2021, 06:19:18 PM »

I don't know, trading already seems meh enough without making it any harder. If money was an actual issue this might make more sense.
Then again the only trading I do is offloading the loot from my expeditions across the sector, so I'm probably not the person to ask.
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AcaMetis

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Re: About running a totally neutral faction
« Reply #2 on: June 08, 2021, 02:52:24 AM »

The problem I see with this suggestion is that if you're making money through trading than you're already doing something that's not intended. The intended way to make money through buying/selling commodities is through smuggling them on the Black Market, and at that point you're not actually trading with any given faction, you're trading exclusively with Pirates (or other criminal elements that, for all intends and purposes, belong to the Pirate faction if they belong to any faction at all). I don't see why any faction would be especially annoyed if I ended up smuggling a bunch of goods to one of their enemies, because that doesn't help them at all. It's actively detrimental (insofar that NPC factions actually care about mechanics and numbers that don't matter to them at all), in fact, so if anything I should be tasked/commissioned to smuggle bulk goods to hostile black markets to disrupt their commerce.

Obviously the receiving faction should >:( at that, but, well, they already do.
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Megas

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Re: About running a totally neutral faction
« Reply #3 on: June 08, 2021, 04:30:49 AM »

Taking a side means signing up for commission, yes?  No commission is a harder or slower start.  Without commission, you do not get those sweet, sweet bounties from a sponsor faction every time you destroy enemy fleets.  Also, you have no access to most of their merch in their military markets, and you need to wait until you steal blueprints from the core worlds' industries (or salvage some from ruins) before you can build your own stuff.

Quote
- If two opposing factions are warring (not just at war) and they spot me trading with their enemies, I should lose more reputation with their enemies than the faction I'm supplying. That way,
There are not too many systems where there are multiple major factions.

Also, if the OP applied to the player, then the Indies should be hostile against all major factions due to major factions bullying too many Indie NPCs like the player.
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KDR_11k

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Re: About running a totally neutral faction
« Reply #4 on: June 08, 2021, 04:33:30 AM »

You can already stay neutral by just exploring around, you even get gamma cores to trade for rep that way. It's already unlikely that you'll end up at war with any faction without instigating that on purpose or getting a commission.
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Zakaluka

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Re: About running a totally neutral faction
« Reply #5 on: June 08, 2021, 08:39:10 AM »

You can already stay neutral by just exploring around, you even get gamma cores to trade for rep that way. It's already unlikely that you'll end up at war with any faction without instigating that on purpose or getting a commission.

I was suggesting that it's too easy to stay neutral, and benefit hugely from other factions' wars, not that it's difficult.

if you're making money through trading than you're already doing something that's not intended.

Have to be honest, I'm in Nex in this current play through. What that means is that there are plenty of shortages to fulfill, and usually there are more interesting trades to be had with non-pirate factions than with pirates. When hegemony tries repeatedly to invade the perseans it creates huge shortages of every imaginable commodity. Much more trade volume than the pirates are ever able to take.

When you're selling huge quantities at triple base price, a little 18% tarriff doesn't matter.

That I'm in Nex *might* count against me for providing feedback on market mechanics.
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AcaMetis

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Re: About running a totally neutral faction
« Reply #6 on: June 08, 2021, 08:50:11 AM »

Quote
Have to be honest, I'm in Nex in this current play through. What that means is that there are plenty of shortages to fulfill, and usually there are more interesting trades to be had with non-pirate factions than with pirates. When hegemony tries repeatedly to invade the perseans it creates huge shortages of every imaginable commodity. Much more trade volume than the pirates are ever able to take.

When you're selling huge quantities at triple base price, a little 18% tarriff doesn't matter.

That I'm in Nex *might* count against me for providing feedback on market mechanics.
Yeah, Nex is almost a completely different game in that regard. Also something to note, your first suggestion is already a part of Nex (and maybe vanilla as well, but as Megas pointed out there's few systems where you can see it happen and even fewer where you've any reason to do open market trading, so...) - open market trading when there's a hostile market in the same system should give you bigger relationship penalties with the hostile faction than you get positive trade points with the faction you trade with. At least it did last I checked. And as for staying neutral, once you found your own faction you'll end up getting the same random diplomacy events that the other factions do (unless you disable random player diplomacy events in a config), so it's not necessarily easy to stay on friendly terms with everyone and avoid opportunistic war declarations either.
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Deshara

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Re: About running a totally neutral faction
« Reply #7 on: June 09, 2021, 02:40:09 PM »

In the real world, being totally neutral would only work if you didn't also engage in opportunistic trade. ... I suggest that this shouldn't be sustainable.

CITATION NEEDED. People arm both sides of a war all the time. Go watch Lord of War. It is, in fact, a major contributing factor in the cause of most wars -- the war would make everybody in a position to prevent it a lot of money selling guns & ammo to both sides, and preventing the war doesnt make anybody any money (except for the people who would die bc of it & nobody cares about them). In fact, engaging in black market trade with both sides of a war is literally how Switzerland made all of the wealth it has today, from helping nazis fence gold & heirlooms stolen off the people they genocided to the rich people inside allied nations to selling machine parts & parts critical for making the sights on bombers to both sides.
In fact, not only do neutral factions make bank selling to both sides, but the factions at war make bank selling to their enemies. One of the major operations US special forces undergo in Afghanistan is aiding the Taliban in starting up mining facilities within the territory they control. This article acts like the role that the afghanistan president's brother plays in this operation is the big story, but focus on the role of the US in funding the Taliban while waging war on them. A note that the article glances over without paying attention much to it is that when they say that this operation was run with the aide of a virginia based company "with ties to the US military", what they actually mean is that the people who started & run this fake company are a bunch of different people who work in the Secretary of Defense's office, which is a very polite way of saying that the right-hand man of the US President himself personally sold mining equipment to the taliban while at war with them -- this isn't just a "the men in the trenches sell smokes to the men on the other side of the field of fire", this is a "the men in charge sold your enemy the cannons they're using to shoot you, and the ammo too. And also they faked the evidence used to start the war". https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/how-afghanistans-president-helped-his-brother-secure-lucrative-mining-deals-with-a-us-contractor
In fact, most of the money that funds half of the US's political parties comes from the personal bank accounts of a family that made its money using the US's infrastructure to sell oil refining equipment to the nazis during WW2.

EVERYBODY gets their hands dirty. If you wanted the game to portray conflict more realistically, what you actually should be advocating for is for conflict with a faction to no longer restrict you from accessing their black markets IF you are acting under the commission of, or rule, a major faction yourself. A realistic depiction of war would be, you going to war with the hegemony, defeating one of their fleets, performing every easy ship recovering of every enemy ship that you can, mothballing all of them immediately, then dragging the derelict fleet to the nearest hegemony market & selling the hegemony their ships back to them to fix up & field against you again.
Every war is & has always been like this & anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong or lying
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Locklave

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Re: About running a totally neutral faction
« Reply #8 on: June 09, 2021, 03:09:33 PM »

If everyone hates you equally then you are neutral. But only if your hate is equal!

- an impartial or unbiased country or person.
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