This recent update, I realized that commissions were a pretty significant feature of Starsector, and I hadn't ever really engaged with the mechanic before. I made it a goal to maintain a Hegemony commission throughout the main story, to see how it worked, and try it out. As I went through the story, I started to notice a few patterns in the optimal course of action.
Commissions incentivize you to avoid fighting the enemy.
The expectation, when taking a commission, is that you will have to fight your faction's enemies, when it declares war. This is brought up by the character in the tutorial, who introduces the mechanic. While you will randomly be set to hostile with some factions, there is neither requirement nor incentive to fight them - in fact, there is the opposite incentive. You lose ten points of reputation, net, at the end of a war, and are set to one point above 'not hostile' at the start of one, as long as you're not already there. This means that the most desirable course of action, at the start of a war, is to do a quest for whoever your employer just declared war on, and then go about your business away from the core until the unpleasantness resolves itself. As an added bonus, the reputation recoup is additive, so you can gain reputation with your faction's enemies faster by doing small favors for them while you're at war. Above all, though, you want to make sure that you aren't doing too much damage, since every point of reputation lost will need to be earned back later, plus an extra ten.
I will say that there is an instance in which this mechanic works brilliantly - ordinarily, tactical bombardments, open hostility, and the like result in permanent hostility until the player earns back a faction's trust. With a commission, tactical bombardments are fully expected, and can be used to support market dominance enforcement, nanoforge theft, and anything similar, under cover of war. Exactly the kind of thing we like about Starsector.
I would suggest taking this a bit farther - hostile actions during war should be expected as par for the course, and receive drastically reduced reputation losses - perhaps one or two points. However, your new enemies shouldn't be so keen to accept someone flying the flag of someone they're at war with, and reputation should be capped at -50 for the duration of the conflict. Potentially, the player's benefactor should expect the player's assistance at some point during the war, and become suspicious if the player is nowhere to be found - perhaps station/patrol fleet bounties with high reputation rewards would begin appearing alongside the other 'open' missions spawned when the player is near a communications relay, incentivizing the player to involve himself in the conflict, and the reputational gains associated with fighting distant pirates could instead be placed here.
Commissions incentivize you to fight your employer.
Just as commissions make reputation with your employer's enemies more scarce (and thus valuable), it also makes reputation with your employer itself relatively worthless. As defending yourself in the omnipresent fights against pirates, pathers, and opportunistic scavengers in the outer rim now awards significant reputation, you have effectively unlimited political leeway from your benefactor. Raiding a convoy full of heavy industry products can get you up to 400 thousand credits, with the main cost of this being the need to regain that five reputation eventually. All manner of lucrative actions are disincentivized with reputation losses, which become irrelevant when you're commissioned with a faction and receive a steady stream of increases. On a funny note, it is interesting that the Hegemony, upon seeing the player waltz into a system adorned with a glowing "DO NOT ENTER, ILLEGAL." sign and start shooting at those things they claim don't exist will not only be okay with this, but actively thrilled with the turn of events.
In any case, I think it would make sense for clandestine attacks against a faction to be significantly harder to get away with under commission. In-universe, this can be justified as a faction paying greater attention to those under its payroll, or the documentation associated with the bounties they pay out making the player easier to track. The same could apply to smuggling, and other sources of negative reputation. At present, picking a commission less involves deciding which faction is most useful (or most interesting), and more involves which faction would be most lucrative to attack with impunity.
Wars - they're now something to pay attention to.
I did find myself wanting to know when a war might break out - random conflicts are interesting background noise as an independent spacer, but somewhat jarring as a commissioned officer. Giving players with commissions some insight into their factions' interfactional politics might improve both the player's strategic options and his immersion. This might amount to an event message 5-30 days before the start and end of a war, similar to the way 'deterioration' messages occur before decivilization.
A tangent: On Reputation
Since commissions play with the reputation system a lot, I had to get good at regaining lost reputation. Along the way, I came to the realization that system bounties were far and away the best means of doing this (which makes sense, seeing as they involve dealing with an immediate, pressing threat). Shortly thereafter, I came to the realization that fighting three standard pirate fleets together gave one third the reputation of fighting them separately, and resolved to split them up before engaging. Shortly after that, I came to another realization - the collection of Drams and Buffalo (P)s that are left behind after the destruction of a pirate fleet also count for reputation, so it's best to let them retreat, then reengage to destroy them. The resulting system involved milking a single small fleet for around ten reputation total, following a quick battle and a series of autoresolves that each destroyed a few of the surviving support ships.
I do think that seeking out system bounties should be a good source of reputation, but the most engaging gameplay there is, unfortunately, the most heavily-penalized. Rushing in and engaging in a grand battle with five pirate armadas at once, pushing an endgame fleet to its limits, nets you less reputation than any other strategy. Conversely, fighting the same fight with one or two Ventures and a Colossus II ten times is optimal.
I think that the system could be improved pretty elegantly, even incentivizing more difficult battles, by drawing reputation gain from a pool denoted at the start of the bounty. Suppose there are 30 points of reputation to be gained - an improvement worth pursuing, but substantially less than can currently be gained. The player's share of that reputation would then be awarded as the percentage of total damage dealt to the pirate fleets - destroying 75 percent of the fleets spawned, a challenging feat, would award 23 points in total. A multiplier could be awarded based on the difficulty of each battle - calculated the same way as the EXP multiplier, which serves a similar purpose. The Doylist explanation is that it incentivizes a faster pace and more interesting fights, and counterbalances risk-averseness bias. The Watsonian explanation is that, when you're in a populated system, you have an audience - people will be much more inclined to spread the story of the brave hero who destroyed five pirate armadas at once with nothing but a single Odyssey, than of the contractor who dutifully eliminated ten small pirate fleets in turn with his four tach lance Paragons.
Bugs
I noticed a bug in the new Diktat quest chain, with a Hegemony commission. The Hegemony mercenary comes up to me, talks casually, and reveals that there are orders to let me go about my business. I obtain the data core, and the mercenary then turns around and attacks me. I think a script that fires on core recovery isn't making the requisite check.
The bug with the rogue Hegemony officer after you obtain Gargoyle still occurs - I don't recall the precise dialogue that led to it, but the popup indicating that the fight will turn the Hegemony hostile appears despite the fact that that officer is treated as a renegade. I remember it being fixed in a previous build, so it might have something to do with my having a commission - or it might not.
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Topic: A very in-depth post on Commissions and Reputation (Read 1491 times)