imo losing a fight vs a faction (assuming they're the aggressors) shouldn't change relations one way or another. I mean, the assumption is you escaped with your life, and thus they're still just as hostile towards you as ever. If you lose a fight as the aggressor, relations should go down depending on losses inflicted (if no losses, it should go down a trivial amount since it's little more than a misunderstanding/harmless harassment)
One thing I forgot to mention: if all you do is escape (without dealing hull/armor damage), while you do lose some standing, it doesn't automatically get lowered to hostile on top of that, as it would if you had engaged. (If your standing is originally good, you could see it as being explained away as a "misunderstanding".)
In-fiction-wise, I can easily see you escaping being aggravating. Not aggravating enough to get into "vengeful" territory, but enough to push to the very bottom of "hostile".
Something else that factors in here is you might find yourself in a fight when the faction is not hostile towards you, for example when you're caught hacking a comm relay and aren't sufficiently contrite.
Vengeful, imo, shouldn't be able to be negated barring VERY special events, off of the top of my head, here are a few possibilities:
-Formal declaration of surrender including massive war reparations and likely loss of planets/outposts
-Armistice/peace treaty signed
-Special pardon from leader of faction, likely result of display of heroism in battle (ofc, this would require the faction to be desperate enough to let you fight for them in the first place)
-Change of faction leadership, likely result of the death of the current leader or the utter defeat and subsequent splintering of the faction
And even then, for the most part the most you'll be able to raise it up to is suspicious
Yep, generally on the same page here.
Sounds like a near perfect framework for these things. One thing i wonder about is why "independents" have a unified rating at all, though.
Yeah, still undecided on how to handle that. I think it more or less makes sense for hostile status, but maybe less so for stuff being unlocked. Probably not going to worry about it for the next release, but it's definitely on my mind.
Also, how moddable do you think the specific actions and effects of relations will be?
Very. The way it's structured now, a mod could override the behavior of a specific action while leaving everything else intact. Adding actions is also simple, and since there's no strictly-defined concept of what an action is (or what constitutes a response to an action), it's very flexible.