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Author Topic: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think  (Read 20975 times)

heskey30

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #30 on: November 25, 2015, 08:15:56 AM »

Is there any reason not to have an across the board increase in the cost of tradegoods? That would make piracy more profitable.
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Kzanu

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #31 on: November 25, 2015, 08:19:16 AM »

Aaand after some "serious" investigation in the "he killed too many pirates department" Hegemony hit me with almost 90 rep penalization. So I guess I have my Syndicate and Indies.
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Cik

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #32 on: November 25, 2015, 10:49:09 AM »

re: piracy

i think a few things are needed. currently if you play pirates (well, without adjusting your standing with the console, anyway) you will have to shoot pirates that inevitably attack you, which shuts down your access to any nearby ports in a way that's essentially impossible to avoid. so, fix that somehow, either by making a pirate start or by making it easier to blend in and approach the dock somehow.

2. pirate ships are really garbage, even on the sole military market they have. i'd make the hidden pirate base (or barad B,A) a military market which allows the player easier access to at least mid quality ships. that way they'd have at least someway to acquire the ships they desperately need to outnumber everything (considering they're going to have piles of (D) frigates because you can't buy anything else at the start of the game)

3. terrain (and being in terrain) should effect sensors more. you need to be able to hide in asteroid belts and stuff, so that you don't always get jumped by the hegemony fast pickets (which are nigh impossible to fight at the beginning) or the mercenary patrols (likewise)

4. mercantile convoys seem relatively scarce, and that's the only thing you can really take on. attacking them is very dangerous for you, because they will have escorts and because they can easily be reinforced by things you can't see. i'd make smaller ones more common, and clutter more terrain around jump points and obvious trade-routes so that they are easier to ambush.

5. reward is too low. even if you do manage to come out on top, and say you have a few frigates for the extra cargo space, the reward is very low. even heavy machinery, what i considered a huge profit windfall in .65 (easy to carry lots of it, high price per unit, drops relatively often) seems much reduced in terms of what you can expect credits-wise, though i'm not exactly sure why. if you have to buy supplies (and you will, because finding things you can reliably kill is not easy) you will lose the tug of war between profits and costs before long. sustainability, if there are no bounties on the table, is almost nonexistent.

i also tried smuggling to make up the cost but paradoxically it's actually harder now that the AI (and you) are not omniscient. where before, all you had to do to get into an any-stability port was just to have -50(?) or higher standing and get a little lucky on the random custom inspection, now you have to sneak through patrols that often completely surround the planet and run sensor pings all the time. keeping in mind that for a smuggler (especially starting out) your chances of killing any one of these numerous patrols is absolute zero, smuggling to any place with high stability (and thus, prices you can actually make a profit at) are very, very low.
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Serenitis

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #33 on: November 25, 2015, 12:16:31 PM »

Imo you shouldn't have to "manage" faction hostility at all.

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Sordid

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #34 on: November 25, 2015, 04:03:38 PM »

Overall I feel like the developer is out of ideas, so he's just cramming in filler. He made the really fun part, the space shooter, and now he's padding it out with stuff that just makes it more annoying rather than more interesting and challenging.

It bothers me that instead of that game getting better, a completely different game grew on top of it, like a tumor.

Seriously ??? The website clearly stated the direction the game was going in from the very beginning. You can see all the features that moved from the "upcoming" list to the "current" list. The plan to make a whole-hearted space game stood from the beginning. That you want some other, purely action-combat game is your good right, but to act as if the dev had betrayed you by not making that is just ridiculous.

I think you're reading a lot more into my post that it actually says. All I'm saying is it would have been nice to see the combat part of the game improve, which hasn't really happened. None of its fundamental problems have been addressed, such as the fact that your deep space battle is somehow limited to an arbitrary box, and all the new mechanics that affect combat, such as CR, are to its detriment rather than improvement. Well, almost all. The player skills are pretty damn great.
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JohnDoe

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #35 on: November 25, 2015, 05:21:33 PM »

Yeah, The sindrian Diktat is now hostile towards me for having good relations with the Tri-Tach, AND THEY AREN'T EVEN ENEMIES WTF!?

Yep, that's the annoying part. Factions that are neutral to each other investigating player's ties with the other faction and drop their relationship with the player to hostile.
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ANGRYABOUTELVES

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #36 on: November 27, 2015, 02:19:30 AM »

Yeah, The sindrian Diktat is now hostile towards me for having good relations with the Tri-Tach, AND THEY AREN'T EVEN ENEMIES WTF!?

Yep, that's the annoying part. Factions that are neutral to each other investigating player's ties with the other faction and drop their relationship with the player to hostile.

I came here to complain about this, only to find someone else already has. It really doesn't make any sense that e.g. the Luddic Church doesn't like you snugging up to the Hegemony, when they're neutral to the Hegemony. The result of an investigation being hostility would make sense if they're investigating your ties to a faction the investigator is hostile towards, not so much when they're investigating your ties to a faction they don't care about. Maybe your faction relation could drop to neutral or favoured, because they don't totally trust someone who's in tight with another faction, but outright hostility doesn't make sense in that situation.

I also like the idea of higher-level faction relations being locked behind missions that require you to prove your loyalty by attacking other factions, bugging their comms, that sort of thing.
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Zelnik

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #37 on: November 28, 2015, 01:29:20 PM »

I find it silly that you are penalized for working with a faction, even if that faction isn't at war with them.
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hairrorist

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #38 on: November 28, 2015, 03:27:25 PM »

Solution:
Once you hit a certain love level with a faction, they will offer you a letter of marque or some other sign of affiliation.  If you accept, you will get a discount on supplies and fuel at their stations or perhaps an allotment based on fleet size to discourage abusing this discount for trade purposes rather than the intended fleet sustenance. Maybe just make a new item that becomes available at a discounted rate: Hegemony Supplies, Hegemony Fuel, etc.  Selling these will result in faction loss for the originating faction and a small faction gain with whoever you sell them to.  You may also receive military oriented missions from them to shoot a certain thing, delivery weapons, etc.  Failing the mission may hurt relations.

It is at this point that investigations may succeed.  Perhaps with the greatest chance of success soon after you complete a mission, with diminishing rate between missions.

If you refuse the offer, you may have a small love loss with the faction.

Now you are carefully managing the requests of a demanding faction that you have decided to impress, rather than acting like a shitass periodically to counterbalance how effectively you've furthered a factions interests.  The highest level of non-indy ships are firewalled behind this choice, and you've got to work hard now for a single faction to acquire their capital ships.  At this point regardless of your choice bounties with this faction will still pay out but they no longer increase relations.

I think that the current system of allowing an independent rogue to purchase a factions most elite vessels is as ridiculous as the current investigation system.

"Hello random pirate slayer.  We would like to sell you the tools you will need to challenge our fleets.  They hold their value well too, sell very well on the aftermarket so feel free to shop them to our enemies.  Thanks for your hard work in fending off the pirates that have attacked your fleet.  That's swell.  Real nice work.
K bye,
-High Level Hegemony Jackass"

 They're going to want some dedication before they open up their superiority vessels to some dude that's just killed some random pirates.
Done.

-edit-
That's a huge amount of work and I don't think the sarcasm of 'bam done' came through there :)
« Last Edit: November 28, 2015, 08:51:09 PM by hairrorist »
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AeusDeif

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #39 on: December 08, 2015, 09:41:03 AM »

Found this thread by googling 'starsector endless investigations'. got back into this game after idk how long, because of the update. Generally avoiding black market stuff, playing a good character, completely confused about the constant investigations. So I read the thread a bit and realized the game is punishing me for putting in hard work with one faction, to access their toys and buy them with game money so I can play with them.. the game is trying to prevent me from playing it.

It's not in an immersive 'this is what happens in this world' kind of way. It's not in a fun 'here is a problem, now how do you solve it,' kind of way. It is just a bad idea having a bad effect. I honestly thought it was a bug at first; single digit reputations hits trained me to think one way, then all of a sudden, negative 66 from black market, you are at war, you have only 1 ship good luck. I fixed that with a quickload and 'don't do that again' but now I'm getting the same thing from investigations. The game is shunting the difficulty up in an unpredictable way, and from what I read here is impossible to backtrack, so apparently the time I spent is wasted.

I do not want to play multiple playthroughs to explore the game content, because in the process I'd have to tediously slog through content Ive already thoroughly explored. As someone else said, combat is -The Main Feature- and everything else revolves around it. I want to continuously explore new combinations of ships, weapons, upgrades, in new settings and against new opponents, in an immersive setting that engenders a story of how I explored it. And good job! A lot of that is implemented, or I wouldn't have spent so much time playing! But that is also what makes this one bit so frustrating -- the idea that the game is designed to force me to stop playing one part of it, or the other part of it, and especially in an irreversible way with no warning?

-----TL;DR----- using reputation hits or 'faction jealousy' to force players into one faction is like baking someone a feast and telling them to pick one kind of food and that's all they get. Bad idea! Please don't mutilate your beautiful game with this thinking.

I may just wait for a mod that unbreaks the game by removing or toning down this 'feature'. Too much realism turns it into something other than a game. If there were anything clear about how it's calculated I might suggest an alternative but in any case, making your game cut itself into pieces that the player can't play = making a self-breaking game
« Last Edit: December 08, 2015, 09:48:07 AM by AeusDeif »
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Thaago

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #40 on: December 08, 2015, 09:48:18 AM »

Update your game; its already gone.
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Vinyl Dash

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #41 on: December 08, 2015, 09:58:44 AM »

Re:
..

As Thaago said, get the latest version of the game. The investigation system was already entirely removed and replaced with a commission system, where you need to opt in to the faction soap operas. If you don't, they leave you alone.
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Megas

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #42 on: December 08, 2015, 10:02:36 AM »

On the other hand, you now need a commission to buy almost anything that required high relations.  Relations alone is not enough.
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Vinyl Dash

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #43 on: December 08, 2015, 10:59:50 AM »

On the other hand, you now need a commission to buy almost anything that required high relations.  Relations alone is not enough.

True, but ship availability on the black market also went up. Not enough to give you everything, but still by quite a bit.
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Megas

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Re: Faction hostility is much easier to manage than you think
« Reply #44 on: December 08, 2015, 11:27:41 AM »

On the other hand, you now need a commission to buy almost anything that required high relations.  Relations alone is not enough.

True, but ship availability on the black market also went up. Not enough to give you everything, but still by quite a bit.
Availability of standard-grade ships are more common, and truly awful junk less so, but I have to see something they could not spawn previously.
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