Ideas for faction relations

Just one additional thought. Joining factions is a great idea to side step this issue of being seen by others as hostile, but the problem is that those factions don't appear to know that they're supposed to help you when it comes to shooting; they don't start acting like wingmen.

In one of my attempted play-throughs, I went to some lengths to rescue a ship under attack. I saved their butts and earned the enmity of their assailant faction in a big way. The faction I helped never thought to return the favour...just remained neutral to my plight when I was attacked later on. I felt like calling them the Eloi (among a few other choice names). Increased standing in a faction needs to have some real benefits in the ship-to-ship combat domain, not just what kind of information you can buy, or who'll sell you stuff.

Is there a way of getting "loyalty" by one's actions as well as by cash?

Heck, Han got Chewie as a 'wingman' just by saving his life.

Thanks for the honest (and polite) feedback. It is just the kind of thing needed to make the game better. Love is blind they say. An objective viewpoint is helpful.

Ok. It sounds like there are some major balance issues in the current design. Only part of which is faction relations. Let me just summarize what I am hearing, to make sure I understand it.

1. The wingman ships are too weak, making the cost of fighting very high.
2. The punishment for even a defensive fight is high (instant hatred) and so it means many, many future fights.
3. There is nothing costly about not fighting. Never is the player put into a position where the best move (most profitable) is fighting.

The sum effect is that a wise player would never fight. While I wanted to make the player reluctant to start a fight, this is clearly way too far down that path.

The first step toward fixing this situation is Shane’s suggestion of making the player ships stronger. Fighting must not be suicide or no rational player will try it.

If attacking a faction does not have much faction reduction, then a pirate player will just keep purchasing standing back up to compensate for attacks. Something needs to change to balance that back out. Either standing needs to go up in price, or a player who attacks ships needs to be blocked from standing increases for a few weeks of game time.

It could even be that fighting warships inflicts less penalty than attacking transports. Then player pirates would be penalized, but defensive fighting, or fighting at tolls would have much less cost. And it would let the player take down those annoying tugs without much fear of starting a war.

Point 3, about cost of not fighting could be addressed in a few ways. We could increase the cost of pirate tolls, to make it more worthwhile to fight them. To stop from constant fighting, we could drop the frequency they show up, so they are rare, but expensive.

That is negative costs. To make fighting have a positive benefit, if the player fights and “destroys� a toll (or group of guards) then that group will be gone for a month or two. This gives the player a good reason to fight and clear a trade route for himself. I could even remember force strength of a toll, so the player could wear them down.

Many of these imbalances occur only because no mercenary game yet exists to balance out the trade system. Right now, trade is absolutely critical (being the only method of making money). However, if other opportunities exist to make a living, the gaps begin to fill in. I believe Unstable Space will introduce mining and, IIRC, a mercenary game is also slated for development. That will alleviate many of these problems.

Some ideas:

Scaling Faction Reaction based on Faction Size

Larger entities always react more slowly than smaller ones. However, when a large entity does act, it utilizes powers far in excess of smaller entities and the effects are longer lived.

A larger, stronger faction (like Emerald or Leung) is less likely to take notice of a few pirated ships than a smaller one would. Not only does the larger faction have more resources to draw from (a few dozen pirated shipments are peanuts to these guys... not worth the effort to track down), but larger entities, due to their bureaucracy, tend to react slower than a smaller one would.

The gameplay effect of this might be that if the player attacks (for first few times) Emerald craft, the nearby Emerald ships will go hostile, but not the entire faction. Once the player is out of range of the hostile ships, things settle back to normal. It is only after attacking a significant number of the faction's craft that the entire faction becomes hostile (i.e., after the player has demonstrated he poses a significant threat which the faction must respond to).

However, when the might of these giants is finally stirred up, the effects are long-lasting and powerful. Not only should any craft which are encountered become hostile... the factions should take direct action to eliminate the threat (i.e, the player). This would take the form of a script which at random times creates a mercenary task force specifically targeting the player ship; a goon-squad carrying a bullet with the player's name on it.

The reverse is true with smaller entities (like the Aikenites or Golliger's Privateers) which have far fewer resources, and thus jealously guard them with vigor. A single pirated transport is enough to get noticed by these smaller and quicker factions. However, the effects are weaker and much shorter-lived; if the player leaves them alone for a time the faction ceases to become hostile (i.e., is dealing with current threats and thus has little time for their old grudge against the player).

Thus, the reaction is based upon the level of threat the player presents to the faction (how many ships he's attacked) and the size of the faction (divided by the number of ships the faction owns (a guess-timate)).

How long the effects last depend upon:

Implementing a Faction Memory Limit
This is similar to the Privateer method, but relies upon time... not kills. It would require a script which, at designer-determined times (i.e., every 7 days in-game) adjusts faction feelings a bit towards average.

For instance, let's say the player has ticked off Leung; boy is the old man pissed this time. Not only has the player been forced to vacate to the sunny climes of the Sultanate, but goon-squads are showing up on a semi-regular basis.

If the player keeps his head down and stays far away from anything Leung, then the faction's memory of the incident will gradually fade. Every seven days Leung becomes less pissed until finally, after a very long time (Leung is a large entity and thus his memory is long), the Empire forgets the player's offenses and is once again on neutral relations.

Note that this relies upon the player not attacking any Leung ships. This includes the Leung goon-squads. If he wants to get back on good terms with the Empire he has to cut and run when the goons arrive (i.e., show submissiveness).


Awarding Credit for Assists
Ah...Hot4Darmat's not the only one who assisted a faction only to find their butt hanging out in the breeze.

I believe you mentioned this is a planned feature. I would offer only one stipulation; if the faction is already hostile to the player, no amount of assists will help. Only time (or bribe money) will eventually return the faction's relationship with the player back to average.


Increasing the Costs for Bribe Adjustments
Since a system of reputation repair would exist, the ability to purchase a good standing with a faction becomes something of a short-cut for the player instead of the 'only way to go'. I would suggest raising the ante on these payments so that the impulsive player, after ticking off a faction, could buy his way back to good standing rather than staying away for a period of time, but must spend a massive amount of credits to do it. His instant gratification (relations repair) comes at a high price.

Awarding Credit for Non-Lethal Combat
If a player drives off a ship (damages it until it flees), he should not incur the penalty a kill would merit. This allows combat to occur without subtracting from the penalties of wanton killing. Perhaps in the eyes of a large faction, 10 instances of driving off a ship might equal a single kill. A smaller faction would, of course, react more swiftly.

It might be rather intensive to script this feature. It would require a rewrite of the iFlee function. However the changes to the function's basic workings would be slight (and it's a pretty basic function as is... just run for the nearest friendly base). I'd imagine the difference between this new iFlee function and the old would be that before giving the orders to flee, a faction reputation global is modified. Afterwards, everything proceeds as normal... the craft is given flee orders.

This also opens up some fun play opportunities. The player's only trying to drive off an escort, but oops... one shot more than was needed and he winces as the ship erupts in a globe of fire. Uh oh... Emerald's not going to like this...

Opening Up Opportunities for Lucrative Combat
A couple of ways to force or entice the player to choose aggression:

Release the Brethren! They should not be confined to Ripon... it's their home base, not their prison. A script would periodically create a Brethren raiding party which might target a single ship, a group of ships in a predefined area (around an L-point for instance), or the player ship specifically. (To avoid recreating the suicidal nature of the Marauders, this script should never target a station.)

Since no one's going to be getting friendly with the Brethren anyway, the player may combat them without fear of consequences. This justifies the need for weapon upgrades. In addition, the raiding party script might utilize the current player worth or skill level to determine the strength of the Brethren forces. This would allow automatic scaling of the raiding party.

In addition, this script would also track how many of the raiding party the player kills... so that we may:

Impose a Bounty on Brethren Craft
The large factions (Leung/Emerald/Sultanate) might post bounties for Brethren kills. Players who kill a Brethren ship (no matter where) must dock to the nearest station owned by the faction to claim the bounty (game-explanation: the authorities must scrutinize the player's CPU to verify the kills). The player is then paid for the kills.

This allows the more aggressive players something to do until mercenary campaigns are added, free of the reputation stipulations.

However, I've not worked out a method of tracking Brethren kills when the player simply heads off to Ripon to do some hunting. Perhaps the rewrite of traffic would handle this? Or maybe upon entering Ripon all Brethren ships are created exclusively by the Raiding Party script and set to target the player only? Will have to think that one through...

Wouldn't it make sense to buy a new IFF code? Is it POGable?

After some unintended shooting/planned piracy the player could "reset" his standing. Maybe a single junker trader ship offers expensive IFF codes. Until he finds this moving trader the determined faction stays hostile.

Could the player collect IFF codes and switch between them?

Could the police stop him, search/scan his ship and discover with a 20% probability those multiple IFF codes, deactivate them and punish the player with a fee? The player has to choose wich single IFF to keep. This could be enough punishment, because the player loses his valuable alliances
Exciting: let the player make a selection on the screen (one to five) wich determines the success of the police investigation.


A trading agreement (sympathy/ally) with one faction should not result in hostilities with an other faction.
Faction A dislikes faction B - but the player should be able to trade with both of them until he chooses to fight one faction. To be allied with faction A should be regular priced, but simultaneously financing an trading alliance with faction B should be very expensive - but possible.

Faction A could offer a big reward/superior weapon/venice freighter for choosing faction B as enemy - a motivation for the player to accept hostilities.

---

There is no safe distance

Some of these concepts fit in quite well with the fleet operations (moving operations) idea. The "goon squads" and brethren raiding parties could easily be implemented as fleet operations.

If the fleet operations could respond to distress calls, and we allow the player to make those calls, then the player could start getting some support from allied factions.

Fleet operations also open up the mercenary side of the game. The player can take missions to take out a specific Fleet Operation. Say a Brethren raiding party or a notorius pirate fleet. Because these Fleet Operations are remembered from save to save the player can be tasked with hunting one down.

The fading of player relations toward neutral is easily done. It could be used to fade player alliances as well. Forcing the player to "upkeep" those relationships. At the moment that would only be with bribes, but in the future it could be missions.

Torn Stars has an Erase Identity feature. Anytime your world gets too messed up, you just pay and reset everything back to neutral.

GT, the solutions to these balance issues sound excellent, and hopefully not too code-intensive. You mentioned one other thing in passing a couple of posts ago: different responses from different ship classes within a given faction. I had thought of this, then discraded it as too hard to code. Is it? If not, I think its worth exploring.

For some reason it makes sense to me that an armed fighting craft would want your hide if you attacked one of his buddies in a similar tonnage fighting craft, but might be less inclined to go after you if you had only hit one of their freighters or tankers. Similarly, a freighter might be inclined to react with greater hostility to aggression toward "one of their own" within a faction (and thus direct their escorts to try to hurt you). This sets up the possibility of a kind of "class" system within a faction whereby pilots of, say, tugs identify more closely with losses to their own gang of tug pilot pals, than they would to losses of little fighter pilots, or megafreighter captains, even if they are all from the same nation. This is a stretch, I know but it speaks to rivalries we know exist in things like different branches of the armed services, or city cops vs. federal agents, or vice squad detective vs. uniform street cops...dunno maybe a better analogy is pilots who fly the Hercs, vs pilots who fly the F-18s. In-group affiliation is a very real and very Human phenomenon...just look at us space sim geeks clustering togehter here!

This difference in class response within a faction might allow some of that wiggle room.

I really like the idea of faction standing regressing toward the mean with time. For those who had been friendly, it is a kind of "what have you done for us lately" attitude. For the hostiles, it may be more like "we'd given up looking for you 'cause we had bigger fish to fry...what did you do to piss us off, again?" In either case, if you lay low and play it safe for long enough, and you lose some of the extremes in standing you'd attained (which may or may not be a good thing).