Trust, Trust rewards/penalties and Stability

[Asherogar]

Trust currently is pretty rudimentary mechanic that does nothing, shows nothing and cleary doesn't provide it's intended function. Or at least how I see it's intended function: show populace general sentiment towards you and how solid your position as an administrator is.

I managed to encounter a death spiral and fail twice so far and both of those times I had 100% trust. Moreover one of the times i died to riots. 500 out of 1000 people on my station were either rioting, injured or about to die, because there's no place to treat few hundred injured. During this whole riot thing the UI was showing me 100% trust and +3 stability in all sectors, despite game clearly telling me that I lost.

If someone legitimately lost to trust falling too low, tell me how did you managed it. The game doesn't really have much ways to lower your trust, let alone managing to hit so many of them in rapid succession, without a clear intention to do so on your part.

So, even if you're not doing great, your Trust is most likely at 100%. But most positive events give you +5% or +10% to trust, i.e. nothing.

On the contrary, every time you do something wrong, game throws stability penalty at you, which actually hurts a lot. You now need to either enact a policy (which also has drawbacks) or spend resources on a building. Compared to some -10% Trust that will be gone in 3 or 4 cycles by you doing literally nothing.

Stability also affects Trust, so penalties to stability technically impact it. But if your stability is low enough to actually start affecting your trust, you have much more pressing matters then -0.3% trust each cycle.

In short: Any penalties to Trust are meaningless, Trust ends up as a rudiment on top of Stability system and only effects impacting the latter matter. Trust also fails as a notification system or meter showing you how satisfied stations crew is with your actions. You can lose to mutinies, riots and unhappiness even having 100% trust and +3 stability. Stability is overused and too intrusive in every aspect of a game, putting many people under too much pressure, while Trust is a dead weight, failing to perform even it's most basic functions.

Every time I discuss systems in Ixion I end up comparing them to the ones in Frostpunk. Not surprising, considering how heavily the game is ispired by it. I want to say right away that I have nothing against it, I am all for seeing more games like Frostpunk telling their own stories. But I am severely dissapointed by how devs managed to screw up every single mechanic they copy.

Anyway, Frostpunk has 2 meters: Hope and Discontent. The same as Trust and Stability, they're affected by your decisions in events, scenario progress, enacted laws and how your populace fair. But unlike in Ixion, those meters actually work as intended due to few differences:

1. Effects are not permanent. When during the first scenario you find out that other city has fallen, you get serious impact to your hope and discontent. But you can eventually fight them back if you're doing good, you don't need to keep 3-5 obligatory "stability" buildings just to mitigate permanent malus from this event. It's a temporary crisis that you can deal with and move on by just playing and doing business as usual. In Ixion it ends up as a piling up burden of maluses, sending you into a slow death spiral if you're not doing great already. You're wasting your meager resources on mitigating this permanent debuff, instead of fixing your current situation, which leads to eventual another stability debuff and you're forced to deal with it again, instead of fixing your even worse general situation. Repeat until you give up in frustration or die. This all just because your resource management decision 5 hours ago wasn't optimal enough.

2. Meters are in constant flux due to enacted laws and events. Again, most events in Ixion affect stability directly and don't touch Trust at all. The ones that do are easily avoidable, rare and have 0 impact due to passive +3% you get each cycle.

3. Meters are actually representative of public sentiment and any negative consequances are tied to them. If you decline a Request, you clearly see an impact on Discontent. At the same time, unless Discontent is high enough, you will not encounter riots and strikes. The game gives you information, warnings and tools to make an informed decision. In Ixion this all happens behind the scenes and handled by some hidden mechanic, which turns it into a complete "Gotcha!" moment and doesn't allow any form of informed decision making. Even in-game Tutorial descriptions tells "Refusing crew requests inside the station will affect crew's trust in your command." Implying it will impact your Trust. But no, it just fills some hidden "riot" bar, which once filled starts an armed rebellion against you.

So what do I want to see? Complete rebalance of Trust/Stability system.

1. Obviously lowering passive +trust per cycle greatly. With it being so high, you will able to bruteforce any public opinion problem in the game and render any changes meaningless.

2. In turn, ease up on a lot of -1 Stability penalties. Much more events and situations should impact your Trust first and only few of them go for Stability.

3. Trust must clearly show you a general sentiment of your crew and make it impossible for things like riots, rebellions, strikes and mutinies to happen if your trust is high enough. Let me make an informed decision if I can afford to decline this annoying request or need to do something to make my people happy first.

4. Make Trust more dynamic. Considering this changes will make Trust more important and impactful on gameplay, there should be more ways and opportunities to affect it. You can just add more requests, but maybe less impactful/punishing ones. Like additional goals for players to accomplish and rewarding them for doing good or helping to recover from rough time or even guiding them towards new mechanics/more optimal things to do.

[centaurianmudpig]

I've never had that many injured at one time, seems you are very likely over working your workers. Don't. Overworking a sector means more injuries from work place accidents. Don't build more structures than you can run with workers, keep 20 worker spare in each sector to avoid overwork. Turn off buildings to get working condition under control until you get more workers from cryo pods.

Build two infirmaries per sector as there will be times when just one is not enough, but two should see you through. You can also research more beds fairly early.

Further in the game you'll get the equivalent to a hospital which one will cover all sector injury needs, but needs the rail transport.

The majority of my sectors stay Neutral on trust, as it still generates positive trust.

Trust as a mechanic can easily be managed with the all the stability buildings, putting crew in housing that's not cell housing, keeping homelessness low, avoiding cryo storage penalties, and keeping the working conditions optimal. You can stick with just the Propaganda at the start for huge stability bonus and ignoring any negative impacts until you can manage it via other means.

[Asherogar]

Originally posted by centaurianmudpig:

...

I did not ask for advice. If you bother read a little bit, you would see you completely missed the meaning of my post.

[Fargel_Linellar]

I mean trust is just a timer on having negative/positive stability.

While your trust is growing fast, having a +10% given to you mean nothing.

However, if you had a prolonged period of negative stability, it will help delay going down (giving you more time to enact plan to provide stability) or raise it faster to the maximum trust.

Without it, what should happen when your stability get into the negative? Immediately lose something?

Trust allow for a time between when you get a new stability negative and the time it will take to make something to compensate it.

Of course, there more than necessary positive stability solution, but you shouldn't spend resources on them before they are needed.

Let's take a more concrete example. You didn't have enough battery/power during a meal cycle and some of your crew missed their last meal and are starving.

Power is back, so those crews members will be fed in the next meal cycle (in 5 cycle).
In the meantime, you have a -3 stability in that sector(s).

If your trust was full, you can safely ignore it, trust will go down a little, then the starving crew will be feed and trust will go back to full in a few cycle.

How do you think such case would be handled without the Trust bar?

[godspeedthunder]

Originally posted by Fargel_Linellar:

I mean trust is just a timer on having negative/positive stability.

While your trust is growing fast, having a +10% given to you mean nothing.

However, if you had a prolonged period of negative stability, it will help delay going down (giving you more time to enact plan to provide stability) or raise it faster to the maximum trust.

Without it, what should happen when your stability get into the negative? Immediately lose something?

Trust allow for a time between when you get a new stability negative and the time it will take to make something to compensate it.

Of course, there more than necessary positive stability solution, but you shouldn't spend resources on them before they are needed.

Let's take a more concrete example. You didn't have enough battery/power during a meal cycle and some of your crew missed their last meal and are starving.

Power is back, so those crews members will be fed in the next meal cycle (in 5 cycle).
In the meantime, you have a -3 stability in that sector(s).

If your trust was full, you can safely ignore it, trust will go down a little, then the starving crew will be feed and trust will go back to full in a few cycle.

How do you think such case would be handled without the Trust bar?

What this guy said ^^

[Asherogar]

Originally posted by Fargel_Linellar:

...

That's probably how Trust bar/system supposed to work ideally, but not how it works rn in the game.

It doesn't work as a timer, mostly because you will be dead or deep into death spiral long before your trust dips below even 50%. And 100% Trust does not help or prevent you from dying in any way. You can have 100% Trust, but if your Stability in all sectors is -5, it doesn't matter. You're in death spiral of Low stability > More accidents > Lower stability > Even more accidents > Even lower stability, riots, strikes etc. Again, Trust doesn't help you to recover or temporarily protects from negatives, it doesn't inform you of something going wrong, it's doing nothing.

Most events reward you with Trust, but as I pointed out, high Trust is worthless, because you're having problem with Stability.

The changes I propose are exactly to make Trust work as a timer and clear indicator of how good/bad things are for your crew. Currently it's a meaningless UI element/resource.

P.S. About your example with starving. This -3 in one sector will do nothing to your Trust, simply because Trust bonuses from all other sectors completely overpower the problematic one (Ironically that's exactly what happened to me today and while this sector with 250 people had -3 stability, I had +3.2% Trust each cycle). But it will not protect you from riots, increased accidents frequency and other negative stuff in -3 sector. Do you see my problem with current system?

[Fargel_Linellar]

Originally posted by Asherogar:

Originally posted by Fargel_Linellar:

...

That's probably how Trust bar/system supposed to work ideally, but not how it works rn in the game.

It doesn't work as a timer, mostly because you will be dead or deep into death spiral long before your trust dips below even 50%. And 100% Trust does not help or prevent you from dying in any way. You can have 100% Trust, but if your Stability in all sectors is -5, it doesn't matter. You're in death spiral of Low stability > More accidents > Lower stability > Even more accidents > Even lower stability, riots, strikes etc. Again, Trust doesn't help you to recover or temporarily protects from negatives, it doesn't inform you of something going wrong, it's doing nothing.

If all your sector are at -5 stability, you cannot be at 100% trust, as trust will be decreasing each cycle.

Now, I never had a strike being provided just by negative stability, from what I've seen, strike will only trigger if you decline random event (which will be spawning when you have negative stability for a while).

Have anything put one of your sector in the negative and you will almost immediately have an event with a quest to fix something making stability low.

You get a quest with a timer, if the majority of your ship is currently in negative stability, then your trust will be decreasing in the meantime.

It take you a few days to fix the issue, your trust is now lower.
The event is now resolved, you get a bonus +% trust, completing some of the lost trust, the rest will raise overtime (now that stability is positive).

I agree that it is quite rare than stability is the factor that make you lose the game, but it is possible.
There are plenty of solution to stability issue and they take less time to put in place than it would need to kill you. (which is great, otherwise the moment your stability is negative you wouldn't be able to do anything).

But you can see in these forums that they are plenty of people who completely ignored all solution to stability and lost because of it.

For stability/trust to be an issue, it's because:

You tell them you will address it, but don't fix it
You refuse to tell your people that you are fixing it and they revolt

Originally posted by Asherogar:

P.S. About your example with starving. This -3 in one sector will do nothing to your Trust, simply because Trust bonuses from all other sectors completely overpower the problematic one (Ironically that's exactly what happened to me today and while this sector with 250 people had -3 stability, I had +3.2% Trust each cycle). But it will not protect you from riots, increased accidents frequency and other negative stuff in -3 sector. Do you see my problem with current system?

The trust coming from each sector is proportional from the population vs your total population.

If 4750 of your population are Happy, but 250 are angry, then obviously you are fine. (as you should be because only 5% are unhappy )

But Having your population sector unhappy can easily mean 1 sector is reducing trust more than the others, even if everyone else is Happy (if the majority of your population is inside the Angry sector).

I was more saying your whole ship is starving due to missing a meal.

Now the game does hide a little of why event are happening, but if you pay attention, you can see why.

Hull is below 50% = Sabotage happen (even if everyone is happy and work is optimal)
Decline random event giving you a quest = Strikes happens

[Rithrin]

Well-worded point. Trust and Stability are in kind of weird places in this game. As pointed out above, they are mechanics divorced from most other aspects of the game, and often from each other. Have 100% Trust rating for thousands of cycles? If you decline a request to segregate your DOLOS employees and UN citizens, you may have riots on your hand, all while having, and continuing to have, 100% Trust. But if your citizens are rioting, you couldn't possibly 'realistically' have 100% Trust.

The game should probably have aimed to have the player balancing various decisions to stay at ~ 70% or 80% across the course of the game, and had more mechanics playing into the dynamic. If you look at US Presidential approval ratings over the years, it's usually somewhere between 40% to 60%, but the Tiqqun isn't some two-party electoral system where there is competition against you as Administrator, so I imagine approval ratings might be a little less political.

They could have better integrated these systems a few ways. For example, buildings which provide passive changes to these numbers, or policies. The crew seems to hate Insect Farms and Mushroom Walls. You could imagine that building Mushroom Walls might slowly sap the Trust meter (and you could keep it proportional to the population affected still) - the citizens aren't starving, which would add unrest (i.e., stability penalty) out of desperation, but they also don't fully trust the Administrator's choices on food production. But building a Exo-Colosseum might improve your Trust meter, as the citizens are quite happy and distracted by it, but it actually decreases Stability as the citizens get riled up over their team's wins and losses, much like real world sports events.

And Stability could be more of an indicator of how orderly and secure a sector is, rather than how happy they are. It sort of is now, as negative Stability can result in very violent strikes, but it's a strange mixture of things. This way citizens might lose Trust if their sector is low on Stability, but that could be offset by other buildings they like more. Stability would then also be a separate source of concern for the player as low levels might result in more vandalism and crimes, have an affect on daily station operation.

So you could have different dynamics of buildings, some which are more expedient in resource usage at the cost of trust, or some which are inefficient or even near useless, but they comfort the citizens, some that destabilize their sector, etc. The player would be constantly needing to make planning choices which balance all of those factors.

Instead we have a Trust meter which almost never changes, and almost a mere cosmetic choice as to which one Stability building you'll build in each sector.