Earning additional police favors?

[Yellow Monkey69]

So you buy off your local police officer and earn some favors. Once you use up all the initial favors you had how do you earn more favors from the same officer?

[SomaSim]

Favors with anyone are a very limited resource - so spend them carefully!

But in general - you will earn favors as you increase the relationship. Since you can't buy, sell, or do quests with the police, you have to look for other ways to ingratiate yourself - get friends to put in a good word, do things for their family members, or try to get trait or ethnicity boosts.

[Yellow Monkey69]

Thanks SomaSim!

OK, and is there a certain "affiliation" level where I can expect to start earning favors or is there any other criteria one should look for? i.e., I have 50 affiliation with an police officer with two of his family member in my crew and another family member's affiliation at 35.

Apologies in advance if I'm not grasping the concept of favors...

[Yellow Monkey69]

Originally posted by SomaSim:

Favors with anyone are a very limited resource - so spend them carefully!

But in general - you will earn favors as you increase the relationship. Since you can't buy, sell, or do quests with the police, you have to look for other ways to ingratiate yourself - get friends to put in a good word, do things for their family members, or try to get trait or ethnicity boosts.

Thanks SomaSim!

OK, and is there a certain "affiliation" level where I can expect to start earning favors or is there any other criteria one should look for? i.e., I have 50 affiliation with an police officer with two of his family member in my crew and another family member's affiliation at 35.

Apologies in advance if I'm not grasping the concept of favors...

[SomaSim]

Yeah, once you use up your favors, they're gone. Sometimes you can get more favors if you push the relationship *even higher* - but it's hard to do with cops, because they don't buy and sell anything, and they don't offer quests.

[Ralek]

The problem with the current favor system is that favors just simply dry up.

As I understand the system you get favors by reaching certain relationship milestones. You reach these milestones from bonuses that eventually expire. This promotes a weird game play mechanic of pushing all the available bonuses at the same time (since the same type of bonus doesn't stack) and you're done. That's the amount of favors you will ever see from that person for all eternity.

By mid and late game, your starting areas are completely dried up of any useful favors.

The whole relationship/favor loop could use a revision as it has the potential to be a good mechanic, but just kind of falls flat in actual game play.

One way of doing it to have the relationship bonuses reset the corresponding milestones when they expire.
Another is to just plain make quests reward you with one favor from that person (this is probably the easiest).

Honestly, I'd suggest scrapping the whole milestone idea. Something like a per turn incremental counter to generate favors, with each generated favor costing more. You can even have in game events add and subtract to this counter without directly affecting relationship.

Something like this:
At the end of each turn add/subtract the current relationship to the favor generation counter.
When the counter reaches a certain threshold, give a favor and double the threshold for the next, rinse and repeat.
You can even do fun stuff here like completing a quest for the character could halve the current threshold.

[SomaSim]

Favors drying up from old friends is intentional - the player needs to be making new connections and spreading their influence.

For example, bootleggers and speakeasies introduce an interesting tradeoff - on one hand, they produce *much* more money than just selling to businesses. But on the other hand, if you do that, you won't build up relationships with all sorts of random people, won't get favors, etc. So if you do that a little bit, it helps financially, but if you do that too much, you end up "eating your own seed corn" as it were.

And whether one is better than the other depends on the situation. So it's up to the player to make this decision and then live with the consequences :)

[Yellow Monkey69]

Originally posted by SomaSim:

Favors drying up from old friends is intentional - the player needs to be making new connections and spreading their influence.

For example, bootleggers and speakeasies introduce an interesting tradeoff - on one hand, they produce *much* more money than just selling to businesses. But on the other hand, if you do that, you won't build up relationships with all sorts of random people, won't get favors, etc. So if you do that a little bit, it helps financially, but if you do that too much, you end up "eating your own seed corn" as it were.

And whether one is better than the other depends on the situation. So it's up to the player to make this decision and then live with the consequences :)

Got it, thanks!