Gifting, social skill, drop pods mechanics

[glass zebra]

For a long time I thought that it's better to make a caravan with a high level social pawn (possibly also with a psychic reader and high sensivity) vs using drop pods if you want to give a gift to push faction relationships. But there seem to be at least two weird things about this:

1. The gift window still shows the trade price improvement value at the top and not the negotiation boost (which I thought would be used based on the description).
2. Dropping the stuff directly into faction bases grants a multiple of the value you get when gifting it with a caravan (28 vs 9 with social skill 13 in my test).

Is the negotiation ability used at all? What multiplier is used for drop pods? It seems impossible to top the drop pods with a pawn and they are the faster and risk free alternative too. Is this working as intended?

[Astasia]

You used to be able to give a "diplomatic gift" of silver using the comms console, I believe that is what was increased by negotiation or the diplomatic stat before it. Negotiation doesn't seem to have any effect on giving items/resources away as gifts to traders, it only looks at the trade value of the item which is affected by the trade price improvement stat. I imagine this is a left over stat description that needs updating and negotiation is mostly just used for recruitment now.

Cargo pods seems to be the much better option as I think you get full market value for the items instead of the trade price. Might be intentional, since it costs resources to send the pod, and it sort of makes sense as instead of giving the items to some random trader you are giving it directly to the outpost?

[glass zebra]

Yeah but I was comparing it to gifting at faction base, not a caravan that comes by. Multiplying it by 3 (at least on losing is fun) pretty much means that you should never give manual gifts as soon as you got pods. I need to calculate it again but I think even really small gifts make up the fuel, steel and component cost. And you can do it at will, without risk too. Seems a bit weird. You can still gift silver with the pods too and not with manual gifting.

[Astasia]

I mean you can gift random corpses with pods and get a bunch of rep (IIRC a fresh dead human is like 15 rep base). Pods are definitely a super easy option for building rep and does make manual gifting for rep entirely pointless once you have them. It's not remotely balanced which is what makes me think it leans toward intentional. I have no idea though, it's possible negotiation is supposed to increase rep from manual gifting, at skill 20 it's 190% so that would certainly put it more in-line with pods, but at the same time at skill 0 it's 40% so would make much worse in a low skill situation.

Like I imagine the intent of manual gifting is to get rid of a bunch of junk and you get some token rep in return. You can either dump everything onto visiting caravans, or load up some elephants to bulk dispose of things. Cargo pods are like little gift boxes, you send smaller packages specifically just for rep and you can get a lot of it that way.

[Raymond]

doesn't really matter. You can load literal trashes like raider apparels on to the pod will still get positive reputation.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Astasia:

I mean you can gift random corpses with pods and get a bunch of rep (IIRC a fresh dead human is like 15 rep base). Pods are definitely a super easy option for building rep and does make manual gifting for rep entirely pointless once you have them. It's not remotely balanced which is what makes me think it leans toward intentional.

I don't really get why it not being balanced leans towards intentional. If the system would be more sophisticated I could agree to that easier, instead of just being basic and overshadowing a more complex mechanic. That they let you get a much higher value out of the normal gifts while also enabling gifts that most factions do not even want, make it seem like there was just a super basic system added like "gift(value){};" and forgotten/never refined.

How rarely I saw people talk about reputation in the scope of gifting in this forum make it seem a bit more like "nobody cares about this" and easy to not "fix" or "change". Since the negotiation skill description has also not been changed make it really seem like there could be a blind spot here.
I personally fell into that noob trap for a long time. I thought going to factions to give them stuff would be useful, until I started using drop pods to give quick and safe gifts after I just betrayed the empire for neuroformers, so I don't get an empire raid. Which also makes getting neuroformers really trivial.
I guess I could just make a bug report to poke around if this is intentional.

Edit: I can sell wake up for 22 with that pawn and they have a market value of 35. So it can't just be that drop pods give 100% value for gifting if it's about 3 times as high.

[Astasia]

Like I said I don't really know, I'm just thinking up reasons on the spot for why it might work the way it does. If you want a proper answer you will probably have to ask on the official forums (or discord?) and hope to get a dev response there. It's true rep is pretty easy to get and not many people care about gifting, it's certainly not a mechanic I have used much and I had to test in game after you made this thread to know what you meant. So I suppose it could be something that's broken and just nobody has cared enough to report or discuss before.

[glass zebra]

I'll just try it out as a bug report and see the response.. once I can mange to sit down and write down all the bugs I have in mind : P I am currently in the making of a "money = power" colony and wanted to make big use of trading and calling for aid and stuff. Seeing how much the drop pods actually give you makes this feel broken until the aid can't do much anymore. (But then honour takes over)