Rep losses from attacking cloaked SCA Ships?

[Darth_Wayner]

As far as I know there is a reputation hit for attacking an SCA ship that is cloaked...is this true?

There are a couple of annoying aspects to this if true and I'd like to know if anyone has found a work-around.

So a couple scenarios:
First scenario is that I see a "TEL Plunderer Behemoth Sentinel" headed for my factory hell bent on hacking my storage and sending my wares out into space. Since my stupid AI pilots defending the station will just sit back and watch this happen without attacking, the only way I can stop it is to order them to attack. Since the ship is claoked, do I take a rep hit? I know I can teleport to one of the defending ships and scan the behemoth to reveal that it's an SCa ship before ordering an attack, but this is horribly bad when in the middle of taking on a Xenon I and a pair of Ks or in the middle of a mission.

Next scenario is that I get a "we're taking hits" warning from one of my auto traders and flip to map in time to see an SCA marauder minotaur attacking my trader. Before my trader is blown to bits I manage to tell a roving patrol of fighters a sector away to attack it. Since the ship will probably re-cloak before my revenge squadron gets there, when They finally attack and blow it up, am I going to take a rep hit for this?

Seems like in both cases this could be alleviated if there was a way to have your AI pilots scan the target with a police scanner to break its cloak before they destroy the target.

Any work arounds for this? or am I mistaken about the rep penalty for blowing up cloaked ships?

[conrado.lacerda]

I may be mistaken about this, but if you're out of sector and order a subordinate to attack a known pirate ship, it will decloak right after the attack begins. That's my experience at least.

You can also create a custom "fire authorization override" so that your ships attack SCA or BUC ships on sight, i.e. as soon as they decloak during an attack.

Edit: a fun thing to do is fly around in a fully armed and modded destroyer with a few units of some valuable ware in the cargo hold and pirates will throw themselves at you trying to rob you, effectively committing suicide.

[ArcticISAF]

AFAIK and someone can correct me, but my impression is it’s roughly divided between two states - where they have their cloak up, and when they drop it/you’ve scanned them revealing their SCA. If they’re just flying around and you blap them, you could get dinged with the rep hit. If they threaten your ship and you go ‘Escape’ (or engage) they drop their cover and it’s good to kill them. Send your fighters against them and they should have no rep hit.

Now there’s some stuff I’d have to pay attention to and test… in system and out of system behaviour, in system close to NPC station or not (close definitely has them respond if in cover), stuff like that. I usually don’t have an issue sending fighters against them OOS even in cover but they may be far away enough from stations/ships, etc.

[blackphoenixx]

I'm pretty sure the rep loss only happens when you're personally flying the attacking ship.

Either that or the loss is so small it's negated by normal trade activity. I've been ordering my ships to kill cloaked pirates while OOS all the time and haven't noticed any permanent rep loss (you still get the normal -30 with the ship, but it doesn't damage your faction standing afaict). No suddenly hostile NPC patrols either, even when my ships attack cloaked pirates right next to them.

You can also protect your stations from being hacked by assigning a destroyer to defend them - it doesn't really matter what kind, just a destroyer being present around the station seems to scare off SCA destroyers.

I also suggest giving your stations fire override orders setting SCA to "ruthless". It doesn't stop hacking, but it means your station will open fire (and send all its defending ships to attack) as soon as the pirate decloaks.

As for protecting your autotraders you have a couple of options besides just hoping for the best and taking revenge.
Number one is using non-trading ships as traders. Their cargo bays are (usually) smaller but they don't get harassed by pirates at all. The Guillemot Sentinel, Barbarossa, Shark and Erlking are pretty good for this.

The other option is to give your traders the Mirage illegal ware concealment mod. I've been running two dozen M traders with Mirage mods for 10+ hours now and none of them have a single case of pirate harassment in their logs, so i'm confident it works.
You can farm the purple nanoweaves you need easily enough from BUC and it's much more efficient than method one (though you can of course combine the two).

[Darth_Wayner]

Messaggio originale di blackphoenixx:

You can also protect your stations from being hacked by assigning a destroyer to defend them - it doesn't really matter what kind, just a destroyer being present around the station seems to scare off SCA destroyers.

I did not know this, almost 600 hour inand still learning I guess.

Great info, thanks to both of you. I'll give some of your suggestions a try.

[Lazarus Long]

Messaggio originale di Darth_Wayner:

As far as I know there is a reputation hit for attacking an SCA ship that is cloaked...is this true?

There are a couple of annoying aspects to this if true and I'd like to know if anyone has found a work-around.

So a couple scenarios:
First scenario is that I see a "TEL Plunderer Behemoth Sentinel" headed for my factory hell bent on hacking my storage and sending my wares out into space. Since my stupid AI pilots defending the station will just sit back and watch this happen without attacking, the only way I can stop it is to order them to attack. Since the ship is claoked, do I take a rep hit? I know I can teleport to one of the defending ships and scan the behemoth to reveal that it's an SCa ship before ordering an attack, but this is horribly bad when in the middle of taking on a Xenon I and a pair of Ks or in the middle of a mission.

Next scenario is that I get a "we're taking hits" warning from one of my auto traders and flip to map in time to see an SCA marauder minotaur attacking my trader. Before my trader is blown to bits I manage to tell a roving patrol of fighters a sector away to attack it. Since the ship will probably re-cloak before my revenge squadron gets there, when They finally attack and blow it up, am I going to take a rep hit for this?

Seems like in both cases this could be alleviated if there was a way to have your AI pilots scan the target with a police scanner to break its cloak before they destroy the target.

Any work arounds for this? or am I mistaken about the rep penalty for blowing up cloaked ships?

Yeah, you would think that after enough reports from player ships and NPC's the sector security forces would start scanning each and every ship to find and kill the cloaked ships. But Egosoft decided to once again promote ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ "gamification" over common sense. You can kill a million pirates in the game and there will always be more. Here in the real world, most pirates die because they chose to be pirates. In X4 being a player pirate is hard, but being an NPC pirate means you get a free pass no matter what.

[☣Bukkakeneer☣]

I haven't seen an actual rep hit that wasn't the rep loss that makes a ship hostile. Usually when I spot one and have a patrol take it out, I get a rep hit because I made that specific ship an enemy unprovoked, but I haven't seen it actually affect a global rep.

[ArcticISAF]

Hey sometimes the local police do their job. I found it coincidentally when they started being responsive when I started working on getting pilots to bail their ship’s achievement… oh look, here comes the police saving the day! Blasting away my ship that I got half of them to bail from already lol.

[blackphoenixx]

Messaggio originale di Lazarus Long:

In X4 being a player pirate is hard

Only if you want trade ships to drop their cargo for you. Boarding ships and hacking stations are both easy and very profitable.

[Нагризолич]

I don't think you do. I remember forgetting to scan pirate phoenixes occasinally, they complain to sector security, but they respond negative and that's it. Neither do you automatically lose rep when destroying their components, like engines.

[Нагризолич]

Messaggio originale di blackphoenixx:

Only if you want trade ships to drop their cargo for you. Boarding ships and hacking stations are both easy and very profitable.

You don't even have to be a pirate for that, it's all legal if you don't shoot.
I mean, I docket a ship that I was currently boarding. Crew don't actually die, they just walk out through the door and that's it. I guess boarding operations are just space bureaucracy.

[blackphoenixx]

Messaggio originale di Нагризолич:

Messaggio originale di blackphoenixx:

Only if you want trade ships to drop their cargo for you. Boarding ships and hacking stations are both easy and very profitable.

You don't even have to be a pirate for that, it's all legal if you don't shoot.

True for boarding, though if you're starting fresh you'll probably have to capture S and M ships first which does require shooting (though you can just steal SCA Minotaurs and BUC fighters since their rep is fixed).

Hacked stations do turn hostile once you start picking up their dropped crates, but as long as you don't shoot back when they open fire (or hack their turrets) it doesn't affect your global reputation either afaik and they go back to normal after a bit.

[Нагризолич]

Messaggio originale di blackphoenixx:

True for boarding, though if you're starting fresh you'll probably have to capture S and M ships first which does require shooting (though you can just steal SCA Minotaurs and BUC fighters since their rep is fixed).

Hacked stations do turn hostile once you start picking up their dropped crates, but as long as you don't shoot back when they open fire (or hack their turrets) it doesn't affect your global reputation either afaik and they go back to normal after a bit.

Naah, you can board your first phoenix with an S fighter with like 3 marines. It takes some time and you have to buy at least one burst ray from paranids, but that's about it. Tickling capital ship with under 20 crew to bail will take you about 10-15 minutes and voila - you have yourself your first 10 millions. Spend that to get yourself shuyaku vanguard and go with legal takeovers.
As for stations, I think you can hack station security terminal for a window to pick up cargo without being noticed, but I've never done that and I'm not sure it's worth the price of spending a security slicer.

[blackphoenixx]

Messaggio originale di Нагризолич:

Naah, you can board your first phoenix with an S fighter with like 3 marines. It takes some time and you have to buy at least one burst ray from paranids, but that's about it. Tickling capital ship with under 20 crew to bail will take you about 10-15 minutes and voila - you have yourself your first 10 millions. Spend that to get yourself shuyaku vanguard and go with legal takeovers.

I usually just get a Hermes Vanguard from the ALI wharf in Trinity Sanctum and do flyby boarding on L miners in Nopelios Fortune since i hate waiting for crew to bail.
They have very low crew compared to most other L ships.

Messaggio originale di Нагризолич:

As for stations, I think you can hack station security terminal for a window to pick up cargo without being noticed, but I've never done that and I'm not sure it's worth the price of spending a security slicer.

You can disable the turrets so the station won't shoot, but it'll still go hostile when you pick up crates.
Disabling station security vessels also doesn't help, i've tried that too.

As for being worth spending a security slicer it's not like they're good for anything else and you can potentially make millions from a single hack if you pick your targets well.
From what i can tell a station drops 1/5th of everything it has stored when you hack it. Do that to an equipment dock or trade station and you'll be raking in the credits (as long as you have enough ships to pick it all up).

[Нагризолич]

Ok I just tested legally ambiguous station robbery. I guess I somehow made the other terminal up, however it's pretty easy to steal full cargo hold of wares. You just charge your travel drive while standing still near dropped containers, scoop them up with magnet and immediately zoom away with terran travel drive. Not very profitable time-wise, but funny if you do it couple of times.
Robbed split equipment dock and wharf for 1.3m credits three times in a row. They're still figuring out wheter they should express concerns or strongly condemn such an act.

[blackphoenixx]

Messaggio originale di Нагризолич:

Not very profitable time-wise, but funny if you do it couple of times.

Depends on who you're stealing from. You can also bring more traders to avoid leaving loot behind if you want to get serious about it.
Personally i just park a supply ship full of cargo drones next to the station to pick up loot and then transfer it over to docked M traders as it gets full.

The biggest haul i got off a single hack was probably from the PIO wharf, that one made me more than 20mil. But it also took an Orca and several Vultures to pick it all up.