Faction relations

[RJS]

I start in a friendly sector, but once I start exploring outward the factions are all neutral, and apparently neutral means they won't trade with me which is frustrating when it took me 6 hours of exploring to find another equipment station and I can't trade.
So the questions are:

If I answer distress call missions right outside a new faction's space, will the relations boost from killing the pirates allow me to trade pretty soon? Any other simple way to boost relations to trading with new factions?

Can I pick a faction to just say eff all with, and hunt their mining ships etc. for loot and equipment, without damaging my good relations with neighboring factions? When that faction declares war will they travel to attack my (future) stations etc in other places?

Also when I slaughter a bunch of pirates, how long will the wreckage and loot stay floating if I leave it to salvage later or way later?

[Knux Redbeard]

You can always sell resource to anybody, and this improves relations a lot faster than you'd think. The easiest way to improve relations, if you've got enough gun, is to hang around the spawn point of the system with the military ships and shoot at the pirate/xsotan raids that pop up. You don't even need to kill anything, really, just need to do some damage. Distress calls boost relations a fair bit and also give you modules/turrets. Search and Rescue boosts relations a lot. You need a decently capable warship to do the "Investigate Missing Freighters" bulletin posting, but I think it boosts relations more than any single other thing you can do.

Asteroids are incredibly valuable, don't make a habit of selling them, hoard them dearly, but early game, they're a quick way to improve relations.

[umop-apisdn]

I typically park an attack fleet in a sector belonging to the faction I want to gain relations with, and pirate kills rack up rep pretty quick while I'm doing other things in the sector (mining, salvaging, poking the local bulletin boards, shopping...).

[Knux Redbeard]

The loot will stay floating for a good while, the wreckages will persist for a good while, but if you leave the sector and don't come back for a few hours, the game eventually does garbage collection and shrinks the save-file by getting rid of the debris. If a hidden mass sector contains nothing but wrecks, they don't despawn. A tip while salvaging. DO NOT use autofire. Aim manually. Hull is worthless, engines are barely worth bothering with. What you're after are the juicy internals. Basically any of the blocks with the glowing patterns, but generators in particular.

[RJS]

Thanks, what about the consequences of picking a faction to just raid and loot?

About the claimable asteroids- I'm not finding any, and I've been thru dozens of systems. I've found 2 and sold them, when I zoom out in strategy mode I may see 2,3,4 that look almost large enough to be one, but just regular shape. Are they very rare? If they're as rare as they seem, I won't have much choice as to where I build bases/asteroid bases.

[umop-apisdn]

Originally posted by RJS:

About the claimable asteroids- I'm not finding any, and I've been thru dozens of systems. I've found 2 and sold them, when I zoom out in strategy mode I may see 2,3,4 that look almost large enough to be one, but just regular shape. Are they very rare? If they're as rare as they seem, I won't have much choice as to where I build bases/asteroid bases.

You can move them. I have a "Rock Tug" with big engines, lots of thrusters, and a docking port on the end. It's super long, to maximize the impact of the thrusters.

Even so, the only way I've found to reliably move them in a reasonable amount of time is to tell the captain once I'm docked up to the rock that I want him to perform a series of jumps (not the travel command, just click/shift-click from sector to sector), then leave the sector by bouncing out to my drone, or my home sector, or my reconstruction site.

Once you're not watching, the captain won't be afraid to spin the ship like a top and take off in the right direction at something approaching reasonable (normal) speed; just stay out of the way and let 'em work.

Once the captain has reached their destination, you can maneuver the rock to wherever you'd like in the sector using the strategy view... but again, leave the sector to let them work; you aren't allowed to see the trade secrets!

[Knux Redbeard]

Near as I can figure, flattening a faction outright doesn't have consequences beyond that faction. At least not negative ones. If two factions are at war, then flattening one will improve your relations with the other. At least that's how it used to be. I haven't seen any faction wars in a while. Pirates are still at war with everybody, and some pirates are actually a cohesive faction. If you see a faction that calls itself buccaneers, nobody will miss them.

Then there's the bit where nothing outside the trinium band actually matters, and you still get the same rarities of module from combat farming no matter where you do it, so if you want to build a 15-module super-dreadnought, just a giant cube covered in guns, and go massacre everything outside the titanium belt, nothing bad will come of it.

[RJS]

I haven't seen anywhere showing inter-faction npc relations. Only all the faction relations to me, via the player menu/diplomacy tab.

[Knux Redbeard]

It's a feature that might've gone away with the release of 2.0, as I haven't seen it since. It absolutely used to be the case that two non-pirate neighboring factions could be at war, and if you participated in the skirmishes you'd gain reputation with one and lose it with the other. I also seem to remember that if you made raids into the neighboring faction you'd get rewarded, but that particular memory might be wrong. It was also possible to befriend both sides pretty easily.

[rickcarson]

Flat out the easiest, fastest and above all most reliable (e.g. doesn't require waiting for certain things to happen) way to improve relations with an NPC faction is to spend a lot of money with them.

E.g. arrange (??) to have one of your ships blown up and then towed and repaired at the faction you want to improve relations with.*

Slightly less convoluted would be simply building a big-ass ship at one of their shipyards. The ship might take 15 mins to build, but you get the rep immediately.

I went straight from "I don't think he likes you very much" to "hey bestie" last night with a single ship build - approx 1.6mil money (IIRC) and ~41k faction rep gain.

I _think_ you can reclaim a significant portion of that money too when you switch to a (presumably smaller**) workshop design.

This rep gain tops out at 45k though, which is mid-blue. But it's enough to trade with them if nothing else.

As a side bonus (since I see you complaining about station founding) when you use the faction shipyard there's a tick box for ... drumroll please ... station founding. :D :D

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There _used_ to be a way to gain massive rep with a faction (e.g. go straight to 75k rep, do not pass go) - but I think it's currently broken and despite having pored over the relevant code*** I cannot see why

*This is really more of a consolation prize - e.g. if you lose a ship near the barrier you might be able to leverage that into some rep at a nearby purple/violet faction, but the 50 LY limit on towing is surprisingly restrictive, so it's more of a blind luck kind of thing. That said, I think the rep gain for this is very cost effective.

**You _can_ exceed the size limits with the randomly generated ships at shipyards, but that's far less useful than it sounds because if the ship is too big (e.g. 13 sockets when you've only unlocked Trinium) then you can't make any modifications to the design - e.g. you can't even upgrade the turret bases to a better material.

***I know it's the relevant code because there's a message in the log which is unique to this one particular feature

[rickcarson]

> You can always sell resource to anybody, and this improves relations a lot faster than you'd think.

Okay so when I'm doing this, I sell off the resources in chunks of about 5k each (e.g. 5k iron or 5k naonite), and I'm watching the rep gain. Selling 5k resources bumps my rep up by approx 250 each time, but there's a cap of about 10k in each system (it's slightly higher or lower if that faction has different opinions about the value of trade).

So a net of approx 200k resources per system, which means that to get to blue from purple you might have to sell close to 1 million resources.

You also have to hop from system to system as you cap out each one. So maybe run an explorer over them (on a scout mission) first (so you know where the resource depots are, rather than playing hide and go seek AKA 'why does the random generator hate me?')

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> About the claimable asteroids- I'm not finding any, and I've been thru dozens of systems. I've found 2 and sold them, when I zoom out in strategy mode I may see 2,3,4 that look almost large enough to be one, but just regular shape.

If you're spending any time hunting these things you should install an OBJECT DETECTOR subsystem. I'll let you figure out what it does on your own. But one of the things it will do is let you know via the white circley-thingy at the top of the HUD (where other status conditions are displayed - e.g. you're damaged, you're low on energy, you're too weak for this part of space etc.) that it thinks there are valuable objects in the system.

If there's no white circle, there's no need to go to the strategy map since there won't be any claimables.

It will also pick up beacons and stashes and secure stashes, so YMMV, but I have a red one on all my 'main' ships. (Actually I use the Adventurer Companion mod)

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> Thanks, what about the consequences of picking a faction to just raid and loot?

They won't like you.

Possible repurcussions include but are not limited to sending bounty hunters after you. These guys are surprisingly well gunned and annoyingly persistent. So it _is_ possible to effectively ruin your save by doing this and then discovering you've bitten off more than you can chew, and then when you re-spawn they keep hunting you down and layeth the smaketh downeth on your space-candy ass-eth ad infinitum.

Because of this I kind of think you almost have to punch down. E.g. if I'm comfortable fighting pirates in Xanion, then attacking a faction in naonite might be doable (with a whole fleet of well-armed ships).

But is it ... worthwhile? E.g. what am I going to get in naonite that I can't get more of (and better) in Xanion?

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Sometimes you can run across a hostile faction on your journey who open fire or cause you grief with a different faction. So sometimes it can be worth it (for the lols/great and furious vengeance) to go back and show them who is the boss - but almost never at the point where I first encounter them. That's a dish that is best served cold and with grotesque amounts of firepower.

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One way to _perhaps_ more safely assess whether you can take on a faction is to find a pirate base (i.e. with a pirate shipyard) at approx the same radial distance, and try to kill the shipyard without losing any ships.

You'll have the same 'oh wait, why do these guys have 10x the firepower of anyone else around here?' moment. And it's a good litmus test because the pirates already hated you, so no great loss :D

[RJS]

Does reloading the game/server reset stock and demand? I read something about restarting for new equipment selection for sale at equipment station.

[rickcarson]

Originally posted by RJS:

Does reloading the game/server reset stock and demand? I read something about restarting for new equipment selection for sale at equipment station.

Way better to just get a mod which vastly increases the number of equipment generated at the equipment dock than doing the Elite:Dysfunction shuffle.

[umop-apisdn]

Originally posted by rickcarson:

Originally posted by RJS:

Does reloading the game/server reset stock and demand? I read something about restarting for new equipment selection for sale at equipment station.

Way better to just get a mod which vastly increases the number of equipment generated at the equipment dock than doing the Elite:Dysfunction shuffle.

... or just wait 20 minutes.

... or better yet, find a route and spend 20 minutes going "shopping" from sector to sector until you get back to the first one and they have new stuff.

Or best of all, equip some ships with scavenger captains and salvage lasers, send them on salvaging missions via the map screen, and stop buying your equipment... you're just going to take it all to the research station and trade it in on bigger/better stuff anyway, right?

[RJS]

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Originally posted by rickcarson:

Way better to just get a mod which vastly increases the number of equipment generated at the equipment dock than doing the Elite:Dysfunction shuffle.

... or just wait 20 minutes.

... or better yet, find a route and spend 20 minutes going "shopping" from sector to sector until you get back to the first one and they have new stuff.

Or best of all, equip some ships with scavenger captains and salvage lasers, send them on salvaging missions via the map screen, and stop buying your equipment... you're just going to take it all to the research station and trade it in on bigger/better stuff anyway, right?

I'm not sure what the deal is with research stations and what they do yet, but factions only seem to have 1-2 equipment docks in their little territories, so that would require me having at least good relations with numerous of them to go shopping for mid-tier stuff. So far it's taken me like 4 hours to get good relations... not excellent, with just 1 additional faction from the starting one. Fighting and manually salvaging have gotten me most the equipment I'm using.

I'm just getting lined out on getting additional ships outfitted with a captain and getting them to do stuff, so I'll figure it out and try the salvaging thing, thanks.

[M]

I got a pretty good answer about gaining rep in a thread I made ages ago - linking the thread instead of copy-pasting so the poster can get the credit for it:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/445220/discussions/0/3371530631525718992/

Personally i find just hanging out in a faction's space and destroying pirate raids / clearing pirate sectors works well enough, if you haven't the money / resources for a ship big enough to make a significant difference to faction standings.

Any yellow-blip pirate sectors that lie within the territory of a faction will cause a relation gain to that faction when cleared out - this can be very useful for gaining rep with smuggler factions, should you need one to like you, since they're very small and have limited other methods of grinding rep besides the 'big ship' option, and also mostly live out in outer regions / no-man's space where pirate sectors are more likely to appear.