Diplomacy?

[Doc Morbid]

Can anyone elaborate on what the limits of the diplomacy system are, especially regarding the maximum rank I can get with a particular species or other type of faction?

For example, if my pilot's race is Paranid, which I never noticed being a thing in AP, does that mean I can never get to rank 9 with Argon, Boron, and their other allies?

I really hope the system works in a way that I just can't be above a certain rank with a particular faction at the same time as that faction's enemies, and if I change rank drastically enough, I can get to high ranks with all factions, just not at the same time. That would make sense.

I'd also like to see an in-built way to opt out of the diplomacy system or at the very least opt out of the wars. For example, add Goner as an actual race, rather than just have Argon that have Goner ships, and they're not enemies of anyone, so one cares who ELSE they're doing missions or work for.... It would be assumed that a priesthood would be willing to help anyone, especially if they believe in charity. It would even make sense if they got halved, or even less, monetary and notoriety rewards for missions, because again, they'd be assumed to be doing things (mostly) for charity. This would rather hurt for missions you have to bring goods to the station, because you'd probably get less credits than the goods are worth... and all their preaching of peace, it would also make sense that Goner would not receive recognition for destroying enemies in territory and couldn't get police licenses.

It would be a slog, because of reduced rewards, but that would make it so someone who is a Goner could potentially be well-liked by all races, like you could do in AP, without removing the system for everyone else. If you choose to be a race that has enemies, you're effected by the wars and politics (and everyone hates pirates, even other pirates, so that makes sense), but if you were to choose to be a race that isn't involved in violence and wars, you should be on the fringes of the political system at most, with various benefits and downfalls to that.

[S.C.]

1. The dynamic relation works the same no matter which start you chose.

2. If you are too friendly with a race(rank +8), your rank with its hostile and enemy races will be limited to rank +7 98%.

3. When you increase notoriety to a race, your notoriety to It's hostile and enemy races will decrease(ex: Argon +100 points, Split -15 points, Paranid -30 points).

4. Check the Diplomacy part of this guide.
https://www.egosoft.com:8444/confluence/display/X3WIKI/X3%3A+Farnham%27s+Legacy+Wiki

[Doc Morbid]

So if I were to tank the notoriety with a race I'm 'too friendly' with somehow, like change my main focus from split and paranid to pirates, I could get back up with a different one rather than back to 9 or 10 with the previous? As such, I COULD have rank 9 or 10 with all races at some point, just not simultaneously?

[S.C.]

Yes you can. They won't remember all of your betrayals.

[S.C.]

There's one thing I forgot to mention: If your rank with a race is under equal to -4(three red bar), increase notoriety to its enemy/hostile races won't trigger dynamic relation, and increase notoriety to it won't trigger dynamic relation too.

[Doc Morbid]

Man, I'm not trying to betray anybody. I VERY MUCH miss AP where I could trade with everyone and they'd keep their noses out of my other business. If I want to trade space fuel with pirates or Aldrin, and I can get it there without the police ships scanning and fining me, or taking it away, that shouldn't be anyone else's business or interest.

In FL... yeah, especially if you do a MISSION to deliver space fuel or space weed, go ahead, find out what happens.

Also, I've noticed the 'getting back out of the red' thing. There's a whole guide on how you could be 'at least neutral' with every faction, including Pirates, Yaki, Dukes, Terrans... everybody that has enemies with almost everybody. In AP, it was easy to do that, but I gather that was not intentional... they just couldn't implement what FL is doing because it's actually very complicated and I'm assuming took a good chunk of the development time.

I can somewhat see the point where a particular race, like say the Argon, wouldn't want you to trade their signature weapon (the Phased Repeater Gun in this example) to some other race that they're at war with (say the Paranid), so they'd be a little mad at you for getting your recognition with them up just to run their guns for profits... but at the same time, if you sell a weapon that isn't used at the equipment dock or military base in question, it flat-out disappears from the world from what I can see. Possibly because they want to reverse engineer it rather than resell it...

If the lack of dynamic reputation is an exploit in AP, why don't they retroactively put in FL's system? I'm sure that's possible. And I still want a way to mostly opt-out of the politics in FL that doesn't make my game modified. Like say the Goner idea that I put in my first post. Or you could even call it 'Classic Mode' or 'Pacifist Mode' if you want to be slightly insulting about it like some of the difficulty titles in old first person shooters. I very much don't mind being called a pacifist, a baby, whatever if that gives me the option, at least, to get rid of a game mechanic that I'm struggling with. And I'm the type of person that will try it in a different play through to check out what's different. I am a big fan of having an easy mode or options to turn things off that I don't like so I can just have a chill game and relax sometimes, too.

For example, it's really peaceful and chill on the AP game that I have something like 400 hours in where I spent the time to get positive rep with everyone so the only people that ever attack me are stupid pirate raids that apparently didn't get the memo from whoever's in charge that I'm their favorite trader. I can mess around in whatever ship I want, in any sector I want that isn't Xenon, and I can go hours or even days of in-game time and never hear the 'combat alert' noise.

[S.C.]

The implement of dynamic relations is easy, the difficult part is to convince players this limitation is necessary. In previous series, the commonwealth members may don't like each other but they keep peace superficial. After the gates start to shut down, the hostility between two guilds of main races evolved to war. Since they are at war, it's reasonable they don't like you to be too close to their enemies. Personally I think this feature is acceptable, the only down side is we have to farm agents to control relations and negotiate/steal everything we need.

If you want to play as pacifist, you have to control the relations carefully. NPC ships won't be hostile to you in their border sectors and other races' territories if your relation with them is higher equal to -3(two red bar), Pirates, Dukes, Yaki, corporations also obey this rule(they are normal factions in X3FL). You just can't get into their core sectors(higher equal to -1 required). You can only trade with Teladi, and only Yaki will get pissed for this. Since you never boarding, you have to farm enormous amounts of discovery points to buy blueprints of those unpurchasable ships.

[Deathifier]

The Dynamic rep system in AP seems to be a love/hate thing for most people with the issue being that it is a big change from the "can be friendly to all bar permanent hostiles" in past X games.

The dynamic rep management guides are good in general but if you want to be friendly with at least most other parties you need to make use of the systems implementation, particularly where at -3 red bars the dynamic rep disables in relation to that race.

You can't be big friends with everyone though - as soon as you get +6 green bars with one party anyone hostile to them will never go above 98% +5 green bars.

The most common divider here are Argon + Boron + Corps vs. Split + Paranid + Strong Arms.
You can only chose one set.

Pirates, Yaki, Duke's, Terran - being big friends with any of them basically makes the rest of the universe hostile.

Teladi you can be big friends at almost any time, except when you are also friends with Yaki.

With careful manipulation of the system you can be friendly (+5 green at least) with everyone except Yaki, Pirates, and Duke's, and you could probably get those to neutral if you really wanted to.

However if you want to get agents you are going to have enemies and the least complicating ones are Pirates and Yaki, which are the races that Teladi station defence missions uses as enemies.

[Doc Morbid]

I'm honestly up to an exploration challenge more than boarding capital ships. I've never done that, I'm fairly sure I'd mess something up and fail repeatedly, and that just isn't fun. I've been planning to 'try to learn boarding' since AP before the terran PHQ. Between other games taking my interest and doing pretty much everything else when I did play AP, we're 10 years on and it hasn't happened.

[S.C.]

For me boarding and force bailing are the best parts of this game, it's a pity you can't enjoy them. If you what to try to learn boarding again, I posted a boarding hint page of wiki to you in another thread. It contains base knowledge a new pirate requires.

There are several tips:

1. Using M7M and boarding pods to max the success rate.
2. Lower the target's shield until your marines breach the hull.
3. Save before you launch boarding pod, and reload if any of the boarding pods get destroyed.
4. Save immediately when your boarding pods landing on target ship - the random values of hull breaching and final ship core hacking resistance are rolled after marines start breaching the hull.
5. The boarding state can be seem at your property -> personal. Check if anything goes wrong during the whole process.

[That guy with the Spoon]

i personally don't fly a m7m myself during boarding op.
i recommend going after m7 ships because those have the lowest boarding resistance of the bigger ships. even tl's can be problematic if you don't have good mechanical specialists and training up to 3 or 4 stars in mechanical can take a while.

a m7 you can take with a 20 men crew of 2 stars in every profession. just shop for 2 star fighters and train the other 3 skills on a military outpost.

fry off anti boarding equipment however you like. i do by controlling a m6 with ion disruptors through the monitor (f4). while your target is tailing your main ship (stay out of firing range of the target and match speed). just make the m6 fly up on it from behind and then lower the shields and keep penetrating the hull with id.

in tc you could do that easily with a normal hydra or the heavy centaur prototype. you want a somewhat speedy m6 with id's that can easily get behind a m7.

jump in your m7m with its marines and pods (ai controlled fire 5 while player only needs 4 to get 20 marines on the ship) and order it to fly to a far edge of the sector or far below or above on the z axis.

when you're tailing the target fly towards your m7m (still keep the speed matched!) give the m7m the order to board ship. if the anti boarding equipment is destroyed you could jump out the m6.

from here you could spam wasps onto the target while your boarding pods from the m7m are on the way. depending on how many shields you killed with the m6 their shields might regenerate faster or slower. the m7m will only fire the pods if in range and if the shield% has reached a certain number.

i like wasps better than flails. they're cheap and in masses they keep turrets occupied. they keep the targets shields steady under a somewhat endless swarm of them. for m7 they maybe melt the shields very fast so watch it. even if you do hit the hull it shouldn't matter that much unless you already destroyed a huge chunk with the m6.

and then it's just waiting for your pods to hit. listen to them cutting through the hull. when they entered the ship you can stop lowering the shields and view your property tab.

[Doc Morbid]

I never said I can't enjoy boarding.... just that I've never tried it, and if I do try it and mess it up multiple times, I won't enjoy that. It has yet to happen for me, so I might try it, nail it, and like it... and then it's a pirate's life for me, maybe. If I could board something REALLY nasty like a Pteranodon or a Xenon K or I, I'm sure that would be cool. Or the Terran Kyoto or Valhalla... But I've heard the Val kind of sucks because it can't touch a gate, even worse than the Aran.

The Aran, I've actually gotten tubed by. It can go through a gate, it seems, but it's... like a kilometer long, so anything that's in front of that gate is going to be destroyed. It's a wonder more people aren't angry at the Goner with the lack of ability to warn that a large ship is coming through a gate, because frankly, if I had a several tens of millions credit ship just get vaporized (I have on one particular occasion, BY an Aran), "Sorry about your ship, chucklehad." wouldn't exactly cut it for not being mad at them.

On recall, it might have been an Ozias, but it was definitely Goner, and I definitely said out loud, "Woah, what is THAT? Okay, I'm dead. Great."

[S.C.]

Originally posted by That guy with the Spoon:

i personally don't fly a m7m myself during boarding op.
i recommend going after m7 ships because those have the lowest boarding resistance of the bigger ships. even tl's can be problematic if you don't have good mechanical specialists and training up to 3 or 4 stars in mechanical can take a while.

a m7 you can take with a 20 men crew of 2 stars in every profession. just shop for 2 star fighters and train the other 3 skills on a military outpost.

fry off anti boarding equipment however you like. i do by controlling a m6 with ion disruptors through the monitor (f4). while your target is tailing your main ship (stay out of firing range of the target and match speed). just make the m6 fly up on it from behind and then lower the shields and keep penetrating the hull with id.

in tc you could do that easily with a normal hydra or the heavy centaur prototype. you want a somewhat speedy m6 with id's that can easily get behind a m7.

jump in your m7m with its marines and pods (ai controlled fire 5 while player only needs 4 to get 20 marines on the ship) and order it to fly to a far edge of the sector or far below or above on the z axis.

when you're tailing the target fly towards your m7m (still keep the speed matched!) give the m7m the order to board ship. if the anti boarding equipment is destroyed you could jump out the m6.

from here you could spam wasps onto the target while your boarding pods from the m7m are on the way. depending on how many shields you killed with the m6 their shields might regenerate faster or slower. the m7m will only fire the pods if in range and if the shield% has reached a certain number.

i like wasps better than flails. they're cheap and in masses they keep turrets occupied. they keep the targets shields steady under a somewhat endless swarm of them. for m7 they maybe melt the shields very fast so watch it. even if you do hit the hull it shouldn't matter that much unless you already destroyed a huge chunk with the m6.

and then it's just waiting for your pods to hit. listen to them cutting through the hull. when they entered the ship you can stop lowering the shields and view your property tab.

This is really complicated and risky...the rear and side turrets and heavy missiles of M7s can melt any M6 very quickly if the AI piloted M6 dosen't dodge, especially those "tough" M7s. The Cargo Bay Shielding makes things worse. It may be fun for skilled pirates to raise the boarding difficulty and enjoy the process, but new pirates may not have the skill to do everything right, so I suggest them to pilot a single M7M - the most stable way to board any targets.

Originally posted by Doc Morbid:

I never said I can't enjoy boarding.... just that I've never tried it, and if I do try it and mess it up multiple times, I won't enjoy that. It has yet to happen for me, so I might try it, nail it, and like it... and then it's a pirate's life for me, maybe. If I could board something REALLY nasty like a Pteranodon or a Xenon K or I, I'm sure that would be cool. Or the Terran Kyoto or Valhalla... But I've heard the Val kind of sucks because it can't touch a gate, even worse than the Aran.

The Aran, I've actually gotten tubed by. It can go through a gate, it seems, but it's... like a kilometer long, so anything that's in front of that gate is going to be destroyed. It's a wonder more people aren't angry at the Goner with the lack of ability to warn that a large ship is coming through a gate, because frankly, if I had a several tens of millions credit ship just get vaporized (I have on one particular occasion, BY an Aran), "Sorry about your ship, chucklehad." wouldn't exactly cut it for not being mad at them.

On recall, it might have been an Ozias, but it was definitely Goner, and I definitely said out loud, "Woah, what is THAT? Okay, I'm dead. Great."

I mentioned the problem of Valhalla in another thread. It is useless besides gate defense even use jump beacons due to the safe route check mechanism.

Boarding Xenon capitals is the most difficult thing in this game. 12 of my full skill marines killed during boarding the I......

[Doc Morbid]

Sounds challenging and rewarding. And the I is one of the best battleships if not THE best. Have you seen how many beam weapons it can mount? And if they're not in split turrets like on the Enhanced Heavy Dragon, they Plasma Beam Cannons ALWAYS hit what they're shooting at if it's bigger than an M4. So almost any M3, M3+, M8, M6, and on up, they will absolutely melt. And there's freaking 16 of them. Also, if you don't mind a 'slightly' slower beam, you can put 14 Tri Beam Cannons on it. And there's a cockpit or front turret that can have stuff... most notably Incendiary Bomb Launchers... so if the plasma lasers don't melt you, we can play Grave of the Fireflies.

It's also tied for first place in my research on laser recharge rate, so it can more than likely run all that beam stuff long enough to annihilate multiple other capital ships with it.

[S.C.]

Originally posted by Doc Morbid:

Sounds challenging and rewarding. And the I is one of the best battleships if not THE best. Have you seen how many beam weapons it can mount? And if they're not in split turrets like on the Enhanced Heavy Dragon, they Plasma Beam Cannons ALWAYS hit what they're shooting at if it's bigger than an M4. So almost any M3, M3+, M8, M6, and on up, they will absolutely melt. And there's freaking 16 of them. Also, if you don't mind a 'slightly' slower beam, you can put 14 Tri Beam Cannons on it. And there's a cockpit or front turret that can have stuff... most notably Incendiary Bomb Launchers... so if the plasma lasers don't melt you, we can play Grave of the Fireflies.

It's also tied for first place in my research on laser recharge rate, so it can more than likely run all that beam stuff long enough to annihilate multiple other capital ships with it.

It can mount Fusion Beam Canon too, makes it a good fighter/corvette killer in Xenon sectors. The most powerful feature of this ship is the THREE rear missile tubes, it can barrage any missile it can mount. With enormous amounts of Typhoon Missiles loaded to its large cargo space, it can destroy at least 40+ capital ships and their escorts before rearming(50+ if not mount large guns at front turrets). It is basically the best M2+(battleship) for pure destruction currently.

[Doc Morbid]

And the AI doesn't use beams or many missiles that I've seen... so it'd be much worse in player hands.