Traffic Reputation Concepts

Unstable Space has a reputation system similar to Freelancer. Attacking people lowers your reputation, and paying bribes raises it. The reputation system and trade system are connected to make the path to wealth and good equipment dependent on having good faction relations.

The major goal in Unstable Space is to get wealthy. Traffic has a new top end player goal, and that is to help a faction achieve the factions Grand Design. A Grand Design might be the conquest of a system (Leung taking back The Dead Reaches), the destruction of an opposing faction (Gargoyles wiping out Pimentel), or starting a new government (Fonsenka Foundation forming an independent state in Akra). A faction achieving its goal will change the cluster in a profound way.

The reputation system needs to entice the player into participating. It already encourages taking sides by making it hard to earn a living without good relations to a faction. Here are a bunch more ideas to make the bond between player and faction even stronger.

Actions Increase Reputation

The first major change is that the player increases reputation by working with a faction. A player increases reputation by trading with a faction or by helping a faction in combat. Refueling stranded ships, running courier datascans, rescuing refugees are all kinds of things that increase reputation. Basically, all actions that move a faction toward its goals should give the player a reputation boost.

Actions that hinder a faction will carry a reputation penalty, even if those actions are not direct combat. (In Traffic spying will become another career).

Reputation changes by bribery will be removed. This was a shortcut feature, and removes the connection between the player and the stations.

Stations and Fleets Track Reputation

The second major change is that fleets and stations track faction standing independently of the main faction. A player can form friendships and alliances with individual fleets and stations. Faction standing with fleets and stations changes much faster than with the overall faction. This allows a player to quickly start earning bonuses when working with the same stations and fleets. It is important that the player be able to earn a living.

Negative reputation changes with fleets and stations are also very quick. It is possible to have some stations hate you while the owning faction does not.

There are many reasons for this change. One is to make the world filled with individuals. These are not just canon fodder ships, but fleets of people. These people know and recognize the player. It would be hard to have the player feel an attachment to a “faction� abstract entity. But the player could easily have an attachment to a fleet that has helped out on many occasions. Or a station that welcomes the player’s return and gives great trade bonuses. An attachment can be made to a fence where the player always sells cargo.

These attachments make it possible for the player to want to protect these individuals and assist them. When they ask for help the player is inclined to agree.

I am reposting this here, as it seems a little bit more suited to faction relatiosn discussion.


At some point, wouldn't a player tied close enough to a faction, and fielding a large enough number of wingmen, be considered an 'operation' in his own right? How about if at such a point the player begins to earn or collect revenue from the stations/fleets of his faction?....perhaps as an incentive to get him involved with dealing with pirates, enemy factions, expanding the faction, securing trade routes etc? The more he deals with those problems, and helps his faction thrive, the more 'tax' of some kind he can collect. That could allow the player at some point to free himself from his starting career, whether it was mining, trading, spying, exploring or pirating. At that later stage he could forgoe those activities in favor of pure advancement of his factions interests, and the reaping of the benefits of said interest advancements.

The player could become the 'point' man in the expanding fortunes of his chosen faction. Thus as we have spoken of before, the faction itself becomes the drive for the players play. The player looks to maximize and 'equip' his faction with all the goodies, like new stations, trade routes, fleets, and whole systems.

The player could field enough ships to be an operation. But it is expensive.

Gaining a support fund from the faction might work best for a Navy kind of faction. Only a combat career would have any challenge if we render obsolete trading, spying, piracy, and mining.

It should be possible to give payment or reputation increase for all faction promoting activites. That could achieve a similar result, and may motivate the player to be more active than a support fund.

When I was messing around the idea of a Navy career (some time ago) I thought of paying the player a fixed rate. And then the player would need to keep up reputation by doing requested jobs for the faction. If the player failed to keep up reputation, they were "fired". And keeping up repuation meant doing the jobs that the faction wanted done.

We have the same effect happening here (but I didn't plan it that way). The player repuation is always creeping back toward neutral (zero). If the player does not do enough reputation boosting activities, then they will lose allied standing.

Lots of ideas to think about. Nice thing about developing in stages is extending once we see how it goes.

Waha GT, caught you double-posting

Here's a thought: Expand the idea of a "military career" to include militias and/or mercenaries at the station level. In other words, any player who'd gained sufficient standing with a station would have the chance of being offered such a career, not just as single missions. It wouldn't be difficult to add the player's rep in completing various types of missions, so that the station would tend to offer mission tracks that emphasize the player's previous experiences. In time, the overarching faction would be likely to look more closely at the player as well, no?

This could have interesting consequences, in that stations that don't usually generate missions (habs and such) might just do so if you made a regular practice of assisting them/their faction. This makes a lot of sense to me; the Cluster is pretty damn dangerous and civilians would be very likely to have SOME kind of standing militia! Human nature, and all that.

I think I forgot that we were intending factions to be kindof like the equivalent of 'weapons and systems' in I-war. Meaning that the factions become something the player identifies with, and sinks money into. Sinking money into is the key. Instead of the factions paying the player to maintain an 'operation', the player could use his oodles of wealth from trading, mining, or pirating to fincance new 'operations' for his faction. Perhaps, considering a point based system for factions discussed in another thread, their money would be converted directly to points that the faction could spend. Or maybe the player could have a more direct say by financing specific types of operations.

Have you guys played Sid Meier's Pirates! (the 2004 remake)? That game has an excellent faction allegiance system not unlike the one you're describing here.

In Torn Stars terms, for instance, picture the following situation:

You dock to a station and ask the station commander what needs to be done. The station commander says that there is an emergency shipment of supplies being sent to the larger Juantico Station a sector away and asks whether you are willing to escort it. You gain "very happy" points if you say you're going to escort it and it arrives safely at its destination. You gain "happy" points if you say you're not going to escort it and it arrives safely at its destination. Otherwise you gain no reputation gain or loss (unless you attack/destroy the shipment yourself!). As soon as you leave the station, regardless of whether you accepted the mission, the station spawns a 'transport supplies' operation and that operation sets off towards the destination. If you said you would escort it, it chooses to follow your ship, so long as you're moving roughly towards the destination -- go off the beaten track and the operation will assume you're breaking off the escort and travel on its own from that point on. The game also spawns a random "obstacle" operation of some kind, usually just a random faction that is hostile to the faction that you are escorting (generally this means a privateer from an enemy nation or a pirate), and finagles things so the obstacle operation has a decent chance of intercepting the escorted operation before it arrives at its destination. If you shoot up the obstacle operation to allow your protegée to get through, the obstacle operation gains "angry" points and your escort operation gains "happy" points -- assuming you don't actually destroy the enemy operation. Destroy the operation and the obstacle operation receives "very angry" points and the escort operation (and the faction) gains "very happy" points, in addition to those points you get when it arrives safely!

Pirates! also tracks local reputations independently from national reputations. It's quite possible to have a Spanish city that you ransacked ages ago open fire on you even when you've been granted amnesty by the Spanish crown. It's a very good game for fans of freeform combat, although the trading system isn't quite so profitable until you manage to get a huge fleet of ships and a huge base of capital (and by that time your crew is probably mutinous from having their pay deferred for so long).


[edit]It should be mentioned in Pirates! that you do not receive any direct payment for accepting incidental missions like these. You receive reputation and prestige, however, which causes governors to give you land grants and to give you the opportunity to dance with their sexy, sexy daughters.

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It's my belief that these sheep are laborin' under the misapprehension that they're birds. Observe their behavior. Take for a start the sheeps' tendency to 'op about the field on their back legs. (off-screen baa-ing) Now witness their attempts to fly from tree to tree. Notice that they do not so much fly as...plummet.