Contracts, Ranks and Rank Losses

[rabidbite]

Alright buddies here is my situation.

I'm trying to get into the Contract business, testing out the waters, figure out how it works, etc.

I have encountered a recurring penalty in Contract that baffles me and as such I'd like to find some ways to get around it.

I accepted contract from De Valtos to go deliver agents against the Thulun faction and one of their planets. Thulun is negative faction for me so I readily agreed. I deliver the agents, hit contract complete and loose a rank with Syndicate Richart!?

Violated oaths etc message.

I check to see if there are alliances or trade alliances between Thulun or De Valtos and Syndicate Richart. None whatsoever.
So what the heck did I do wrong?

PS: Similar problems occur when I choose any contract against Independent Star Traders. I loose rank and/or faction with someone. That's why I refuse to do contracts against independents. I don't like rolling the dice on my hard to earn reputation.

[Cory Trese]

Sometimes Independents will be on a Faction Ship and destroying / marauding that ship will cause Reputation and Rank damage. A political Officer will help with that.

The loss of Reputation in Contracts can only be caused by Alliance/Conflicts. I can say with some confidence that this code works (it has not been modified in 265 days!)

What may have happened is that the Alliance or Conflict ended in the turns following your Contract. I have tested this (and hopefully SlayerNZ or BG will test and post as well) and did not have any unexpected reputation issues.

If you think you have a bug, please post information about your device, Android OS, locale and any ROM or customization you are running.

[slayernz]

Also, sometimes, in the first example you gave, although the contract was against delivering a passenger to Thulun territory, the passenger was actually from Rychart. They had lured you into the contract under false pretenses (fake papers).

Rychart were actively wanting these people because they had been discounting hats in an unauthorized manner, and you effectively took them out of Rychart's reach. They would, obviously, be a little disgruntled with you, even though you were just the delivery boy.

You'll see this type of thing more often as you accept contracts. It seems almost every other contract seems to be attacking a target different to the one you signed up for. You sign up to blow up a Steel Song ship (as every right-minded person should), and you suddenly find the ship is flying Cadarian colors. Sure you can ignore the target but your contract is void. You could blow up the Cadari, but that feels wrong too.

Finally ... it does happen from time to time where you sign up for a De Valtos contract to deliver something to Cadar. On delivery you find that something is actually De Valtos property, and De Valtos give you negative RP - and sometimes rank/permit loss. Why does this happen? Because contracts are done by individuals within a faction, not by the faction itself. That's really important to understand. An individual in De Valtos could be disgruntled with a fellow De-Valtian, cut off his head, package it nicely, and get you to deliver it to a cousin in Cadar Prime. You didn't know it was De-Valtian ... but you'll be the one they blame (everyone blames the messenger).


So ... what can be done about this? I think the Political officers help weed out the fake papers, and your negotiation skill will help too. If you have found the Predator Tracking Array upgrade, that is amazingly good when it comes to the capture/kill missions because you can re-acquire your target (who might somehow change flags).

FYI ... with the Bounty Hunter / Military Officer / Predator Tracking Array, here is what you need to do:
1) Arrive at your contract destination
2) Do a surveillance activity until you get some information about your target.
3) Initiate the capture/kill mission (either patrol, or land on the planet and go where you need to go).
4) If you find the target is not desirable (eg, they are wrong faction, they are high level), then let them go.
5) You will be told your contract has failed, but in reality, you can just go back to step 2 and repeat until either your contract expires, or you find the target more agreeable to your torpedoes.


Also ... if you get blockade/surveillance missions, they are always for the right faction . You need good tactics skill to do blockade/surveillance missions, so don't accept them right at the beginning of your career.

[blackgauntlet]

@slayer- Wait... uh... that sounds a tad confusing... Sorry, ain't got no Political Officer onboard at the moment. Busy hunting aliens and just tried to take a simple delivery contract for testing. Pure Cadarian here with massive negative rep with everyone else. Had to jot down the rep number for each before I took a contract to test it.

Package delivered for Cadar against Javat on Independant planet. No rep loss on other factions (damn!). Could be an isolated case for rabidbite but I dunno. Just a single contract done by me and I was risking loads putting myself out of my comfortable range doing it. I can smell aliens running after my ass.

[slayernz]

I'm saying that there will definitely be cases - I'd even go so far as saying the majority - where the faction you take up a contract against will be the actual faction impacted. Eg, Take on a contract against Javat and it's likely that the target will actually belong to Javat

Political officers (and I could be wrong - it might be Spy officers) will help reduce the chance that the faction is different to what you signed up for.

Also ... the -RP is not guaranteed, especially for delivery missions. There are some internal dice-rolls to determine whether you got caught doing the delivery or not. If you're lucky, the delivery happened without anyone noticing and you get money without any negative impact.

[blackgauntlet]

Hmm... once I get a new phone, I'm gonna rip this one apart and find those mini dice.

[slayernz]

If you drop your phone, sometimes the dice dislodge and you can hear them rattle when you shake your phone.

Of course generally the phone doesn't work after you drop it. I'm suspecting that's because all smart phones rely on dice to operate properly.

[blackgauntlet]

I guess the lag and loading times are caused by the little goblins in there trying to calculate the total score on their 26D100 dice rolls. ;D

[rabidbite]

Nov 23, 2011 19:05:46 GMT -5 blackgauntlet said:

Package delivered for Cadar against Javat on Independant planet. No rep loss on other factions (damn!). Could be an isolated case for rabidbite but I dunno. Just a single contract done by me and I was risking loads putting myself out of my comfortable range doing it. I can smell aliens running after my ass.

I just don't do independent contracts any more unless I'm prepared to deal with the random penalty loss.
As for the Thulun De Valtos Rychart weirdness penalty loss, I got NO idea what happened there. No conflict/alliance before or after. No Spy war, nothing. But I have rep to loose so I'm going to test it out again, see if I can find a similar mission. Heck with my bank account running around 5 million is not as if I'm going to go broke.

And as for aliens. Man I WISH aliens went after me. I've been pretty much all but dancing my ships in the "rumored alien attacks in deep space" areas and NOTHING. Level 42 and still nothing. I'm thinking my stealth is too high (over 60 pilot 60 stealth already).

Man I love the game anyways, its so much fun ... and now I got a long weekend were I can play without affecting my corporate duties. Woots!

[blackgauntlet]

What's your difficulty level, RB? It helps if you're playing on Impossible.

[slayernz]

Your stealth could be a little high ... or rather, you could put your XP into other stats for a while, leaving stealth at 60.

Why?
1) In Level advancement, Stealth contributes 2 points in the calculation, whereas any other skill contributes 1 point. This means that if you solely focused on stealth as your skill of choice, you'd level up almost 2x as fast as if you focused on anything OTHER than stealth.

This is important because enemy level is in part calculated by YOUR level. If you are level 50 because you've focused primarily on stealth, your enemy could be level 100 (in Impossible). If you had focused on everything in a more balanced way, you'd be level 30, and your enemy would be a slightly more manageable 60. This is based on the same amount of XP consumed.

Also ... as you go up in levels, the XP cost of getting a new skill increases. Again in the example above, at level 30, you might have to spend 10XP per skill. At level 50, it could be 15XP.

2) Combat is where you get the majority of your XP during day to day type activities. Killing things = XP = more skills to kill things (nice circle of life thing).
High Stealth means higher chance of avoiding encounters ... good at the beginning while you get a good ship and beef up your Pilot/Tactics, but once they are good, you will be spoiling for a fight and may well be missing some easy-beats because you are so stealthy.

Stealth IS important for avoiding enemy weapons fire, especially torpedoes. But in saying that, one of my captains is level 95 on Impossible, and has 35 for Stealth. He's still alive because he still manages to avoid enemy attacks. His pilot is 110 and tactics is 115.

[blackgauntlet]

95 on Impossible? Heck! This here, is a man who eats, sleeps, dreams and probably even farts ST!

The good thing is... you're not alone! ;D

[slayernz]

There are others with much higher level characters than me ... and also now I am too scared to take this captain out for fear that he will be killed by some level 200 captain (great great grand-child of a captain I obliterated in my early levels).

I'm at something like 21,000 turns though.

[rabidbite]

Nov 24, 2011 16:49:52 GMT -5 slayernz said:

Your stealth could be a little high ... or rather, you could put your XP into other stats for a while, leaving stealth at 60.

Why?
1) In Level advancement, Stealth contributes 2 points in the calculation, whereas any other skill contributes 1 point. This means that if you solely focused on stealth as your skill of choice, you'd level up almost 2x as fast as if you focused on anything OTHER than stealth.

This is important because enemy level is in part calculated by YOUR level. If you are level 50 because you've focused primarily on stealth, your enemy could be level 100 (in Impossible). If you had focused on everything in a more balanced way, you'd be level 30, and your enemy would be a slightly more manageable 60. This is based on the same amount of XP consumed.

Also ... as you go up in levels, the XP cost of getting a new skill increases. Again in the example above, at level 30, you might have to spend 10XP per skill. At level 50, it could be 15XP.

2) Combat is where you get the majority of your XP during day to day type activities. Killing things = XP = more skills to kill things (nice circle of life thing).
High Stealth means higher chance of avoiding encounters ... good at the beginning while you get a good ship and beef up your Pilot/Tactics, but once they are good, you will be spoiling for a fight and may well be missing some easy-beats because you are so stealthy.

Stealth IS important for avoiding enemy weapons fire, especially torpedoes. But in saying that, one of my captains is level 95 on Impossible, and has 35 for Stealth. He's still alive because he still manages to avoid enemy attacks. His pilot is 110 and tactics is 115.

Good tips mate.

I thought that I needed to keep pumping up stealth to keep ahead of the "they going to hit me" curve.
So, I'm thinking maybe 15 points in stealth as fast as I can, then 15 points in piloting and 15 points in tactics.
After that initial spread: 1 point of stealth for every 5 points I distribute into piloting and tactics.
So at 20 Pilot and 20 Tact I have 17 stealth.
At 25 each 19.
At 30: 21 and so forth.
I'm pretty sure this will get me similar stats to those you have described your lvl 95 has with a little fiddling and adaptation.

Heck, I COULD just plug in the numbers as they come up. Just create the table write the stats and record the changes as they occur. That will tell me exactly how it all works from the end result point of view.

But I go back to work on monday. Oh to have the time to work on the obsessions i want to work on and not those imposed by necessity.

[slayernz]

Beef up both Stealth and Pilot right at the very beginning. Reason why ..

Stealth allows you to avoid encounters, and avoid enemy weapons fire when you do get encounters ...
BUT if you do have an encounter, you'll have to rely on Pilot to allow you to retreat from your opponents (eg pirates, independents, Steel Song bounty hunters ...)

If you have low pilot skills and high Stealth, your enemy will close range, be able to hit you with their guns, and probably board you.

Once you can change ranges and generally not get hit by enemy fire, then start adding to Tactics so that you can shoot back more effectively.