X3AP - Pirates and rep with them (kinda solved)

[Red-Spot]

Edited post. Dun wish to have several topics on my name with fairly basic questions.

In AP I am noticing anarchy ports keep turning red on me. Before you think it is cause you have negative rep and they made that so (as I understand) cause of RR-fleets .. No my rep with the pirates is above 0, around 500 mark.
Few hours later though, being very friendly to the pirates and not taken any assassination missions, my pirate rep is all of sudden -500 when I am informed one of my traders is being shot down by static defenses where the entire p-dock is filled up with goods my guys supplied to them.
Is pirate rep negatively adjusted over time? That is at least how it feels.


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Original post:

Found out about the mobile mining thingy in X3TC by mistake (buy 20 miners, send them out of days only to find out it does not remove a single rock).
Is the bug still in AP? Would like to clear a few sectors and not have it turn into some sort of unwilling cheating

[Alan Phipps]

I am not aware of a serious mobile mining bug in either of TC or AP. They both seem to work just fine for me in vanilla (although perhaps with different results between the two games in terms of rock respawns and what the miners do when full).

No AI mining ship will ever break a full-size (shows on sector map) asteroid in vanilla play, the player has to do that first. Mineral mining ships (if armed) will break down larger rocks of the specified mineral to collectables, while rock collectors will only collect the smallest size of rocks of any minerals available. The rocks do have to be within scan range of the mining ships or other player assets.

There are a few rubble (zero yield) clusters of rocks in-game that can tie up miners in TC if the rubble constantly respawns and so cycles through constant no-yield collections. This cannot happen in AP. Maybe that was the issue you meant?

You can clear a sector of all rocks by mobile mining in AP over time as there are no rock respawns (only full-size asteroids without mines built on them will respawn if destroyed). In TC though, the best way to clear rocks is to use area effect weapons such as PBG or PSG (or ramming by a big well-shielded ship with no mineral collector) to clear them. That way you avoid the rock respawns in TC.

[Red-Spot]

There are a few rubble (zero yield) clusters of rocks in-game that can tie up miners in TC if the rubble constantly respawns and so cycles through constant no-yield collections. This cannot happen in AP. Maybe that was the issue you meant?

Bingo!
Never like going into build up sectors in general but the ones with the collectable rubble seem to be hard on FPS and autopilock. Tried to clear some up in TC using miners, without success and now most kills I have in that game is on 'asteroid'..
Nice to be able to clear some sectors up a bit using some of the games own functionality
Thanks for the info!

[Red-Spot]

Made a minor edit to the topic. Getting a bit annoyed with the pirates who I am keen to keep as friends just not if I need to constantly be aware of my relation with them when having set up a dedicated 'pirate support hub' in Lost Order.

Edit: Problem I have with the anarchy ports turning red is that I invested quite a bit to be on good terms with Yaki & Pirates and am supporting all 4 IBL-forges. The 2 pirate IBL-forges are so near the anarchy ports though that UT's & CAG-suppliers get shot down doing their job that they have been doing for gamedays now.

[Alan Phipps]

Even with a great rep with pirates there will still be a few pirate ships and/or lasertowers around that are red to you and will attack you, your ships or your stations. (Indeed quite rarely some of their ships will spawn with job orders specifically to attack a station of yours.) Naturally if your assets return fire or your patrols attack them then your pirate rep will suffer. Well, the pirates are hardly to be considered as a consistent and well-coordinated faction in any case.

Another gameplay oddity may be through your ships or stray shots hitting jumpgates in pirate-controlled or unknown sectors which can make pirate stations there go red to you. Further, pirate ships just colliding with your assets by accident (or your ships similarly colliding with their assets) can cause rep issues too. Remember that all your AI ships with 'Enemy if enemy to me' set will see pirates as hostile if you personally are currently being hostile to a pirate asset.

I use Anarchy Port attitude as a sort of indicator for pirate rep or pirate-related issues in my games and so go looking for problem areas such as above if they unexpectedly go red on me. Reissuing a *global* pirate 'friend' order is often a good first step.

[Red-Spot]

Yeah, that is why I deliberately build all my hubs slightly further away from gates as I did in TC (prevent my defenders shooting at a pirate cause when it entered the sector it was in 10km radius).
Have no 'rolling defenses' just Tigers on hub-defense and place them on top of SEWN-sats which seem to constantly give false positives for pirates and cant seem to find all but 1 Tiger that hit a pirate. I generally do the 'global command' thingy every hour of when I spot something off.
Still can not figure this one out if the game does not slowly makes rep with pirates degrade over time. Seem I may just need to go to pirate alley I & II and do some missions for them again

Funny thing is I had 1 pirate attack and after putting it down I had a rep of 565 (checked to be sure .. and slightly neurotic ... ahem), no noticeable attacks and just 1 Tiger that kicked a pirate eclipse for getting too close in red-form and all of a sudden Anarchy goes anarchy on me ..
(Thankfully this does not happen with the Yaki as else there would be no Yaki soon after .... )

Well, MK3-blacklist, CAG-restrictions and pirate-missions .. here I cum


Edit: 3065 rep now
Few more P-stations in Lost Order and Gaian Star which should make it easy to keep rep up.
Thanks for the feedback Alan. Still not sure what caused the drop in rep but any crisis is averted

[Jimmy C]

Anarchy Ports go hostile to you more often than not. If you have good reputation with Pirates and have access to every other Pirate station, it's not a concern. You should be able to find someone willing to Hack the Port or make it neutral if you need to do business with the Port.
Getting good reputation with Pirates is the easiest thing ever, it requires fewer missions than for any other faction. And if they go hostile to you after a long run of combat missions against Pirate targets (happens to me all the time) just one Pirate mission, of any difficulty, will make them neutral again right away.

[RainerPrem]

Normally I have one Booze-And-Weed factory in Loomanckstraat and Mercenaries each. That keeps the Ports on my good side. I ignore the one in Hatikvah, since it's so far away that my ships don't normally stray into its area.

[Red-Spot]

Anarchy Ports go hostile to you more often than not. If you have good reputation with Pirates and have access to every other Pirate station, it's not a concern. You should be able to find someone willing to Hack the Port or make it neutral if you need to do business with the Port.
Getting good reputation with Pirates is the easiest thing ever, it requires fewer missions than for any other faction. And if they go hostile to you after a long run of combat missions against Pirate targets (happens to me all the time) just one Pirate mission, of any difficulty, will make them neutral again right away.

You do not need to hack A-ports (including the stock-exchange), they will go blue when rep is good enough and turn red when rep goes down, unlike regular P-docks. This has changed from AP though, just to be clear about it. I feel you are talking TC when I am really playing AP now

[Jimmy C]

Actually, I was referring to AP, which is the one I played more.
For me, it doesn't stay blue very long one way or another. Either because I hacked it or, like I said, I keep taking combat missions against Pirates.

[jlehtone]

Code: Select all

Should I be red to player?
Yes, IF I hate player OR my race hates player

That is the base. The latter condition correlates with reputation.

The former, a personal issue, is set by player directly harming you (ship or station).
Hacking clears the "I hate you" of a station.

Saying "sorry" clears the "I hate you" of a ship. That, however, is not quite binary. The "sorry" clears some amount of accidents, but turns ineffective by overdose.

An object that starts to hate you can tell its "followers" to do the same. Station could broadcast the hate to Lasertowers.

What is "direct harm"? Being shot at, obviously.
Trade Stations consider the Gates of the sector their property and react on Gates being shot at.
Police ships consider non-enemy bypassers their "property" too.

Acts that make someone personally mad (or dead) tend to affect the reputation too.

Pirates are relatively easy to please though.

[Red-Spot]

I can confirm pirate rep is negatively adjusted over time.
At least none that I or any of my ships did caused a drop and the rep I have with them dropped with 200 points per interval. Doing some pirate killing made it drop significantly (few M3«»M5's made it drop ~1500).
Have not really looked at how much time passed though so I can not really say how long it takes for the rep to drop. I set everything friendly to pirates, 'enemy to me' setting to 'no' and kept selling loads of weed'n whiskey to the pirates. Seems trade does not affect rep though, at least I also sell to the Yaki (also weed'n whiskey and 2 IBL-forges are supported) and the rep with them is at steady ~1100 since a long time.

[jlehtone]

I can confirm pirate rep is negatively adjusted over time.
At least none that I or any of my ships did caused a drop and the rep I have with them dropped with 200 points per interval.

Interesting. Does it stop at 0 rep or would it go to negative bottom due to no interaction?

If it does stop at 0 rep points (or some other threshold), would it also improve over time if your rep is on the hostile side?

[Red-Spot]

I can confirm pirate rep is negatively adjusted over time.
At least none that I or any of my ships did caused a drop and the rep I have with them dropped with 200 points per interval.

Interesting. Does it stop at 0 rep or would it go to negative bottom due to no interaction?

If it does stop at 0 rep points (or some other threshold), would it also improve over time if your rep is on the hostile side?

Seeing the existence of this topic I would assume that has already been answered .. it clearly does not stop dropping at 0.
Note that I am trying to point out:
-Rep drops (confirmed)
-My 'known' assets do not shoot at pirates (confirmed)
-(auto)Trade does not impact rep with pirates/yaki (confirmed)
-many things that may still influence rep that I am not aware of (can not confirm)

The last is very important if you ever want to work with this and I will not make any hard claims regarding it. Maybe I am just missing something obvious causing the drop, but it does not seem that way.
It does however confirm me that I have a continuous task in my game, as I see it, when I want to stay friends with the pirates in the broadest sense of the word ... Maybe I'll eventually just opt for the 'owned IBL forges' and drop any support for the pirates, that'll teach em!


Edit:
Noticed a sudden, pretty steep, increase in rep with pirates and yaki. Did just get my rep with a few races to the max, pretty much the only difference between now and before.
Yaki rep was at a steady 1100(+ a bit), few mission later, 12.000(+ a bit). Pirate rep going down from 3065 (took several mission to get there) to just over 1000, few 'average' missions later .. 6560.
I wanna assume some things now

[Red-Spot]

Gonna derail my own topic

Any way I might be able to trigger the 'instructor' from early game to reappear? Never did the mini-plot as a humble merchant with the 'no weapons' and stuff, kinda want to complete it in my current game now I did source some weapons (and 3 billion invested in weapon-forges)

I know I can just restart and do the 'achievement' in an other game, would like to cover it in my current if at all possible though.

[Klord]

Gonna derail my own topic

Any way I might be able to trigger the 'instructor' from early game to reappear? Never did the mini-plot as a humble merchant with the 'no weapons' and stuff, kinda want to complete it in my current game now I did source some weapons (and 3 billion invested in weapon-forges)

I know I can just restart and do the 'achievement' in an other game, would like to cover it in my current if at all possible though.

Is he not available in your spawn sector?

[jlehtone]

What 'instructor'? Which 'mini-plot'?

[Red-Spot]

My game is now, I think, around 10-ish days old. He was there at gamestart, but with the 'no weapons' start and the instructor having you shoot a crate I just moved on and started exploring. When I realized I had totally forgotten about the instructor he was no longer around in Herron's Nebula (Humble Merchant start). Looked in M124 (or what the sector is called) hoping he might perhaps show up there , but does not seem to be around.

Jlehtone, when you start a game there is an instructor telling you how to target, fire a missile, shoot a crate, some rudimentary stuff no experienced player would need. He is missing

[jlehtone]

About 40 days from (Nostalgic Argon) start I still have Argon Flight School Buster in Argon Prime, with lightbulb.

[Red-Spot]

Been looking for him, even scanned stations to make sure he would not be docked. Nada ...