[SVN] Some loose ends in the faction system
Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2011 2:07 pm
I'm very grateful that the old factions.xml has been revised in order to get rid of the "obnoxious Uln" complex, and I also appreciate the attempt of making faction standings more human readable in the new savegame format.
That said, and after two long games played in Svn over the past 3 weeks, I need to report a couple of issues that arise with this new system.
Inconsistencies in the new factions.xml:
That said, and after two long games played in Svn over the past 3 weeks, I need to report a couple of issues that arise with this new system.
Inconsistencies in the new factions.xml:
- Rlaan-citizen: Quite unlike the Rlaan faction itself, the citizens are not affected by any player actions. Which means: they remain at point "0" neutral forever. Should you hit one of them only inadvertently, I'm sure this will cause a downward spiral which can never be stopped.
- LIHW: They have only 0.2 standing towards themselves and their citizens. Also, their 0.2 standing towards the Privateer faction seems to be hard-coded, because when you start killing Aera they go up to a 120 maximum.
- Aera and Aera merchants: You can work your way to a neutral standing ('0'), but there is no way to get a positive friendly reputation with them. This pre-determines them as the enemy and robs the player of a choice. On top of that, the '0' point faction does not seem to be recognized as neutral: Aera structures still attacked me when trying to dock.
- Only an hour or two into one of my games I noticed I had a -100 standing towards the "Privateer" faction. I don't suppose 'self-hatred' is a valid parameter in Vegastrike. To fix this, I had to reload an old savegame.
- A while later I noticed that the faction points I had with the Andolians were "1.25e-00599". This misreading corrected itself after two or three reloads.
- Some time into another game I became aware that I was rapidly losing faction standings with the "Upgrade" faction. In less than an hour it went down to "-100" and "4 kills". But I had never shot at any place where you can obtain upgrades, let alone killed any neutral unit. And I could not observe any changes either: there were no red dots on the radar, and I could still dock to all structures, planets and capships as well as have friendly communication with them. To get over this, I had to edit the savegame. Since then, the values never again deteriorated.