Relation hit on damage - is there any way to handle it properly

[lammaer]

The biggest frustration in the game for me is how easy to destroy relationship with AI factions, and I believe it should be handled  a more lofgical way or simply toned it down.

 

I'm near the core, and when big fights happen (eg alien invasions) now days I reluctant to help the residents, because it is just too easy to ruin even EXCELLENT relationship with some accidental hits.

For example, killing an alien ship gives like 400-500 relationship improvement - but an accidental hit from some stray missiles or fighters on an ALLIED ship takes couple 1000's.

 

This is just plain wrong.

 

My ideas (from the simples to the more complex solutions):

- idea1: reduce relation hits to 10% (at least).  (actually I'm looking to mod it myself)

- idea2:  scale down relationship damage as the  player gets closer to  the core. 1000 damage near the core should result in much less relationship damage than the same damage near the edge

- idea3: scale down relationship damage taking into account the CURRENT relationship with the give faction. Eg having better relationship should mean the relationship damage should be LESS when damage happens. Just as in real life, we can bear more from close friends...

- idea4: based on the curret relationship, have a buffer damage "pool" what causes no relationship hit. Eg in every Y minutes, you can cause X damage to a faction without having relationaship impact (X can be proprrtional to the current standing). This is to mitigate the ACCIDENTAL damage, so X should be chosen carefully

-idea5: in a given fight/sector, compare the damage done to the faction's enemies and the faction itself. Get relationship damage ONLY if the ratio of (faction damage / enemy damage) is bigger than X (eg 5% or less). This is to handle the accidental friendly fire cases in big fights.

 

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Eyeing the relations script, it shouldn't be complicated to scale hull/shield damage losses to the sectors expected dps, which would normalize losses from friendly fire.

[lammaer]

Well... i found out that relationchanges.lua is the file seems to be responseible to calculate the relationship impact depending on the damage made to shield or hull.

I decreased the "factor" to 10% (simply just multiplied by 0.1 :) ) and while in the debug console I saw the effect of my change (very small factor numbers), but the actual reputation damage remained the same.

I even didn't find the code what actually prints the reputation damage on the screen, so there must me some hidden (not LUA) code playing a role here....