inexplicable reputation loss

[lhartvik]

I captured some ships, built a couple of factories and suddenly one of the factions (MIN) keep reporting rep loss.

-5 rep, unautorized attack, "I'd like to report an attack against this station", "Now suffer the consequences", etc. over and over

So when I hit 0 rep with them I went to MIN space and started doing missions for them. The -5 rep reports keep flowing in, reducing my rep by 10 points by the time I could finish one mission and restore 1 point.
I have no idea why.

A theory is that I captured my first couple of ships in a MIN sector(Two grand) and maybe the autonomous distress drones are just now reaching the station after a few hours(There could be as many as 50 of them), but could there be another explanation?

Ships defending against ZYA perhaps? (I am FRF lowda) I don't see my ships doing stuff in MIN sectors as the but I have many of them, and perhaps they shot at something and distress drones were sent out a few minutes ago?

A couple of wishes to Egosoft:

• 1. When my ships choose to open fire against enemies, I'd like a report from the pilot. I'd prefer not hearing about it from the authorities later. "We are opening fire on XYZ because [we are at war with them/They wanted us to drop our cargo/they fired first]"
• 2. When the police gives me a big rep loss, I'd like to know why: "Because you boarded the ship X in sector Y, and by the way this happened 123 mizuras ago", or "Because your ship 'Trader TS+ November' in sector XYZ damaged our station XYZ"

[KiwiNZ]

Useful for these enquiries to upload a save game.

When you capture a ship in race space, you usually get marked down unless the race is at war with the race whose ship you are trying to acquire.

When you hit pirates, make sure you scan them first so their true allegiance is shown and not that of a friendly (to somebody) race.

Same goes for factory turrets. If they are set to "attack all", which is default, I think, they will attack ships of races you are at war with and if these are not at war with MIN, you will get a hit in notoriety.

[pref]

I suffer the exact same issue, MIN randomly complaining about one of their stations being attacked, which doesn't happen in reality.
I have to do those terrible missions for them constantly and hunt that stupid mass traffic or else i'd have to give up my current endeavour that happens to be in TEL space. It's really messing up my game now.
Started to happen since i have built a station in their space (actually i built 2, had a station mission for MIN, and also building my own in profit alpha).

I haven't boarded any MIN ships recently so probably that isn't the reason.

Here a save, one just needs to sit on seta for a min or two and a lizard will complain soon - can't even use seta any more due to this..


Another error in here is that the loadout menu for big stations murders the ui, between every tick where events are processed there are like 10secs while UI is frozen. Just open loadout menu for a big plex( VKG-408, AIX-002 or UEB-478).

[Scoob]

MIN are a bloody nightmare, always complaining about something despite NOTHING actually be going on. They nagged me last night for attacking an identified and already hostile SCA ship that had been harassing local shipping. I killed it, as I've done many a time, and took a hit for it.

There is a bug regarding SCA Pirates disguises, reported previously, when they apply a new disguise when they're already being attacked. I.e.

1) See "Marauder" or "Pillager" ship.
2) Force it to shed its disguise (SCA)
3) Proceed to shoot the ship, marking is as a hostile
4) Ship is suddenly listed as PAR, ARG etc. etc. again which can lead to problems.

Generally killing a ship you KNOW to be a pirate is far less of an issue than it once was. It's like the faction now knows it's not one of theirs even if it's disguised as such. This is GOOD. However, every now and again, and MIN are the absolute worst for this, they get pissy with you for killing a verified hostile pirate.

For the most part, I kill SCA ships - disguised or otherwise - in TEL space without issue. It wasn't always like that of course, but it was fixed, so things are much better now. Every so often though, MIN take offence, but generally get told to bugger off by sector security when "reporting" this non-crime, as they should. Once in a while though, one creeps through.

Note: one possible cause of this might be deployed LT's. They usually deploy as SCA but sometimes not, killing those will cause problems due to the incorrect faction affiliation.

Scoob.

[lhartvik]

Useful for these enquiries to upload a save game.

When you capture a ship in race space, you usually get marked down unless the race is at war with the race whose ship you are trying to acquire.

When you hit pirates, make sure you scan them first so their true allegiance is shown and not that of a friendly (to somebody) race.

Same goes for factory turrets. If they are set to "attack all", which is default, I think, they will attack ships of races you are at war with and if these are not at war with MIN, you will get a hit in notoriety.

I went through all my ships and yes I think you hit the bullseye, one of my oldest frigates had 'attack all' set on its turrets and it is not impossible he was attacking ZYA ships passing though Two Grand. Here's hoping. I turned it off and sent him on guard duty in Heart of Acrimony 2. I'll see what happens.

I'm also stuck on my peace attempt doing missions in Eighteen billion - I put this mission npc on my mining ship and I'm supposed to pickup 170 units of Silicon there, but it doesn't register. Collected: 0/170. Are you supposed to pick the Silicon up a certain way? EDIT: nevermind when I picked the silicon up with the mining drones and not running over and destroying them, they registered.

[pref]

one of my oldest frigates had 'attack all' set on its turrets and it is not impossible he was attacking ZYA ships passing though Two Grand.

Friendly fire can only happen when you are in sector afaik. At least i got these messages while staying in other sectors, not TEL ones.

[xuancong]

Very strange, I loaded your savegame, sit in the ship stationary not going anywhere, turned on SETA for 10-20 minutes, but did not experience any MIN's complaint, nor reputation loss from any faction.
Are you sure the warning occurs when you are in Two Grand? Are you sure the problem occurs upon reloading the game (some bugs auto-disappear after re-loading the game)?

In general, when you have lots of military ships near an ally's station or fleet and that sector often has Xenons/enemies, you should not avoid visiting that sector. This is because upon entering that sector, you turn on weapon projectiles and trajectory in that sector (when OOS, weapon causes damage directly according to probabilistic formulae, no bullet path calculation is involved). When your ships fire at Xenon/enemy, some projectiles very easily land on ally's stations/ships, triggering hostile reaction and causing reputation loss. What is even worse is that this can trigger a whole series of chain reaction, more and more ally's ships and your ships will join the fight, eventually turning the entire ally's fleet hostile to you, so in the end your whole fleet will be attacking ally's whole fleet and station. This is a design flaw very hard to fix as it affects C/C#/C++ code, see my post viewtopic.php?f=146&t=427744.

[pref]

Very strange, I loaded your savegame, sit in the ship stationary not going anywhere, turned on SETA for 10-20 minutes, but did not experience any MIN's complaint, nor reputation loss from any faction.
Are you sure the warning occurs when you are in Two Grand? Are you sure the problem occurs upon reloading the game (some bugs auto-disappear after re-loading the game)?

If you tried my save the idle location is Silent Witness or Bright Promise.


Might be a lasertower? RHA dropped a laser tower on my station earlier which has been destroyed since.
Possible that the police AI treats those as stations and punishes the player for hurting them?

There is about no benefit from gameplay aspect with police, but it brings so much annoyance.

edit: Lasertowers are not the culprit, RHA just dropped another one, one of my ships killed it and i got no messages from MIN.

[shanrak]

One thing I discovered recently, my police ships sometimes ends up chasing a ship through a gate, so I was getting dinged occasionally when my police in Nopileos Fortune VI chased a ship to Grand Exchange, scanned it, then started attacking it for some reason, which pissed the MIN off. I've turned off policing in that sector for now to see if it helps.

[Raptor34]

One thing I discovered recently, my police ships sometimes ends up chasing a ship through a gate, so I was getting dinged occasionally when my police in Nopileos Fortune VI chased a ship to Grand Exchange, scanned it, then started attacking it for some reason, which pissed the MIN off. I've turned off policing in that sector for now to see if it helps.

My fighters like to chase ships right into Xenon sectors too. Perhaps there should be a Hot Pursuit setting for it, if yes then a ship will execute its orders regardless of anything, if no then if a target leaves the sector the order will be cancelled.

[leoriq]

If you have rep losses after boarding is finished, check for laser towers and defence drones that your target might have left behind.

[phrozen1]

Had the same issue with reports of my ships attacking a min station without any reason.

[lplates]

I recently (6.0) had this issue and found this thread after a quick search so I think it is worth adding my story here.
It took me an AGE to find the source of this issue and hopefully this will help others with this ongoing problem.

Background:
I started the ZYA Split DLC and i'm at -28 with Argon so my stuff and their stuff doesn't get along.
I have a lot of Trade/Mining ships carrying Laser Towers with order to drop one and flee when attacked.

Issue:
All of a sudden I got the little video message form an angry Teleadi that I was attacking a 'station' and that I was being reported. Criminal record updated etc.
MIN standing dropped by -1 then -2 then it plummeted every few minutes.
It was not at all obvious where this 'attack' was taking place, who was attacking whom or any real info to aid me in putting a stop to it.

I started looking around the map/sectors and filtering on everything Ministry but this didn't get me very far.
Whilst looking around I noticed that I was killing a lot of ARG Miners where my Miners were dropping Laser Towers
After more time that I would like to admit, I gave up trying to find the specific problem location by hand and took more drastic measures.

Solution:
I saved the game, and Destroyed ALL of my Laser Towers. The quickest way to do this:

• filter by deployables
• select the 'my property' side bar option
  select ALL laser towers (click the top one, hold shift, scroll to the last one
  Right Click - Self-Destruct

****The messages stopped immediately****

For a less drastic solution, I then loaded the save and repeated the above going sector by sector until I homed in on the culprit, noted by the messages stopping.
So I loaded again and just focused on that sector.
I actually never found the one that was causing the issue and I suspect it was quite a few of them in that sector as it was close to MIN stations albeit via a close gate.

I settled for clearing out just one whole sector of my towers and it worked so I moved on.
Hope this helps as I got close to abandoning the save and this was a great relief to resolve.

[Nanook]

I recently (6.0) had this issue and found this thread after a quick search so I think it is worth adding my story here....

No, it's not. This is an old thread based on several game versions ago. If you have something new to post, please start a new thread. Dredging up old ones is never a good idea.

[Alan Phipps]

If you prefer, there is a far more recent thread that you could use and add to here.