[Suggestion] - Reputation Problem #2 - High Reputation

[mjbroekman]

Disclaimer: This is basically a port of @Edmon's reputation thread (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...s-of-flashpoint-a-suggested-solution.1133319/) wherein he posits incentives for high reputation with factions. This is NOT my original idea and all credit for starting the discussion should belong to @Edmon ...

Problem
The problem with HIGH reputation is that there is really no incentive for it aside from access to higher difficulty missions. Making an Alliance with a faction is really only "okay". You gain access to the Faction store but at the same time, you can lose a significant amount of hard-earned reputation with the enemies of your Ally. The Faction stores themselves are only "okay" with only a few offering access to unique items. So, in reality, there is little to no upside to an Alliance and no real incentive of high reputation aside from mission difficulty.

@Edmon 's solution
Introduce a new resource called "Favours" (we'll use the correct British spelling) that is part of the negotiation screen:

@Edmon posits a few uses for favors as well:

• You could use them to improve or ruin your reputation with them as you desire, as people inside of the complex machine that is a noble house act on your behalf at your command
• Favours could also be used in faction stores to buy items, tech, etc
• Favours could be stockpiled and used to dig yourself out of a hole... or create one
• They could be given in events and very slowly regenerate, allowing campaigners to rescue themselves from impossible to get out of holes

And it got me thinking (and really hoping that someone would move this discussion into the Suggestions forum where it rightly belongs)...

My elaboration on those uses
First, I like the idea of favours but I'm not sure they would be something you could bargain for directly. I don't really see an Indifferent faction (or worse) granting a favour to a merc unit as part of contract negotiation.

On the other hand, I can see a merc unit being able to trade reputation for favours... if you are Allied with a faction (have connections / people in high places). And I can see a merc unit trading favours for positive reputation when they have favours to burn and need a higher rep (you have those connections and burn them one at a time for higher rep).

I can also see favours being used to increase mission rewards without impacting reputation negatively. For example, (assuming 3/3 as the default starting point), you could spend a favor to increase the rewards to 4/3 or 3/4 and so on to the point of calling in FOUR favours and getting max cbills AND max salvage for the default reputation value.

As far as gaining favours...

• Cap the display of reputation at +100, but for every X reputation after that, you gain 1 favour (and reputation drops back to 100). The original thread discussed various values for that but 25 seemed about right.
  
• For allies, I can see burning reputation (to no lower than Liked) in order to gain favours. Again, 25 seems about right, which means that from +100, you could gain 3 favours by burning reputation back down to +25. This would be a BENEFIT of being in an Alliance. You wouldn't be able to burn reputation without the alliance being in place (friends in high places).

Aside from spending favours for increased contract rewards, the other use of favours would be to gain reputation (calling in favours to talk up the reputation of the group). However, I don't think that should be nearly as effective and, as such, I think using favours to increase reputation should be around 40% of whatever reputation it takes to earn a favour. This means a 25-point favour purchase would net a +10 reputation increase if uses for that purpose. While not nearly as effective, it does allow 2 or 3 favours to move reputation out of Loathed and "safely" into "Hated" where missions are much more common in the late game.

I can see an argument for allowing anyone to burn reputation to gain a favour and could be persuaded in that direction, but it feels more appropriate as a benefit to being in an Alliance. Maybe being in an Alliance makes the reputation burn cheaper. Maybe non-Allied factions grant favours for 50 rep each while Allied factions grant favours for 25 rep each. Not sure.

Alternative Uses
Some alternative uses for high reputation that aren't related to the concept of favours:

• Influencing store contents. The higher the reputation, the more likely rare items show up in the store. Something like +5% chance for rare items at +100 reputation (or simply +1% for each positive step away from Indifferent)
  
• Influencing store and contract prices. Instead of being based on "standing" (Liked, Hated, Honored, whatever), have the prices influenced by some percentage of reputation. Built up a +150 reputation with a Faction? Well, contracts and store pricess will be better than when you were at (only) +100.
  • This also brings up the issue that reputation only impacts what you pay for in the stores and not what you can sell for. While I agree that with the idea that you shouldn't be able to play MechMerchantSim and make profits buying from one system and selling to another, increasing the amount that a Friendly store will pay for your stuff compared to what a Disliked store just makes sense. You will never make up the 90% difference between purchase and sell price anyway without explicitly aiming for it. Using a $100k base purchase price example (and thus, $10k sell price), at Honored, you would pay $75k for that item. Even if sell price was increased by the same percentage, you would only be selling for $12.5k so there's no real risk of this becoming a MerchantSim even with extreme reputation levels.

Conclusion
Hopefully, this gives HBS some ideas on how to make high reputation for meaningful and maybe spur ideas in the community for other suggestions. By all means, add them to this thread.