To back up what MichaealIgnotus is saying here, I’ve been writing up my Legendary campaign on these forums, and one thing that really struck me was how out of whack the rewards for piracy are.
In this post, I raided a NJ haven for a Thunderbird. Total mission rewards were:
1 Deceptor machine gun
2 Cyclops sniper rifles
1 Thunderbird
1 NJ aircraft railgun module
1 NJ aircraft rocket pod module
1 NJ aircraft armour module
A medkit, half a dozen mags of ammo, and some minor stuff
Now, I haven’t gone to the wiki and looked up the value of all that, but just from a glance, it’s clear that those rewards are vastly greater than any “normal” mission. And in exchange for this you lose . . . 6 points of reputation. That’s less than you gain for hitting a single Pandoran Lair.
But what really makes it ridiculous is the way that the factions just shrug this off. Trying to justify it as “well, the factions put up with piracy because they need you”, as Voland is doing, makes absolutely no sense to me, because if the factions are this stupidly rich, why aren’t they just hiring you to win the war for them? They’ll give you 350ish materials and 60ish tech (or whatever) for saving one of their havens, but they don’t seem to mind very much when they lose an aircraft and a squad of soldiers that are worth 10 times that much. In fact, they barely even seem to notice. When you raid a haven, murder the defenders, fly off in their aircraft, then show up at the haven next door expecting to trade, you’d expect that the faction leaders would at the very least make a few snarky comments, but you don’t get any reaction at all. It’s particularly noticeable with Synedrion, who whine about Arthrons, whine about NJ’s technicians, whine about Tobias West in general, but suddenly go silent when you kill them and take their stuff. In fact, they seem to get more upset about you killing Pandorans than about you killing Synedrion soldiers.
Well, IME the biggest problem is that destroying Lairs and Citadels very quickly brings you to 100 rep.
So the problem with what you are suggesting is that it would railroad the player into massive transgressions in the early game to build an economy, and then coast into inevitable alliances with everybody as you rack up rep for destroying Pandoran bases.
Reducing the source of the rep gains, on the other hand, would mean that if you play nice with the factions you have plenty of sources of rep to advance quickly, but the more you raid the more uphill your diplo efforts will be, which I think is what you (and me) ultimately want.
They kind of do that already: they pay you for completing faction missions and achieving rep milestones, not to mention the haven events.
I think we all agree that is wrong, we disagree on the consequences it should have.
Now, if we are talking about the kind of game each of us wants, I’m sure that many would say just get rid of raids altogether or make them so prohibitive that, e.g. stealing an aircraft would mean immediate and permanent war. But if we want to be somewhat realistic, let’s admit that the content is there and it’s not going to get cut or made so onerous to experience that hardly anyone will play it.
I know, but I find it really frustrating that the default way to get stuff from factions is “kill them and take it off their dead bodies”. I know exactly why it works that way – it’s that PP has a very expansive combat system and a very small and limited diplomacy system, so the default solution to any problem in the game is “shoot it in the face on the tactical map”. But after a while this becomes really frustrating, especially when you’re theoretically allied with a faction yet still can’t just ask them nicely for what you want.