How does Nova do this?
I cannot seem to figure out how Nova calculates your legal status. I looked in the Bible and searched the forums with no luck. My problem is that I can't seem to find any pattern that would help me be able to tell where a status begins and ends. The numbers seem to randomly jump around. I need to be able to use this for missions. Does anyone know how this works?
Ok, looked at the appendices... so then if my gov't has say a crime tolerance of ten then I would have to have 14 points to be citizen? And -74 for wanted criminal? Etc?
Erm, no.
Think of it this way: there are two legal status "point" counters. One counts the amount of bad/good stuff - as determined by missions and the penalty fields. The other is your actual legal status, which is the first counter divided by the tolerance. Let's say your government has a tolerance of 10 and a ship destroy penalty of 5. If you destroy six ships, your "points" will be 30, but your legal status will be 3. If you set the tolerance to 15, your "points" will remain the same, but your legal status will be 2.
Just tried it and it worked like a charm! Thanks a lot! This new knowledge will help a great deal in setting up how missions affect legal status.
The one thing I'm not sure of is how much it adds or subtracts when you annoy one of its enemies or allies. I'll do a test sometime later.
Testing results:
- despite my prior beliefs, the pilot log shows the total status "points", rather than the tolerance-adjusted ones
- when you invoke a government's disable/board/destroy/smuggle penalty, that same value is added to your status with other governments, and presumably is subtracted from ally governments*
*The game changes this somewhat for systems outside the current one. A certain amount is subtracted for each system - i.e. in the current system it will be the base amount, but in systems one jump away it will be less, in systems one jump away it will be even less, etc. I am unsure how much it subtracts - whether it's a fixed amount, whether it's proportional to the base amount, and whether it's linear. What I do know, from prior tests, is that the higher the penalty, the farther away it affects. A low penalty like 10 may only affect a couple systems nearby, but a high one like 100 will affect systems significantly farther away. This is, I might add, in contradiction to determinations made by others (COUGHBELTHYCOUGH) which stated that systems a set number of jumps away (I've heard three and more recently two) would be affected.
(Don't worry Belthy, I still love ya. :))
This post has been edited by orcaloverbri9 : 30 August 2006 - 10:58 AM
Within one system, killing an enemy has half the effect of killing a ship of the government itself, if my memory serves. Lestways, in Teacup TC, which has only one government, a xenophobic one, killing the Inspector penalizes you 100 points, and you have to kill two C-Y78's to get back where you started.
Distancewise, I know in Fed space it's two jumps, and Auroran space it's two jumps, but I suspect Heraan space might be 3 jumps, but that might've also been a one-time fluke.
@orcaloverbri9, on Aug 31 2006, 12:23 AM, said in Confused:
(COUGHBELTHYCOUGH)
Offers orca a cough drop For the record, I didn't determine anything - I was just going by what I heard from other people for this one. Which is part of the reason I didn't answer Ant'Iglas' CrimeTol question above - it was blatantly obvious that it was incorrect, but I wan't entirely certain as to what the correct answer was. Besides, you explained it better than I would have. 
@qaanol, on Aug 30 2006, 01:30 PM, said in Confused:
Within one system, killing an enemy has half the effect of killing a ship of the government itself, if my memory serves. Lestways, in Teacup TC, which has only one government, a xenophobic one, killing the Inspector penalizes you 100 points, and you have to kill two C-Y78's to get back where you started.
forehead slap This is what I get for setting the enemy government's penalty to half of the first government's.
Well in light of this new (to me) information about tolerance I've been able to identify another string entry in my Resource ID Guide. Previously, I was unwittingly using a govt with a high tolerance in my test cases and could not get the "Public Enemy" string to appear. I also have a bit of a correction to make to the bible:
Good Scale: Legal Status:
0 No record
1-4 Citizen
5-16 Good Citizen
17-64 Upstanding Citizen
65-256 Leading Citizen
257-1024 Model Citizen
1025+ Virtuous Citizen
Evil Scale: Legal Status:
1 No Convictions
2-4 Minor Offender
5-16 Offender
17-64 Criminal
65-256 Wanted Criminal
257-1024 Fugitive
1025-4096 Hunted Fugitive
4097+ Public Enemy
This post has been edited by Guy : 24 April 2007 - 06:58 PM
@orcaloverbri9, on Aug 30 2006, 04:23 PM, said in Confused:
The one thing I'm not sure of is how much it adds or subtracts when you annoy one of its enemies or allies. I'll do a test sometime later.
Testing results:
- despite my prior beliefs, the pilot log shows the total status "points", rather than the tolerance-adjusted ones
- when you invoke a government's disable/board/destroy/smuggle penalty, that same value is added to your status with other governments, and presumably is subtracted from ally governments*
*The game changes this somewhat for systems outside the current one. A certain amount is subtracted for each system - i.e. in the current system it will be the base amount, but in systems one jump away it will be less, in systems one jump away it will be even less, etc. I am unsure how much it subtracts - whether it's a fixed amount, whether it's proportional to the base amount, and whether it's linear. What I do know, from prior tests, is that the higher the penalty, the farther away it affects. A low penalty like 10 may only affect a couple systems nearby, but a high one like 100 will affect systems significantly farther away. This is, I might add, in contradiction to determinations made by others (COUGHBELTHYCOUGH) which stated that systems a set number of jumps away (I've heard three and more recently two) would be affected.
(Don't worry Belthy, I still love ya. :))
I think it's probably a proportional decrease with the distance in systems (e.g. 50% of base amount in a neighboring system, 25% in a systems two jumps away, even less for a system three jumps away, etc...), though I don't know how the proportion decreases with distance (if I were to venture a guess, I'd say exponentially decreasing). This belief that it stops farther than two jumps away is merely due to the fact that the penalties in the stock Nova scenario are not really big and any effect farther that two jumps away is rounded down to 0 for most of them, while with higher values (like 100) the effect doesn't reach 0 (even with rounding towards 0, or truncation, as it's how it probably rounds) until a somewhat larger radius.