Guide to the Corporations (Page 5 of 7)

Written by Deadbeat_Spinn

Rank/Rep Increase/Decrease for Successful/Failed Missions

Increase

When you complete your first mission for a given Corporation you will start at Rank 0 with a 65%. All successful missions completed will give you a 10% increase until you reach Rank 1. After reaching Rank 1 the rank/rep increase for completed mission will be anywhere from 13% to 25%, and yes the increase is random as well. If you don't like the increase you received for the completed mission, reloading is always an option but that's up to the player. If anyone's ever gotten a rank/rep increase higher than 25% please let me know.

Rank 0: 10% increase,
Rank 1-->Rank 9: 13-25%,
Rank 10: 13-25%, until the rank percentage can go no further,

Sidenote: If playing under an older game version like 1.0, the rank/rep increase after the first misson at Rank 0 will be 5% instead of 10%.

Decrease

Depending on what your Corporation rank is will decide the amount of rank/rep loss one receives for aborting/failing a mission. At lower levels (below Rank 4), aborted/failed missions gave me a 3% drop. At Rank 0, however, the rank/rep loss will be 5%. At higher levels (above Rank 4) aborted/failed missions gave me a 0% to 1% drop. Further looking into this matter will be required and any additional information will be posted as it becomes available.

The percentages will be abort/fail, respectively.

Rank 0: -5%/-25% decrease,
Rank 1: -3-6%/-3-6%,
Rank 2: ?/?,
Rank 3: -0-1%/-1-3%,
Rank 4: -0-1%/-1%,
Rank 5: -0-1%/-0-1%,
Rank 6: -0-1%/-0-1%,
Rank 7: -0-1%/-0-1%,
Rank 8: -0-1%/-0-1%,
Rank 9: -0-1%/-0-1%,
Rank 10: -0-1%/-0-1%,
Rank 10 (100%): -2%/-2%,

(Information is incomplete at this time)

You may notice that at Rank 10 (100%) an abort/fail results in a 2% loss. No matter which mission I aborted/failed it always resulted in a 2% loss.

The Starting Missions - Targets for Assassination: Atreus, Strong Arms, & Duke's

These missions are slightly different to the usual Assassination missions given by the Corporations as the target will be of one of the main races as opposed to a Pirate. This means two things:

1. The rep loss can be significantly more problematic in the long run with a main race than it is with Pirates. Keep in mind that when Duke's Haven (HQ) gives an Assassination mission the target will always be a main race, the Paranid.

2. In Pirate assassination missions the biggest ship the target will be in is an M6 but for the main races the target can be in anything up to an M2... and killing one of those will take you from whatever race rank you were at to rock bottom!

This means that how these missions are done is very important and the rank/rep loss can be reduced significantly with a little care. What you ideally want is to take out a small target without engaging the escorts. It is also preferable not to be in a sector owned by the same race as your target to avoid police involvement.

First things first, you should read this information from Carlo the Curious explaining how the enemy ships that are spawned are decided for combat missions that the player undertakes which can be viewed at the following thread, The Opponent Balancing System (OBS).

That is kind of complicated so I'll give a quick explanation. Basically what it says is that the enemies that are spawned for combat missions are decided on a points system based on... in order of importance (i.e. how much they affect the mission target):

Your current combat rank,
The mission difficulty,
Your current ship,
The ships you own IS when accepting the mission,

One of the above is irrelevant to this because, as far as I'm aware, all the Corporation missions difficulty are set at Average. So according to the information this means that the target ship and it's escorts are decided by:

Your current combat rank,
The class of your current ship when accepting the mission,
All ships that you own within 15km of the player ship,

This means that it is possible to significantly reduce the size of the target and it's escorts and therefore the amount of race reputation likely to be lost upon completion... and that's before you've even accepted the mission.

To achieve this goal there are varying methods.

1. Accept the mission at a very low combat rank (i.e. as soon after you start a new game as possible and before you start anything like the Terran or FF plots would be best).

2. At higher combat ranks accept the mission in an M5 and make sure that there are no other ships that you own within 15km (get them OOS to be sure).

3. If you are at a high race rep and the target you are given is still a capital ship so destroying it is completely ruining your race rep. Try capping it instead. The rep loss is significantly less and you get a free ship although it may disappear shortly after you take it.

(Thanks to Spychotic and Bill Huntington for information on capping these ships)

Further tips to reduce rep loss relating to enemy escorts:

1. You must kill the target yourself or an AI controlled ship that you own to complete the mission but the escorts are meaningless. Try getting and M7M or M8 to launch missiles at the escorts (making sure that the excess will not destroy your target) and then jump the ship out before the missiles contact...for those that don't know...this counts as NPC kills and you will not lose any race rep or have to worry about the escorts anymore.

2. Most of the escorts will jump away when the target is destroyed and this can save you a lot of rep loss. It's advisable to turn any turrets to 'missiles only' and go straight for the target ship and ignore any escorts.

3. If all else fails then before you do this mission accept as many 'Very Hard' missions as you can get away with for the target race but don't complete them until you have done the assassination. This way you can the complete the queued missions (which wouldn't be offered at such low race rep) to rebuild your reputation after you're done with the killing.

Information for First Mission Assassinations gathered by Spychotic, Bill Huntington, and jimlpearce.
Compiled by jimlpearce.

The Starting Missions - Escorting the Convoy: OTAS & TerraCorp

The Convoy missions have an interesting feature (option) about them that contain both an upside and a downside.

Option I: When the player accepts this mission from either OTAS or TerraCorp and remains IS (In Sector) and follows/protects the convoy, the player will have Pirate Syndicate forces that appear and try to destroy the freighters the player is charged with protecting.

Option II: However, if the player accepts the mission and remains OOS (Out Of Sector) for the entire duration of the mission, the Pirate Syndicate forces will not show up to attack the freighters. Basically you get paid for doing absolutely nothing making these missions among the easiest to successfully complete.

The upside is that by taking the second option you don't have to worry about failing the mission. The downside to taking the second option is that without the Pirate Syndicate appearing there is no opprotunity to steal their ships (either by bailing or boarding).

Out of the three Pirate factions (the Pirates, the Pirate Mercenary's, the Pirate Syndicate) the Syndicate is by far the rarest of the three to make an appearance. AFAIK Syndicate ships only appear three times in the game with two of the appearances pertaining to the First Missions, the third appearance is during the Goner plot. Like the Pirate/Pirate Mercenary ships, whose vessels retain the "Pirate" and "Mercenary" tag when Betty id's the ship if the player aquires them holds true for the Pirate Syndicate as well. So if you're the collector type you have few opprotunities to aquire ships with a "Syndicate" tag.

Breaking the Corporation Missions

Mentioned in the Transportation mission section of Section II, it is possible to break the Corporation missions. By aborting/failing the mission the future representative will not be present at the station the next time the player receives a comm message from the given HQ for future work.

This was originally mention by a player in an old thread who broke NMMC. I can confirm that breaking can happen because I managed to break five of the eight Corporations. So unless you have a save prior to the breaking of a given Corporation, you will be unable to continue and your quest for ranks and ships from that Corporation will be over permanently. There is a brand new script that will reset the Corporation to start over from the beginning, it can be found below Contract Termination.

New information

Concerning the breaking of Corporation missions, it seems that if the Transportation mission is "TP required" and the mission is aborted then the Corporation mission line will break. It also does not matter what the destination station is, be it an HQ or any NPC station, the breaking will still happen. However there is the rare chance that an aborted/failed "TP required" Transportation mission will not break the mission line. Transport missions that have no ship requirement will not break a given Corporation if aborted/failed, but on the rare occassion the breaking can occur when the mission is aborted/failed.

Information was gathered from lengthy testing by jimlpearce and Deadbeat_Spinn_Spinn.

Contract Termination

This is one thing the player should try to avoid at all costs. If this happens there are two very noticable ways to tell that a given Corporation has just fired/dropped you, the player.

1. You will receive a comm message from the Corporation in question.....a very pissed off comm message.

2. The Corporate ranking for the Corporation in question will disappear from the Player Status display.

Should the player have their contracted terminated by a given Corporation due to player error (i.e. firing upon/destroying Corporate ships, ramming the HQ, etc), you will not get a second chance. Meaning you will not be able to do missions for that Corporation ever again, unless you have a save prior to the......unfortunate incident.

One other thing, if you steal ships from a given Corporation while under contract you will be fired. So if you intend to steal Corporate ships do so before starting work for them or after you're done with them (i.e. reached Rank 10).

Reseting Corporations (Script)

The Reset Corporations script is a brand new script that was just recently finished. This script was created by dillpickle and the use of this script will allow players to start over at the beginning again with any given Corporation. Full information about this script and what it does can be found in the link provided below. Using this script will most likely result in the player receiving a "Modified" tag, but there's no vanilla solution that will fix a Corporation that the player has broken or been fired from. Any questions/concerns/issues that may be encountered when using this script must be addressed in the Reset Corporations thread and not the Guide to the Corporations thread.

[MD Script] Reset Corporations by dillpickle.

Multiple Ship Acquisition

As mentioned in the beginning of Section III there is a way to get multiple reward ships from each of the Corporations. When you get the aforementioned message (also located in the beginning of Section III), do not dock at the given HQ in your personal ship. If you continue to accept missions for the given HQ and are successful each time, you will get an additional reward ship for each completed mission as long as you do not personally dock at the HQ in question. It has also been said that if you fail a mission you still get another ship, which I did test and I did indeed get an additional ship rewarded as long as your Rank level doesn't drop (i.e. Rank 4-->Rank 3).

New information

Once you gain a rank (i.e. Rank 4-->Rank 5), you will still have ships awarded. However, assuming you're stilling having ships awarded, once you reach the next reward rank (i.e. Rank 7) you will only get the Rank 7 ship awarded. All Rank 4/7 ships that the player has aquired will no longer be awarded once the player reachs Rank 7/10. All ships you have been already awarded (i.e. Rank 4) will remain frozen at whatever the reward number may be and will be waiting to be claimed by the player once they dock. It must be noted that there is no cap at Rank 10, so the player can have as many Rank 10 reward ships that they want. Now you might be asking "How I am suppost to get that many ships if I have to dock to avoid breaking the mission line?".

Here's how it's done, the term has been coined "The Quick Dock" method which I discovered on accident. As soon as you dock at the HQ (say for a transport mission), immediately undock. The passenger will still get off and you will get a mission completed and no reward ships will appear docked at the given HQ. But sometimes, even with the Quick Dock, the reward ships will appear. There may be some variable when docking at a HQ for a mission that causes the ships to appear, what that variable is....I don't have a clue. A simple way around this is to reload prior to picking up the passenger or before accepting the mission. If the "fare" is at the HQ and has to go elsewhere, accept the mission before docking otherwise, in the time it takes to accept the mission, the reward ships will appear.

This method will not work for Delivery missions.

As of current testing there seems to be no limit on how many reward ships can be docked at a given HQ. The number of ships awarded, during testing, exeeded the number of docking clamps by 3 to 1 (ships vs. clamps, respectively). If the player wishes to have their awarded ships appear at the given Corporate HQ they may do so. But as soon as you get them, send the ships to another station. It appears that if the reward ships, no matter how few or how many (unless you only have 1), remain docked at the given HQ over a period of time, they will start to disappear/vanish and they will not be coming back.

Encyclopedia

The Encyclopedia can be a very handy tool. If you ever encountered something in the universe it will be logged into the Encyclopedia. It can be accessed at any time should the player need to locate something (i.e. buyable ships, weapons, wares, etc.).

The location of the Encyclopedia: Personal Menu (top menu)-->Advanced-->Encyclopedia.

PDF Manual

If your game came without a paper manual, one can be downloaded from the X Universe site. If your game is a STEAM version a manual is located in the files.

Downloadable PDF Manual.

PDF Version

You will need Adobe or an equivalent progam in order to view the PDF, all credit for the PDF version of the guide belongs to Alex Vanderbilt.

Corporate Guide (PDF Version) Download

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