In your player status window, click on the name of a faction, and a short description of them will come up. You can then see who their allies and enemies are.

Kill a faction's enemies to increase your standing with them, or kill their allies to lower your standing with em.

Within most of the factional ally/enemy relationships is a fundamental theme of the law vs. the outlaws. No surprise there; but it can have effects that are surprising if you don't pay attention. Killing any outlaw can lower your standing with other outlaw factions, even though the outlaw you are killing is not a direct ally or enemy of those other outlaws, because you are likely raising your standing with law, military, and bounty hunter groups, which ARE direct enemies of most outlaw factions.

As an example, I managed to lower my faction standing with the Corsairs from max friendly to neutral by killing Hogosha... which I didn't understand at first.

Yes, good point, the allies enemies list is not an end-all be-all guide. There are some subtle changes you don't expect. Trust me, I'm pretty good at rep work. I have 18 friendly factions and everyone else is neutral except the xenos who are hostile...it took a while but it's possible.. I now plan on landing on EVERY base in the game. all 52 SP systems...or more if I've missed a any. BTW a good strategy is to get in good standing with one military. Then bribe an outlaw group that only that specific military doesn't like. it will raise your standing with many outlaw groups while only dropping your standing with that one military which should still be neutral. Suggestion: kill hessians till the corsairs and rheinland like you. Then bribe the bundschuh to make the hessians neutral. Finally nail xenos forever and you'll have a reasonable rep...to get it perfect takes more work, but this is a good start

Good idea Wing, I'll give that a whirl. Does killing Hessians have any other factions hits?

Thanks for the wisdon Wing,

I was at Bundschuh Brushchal trying to get tfriendly with them, so that I could get the Sunslayer Torpedo. They didn't have anybody I could bribe even after visiting the bar several times. I got bored and decided to take up the bartender's offer to get friendly with the Hessians. Boy, was that a HUGE mistake, and it cost me 150k. I now was hated by the Corsairs, when I was neutral earlier on. So forget about Brigandines and Salamancas.

Tried to fix that by killing bounty hunters, whom I was friendly with. Now most of them police hate me, and I can't land on lots of systems.

The only good thing that came out of it was that the Hessian's missions paid out like 100k+. Yup, they pay you to kill Corsairs.... so it ain't so safe to go up to Omicron Gamma to nuke the nomads, coz you'd have the Corsairs trying to nuke you too.

I guess I'll just go back to killing Hessians. Lot's of them.
Lesson to learn. Just kill off the Hessians, after you buy the Sabre from Vogtland of course. You don't need anything else from them.

Bram: More "undocumented" faction effects of killing Mollys:

-*increases* your rep with Xenos (slight effect)
-*decreases* your rep with Independent Miners Guild (medium effect)

There are plenty more and unfortunately, the system seems somewhat complicated (i.e. non-linear - that is, killing X number of Mollys won't effect your standing with a given faction by the same amount when repeated - that is, if you lose a "bubble" the first time, you won't necessarily lose the same amount the second time (even if you don't hit the limit with *any* faction)).

If anyone has a good idea as to how the faction standings are put together, I'd be very interested. The underlying equations is what I'm gunning for, but any fundamental ideas would be a big help.

-fyo

The Strategy Guide has a great table of all the factions and what it takes to make them happy/piss them off. Hasn't someone taken that info and posted it somewhere on this board?