the Bretonian police are a pretty harmless bunch dont worry about them
to get an outcast rep i usaully bump off some gmg makes good money too!

Launch from Manhattan and switch your target list (lower left-hand corner) to loot display (treasure chest icon). There will be three things in this display - two police depots and one DSE depot. Select one of them in the list and issue the "Go To" command. When you get near you'll see something like a plus sign with a pod hanging off each earm. That's a depot.

In multiplayer games (Internet) the pods are usually gone because they get replaced only at server reset, but in singleplayer mode they always get replaced when you dock with a base or jumpgate/hole - you could even loot the same depot twice during the same mission (like when you fly mission 2 in a Rhino).

Destroying 9 pods of Interspace Commerce depots as I suggested in my post will get the Outcasts from maximum-hostile (nine red squares) to non-shooting unfriendly (less than six full squares on the negative side) in under 30 seconds. If the Outcasts are not fully hostile then you need fewer pods. Depots of other factions may have a slightly different effectiveness with regard to the Outcasts.

As I said in the earlier article, smashing one pod of a depot lowers your rep with the owners by about one square. So have a look at your rep sheet before you start smashing, to see how many pods you can take without making the owners more than five squares unfriendly. I.e. leave a margin of roughly one square because many factions will disapprove if you destroy a depot of their friends and allies.

Usually, when I travel past Deshima or Sheffield I have a look at my rep sheet to calculate how much rep improvement I can afford without making the Bounty Hunters more than 50% unfriendly.

EDIT - corrected imprecise use of 'pod' and 'depot'; one depot has four pods.

Edited by - Sherlog on 29-08-2003 18:17:35

Okay. Sounds like a good idea. There´s only one problem. I´m like "the good guy" in games, and usually never does anything that makes the police unhappy. And bretonia is a frequenty visited system so I rather smash some corsairs.

How many corsairs do I have to kill to make the hessians happy? I have killed at least ten ships now, and the rep hasn´t improved a bit.

Assuming the Red Hessians are fully hostile (9 red squares) you need to kill 73 Corsairs or 49 Bounty Hunters or smash 12 Bounty Hunter depot pods.

In other words, a quick drive-by at Deshima or Sheffield will get you where you want to be much quicker. Of course, you can mix and match to keep the Bounty Hunters from becoming hostile (pain in the neck since they are everywhere in numbers).

The calculation goes like this: the Red Hessians have -0.35 empathy with Corsairs, and destroying a Corsair ship will lower your Corsair rep by 0.0119 which the Red Hessians honour with a rep improvement of -0.35 * -0.0119 = 0.004165. Fully hostile means -0.90 rep and the 'stop shooting' threshold is -0.60, so the required number of Corsairs is ceil(0.30 / 0.004165) = 73.

The Outcasts are easier to get around because they hate some factions that have depots. The Red Hessians hate the Bounty Hunters but not very strongly: only -0.25, compared to -0.40 for Outcasts vs. Liberty Police or -0.35 for Outcasts vs. Interspace Commerce.

Okay, thanks. Time to start counting corsair ships, I guess

Thx everyone for your help!