Caution: Aggressive Negotiation will completely and Instantly ruin your reputation

[Origim]

Hello,

I am not sure if it is working as intended or not so I am posting this here instead of the bug section.

I decided to do an 8.5% aggressive negotiation tactic. I didn't really need it (at all), but I wanted to play with the new features.

What I thought it did: Takes 40 reputation or your commitment equivalent every time you launch your ship

What I did not realize it does: Every single R&D purchase counts as a discount event.

I had just come back from a long Duna mission and had 3,300 science to spend so I went to town purchasing all my unlocks (Hard mode). When I went to launch my next ship, I saw that my bar went from NEARLY FULL BLUE to NEARLY FULL RED. Instantly, just like that. Luckily, I had a quick save just before my Duna ship came back (I modified Hard mode to allow quick loads for game crash events and unforeseen events such as these).

By repeating, I was able to verify it is indeed the R&D purchases that completely destroyed my reputation. What is worse, is that the reputation bar DOES NOT UPDATE while you are in the science building, so you cannot see that you are bleeding rep like crazy while buying your unlocks.

In my opinion this needs to be changed. With how the science unlock mechanic works, this strategy is completely useless unless the rep loss is removed from R&D purchases.

[RocketPilot573]

I didn't even realize at first that it was every time I spent money!! RIP .25 hard-mode career attempt 1.

[Cmdr. Arn1e]

As this is a new feature with .25, and there have already been multiple threads about the Outsourced R&D being too OP (It will unlock the entire tree with 1 Mun visit, I've heard!) I won't be surprised if this is one of the things that will get tweaked starting with 0.90 and beyond...

Cheers for the heads-up though, I haven't yet played with this strategy much, and it's nice to know when something is going to have unforeseen consequences!

[Masetto]

You definitely need to couple it with the Marketing strategy (the one that trades funds for rep).

Also -- in my opinion it's an "endgame" strat. It's a strategy to take when you're done with your research, and funds are basically all you care about.

I use it at max strength in my career, because I've done all the research and have all the parts -- so I'm only getting the deduction once per launch. The reputation costs are more than compensated for with the Marketing strategy (which I put at something like 10% strength), and I've been holding at max reputation without any problems -- and my launch costs are cut by a dramatic 40%! (Well, I think it's 34% actually, because I pay an extra 6% on the recovery strategy)

Once your research is done, it's really the strongest strategy in the game, and the biggest difference-maker in funds.

Edited October 26, 2014 by Masetto

[AmpsterMan]

Well that's what happens when you have negotiations with a Kerbsaber *giggles uncontrollably*

Thanks for posting these findings though. My fears were that this was the case but I never tried it. Seems like it needs to be tweaked.

[Slam_Jones]

As this is a new feature with .25, and there have already been multiple threads about the Outsourced R&D being too OP (It will unlock the entire tree with 1 Mun visit, I've heard!) -snip-

Absolutely. My first time playing through campaign, it took me a week or two to fill the tech tree. Just started a Hard Mode game (well technically Moderate mode) game yesterday, and I've already got most of the techs unlocked (thanks to Outsourced R&D and the Unpaid Intern thing).

OP? Totally.

Awesome? Absolutely!

[SkyRender]

Yeah, having linear deductions and other such malarkey for a log-scale component like Reputation just plain does not work. It also renders any Reputation-to-X option completely and utterly valueless, since you'll have to basically spend all of your reputation to sacrifice all future reputation... which you will then be unable to recover because all reputation will be converted into something else. For science and funds, that's no big deal, but for reputation, the only way to get high-reputation-rewarding contracts... is to have high reputation. You get this "delightful" Catch-22 scenario as a result.

[Kaos]

I think this behaviour is intended and still usefull. You can turn it on, launch a couple quite expensive rockets, and turn it off again. It will cost a lot of reputation, but save overproportional much money, given the rockets are expensive enough.

I have never done that, though.

[Geschosskopf]

I think this behaviour is intended and still usefull. You can turn it on, launch a couple quite expensive rockets, and turn it off again. It will cost a lot of reputation, but save overproportional much money, given the rockets are expensive enough.

I have never done that, though.

I believe there are limits to the number of times in any given game that you can change strategies so I'd be careful changing strategies for short-term things like this. Strategies are for helping you achieve long-term goals and should only be changed once you've met those goals.

For instance, a big income is always vital but you only need science while you still have parts to unlock. Rep just affects the rewards of contracts; otherwise is there to convert to science and/or cash. So early in the game, you might want to convert rep into money and/or science. But once you've got the tree unlocked, you should change to convert science into cash and/or rep. At each stage, whether you do 1 or the other conversions or both, and your commitment levels, will depend on your playstyle, difficulty settings, etc.

Personally, I find early on that converting 50% of my rep, in the form of 30-40% to science and 10-20% to cash keeps me comfortably in the black and noticeably speeds research, while still letting my rep grow enough to make contracts worth doing. Once the tree's unlocked, I switch to strategies that convert about 80% of my science to cash and rep (usually 30-50 ratio) until such times as my rep is maxed out, then I leave rep alone and convert 80% of science to cash. I keep a 20% science nestegg just in case I get a new mod that has higher tech trees.

[prophet_01]

I used it a lot once I unlocked the parts I wanted to do my first couple of landings on minmus. I got a large amount of science unlocked, unlocked some more parts to go for an apollo like mission to the mun and continued.

if you use that strategy for performing costly programs like grinding a certain part of the solar system. Just do the planing and construction stuff before you start and you are fine.

It's also nice if you do highly expensive testflights that have a high chance of failure. Develop and testfly a piggyback shuttle in hard mode career and you are as good as bancrupt I crashed 4 of them before it worked as intended (FAR and DRE can be mean)

[Kaos]

I believe there are limits to the number of times in any given game that you can change strategies so I'd be careful changing strategies for short-term things like this. Strategies are for helping you achieve long-term goals and should only be changed once you've met those goals.

From what do you conclude that strategies may only be changed a finite number of times? I found no information about strategy changing number in the safe-files, also I could not manage to change the strategy so often, that I could not change it anymore. Then, KSP is not known for surprising the player with hidden limits, I cannot imagine this would be other with strategies.

For the other argument: Yes, most of the strategies are for long-term goals. Nevertheless using some strategies only for some time does also make sense. And like the others, I fail to see the long-term benefit of this strategy.

[Geschosskopf]

From what do you conclude that strategies may only be changed a finite number of times?

I believe this was mentioned in some dev notes at some point.

[Wiseman]

I also used it as a way to dramatically reduce the cost of R&D. I used the PR strategy to max out my reputation (10% from funds to rep, not too difficult), saved up some cash, grabbed a high-paying mission, and then splurged on all the R&D I could. My rep is at -1000 or whatever, but I have a mission that'll give me 3000-4000, so it's not a big deal (assuming I can actually complete it). I play with a ton of mods, so the funds cost for unlocking the tree is way higher than the science cost, so using this swingy strategy in the midgame worked out. Once I got most of the tree unlocked, I canceled Aggressive Negotiations; by then money was no longer an issue.