[1.3.3200] Gifting resources for reputation seems off

[glass zebra]

Gifting resources to factions for relationship seems to be bit misleading and maybe unintended.
The "negotiation ability" stat indicates that it is used for giving gifts, but in the gift window you see value that comes from the formula for "trade price improvement" stat. I think in the past the negotiation ability was used for the silver gifts via the trade beckon, but does not seem to be in use for the new system.

Apart from that, drop pods seem to use an entirely different formula. I tested gifting 40 wake-up to a faction base (on losing is fun difficulty) which would have given me 16 reputation with my social 20 skill leader on their base. The value shown in the menu seems to be 24 compared to wake-ups 35 base, which is already close to 70% of the base value. Gifting the same with drop pods however, grant 37, which is even above 100% of the base value (if the numbers shown are correct).

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1841408985877529443/BFE0B941883EA7778434B7AA43B78A811B263415/
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1841408985877529669/48F6FB51B62B4D2E5F4B57B14201BE2630BE5CC3/

Drop pods furthermore are able to gift factions things you cannot otherwise gift and that they would normally not accept as gifts including: industrial weapons for the empire, your own (non-imprisoned) colonists, silver, fresh corpses and I think even tainted clothes. It does not seem like drop pods give a flat value as a bonus because of the (very little) resources they need as one might expect from this weirdness, but instead a big multiplier.

This does not seem as intended as it makes gaining reputation trivial and gifting stuff with a caravan to a faction extremely bad in comparison. With this you can easily do stuff like betraying the royal title bestower for the 2 neuroformers and fix the relationship with very little value needed. Given how little I see stuff like this mentioned in the forums, it might just have been an oversight.
Is this working as intended?

Both DLCs, no mods used.

[Pheanox]

I think you make some good points here.  I have brought up in the past the negotiation ability not working properly, I think they decided it was a clarity thing but apparently it didn't make it into Ideology when I was testing it.

While I would say its 'intended' right now for you to be able to gift colonies anything, it makes sense that they should have restrictions based on their precepts.  As for the betraying the bestower, that is also an exploit I've written a very large write up on for the devs.  I'll remind them of these things and point out a revision of the gifting system may be appropriate, thanks for the report.

[JenKin]

Description:
Due to a math error in calculating market value in TradeUtiltiy.GetPricePlayerSell, players can get multiple times goodwill with drop pod gifting than caravan gifting.

More information:
The bug has been reported by Owlchemist 4 months ago in the official discord server at https://discord.com/channels/684960023020961812/684960023020961815/900900793752899664

Simply post it here to make sure it's not left out

Owlchemist — 2021/10/22
It's a math error at TradeUtiltiy.GetPricePlayerSell

Specifically this line:
num *= 1f + priceGain_PlayerNegotiator + priceGain_DrugBonus + priceGain_FactionBase + priceGain_AnimalProduceBonus;

You're pretty much guaranteed to always get a 4x bonus there because 3 of those are always just 1 (hard coded parameters being passed), and it's just adding 'em up.

...at least that explains most of the unusual gift value. It still inflates farther down the line (in the post processing curve I think) about twice as much vs in-person gifting to a wandering caravan.
Cynapse — 2021/10/22
That's a good catch, thanks
Seems like some of those should be multiplied together instead of added

[glass zebra]

I made a ticket about this without the quoted math (post was not just about the pods). Might be a good idea to merge these:

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=56050.msg493947#msg493947

[Pheanox]

Thanks for the additional information though JenKin, I think I'm going to upgrade this to a full bug report rather than where it was sitting before now.  Appreciate you taking the time to point out the issue.