I don't know if I'm old-fashioned but I really pay attention to my integrity levels and very seldom go below Noble
. I somehow value it greatly to see that I haven't been as treacherous to others as they have been to me, even though it's just AI...Kind of a sense of moral superiority. Maybe that's because I take this game too seriously
...
At first thought, I remember Faithful as the second best and Scrupulous as the worst (uhm, a few times in the distant past when I was new to the game, I might have dropped a PB or two over some other faction I was at peace with, that's how I know
)
But if you are concerned about your reputation, there are some ways that you can get your opponents into declaring vendetta without hurting your reputation.
My experience is that, most of the time when you "demand withrawal" using the contact menu, people get pissed off enough to declare war insantly. But sometimes, maybe because you are too powerful, they chicken out and say "as you are aware, I have no troops in your territory" or something like this and it doesnt work. You can try to up the ante by demanding cash, tech or bases, and this may do the trick...But then again, if they still desist, you can attempt to bypass this "mature" behaviour by sending some probes to their nearest base and GET CAUGHT doing something (needless to say, choosing a difficult mission raises your chances of getting caught)...Although probe teams with high morale is what you normally crave for, in the beginning of the game probes usually have low morale and are more likely to get caught, thus in a perverse way "achieving" your aim of having war declared to you (at the price of a probe team).
All of this is based on my observation (at transcend level, but it should be fairly relevant to thinker) that, when you get caught in a probe activity, your reputation doesnt get hurt (be careful though, if you blamed another faction with whom you are at peace, they declare vendetta too)...But then again, in very extreme cases, if your target is really nigh-on-pathetic as compared to you, they can still swallow everything and not declare vendetta, it's not a guaranteed recipe...
Being in the "aversion SE" choice of the faction in question also increases the likelihood of a "successful induction of a decleration of vendetta".
Most of the time you won't lose more than a few turns with trying this. If this process is too slow for any temptation to just roll over everybody, then I don't know any other way to have the best of both worlds
In a recent transcend game, I was playing as Aki and I had Zak and Roze as pets and they only had one base each. After I decided that they lost their utility for me, I probe-purchased their final bases without even renouncing our Pact and I was still Noble after this rather less-than-truly-straightforward act
.
