1) Find a station spoke of the faction you want to blow up (so as to raise another faction's reputation), preferably where all home areas are a couple levels below you:


(If you can't find one at a good level, go a station previous, or save/quit and reload, which will re-generate the map)

2) Fly into each of the home base areas

3) Kill every combat vessel in the home area (data transports are worth close to nothing), and the generator beam emitters

4) Once you've hit the three or four home areas in the station spoke, go blow up. Kill yourself with the PlasmaGun and/or missile splash damage. Say goodbye to 1% of your Uranium, as if it mattered.

5) Respawning will repopulate the spoke, so fly back and do it again.

6) Cry, probably.

So you wanna change factions.


Do yourself two favors before you begin:

1) Have a plan, and start early- not like level 6 early, but first two stations. Pulling a faction's reputation from, say, the -8000s could take a few HOURS. We'll go into how to mitigate this later.

Also, you don't need to do a full switch from cold colors to warm. Wanna like Virus and continue to hate on Malware? Easy.

2) Update your visibility settings. Hostiles are red, friendlies are green. Virus is red-themed, Malware is orange. If you're trying to, say, make friends with Virus, it's helpful to know at a glance which sort of hostile you're looking at.

Pop open the options:


And check this box for Yellow Hostiles:


Now anything mean is helpfully yellow! But Nax, I still can't tell a yellow Virus from a yellow Antivirus!

Besides checking in your helpful HUD when targeting something:

(targeting an antivirus)

You can identify factions by exhaust trails. Using again our Virus/Antivirus example, we see this yeller feller has a blue trail- Antivirus!:


This one's red. Virus. Easy.


This is less of an issue when you're deep in the territory of a faction's enemy, but it's worth bearing in mind.

So OS and Antivirus (blue and green) are allied to each other, at least tenuously, as are Virus and Malware (red and orange). It makes an alliance happy when the other alliance's ships are blown up. Here's an example:


I fragged a Malware ship in a Malware hallway. OS and Antivirus liked that. Each gained 1/3rd the reputation points lost from the exploded ship's faction (which has a multiplier since it's in home territory). You'll note that Virus didn't care at all, and generally won't, unless you're fragging Malware in Virus territory. The faction allied to the ship you blew up in that faction's territory will take a small hit. To demonstrate:

I turned an Antivirus ship into kibble in an OS hallway:


NOW the allied faction cares, but only barely. OS took a -4 reputation hit for this one. Nothing to write home about.

Generally, this makes it pretty easy to straddle alliances, so long as you're picking on one group in particular from each.

So, simply put:

Dead blue - happy red/orange.
Dead orange - happy blue/green.
Dead blue in green land - happy red/orange, unhappy green.
Dead red in orange - happy blue/green, unhappy red.

WHERE you blow up ships has a significant effect on how much reputation moves. We can simplify this to a couple rules:

Blowing up a ship in their home color hallways applies a 3x multiplier to their reputation loss.

Blowing up a ship in their home color base area applies a 10x(!!) multiplier to their reputation loss.

Blowing up a ship in the opposing alliance's hallways applies a 3x bonus to the faction it was located in. Call this your defender bonus.

So where does that put you, oh turncoat? Defending the hallway of the faction you want to boost reputation for sounds good in principle, but if they currently don't like you, then you'll have two factions shooting at you, and steeper reputation losses if you blow up the wrong ship. Plus, you have to count on your targets actually going there, and that's slow.

Our next best option is to plunge into the heart of enemy territory. In this example, we want to join Virus or Malware, so we're going into the heart of Antivirus territory:


And we're going to take a lap around this ring.

As before, where you blow up ships in enemy territory has more of an effect. So if you're in a hallway:


Your gains (and losses!) aren't so good:


This does help if you're trying to antagonize a faction without dumpstering their reputation entirely, so for your early game, you're going to want to stick to hallways. The mouth of the loop is a good place to be, since you'll have enemy ships filtering in from three directions.

If you want to really start making the donuts, you need to go into the home base areas below the hallways:


where we see much bigger hits to reputation:


and greater rewards reaped for the opposing alliance:


Now that's more like it! This does bring with it a dreadful truth- it takes a long, long time to fix a relationship with a faction. At twenty reputation a pop, that -8000 reputation I was flirting with for Virus will take, optimistically, 400 KILLS. Subsequently, Antivirus now has -21,000 reputation. I will never recover from this.

Oh, final note here:


You can frag these laser beams at the base so they stop healing/powering every nearby ship, and you'll get another nifty 20 points for/against the corresponding factions:


Just ignore that the text for 'increased' and 'decreased' are reversed specifically for these beam emitters- the points are still allocated correctly, so this Antivirus beam emitter chunked -20 points from Antivirus and gave +20 to Virus and Malware.

No. Absolutely not.

You can spend a minute in a Data Transport flying across the station for 12.9 reputation points, or you can fly into a home area and kill 12 ships in the same span of time for 120 reputation points.

Don't bother.

So, why bother?


Honestly, I don't know. It's a thing you can do, so it felt pertinent to do it. I'm not sure yet if different factions have different hulls, or wares. But you can do it!

It's probably not worth the time if you've dug yourself deep already, but if you're starting a savefile and know what you're getting into, you can save yourself a lot of time and blown up ships.

Also, the carbon nanotubes add up.

Happy hunting.