Custom faction issue

[Legacy_Proleric]

               I have a global custom guard faction.


Areas have guards (fighters) and commoners (faction and class = commoner).


Guard is friendly to commoner, commoner is neutral to guard.


Every time the PC attacks a guard, even in self-defence, commoners nearby go hostile to PC and friendly to guard (as measured by GetReputation). Commoners elsewhere aren't affected unless they see combat with guards locally.


Parent faction is not the issue. It happens before shout handling, so I don't think it's a script issue, either.


Strangely, other custom guard factions don't seem to have this issue.


So far, forum searches have drawn a blank (though someone reported a similar issue with a faction that was neutral to itself, which I can't reproduce).


I know there are workarounds, but I'd prefer to get to the root cause.


Any thoughts?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_WhiZard]

               

Strangely, other custom guard factions don't seem to have this issue.

 

Could you describe the ones that work and the ones that do not?

 

 

Parent faction is not the issue.

 

It may well be the issue, even if the global settings are adjusted.  Is the commoner faction also custom?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Proleric]

               

Correction : the other custom guard factions don't work either, if I change the guards in the test area to those factions.

 

When I say parent faction is not the issue, I mean that changing it on the guard faction doesn't change the behaviour.

 

The Commoner faction is the standard one.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Proleric]

               

I find I can prevent the commoners from going hostile by setting WITFRIB to zero in repadjust.2da.

 

This must be a bug. According to the documentation, WITFRIB is only supposed to apply to friendly witnesses, but the commoners start out as neutral. Changing WITNEUA (the response of neutral witnesses) has no effect, so perhaps that feature was never implemented.

 

Unfortunately, this fix leads to other problems, such as guards attacking but remaining neutral to the PC, and commoner conversation events seemingly broken.

 

So, reluctantly, I'll resort to the workaround of plot-flagging all commoners. Thank goodness for moneo!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

i suspect that the parent faction is indeed the problem. its the root of many custom faction problems. you should never apply a standard faction to any creature. Those should simply be root factions from which you make custom factions.

 

This has been discussed before. I don't have the time to google fu all this to the surface. But I have been down this road as have countless others over the past decade.

 

I suggest never ever under any circumstances using the standard factions due to the "creep" issue. I also recommend creating your own standard factions if you are going to get crazy with factions (make 100's of them) so that you have more root branches to build off of.

 

There are many other hacks as you have discovered. but i think being very careful with faction design is a better choice.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_CaveGnome]

               what Henesua said. Been there, experienced that. Make your own independent (no parent) custom guard faction copying the standard guard params and don't forget to untick the "global" parameter if you don' t want your reputation going to hostile against all guards when the PC just attaqued an isolated guard if what you want is individual guard behavior.