Reasons Feds (Don't) Attack

I've hit a rather odd problem in my Anathema testing. I can't get the Feds to try to kill me. I've checked to make sure I don't have any ranks that would keep them from going hostile, I set a few dummy missions to put me in the negative thousands with gov't 128 so I'm showing up as Wanted Criminal in Fed systems, but they still won't gun for me. I've ruled out a class/allies/enemies problem, because they'll attack other Exile (ID 199) ships, and on top of everything I'm flying a Cutlass which uses ID 199 for both combat and AI purposes.

Also, I can get everybody else to attack me – pirate, Auroran, Polaris, etc. And on top of not attacking, Feds give friendly hail responses so I know it's not something like Max Odds which can keep someone from being attacked even if the government would otherwise be hostile. I've also controlled for "attack player in non-allied systems," and, like I said, for class/allies/enemies. There must be some flag or something that I'm forgetting about. Anyone have an idea?

This post has been edited by Archon : 29 January 2012 - 01:32 PM

Is never attack player checked in the gov't or dude resource?

@evweb, on 29 January 2012 - 06:29 PM, said in Reasons Feds (Don't) Attack:

Is never attack player checked in the gov't or dude resource?

Nope, and I can still hit them just fine with non-beam weapons, so I know there's not a resource conflict somewhere that's causing it to be checked by accident.

I seem to recall having this happen to me. I think it's because there's a range of wanted status within which the feds will attack you. eg. Between criminal and fugitive. It would make sense from a flavour perspective as well. No one ship by themselves is going to attack the most wanted person in all of fed space. I don't know really. That's my recollection.

Do you have Knight of the Red Branch?

Finally got a little free time to spend with the game, and while I didn't have Knight of the Red Branch active, I did still have, along with a few other ranks I'd been meaning to deactivate, United Shipping Courier. I'm going to guess that was the problem. I hadn't thought of that because I didn't know that the "don't attack" would keep allies from attacking you too, but I guess that makes sense. Thanks for the help everyone, and thanks Josh for setting me on the right course. It wasn't keeping me from completing the missions obviously, but man did it make balance and difficulty testing difficult.

Actually, the United Shipping Courier rank shouldn't keep Feds from attacking you. I've had that rank every time I've gone through the Auroran string and the Feds still target me on sight. I don't know what was causing the problem, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't it.