The Ploy

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The Ploy is a guide to simultaneously increasing Amarr Empire, Caldari State, Gallente Federation and Minmatar Republic Faction Standing to 5.0 as quickly as possible.

Advanteges	Drawbacks
Access to all seven Epic Arcs	Hard to achieve 7.0 Faction Standing with any Empire
Access to all Empire Level 4 Mission Agents	Derived Standing from Storyline Missions may drop you below 5.0
Reduced Broker Fee in all major Trade Hubs

Preparations

Skills:

•  Social V (1x) to gain more Standing from each Mission. You can manage with Social IV, but The Ploy assumes you've trained Social V.
•  Connections IV (3x) to decrease the amount of Unmodified Standing you need to achieve 5.0 Effective Standing with each Faction.

The Ploy can be completed by following one of four different Paths. Each Path requires a different amount of Standing:

Required Standing	Connections IV
	Gallente Path	Caldari Path	Minmatar Path	Amarr Path
Gallente	3.74	1.28	3.75	0.08
Caldari	1.55	3.92	0.35	3.92
Minmatar	3.60	0.15	3.60	1.35
Amarr	1.09	4.10	2.21	4.11

Early in your capsuleer adventures:

• Avoid accepting Missions against an Empire; the Gallente will want you to fight the Caldari: decline it
• Complete the Career Agent Missions no more then once as you'll need the other two sets later
• Pick your favorite Empire and increase their Standing first
• Run Missions for as few Corporations in each Empire as possible

Tips for getting the sum of 20.0 Empire Standing:

• Do Level 4 Security Missions; blitz them with other pilots to speed up their completion
• Every 16th completed Mission you will be sent a Storyline Mission
• Sisters of EVE Epic Arc The Blood Stained Stars increases your Standing by 7% towards an Empire of your choice

• Standings set up in specific way, to ensure that target (5.0 with all Empires) is reachable
• At least 2 Career agents from each faction are available to run - if that's not possible, other means can be used, but with significant drawbacks
• Capability to run empire Epic Arcs - in terms of ship/skills
• Main faction chosen - faction for which you have the best standings (or the worst standings for it's enemy)
• Copy of Google spreadsheet

How it works

Derived Empire Standing modifiers

Standing	Amarr	Caldari	Gallente	Minmatar
Amarr	1.0	0.7	-0.2	-0.5
Caldari	0.5	1.0	-0.5	-2.0
Gallente	-0.2	-0.5	1.0	8.0
Minmatar	-0.5	-0.2	0.8	1.0

Amarr fight Minmatar and Caldari fight Gallente.

Storyline Missions will start decreasing your total sum of Empire Standings. This is because negative Derived Standing will become greater then positive Effective Standing gain.

Standings gain mechanics

When standings go up or down they do so as a percentage; this is always a percentage decay towards the extreme end of the scale. For example, if someone has 1.0 standing with an NPC corporation and completes a mission that changes standing by +5%, then the current standing is increased by 5% of the difference from 1 to 10; that's a change of +0.45 with an end result of 1.45. However, if someone else with a 4.0 standing completes the same mission under the same circumstances and also gets a 5% increase, then that's 5% of the difference from 4 to 10; that's a change of +0.30 with an end result of 4.30.

If something causes a standing decrease, then it's a percentage decay towards −10. For example, if someone with 1.0 standing suffers a −5% change, then that's 5% of the difference from 1 to −10; that's a change of −0.55 with an end result of 0.45. If someone with 4.0 standing suffers that same −5% change, then it's 5% of the difference from 4 to −10; that's a change of −0.7 with an end result of 3.3.

The formula for standing increase is

[math] \text{ New standing} = \text{Old standing} + ( 10 - \text{Old standing} ) \times \text{Standing increase} [/math]

The formula for standing decrease is almost same, just towards -10

[math] \text{ New standing} = \text{Old standing} + ( -10 - \text{Old standing} ) \times \text{Standing decrease} [/math]

where Standing decrease is the decimal form of standing change. For example 0.4% would be 0.004.

The consequence of this math is that the higher your standings are, the less effective standings increases become and the more dramatic penalties become. For example a standing loss of 1% turns 9.0 standing into 8.81 but increase of 1% would bring 9.0 standing to 9.01.

Choosing the path

"The Ploy" is detailed plan how to get to 5.0 standings. The process is very similiar, but differs depending on the path you choose. In order to choose one:

• Your path will most likely be the Empire path for which you have the most standings
• If you have two Empires with similiar high standings - choose path based on the faction with lowest standings
• In all other cases consult the detailed standings requirements on specific wiki pages for each path - the answer is not obvious which path will be the easiest

Alternatively, "Selector" sheet in Google spreadsheet allows you to put your current standings and check for which path the requirement are met.