*UPDATE: One possible solution found

At some point during the story of Privateer I was stuck being chased by a pack of Demons [faster than Centurion] and couldn't jump before they destroyed my ship, so I had to kill a few Bounty Hunters to get on.

Ever since, they've been hostile though - and I can't seem to get them back to neutral or friendly, like they used to be. The guides say to stay friendly with them, "don't align yourself with pirates" and "don't kill Hunters". Now, the story made me kill Hunters, and made me align with Pirates at some point, too.

I'm able to use Coms to get them to be neutral after 3 to 6 tries, for each Hunter, but that doesn't seem to better my reputation with them overall. I've been killing Retros and Pirates and Kilrathi, but unlike the Militia and Confed now bringing flowers, the Hunters didn't budge.

Is there a way to directly better my rep with the Hunters, or reset my rep with them? Heck, I'd even go for completely resetting my rep with EVERYONE back to default just to fix this, but I can't find anything in the save file.
Help, please?

Oh dear, that's a thing that caused me problems too when playing, I wonder if it was intentional on the part of the developers as a sort of "enemy leveling".

Well, how do I get them off my back now? I used to be one of them, then the story made me a pirate on the run, now they are STILL out to get me while everyone else is back to normal. Are they hostile forever once the player has engaged in combat with them and / or been friendly with pirates even if that's been just once for story purposes?

Sincerely I don't know; I've grinded pirates and kilrathi for ages before giving up.
Now I'm replayign the game and I'm trying to avoid missions that require to destroy mercenaries or that have hostile mercs in them and see if I can avoid killing them in story mode.

Well, I've had another mission just now, with 3 or 4 more hunters in Demons. In RF, killing the Menesh (?) guy, who says he put a bounty on your head before you can kill him. That's why the Demons in that mission are everywhere, and even with maxed out speed upgrades you can't outrun them. You can jump away usually, but if you stay in-system to speak with Menesh, jumping away is not an option. They annoyed me all the slow way to the jump point where you encounter him, and continued to shoot me throughout until I was so annoyed with them, I just killed them. It's a lost cause, anyways.

My only hope is to cheat the game in some way. Editing the save file, if I could just figure out how and where this is stored. I even tried using a memory altering program to reset my kill counter with the hunters. Enter current number, scan memory. Change number ingame, enter again, scan for matches. Repeat. It found it, and successfully changed the counter - but that didn't change the reputation, either.

I'm really getting desperate here. I don't WANT to fight my way through each and every system or make a run for it like I'm a pirate. If the Hunters are meant to become hostile for good, no going back, then there's just WAY too many of them. It ruins the gameplay if you're not playing as pirate, really.

Which ship are you using?
The Orion has basically unlimited afterburner when fully upgraded.

So does my Centurion:

Neutron, Tachyon, Tachyon, Neutron
Missile FF, Missile FF

Meson, Meson
Tractor

Shield Lvl3 + RF Regen
Engine Lvl4 + Afterburner + RF Speed + RF Thrust

This exact combination results in either two-salvo Talon kills or continuous fire from alternating guns, perfect when trying to hit something. Also, afterburner's infinite, and allows for one full salvo each 4s, which is good with these weapons. With a pause of ~1 sec, Energy is fully recharged for another 2 salvos while afterburning.

This works only with Shield Lvl3 rather than 4, though. But that would make it much harder to actually A) get places abd B) destroy ships as quickly. Quick offense is best defense!

Now for the more interesting news: I fixed my problem.
I think. See attachments, too.

There's an editor around from back in the day, PREDIT.EXE. I had that one, but it doesn't say what does what in the save files (see confusing mess in z). So, here's a guide on how to entirely reset player reputation to default:

1) PROBLEM
2) If RF save, rename its ending to .SAV
3) PREDIT.EXE Savefile.SAV
4) n
5) 12
6) 2
7) 19 (PLAYSCOR is your reputation, your "score" with others)
8) done (type it exactly like that, no more no less.)
9) y
10) 5
11) 14
12) y
13) 15
14) If RF save, rename its ending back to .PRS
15) PROFIT

Case closed!
That is, until someone tells us what easy staps to take to make Hunters like you.

Sorry for "necroing" this, but since this development is at one point of Privateers plot +/- unavoidable, I think I can still contribute a little to this...

After one point, bounty hunters simply become hostile, no matter what.

Why try to appease them?
Exploit it!
Kill them, whenever you can and reap the cash from it - you can finally take all those bounty hunter killing missions without hesitation.
Also, Kilrathi will take much less effort to appease, if you do this... and this will come very handy from time to time.

And in Righteous Fire you will be given the opportunity to amend the situation via the game itself...


Side note - this is of course side effect of Origins's cutting semi-random missions given by fixers from the game before its release (some leftovers can still be found in the game code) and as a result, the game balance is off and it is practically impossible to overturn hostile relations with various factions.

Thanks for this. I just ran into this issue, and it seriously annoyed me. The hunters were all quite friendly towards me...until I accepted a few plot-related missions to kill them, and then after each kill I scooped up the ejected bounty hunters and sold them on the slave market. I'm not sure why they turned hostile towards me. But it's quite annoying being attacked by bounty hunters nonstop.