Most agents will accept either faction, corp, or personal standings to fulfil their requirement. That means, even if you have no corp standing with Caldari Navy, if you have faction standing with the Caldari State then you will be able to access agents using that faction standing. Likewise if you have no faction standing with Gallente Federation but high corp standings with CreoDron, you will be able to use Creodron agents based on your corp standing. The exception to this is R&D agents: if you attempt to use your faction standing to access an R&D agent, you must also have the appropriate corp standing up to the agent's requirement -2. If a Kaalakiota agent requires 5 standing and you have 6 standing with Caldari State and 2.5 standing with Kaalakiota, you will not be able to use that agent.

In the vast majority of cases, when you gain faction standing you will also automatically lose standings with factions that dislike them and gain standings with factions that like them. These standing changes are called “derived standings”; they depend on the relationship between the two factions and are usually smaller than the original standing increase.

• Shooting that faction's ships during a mission or complex: Significant standing drop based on the value of the ships destroyed.
• Completing a storyline mission: Small to moderate standing increase depending on the level of the mission.
• Failing a storyline mission: Standing decrease. Unsure whether this still translates into derived positive standings for opposing factions. It used to.
• Being promoted in Factional Warfare: Increase.
• Doing Tutorial missions for that faction: Small increase. This falls under the category of storyline missions and may only be done once. This includes the 15 career agents per faction. And before Incarna used to include the numerous agents who point you in their direction with a small two-part storyline mission. They where replaced by Aura who doesn't provide faction standing increases.
• Doing Datacenter missions: Increase, with higher level missions granting more standing. These missions require turning in pirate tags, and may only be done once. To access higher levels requires higher standing, L1 can be done at any time.
• Doing COSMOS missions: Increase, with higher level missions granting more standing. These missions are more complex than normal and may require special attention and research. They may only be done once. To access higher levels requires higher standing, L1 can be done at any time.
• Doing courier circle missions: One increase only, the first time you do the loop.
• Doing the SoE epic arc: You will be able to choose a faction at the end and you are granted standing with that faction. This does not negatively affect your other factions. Can be redone approximately once every 3 months.
• Doing the L4 epic arcs: Significant standings increase with no concomitant decrease in opposing factions' standings.

• Quite simply, if you are below −2 , you have limited options. First, train Diplomacy skill to as high as you can. This will modify your negative standings upward by a certain percent. You should do all the tutorials, datacenters, and COSMOS missions you can, for both that faction and ones that are friendly with it for the derived standings. Remember even if Caldari State is −3, if Amarr Empire is −1 you will still have access to all the Amarr agents and can even run L4 missions for them which will eventually get you derived storyline standing. If you have no more tutorials, COSMOS, or datacenter missions available, your only recourse are L1 agents (very small faction standing increases with storylines), playing the derived standings game, doing the epic arc, or joining Faction Warfare as detailed below. It's a long road to travel.
• Once you get to −2, you can again access agents with whom you have a high corp standing. Both corp and agent personal standing can be shared in missioning fleets, so this can be the fastest way to start doing high level missions for that faction. You will never gain or lose faction standing from other people's storyline missions when in fleets.
• If you are in a corp, the corp's relationship to each faction is determined by simply averaging all the member's standings together (ignoring members who do not have standing to that faction). This means that even with low faction standing, you may be able to join a corp that qualifies for Factional Warfare, and work your way up through the ranks to recover your faction standing.
• Remember that all this work will be hurting the standings of opposing factions, to the point where they tend to balance out between −1 and 1. It is extremely difficult to get high faction standing (e.g. 5 or 6) with two opposing factions. It is almost impossible to achieve standings that high with all the Empire factions simultaneously.

• Judge early in your career whether or not you want to stay friendly with all empire factions. There are some benefits to this (freedom of travel mainly), which must be weighed against the rewards of achieving excellent standing with one faction.
• If you do want to keep faction standings balanced, the best way is to not let them drop in the first place. Do not kill faction ships (decline those missions), and have a way to balance the effects of storylines once in a while. With good forethought you can avoid the horrible grinding mess that it can be to recover extremely low faction standings.
• It is not difficult to keep positive standings (all above zero) with all the Empire factions simultaneously, even if running only normal missions. Just run missions for a faction when it approaches or dips below zero, and decline all missions which require you to kill an Empire faction's ships.