No, no saves. So far the only merchant who would deal with me after dropping off the cargo is the one on Cayman.
Maybe you're being particularly unlucky? If I have a save, I could double-check if indeed you were recognized.
Could even reset the merchant's memory to check if he recognizes you again.
What is your Fame level? Maybe you indeed ARE being recognized more easily than you'd like?
About the fleets. They seem to be changing their behavior. At first they would attack. Period. Now it seems they either ignore me or sail away.
Whenever you encounter such behaviour again, please check your compile.log . I'd be interested to know if the ships in that fleet are mentioned in there.
Do you have the minimap showing you hostile/neutral state? Ships that are hostile should, of course, be red.
So ships that believe your false flag will be grey and they turn red when they recognize you (or if they remember you from before).
There should be an accompanying on-screen message as well to indicate when you are recognized.
What definitely should NOT ever happen is for ships to be hostile
without a reason.
If that seems to be the case, check compile.log . I deliberately created messages in there to ALWAYS indicate the reason for hostility.
I may have disabled some of those log messages, but we can easily re-enable them to double-check exactly what is happening and why.