You said it all. I've started to play without them and the game was so much more enjoyable. In fact the pirates make little sense anyway, they should go after trade ships and such, not try to conquer a planet. If they are such a major fighting force that they plan to take down planets, they shoudl very well be a race of their own. With an economy of their own. They waste ships like no tomorrow. How do they find all these pirates.

ill join them.. even though what ever we do, it will get us killed

Thats why i think the pirates should have somesort of base somewhere hidden. And if you can find it and destroy it, they will let you be for a time

Whatever you do, do not get rid of Pirates.

I think your idea is perfect, and I'm

I do think the current bounty system need some tweak. As a player we tend to have a better defense mechanism against pirate raid, as a result our bounty never go down, at least mine never does.


This, in a long game, means that the player will become a sore target for pirate. If you carefully think about it that poses a lot of problem:

- The bounty get unrealistic high: unrealistic as in it's an amount that is accumulated overtime. To a point you have a high bounty not because you are the largest threat, but because yours never to collect. Say toward mid game the AI think another AI is a much bigger threat then you are, but they will never able to put a sufficient large bounty because yours have been accumulated through time.

- 2 balance issues: first the AI is taken off the load of pirate as the player becomes the sore target, second the bounty system become useless to everyone.

- Like I said before, with the current system the highest bounty does not translate into a large threat. I said that the player usually have a better defense mechanism, this does not mean the player is any stronger then the AI. So in a lot of way the current bounty system is counter productive.


So yes, something needs to be done with it, either like suggestion it should reduce a bit if we take out the raiding pirate, or maybe have a decay rate on the bounty and have it reduce after an amount of time passed.

Whatever you do, do not get rid of Pirates. It is an original concept in a bland world, please work with it.

Besides I think your idea is perfect when we break it down piece by piece.

The Problem: Pirates are too strong and wind up winning games.
Why: 1. Because they are recruited on the basis per kill, so no matter what, they will always 100% get their kill. Any stragety that can work at 100% is gimped at the get go 2. Pirates are coming in unreasonable numbers because killing Pirates has no effect on their numbers (Which makes no sense).

Solution 1: Nerf Pirates: Ineffective because it kills the whole point of them. You always want as many strageties as possible. (Gee, I have alot of money, but my main force is invading planet Cool, I'll send Pirates to keep the pressure on my ally so I can get him next, is imo, what your looking for.

Solution 2: Buying Bounties off: Will NOT work. I'm sorry, but what was once a Space Empire Game will now turn into "Space Economy" where you horde all your resources to buy each other's bounties off. And even if you could, it still won't get rid of the fact that Pirates are killing on a per kill basis for 100% and their size will keep growing and growing because killing pirates has no effect on them person with the least amount of money, no matter the circumstance, pretty much loses.

The game will turn into one giant game of BS.

Solution 3: Killing Pirates lowers their Bounty: Wow, this might be a winner imo. The Problem was, again, that the Pirates no matter what would always get 100% of their kill because they kept coming in unreasonable numbers.

But this idea works because now the pirates WON't keep coming in unreasonable numbers and they won't get their 100% kill share. Everytime you kill one, their total size decreases (lower numbers) and their bounty decreases (no longer a 100% kill share). But their still an effective force as long as you fund them, which makes sense.

So this will
A: Pirates will no longer ALWAYS get their money's worth. (Bounties can fail through a good defense)
B: Pirates will no longer sustain unreasonable numbers. (Now that their bounties shrink at every assault)
C: Killing Pirates now has an effect on Pirates (Who could imagine???)

Zeronock - welcome to active participation   

I agree that the pirates should be affected by a cost/benefit analysis. My suggestion: Pay the pirates a portion of the bounty up front scaled to the size of the attacking force. This has the effect of knocking back the total whether or not they are successful. Additional bounty can be paid for damage done. (Players - human and AI still only get damage done $.) Additionally, the target of their attack should be determined by a ratio of [Pirate fleet strength vs structures/targets values vs strength of defense] with enough fuzzy logic to defeat the "sacrificial dead asteroid lamb" tactic    . Figure that with enough motivation the pirates will suborn someone to provide them with good intel for attack timing opportunties.

One enhancement that could be made to the bounty system is to allow (within practical programming limits) the ability to 'target' the bounty - for example, to set a high priority on the opponent's research capability, or ship building capability, or culture, etc. This info would not be available to the targeted player, of course. Whether other players could see this I'll leave for discussion.

And no, I don't agree that you should be able to pay to offset the bounty. If you are putting a bounty on someone because he's the 800# gorrilla in the system, you want him to feel the sting and not just pay out $ that he can probably afford out of pocket change.

Definitely need to do a cost-benefit here, as has been mentioned though ignored.

Think about it. Pirates do what they do entirely for the money. If they get each and every ship they send out destroyed, they should realize that the cost is now becoming higher, making the bounty effectively worth less.

The best system suggested thus far was the Virtual Bounty system above. Where there is the actual bounty, and a virtual bounty--the virtual bounty gets lower as more and more ships are destroyed, because the pirates do need to cover their costs. When the virtual bounty hits zero, the pirates stop attempting. To clarify, the best bet would be to make the size and quality of the attacking force based on the size of the actual bounty. The pirates should then estimate ahead of each attack what their virtual bounty will be if the attack fails. If the virtual bounty would hit zero at the end of an attack they're preparing to send out, the attack should be called off, as long as it isn't the first attack (which should never be possible anyway). This being, of course, because they've tried in the past with the same sized attack force and failed.

If, instead, the actual bounty sets the size of the initial force and the force increases with each attack, probably by a percentage of the actual bounty, this will result in a more dynamic experience where a large enough bounty may, eventually, actually cause the pirates to do some damage, while simultaneously reducing the annoyance of smaller bounties.

Why not make pirate a unit you can buy for money instead of the bounty system? You pay to make a special pirate clonizer unit who wil be autonomus. All you can do is set the target player and it will go out and make a base on a randome asteroid someplace near the enemy and attack as it builds ships. This is much more historicaly accurate anyway. Pirates were funded mostly by the great powers of europe and made bases out in the caribean to attack and loot the spanish.

You could reduce the ammount of harassment from pirates by going out and destroying their bases. There should be no way to see who sent the pirates.

i just dont look at the bounty of players if i want to conquer them i dont look how much bounty is on thier head i just do it i almost neaver put bounty on another players head because it is just a waste when a new cap ship would be much more useful. the ai need to put reaserch and building more ships over bounty.

The Logic is if I put 500k on your head and you turned around and offered 800k to the pirates to not take the bounty job and leave you alone.

If Person A offered you 500k to go put the hurt on Person B.
Instead Person B offered you a lot more to not hurt them.
It would seem for you the logical thing would be to take the easy money for now and wait to see of Person A would again try and buy your skills if so, would Person B agian offer more to be left alone.

I agree with both of these. The pirates need to be using some form of risk assessment system. Real pirates don't just attack based on the biggest bounty. They assess their level of risk and choose the option that is most profitable. I also think they should not be targeting planets very often unless the bounty is enourmous and they have an adequately prepared fleet. Maybe there needs to be separate pirate factions in the game that can vie for power. They could build pirate bases among asteroids, collect resources, and build structures and ships. As they get paid for attacking freighters and other small ships, they amass wealth and power which they can use to build a bigger fleet. When their fleet reaches a size that it can take on a particular planet, they will attack that planet. A player could put a bounty on a specific target (such as a planet, a shipyard, or a trading lane). Or, you could issue a general bounty for destroying ships of a particular empire. The bigger the target, the bigger the bounty required to get a pirate to attack it.

You should also be able to retract a bounty at any time to have that money put back into your "account."

Lots of good ideas guys and I'm glad it's under full discussion here - this is the kind of analysis and feedback we like to see. We're are taking it all in and are in the middle of deciding on what to do for the next upgrade to the bounty/pirate system. Expect another leap in improvement on the next release.

Well, I like most of the suggestions that have been brought up in this thread, especially making the pirates think twice about attempting to collect on a bounty without actually affecting the bounty price. But I think that there are two main problems with the bounties. 1)Once the bounty is offered it is in play permanently. I think that a much better way to manage the bounties would be to have bounties be timed based on the amount that the bounty is for. 2) bounties should be offered on specific types of assets, i.e. military ships/structures, population, production(Research and ship manufacturing), economy ships/structures, or general(i.e. the way bounties work now).

Exampe: 3 entity ffa game

player A: puts a general low bounty (<1000) out on player C. Pirates and players are notified that their is a bounty offered on player c and that it will be collectible for say 10 minutes

Player B: Needs cash and attacks Player C and succeeds in destroying say 3 frigates and a trade post. This rewards Player B with the bounty amount those assets are worth. Player B is unable to destroy anything else of Player C's before the bounty expires.

Player C: Puts a Mid bounty (1000-5000) on B's military in retaliation for Player B's attacks which he cannot respond to directly due to his conflict with Player A. Pirates attack player B's military assets and destroy x amount of military hardware before the 20 minute timer on player C's mid level bounty runs out.

The times for each bounty level would of course have to be fiddled with as would the pirates pickiness about attacking only what they are paid to or being a little more destructive.

There are also two minor problems with bounties as they are currently implemented. 1) you can collect on bounties that you yourself put out; and 2) The pirates don't appear to USE the credits that they receive from bounties.

Lets look at #1 first, Why would I as a player put a bounty out on a person and then go attack them simply to collect the credits that I just spent to encourage someone else to attack that same player. The bounties that you can collect should be the total bounty on a player minus the bounty that you have put out on them. Obviously no other players would know this number.

Now for #2, lets assume that the pirates do actually manage to collect a sizeable or any amount of bounty in a game. Shouldn't we be seeing better ships involved in raids as a result of pirates that are doing well whereas a game that has unsuccessful pirates would have pirate ships that would get progressively cheaper/worse. This also ties in with the idea of having specific bounty types, meaning that pirates that were not doing well would stay away from attempting to attack say military assets and instead would take the bounties on trade ships and as a result would bug out of a system when a sufficiently powerful military force/unit arrived in the system.

Another thought just occurred to me. If pirates are building bases / ships / etc, then they would need resources like crystals and metal. If you were to go that route, you could also allow people to offer crystals and metal as part of the bounty. Depending on how strapped a pirate clan is for the resources, it could be more valuable to them than just money. This would be true for players trying to collect bounties on other players, as well.