I haven't read all the posts, there is just way too many, so my post may be an old idea. I don't think the bounty should go down when attacking pirate ships are destroyed. If the bounty does go down when attacking pirate ships are destroyed it would weaken the whole infrastructure for the balance between an Economic based strategy over a Military based strategy.

The pirate ships are weak. They're secound rate to all other ships out there, so that alone should be enough to prove that taking away bounty for every ship they lose is both unfair and unbalanced.

Being able to buy off the bounty for double the price is a great idea. It's realistic and simple, after all the pirates just want to make a profit.

As to where the pirates come from, I think it's simple enough to just use our imagination as we play to solve that one. If the origins of the pirates is really necessary, then I would say that they just come from uncolonised planets or for a more 21st century take on pirates/mercinaries, have them be the products of interstellar corporations: aka Halliburton & associates nowadays.

Something else I thought of that I didn't see mentioned throughout this thread would be to have the bounty you put on someone go towards a pool, just like it does now.

The game then, at set intervals, takes a chunk of that cash depending on whatever variables may be set in place, and spawns a varied selection of pirate ships around the star and sends it after the designated player.

An example: Say Player A has a 1000 credit bounty on him, the game then decides that 800 of those credits will go towards "spawning" a pirate fleet "worth"* 800 credits. And sends that fleet after Player A.
The scale of the fleet spawned, in relation to the bounty size consumed, can scale as the game progresses. That way you'll have a natural progression of Pirate Fleet Sizes vs Bounty as the game progresses. Done to prevent excessively huge fleets early on, and to keep increasing the difficulty of the pirate attacks.

One more thing is that the the system would instead take those 800 credits from the above example and remove them from the Bounty Pool on Player A once the Pirate Fleet is spawned. This would also serve to keep bounty pools from reaching astronomical values as it is currently.

This I realize makes the Pirates come off as more of a mercenary force, then rampaging lunatics out to plunder and wreck havoc.

I also realize the above is far more then a minor adjustment to the features/mechanics already in place, but I thought I'd post it out anyway.

I think the types of pirate attacks should change as you become more powerful.


For example, you could have acts of terrorism. Someone blows up a shipyard or something... You could defend against it by moving a security slider to the right which improves security at the cost of lowering efficiency or costing you money. Additionally such acts would probably only be possible on frontier zones... so if a world were deep in your empire they would be generally immune to such attacks...


Another idea would be to have the value of the ships attacking you be proportionate to the size of your bounty... so that if your bounty doubles the size strength of the pirate attack doubles.

The size of pirate attacks is partially proportional to the bounty on you. It is affected by the bounty on you, the size of your trade network and the size of your empire (number of planets). The composition of a pirate force changes as you get more powerful. e.g You won't see Corsairs early on.

I disagree that bounty should go down, and I agree with other posters that Pirates need to be smarter about attacking, instead of constantly attacking well defended systems with small numbers, they should only try to attack when they have a reasonable chance of success.

If someone has a large bounty on them, they expand, and have a minimally defended systems, that should be a primary target.

I don't know if this is possible but it would also be cool if Empire B had a really large bounty on them, and Empire A attacks Empire B, pirates see that its a good time to attack (Empire B is occupied) and then they attack

I've now played a number of games on small and medium sized maps, and I have to admit that I didn't realize that it was the size of the bounty that was spawning pirate attacks on my systems. I just assumed that because my fleet was growing large and I had a good economy I was getting pirate attacks. Now that I understand the bounty system better, I have to say that I really like it as an added challenge. It is very true to life in that seems to be the model that terrorists and states that sponser terrorists seem to work nowadays. I did have a few thoughts:

1. Bounties can and should be able to be collected by players. This would seem to provide a good incentive for other empires to attack you as well as the pirates, and I don't see why it shouldn't apply to both. The size of the bounty could still determine the size of the pirate fleet. The player can decide what sort of fleet to send. However the requirement to collect a bounty should be a bit higher than a tradeship or single cobalt, maybe the destruction of logistical structure. That would keep players from sitting at the star and sniping at the passing trade ships, especially since I don't want to add micro-management of following your tradeships around.

2. In terms of buying off the bounty, this is sort of a silly thought in context of say terrorists. They have more ideological reasons to want to destroy your empire and the money just helps them achieve their goals. However, you could add an event that if a pirate fleet of a good size enters a system with low defenses, they could make some sort of demand for money to go away, or they will attack. This would still drain down your resources, and would be sort of amusing if you choose to turn them down and lose the system trying to get a fleet back in time to save it.

3. I do think that an effort should be made to keep the pirates from becoming another AI teamlike opponent. There were some posts higher up that suggested that more resource than money should be used to buy bounty and that the money should be used by the pirates to make better ships. I'm not sure if you could still call them pirates, you might as well made another team to fight against. If you want to justify the reality of pirates getting ships, why not add an event where a ship is stolen from time to time by a pirate, or lost in transit and recovered by a pirate. You really would have no idea how many ships have been "stolen" from the enemy and then a pirate fleet could have a neat variety of ships from lots of different races. You could even have a research technology to improve security to reduce the numbers of ships stolen or improve the accuracy of the jump techology to avoid losing ships on a jump. Of course Capital ships would have to be made immune, but a cobalt missing here or there could be fun.

4. What about the idea of salvaging a defeated pirate fleet to reward you somewhat for defending your system. Maybe a few crystals and some metals. This would work to your advantage if you managed to repel a big attack and to your disadvantage if your attempt to get your enemies attacked fails, giving them more resources.

5. I'm wondering if part of the reason that the AI seems to be stacking huge bounties instead of building ships to kill you is that they are suffering from a shortage of crystals like I usually am. Money is always available in a way that crystals aren't. So it takes the only road available to it with the hyper amount of money it has and lack of crystals. I have no idea of the mechanics of game AI but I thought I would offer my thoughts. That is all. Thanks

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Some good comments in the there. Just a few from myself: Bounties can be collected by other players; this was in even before the pirates collecting bounty was  The amount of bounty is proportional to the value of and/or in the ship/structure.

If that is the case the designers need to fix the AI so that the AI will buy resources just like the rest of us do when we're strapped for crystal or on the rare occasson metal or sell metal or crystal on the RARE occassion that they have a glut of resources and a lack of cash.

Check out the stats at the end of the game, they are extremely optimal at using the Black Market - probably better than any human can be due to the fact they are constantly analyzing it for deals

You don't get it... The bounty isn't only for the pirates! I've been trying to get this through to you all along! You can pay the pirates (and that's why I proposed the "virtual bounty" that would apply to them alone) but it shouldn't affect the bounty being paid to other players that mean to profit on your misery!

No way. Somebody started a war based on this bounty... You can't just offer a nice bounty, wait for people to start a war on the bounty's subject than retract it.

I really like the ideas posted, especially because of how realistic they are
My thoughts:

1) Killing pirates lowers your bounty: this would make sense as killing pirates basically dwindles their resources and hence forces them to spend more money, meaning the bounty worth lowers as well.

2) Buying your bounty: Pirates want loot - obviously if you offer them more money and they don't have to fight for it, I think anyone would go for that instead of sacrificing men to attack an enemy.

3) Personally, I think bounties should depreciate over time (sort of like the time-based solution posted). Why? Well, I would think that bounties put up at the time expect a quick response. The longer it takes to respond, the less one should earn. Time IS money (in most cases). Of course, this rate could be scaled by difficulty.

4)

I like where this idea is going. This would be cool and extremely annoying (in a good way, if that makes any sense) to the player. Of course, this idea wouldn't be easy to implement of course - balancing, new research additions, and a bunch of other stuff would need to be carefully assessed and integrated.

One possible approach could be in order to have a 'terrorist' attack on a planet, one would first have to identify an enemy planet and then place a sabotage bounty on a structure within it. The higher the bounty placed, the more likely the attack would succeed. This of could then be countered by counter-terrorist research/structures/funds/etc.

Also, terrorist attacks might not necessarily have to be focused on the destruction of structures. Other possibilities could be: a temporary loss of power to defensive structures on a specific planet, a sudden loss of a specific resource (metal or crystal), a disaster resulting in a massive loss of population, your own units get hijacked, etc.

  Ok, I'm outta here...

To keep the thread alive.

The reason why, "I'll pay you more to attack him/her instead" is because the game gets changed to one giant version of a hot potato auction where people are paying each other money pirates instead of actually building units.

Having a Hot Potato auction where the person who had $300 more then you because he didn't built his *^%*% Scout Frigate and gave you the all pirate agro would suck

While spending all your money to starve off a pirate attack instead of fighting and buying units would suck.

Having to play Bounty Nazi and watching your bounty at all times to prevent someone from pirating you would suck.

Losing an actual game because your enemy player noobought your auction price for not building any units would suck.

Creating complicated formulas to give the AI a cardiac arrest would suck.

Buying off all the bounties for double price would always let the winning/dominant player be free of bounties, which might suck for game balance.

Killing Pirates without their bounty lowering to loses would definetly suck.

Going further then buying off bounties, having Pirate Trust Funds that build over time, I-O-U notes to Marauders, and Writing Blank Check Bounties would suck.

BTW. How are the Pirates with the New Update.

Has anyone thought about making bounties optional? Pirates are optional. Why not the bounties? In a no pirate, and no bounty game the AI may actually do some research, build some ships, and attack you. Since it has nothing else to spend its credits on.