Bounty and pirates are a way to get to the strongest player whom you cannot reach by weapons power alone. That is exactly why pirates need to be very annoying to the strongest player, because nothing else can annoy that player.

Sure, that's why similar systems are used in reality so often... Mercenaries for instance are used intensively even in Iraq. In a slightly different manner but nevertheless. When you don't want to get your hands dirty or can't afford others to know it's your doing, you do exaclty what this pirates system is doing.

What bothers me is that one faction (let's say the player) will start a war because he plans to fund his war effort with "collecting the loot", meaning collecting the bounty. Only to find out that the faction that has the prize on its head killed some pirates and your loot is much smaller than planned. So you started the war for nothing - while the whole purpose of the bounty system is to make it worthwhile!

So if this pay-off system or whatever would only affect the pirates I'm ok with it but it shouldn't have any effect on the "bounty revenue" other game factions get.

lol iv got another 6 out of 10 systems to kill and iv got 700k on my head and the pirates are only a minor problem which a few bomber squads can sort out. I also think in the diplomacy that u should have players neutral, alliance, federation and of corse war so that u dont make enamies right away by killing all thier frig that are just passing by like i do lol

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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