Killing Pirates should reduce your bounty

I absolutely agree with this. It adds a sort of counter-ploy to the whole "economic attack" system. E.G. Someone puts a bounty on you, if you're able to repel it you get XP and the bounty goes down. As it is all you can do is put a counter-bounty on your enemy (whoever that may be) and hope that the pirates go after him instead.

If this idea (which I think is a good one) doesn't go through, then there should be *some* way to lower the bounty; even something as simple as being able to pay it off yourself.   

I disagree
I think they bounty should stay until something on that player gets destroyed.
So the longer you play, and that player havent lost alot of units, he will be more of a target for cash

Thats my opinion

Also, if a given player is becomming too powerful, he can just buy his way out of the problem, and that, i think thats a bad idea.

It's just ridiculous to me. Every game I've topped the list of bounties as they couldn't collect. I get wave after wave of pirates who just dies.

Why even use marauders if you know you're always going to have it like that. I'd rather have them turned of because it's not one bit logical behaviour. Where do they get the ships, how can they afford it if they can't collect the bounty.

Hmm I don't understand what you mean by this?

lets say we play a 4 ffa game.
Your the strongest in the game. Me and the other 2 cant beat you because your too strong, but we got lots of cash to use.

So if we where to use our cash and you could a: kill all the incomming pirats and reduce the bounty, you still will be leading. Or b: if you could just buy your way out of it.

So i see the pirates in a way to even the score out abit, for the none military strong player

thats why i think it should stay as it is

Nah that doesn't make any sense at all. The pirates are pirates, if they lose ships and money trying to get that bounty, they should think again. As I see it they're not there to even out the odds for those who is losing. You lose if you lose.

But i do disagree on the part that the bounty will be lowered if you kill the pirates. Where would the cash go?

To pay for all the ships they lose. In theory. But in fact they go nowhere. They disappear. I'm not talking about a 1:1 ratio, but they should be lowered to reflect losses.

It might be interesting if you could buy off the bounty for double (or 1.5x) the price or something.

aaah psugar comes to the rescue
That idea i like alot better

I have to agree there, of though I still think lowering bounties to an extent might still be a good idea, but I do agree, that once you have the funds you can clear the bounty quite easy yourself, but maybe once you have reached X amount of wealth, the price of clearing the bounty increases?

0 - 1000 no extra charge on top, that is if you have a bounty of 1000 you can pay 1000 to pay it off
1001 - 10000 you have to pay 25% extra so that a bounty that is 12500 should cost you,

and so on, but this is just rough figures, so the more you own the more expensive it is to pay off your bounty, so its more difficult for rich players to pay it off completely

Well that just makes you wrong

j/k...

I'm not even saying I'm right, I just think as the game stands there has to be some sort of counter to having a gigantic bounty on your head besides...well, death...   

No, I don't think this would work. If I were able to buy my bounty back with your proposed system, I could instead put a higher bounty on an enemy of mine, which would give me the advantage of sending the marauders in his way.

Imho the idea of the thread creator is quite good. I find it quite annoying to have bounties in the hundreds of thousands on my head, without being able to do anything against it.

I SAY NAY. No offense. I feel that you should be able to pay off your bounty (money would go to the pirates, not the factions that placed the bounties and you would need to pay, say, twice the price of your bounty to pay it off. Say you want 500 off your head, you would need to pay 1,000 credits).



EDIT: Oops, other people were already talking about this lol. A current way of getting bounty off your head is to make a lot of cheap scouts and send them to their doom (not the best strategy but it could work....)

Well, as every single game ends up like that something needs to be done about it. As it stand it's just boring to have the marauders on.

Marauders could be fun if it's more interactive. Building ships to sacrifice to lower bounty is rather tyrannical if you ask me. There's people piloting these ships.

You can't "buy off" a bounty. The giver of the bounty won't lower it... What could be done is a way to pay off pirates; like giving the money (paying tribute) to the mobsters and lower the occurance of pirates. The bounty can't be lowered by your actions since you're not the one offering it or in the position to pay it out. So such payments should only influence the pirates and not the bounty as such.

By Designer

"So, it struck me. Why not have the bounty reduced as you kill off the incoming attackers. This way you can manage bounties and pirates "think twice" about attacking you as they're just sent to the grinder".

That is a very good Idea

By psugar

"It might be interesting if you could buy off the bounty for double (or 1.5x) the price or something"

That is also a good idea.

I would be happy to see one or the other.
Matthew

It is most definitely NOT a good idea, neither of them IMO. If the bounty only affected the pirates I'd agree, but the bounty also affects all players! You can't persuade the giver of the bounty to lower it - he wants you dead after all, you can only pay one or the other faction (like the pirates) not to attack you inspite of the bounty.

Perhaps an underlaying "virtual bounty" system could be set up just for the pirates. It would start as high as the real one but the destruction of the pirates and/or paying them off would lower it.

When somebody adds to the bounty it would add to the virtual one as well.

I think this would be easy to do as it is a very simple math and one variable per faction added. Than again, I'm not a programmer.

EDIT; I need to think things through better before I post and not edit the post multiple times...

i think its a great idea

I think that sounds like the best idea proposed in this thread. And would go along way to wards preventing 250k+ bounties in extended games.

I've been loitering around these forums for a while, and although I haven't got the beta(money, hard drive, and a crappy system prohibit this, a problem i hope to have fixed by 08) I have played it(thanks to a friend) I was very impressed and I played it several times through on a full galaxy(100 planets, 4 stars) but as for the bounty, when you top 10 mil it gets a little nuts(being the elitist I am I don't sacrifice ships I simply have a massive invincible death fleet) the ability to pay off your own bounty I believe would be a viable option. along with more options for a "one click" bounty addition to an opponent instead of just 250, when I'm making 200k a minute it would be nice to be able to put more of that in a bounty quicker. But back to the thread's topic.

I think the pirates need a "risk to profit" system in place where say a given empire has a very strong fleet and a bounty of 10k while another empire has a weak fleet and the same 10k bounty, the pirates would of course go for the more profitable empire. Maybe giving all tactical structures and ships a hidden point system that would determine the risk factor then divide that by the bounty to asses the risk to profit ratio. This same system could be used to determine which planet is attacked by the pirates, a planet with no defenses would be a bigger target than a fortress world. Also Bounty per population point killed would be nice, so if the pirates go and raid 10 undefended worlds that might work off all or most of a bounty the numbers of population to credit would have to be played with for a while, but having a fully population upgraded Terran planet should be worth around 10k.

As for paying off a bounty it should be a viable option after all bounties aren't something that goes on in the UN, no one stands beside a nice little graph and announces when a country has a bounty on it. No, the bounty is all part of the black market system(same as buying and selling resources) so why not for every 1000 credits put on somebody's head make its cost 5% more to pay off a given amount. Heres an example,

Empire A - Bounty = 50,000 - multiplier = 250% - Cost to pay off = 250,000
Empire B - Bounty = 250 - multiplier = 0% - Cost to pay off = 250
Empire C - Bounty = 100,000 - multiplier = 500% - Cost to pay off = 500,000
Empire D - Bounty = 1,000 - multiplier = 5% - Cost to pay off = 1,005

The reasoning behind this madness? If your running a black market bounty ring won't you jack up the price if someone wants a bounty to "go away" it's not good business unless you are. After all it's not the empire handing out the bounty to the pirates, once the money is put on a bounty it's gone from your reserves, not put into a special part of your treasury devoted to bounties, you gave it to someone.

I'm surprised so many people like these ideas. There is no logic behind them whatsoever. If I put out a prize on someone's head and he kills one of the murderers the promised prize is no smaller... It stays the same.

Whats this "Space Mafia"?

The bounty system is ridiculous as it is now for what the OP says. 9 of 10 time it is YOU with the highest bounty, because the AI still way overspends on bounty's. Instead of building its own fleet to try, and kick your ass, but noooo the pirates have become the "button men" of space. The idea of using pirates to do all the fighting for you if your the weakest link is kind of cowardly IMO.

I like the "buy out" suggestion so far (make em an offer they cant refuse ). I also would like to see ways to further curb, or cap off AI over spending on bounties. They need their money to research, and build ships. Not send the "mob" after you.

I do have to admit that i was impressed with the an AI fleet that actually did engage me, but thats another topic

Space Voyager, I will agree that destroying pirate ships shouldn't lower(if anything it should raise it as the pirate lords get pissed at you) your bounty. but the way a bounty works is this.

Client

Service Provider

Bounty hunter

the Client gives money to the Service provider, who takes his cut, and then pays out to whichever hunter gets the kill. If someone gives the provider money for a bounty to go away why wouldn't he? especially if he makes a profit. a very large profit. after all it is a business. And until a kill is made, that money is just sitting there. not like the pirates are like "We got all this cash guys! BUT! Before we can use it we've got to kill some people, after all its what we said we'd do!"