2018-12-21 Bounties, System Gen, Mating

[AnrDaemon]

So, I can trick somebody to place bounty on me, then have my friend kill me, and we split profit 50/50.
Is that an intended bounties mechanic?

[pizzasgood]

To me, the point of bounties is to have a means of inconveniencing somebody by incentivizing other people to attack them. If the target can just set down their stuff and let a friend kill them so that they can both share the bounty with no risk of lost items, that's not very much of an inconvenience, nor does it leave much room for people to hunt the bounty. Depending on the size of the bounty, I might even have helped them by issuing it. That's the opposite of what I want to do.

I would be a lot more likely to put a bounty on somebody if I could specify which empires (e.g. only those allied to mine) are allowed to see and claim it. There'd still be the potential for shenanigans if they have alts infiltrating those empires or if they bribe people, but I'm fine with that. There should be some capacity for shady stuff. It just shouldn't be trivial.

[Ikkir Isth]

Yeah, bounties without some sort of either permadeath or otherwise massive personal loss have no real bite.
I mean, money itself has no value in the upper end anyway, so I guess the real value of bounties are just... memes?

[Deantwo]

Should you have to go to a particular building to collect bounties? There is no specific bounty hunter building.

The third option is to of course make a special 'Bounty Hunter Guild' Building for cities to turn bounties in at. Maybe add a little more functionality to it than just turning in boutnies like allowing you to hire OP NPC body guards to follow you for exorbitant amounts of weekly cronos.

The police station would probably be fine for now. Add a building tab that lets you redeem bounties and maybe even see a "top wanted" list with location hints.

I would suggest removing bounty until there's value attached to the loss.
When there IS a value, then pay the bounty hunter a share of the lost value from the bounty pool.
Like, you have a bounty of $5 on your head. You get killed and lose $3 in value. The killer get $2 (66% of loss value) paid from the bounty pool. You resurrect at your usual location, your bounty pool is now $3.

Any mechanic not associated with actual loss value would just be a scam attractor.

I did not understand the 66% bounty pool thing, sounded complicated.

Anr is saying that the best way to stop bounties for being exploited and easily redeemable by friends or alts, is to associate the bounty with a loss.

This is what they did in EVE Online, and it works pretty well. When you blow up the ship someone that has a bounty on their head, you get a share of the bounty equal to the value of what was destroyed. This means that bounties aren't just given in full for a slap on the cheek, but they are directly related to the amount of value the target lost. That way it is not advantageous for the person to have the bounty collected. This works great in EVE Online because everything has a value, destruction of your ship can be a financial nightmare.

That said, in Hazeron we don't loss anything when we die. At most we drop one random item.
The bounty could be moved to the destruction of a spacecraft that the bounty target is captain on. But berths change quickly and spacecraft can now adays be respawned.
So without money and loss being valuable in Hazeron, I doubt bounties will really function as intended.

[Phenoix12]

Interesting idea to make bounties more interesting.

Convert one or two of the pirate factions into privateer factions. The major difference being that privateers only spawn in to attack people with high enough bounties and the higher your bounty the more/stronger their ships.  ...also they don't take over cities.

[Deantwo]

Interesting idea to make bounties more interesting.

Convert one or two of the pirate factions into privateer factions. The major difference being that privateers only spawn in to attack people with high enough bounties and the higher your bounty the more/stronger their ships.  ...also they don't take over cities.

I remember the same idea being mentioned on the old forums once. Mainly I am against it because it makes bounties into a very easy form of greifing. Simply put small bounty of a few trillion on someone and listen to them whine about pirates trying to kill them constantly.
While money has no value and is too easy to make, a mechanic like that is not a good idea.

I think at most maybe pirates could mention your bounty when they show up, but I don't think they should have altered behavior or higher chance of appearing because of it.

[SpaceGeek]

Griefing? In my Hazeron? Say it ain't so.

Bounties should be replaced with reparations since the naughty things we get up to in this game are usually war crimes on a galactic scale. Take the same mechanic used by EVE but give it more punch by forcing the defeated player to repay the government which placed the bounty. Have it scale with the crime(s), up to and including empire-scale political reparations like trade sanctions or even empire asset seizure required to be paid out over time. It could even be optional for the losing party to actually do this; failing to make reparations can lead to increased sanction or an automatic state of war depending upon severity and empire settings.

If we're going to discuss a bounty-like system, why pull punches? Give it the oomph the demigods of Hazeron would actually stop and think about.

[Deantwo]

If bounties were set on empires rather than avatars/units, it would maybe be simpler. Then you could set a bounty on an empire and other empires would be able to collect parts of it for all the damage they inflict on the target empire. That is how it worked in Sins of a Solar Empire, and it was pretty cool. Pirates would act like normal, but if they happen to inflict damage on your empire they get some of the bounty too.

In short, set bounty on target empire. Other empires attack the target empire and get bounty reward for inflicting damage to the empire, such as getting the wroth of a spacecraft in bounty when you blow up the ship. Destroying buildings could give bounties depending on the volume of the building destroyed. And capturing worlds could give bounty depending on the total amount of volume captured.

[resonkinetic]

i like the idea of permadeath