Bounty: does it matter to you?

i always use bounty as a way to stop someone beeing able to attack me , like if i have 2 neighbours , i will place bounty on one and attack the other.

early game when people have small fleets they wont get many pirates attacking them but it can still be useful for slowing people down from colonising planets quick if u can get a nice cheap pirate raid on them

AI-wise they don't put enough bounty on anyone.

Midgame the AI is putting 1500 credit bounties on each other - I'm putting 20,000 credit bounties.

No, I mean FFA with other people. I understand its use with pirates and with AI, but in multiplayer, has bounty ever affected your decision of who to target?

It's very situational, if i've properly scouted him,and see an opening then yeah, i would likely attack him, but then again....if it's mid-game then the opponent should easily handle the pirates,and then just move on to me, so i typically use them only early on when it makes a big difference.

And no,i don't mind getting pirates put on me,put 1 capital ship in the direction their ocming from,and watch it level up.

my reply was based around FFA multiplayer with real people.

pirates will always attack the base of the person with bounty that is nearest to them them, so the place getting attacked can play a huge part of the decision of wether its worth it, will it make the guy bring his fleet half way across the map leaving his other worlds vunerable? if so and you were planning on attacking anyway then why not use a pirate raid to get a nice advantage? build a bunch of siege frigates wait for a pirate raid stick 10 onto each of his planets and attack somewhere with your mainfleet.

hes going to have a hard time dealing with it all

Bounty has basically zero influence on who I decide to attack. While manipulating pirate attacks with it has use, the actual bounty itself is rarely worth the hassle. For one, the amount of bounty paid per ship killed appears to be an absolute sum rather than tied to any kind of proportionality, as I eliminated an AI player that had some 122K bounty placed on him, and yet did not receive all the bounty despite having annihilated him utterly! I've seen, at most, maybe $250 placed on a given ship, and honestly, to collect that money from an actual player would cost you more than you'd get back! Apparently, the bounty placed on a ship will not exceed the worth of the ship. If it did, I suspect the behavior of attacking a player for bounty would happen, but it would be utterly corrupted. In other games in the past, it *WAS* possible for a player's bounty to exceed his own worth, and when this occurred, the bountied player would actually willingly cooperate in the collection of his own bounty, since his profits from his own bounty could exceed his losses from being destroyed for it.

In addition, against human players, bounty is simply not a meaningful tool of diplomatic influence in ANY game: Your enemies are primarily dictated by factors of geography and history. In *ANY* game, you attack those who are typically your neighbors (otherwise it takes too long to get there and leaves your forces out of position), and of those, you attack those who you have fought in the past. In short, if you go after somebody for his $20K bounty, long after you have collected that bounty and any profit to be had is vanished, YOU WILL STILL BE AT WAR WITH THAT PLAYER. He is not going to suddenly forgive you when the attacks halt after the bounty exhausted. Humans are not inclined to forget such things casually: They will seek revenge. As most likely a committed war against a given player will cost you more than any bounty you can reasonably expect to collect, the cost of such a move will certainly exceed any short-term gain to be had.

On the other hand, a bounty COULD influence my choice of tactical shooting. If two enemies warp into my system with the intent of attacking me, both having equally threatening forces, I am going to choose to kill the one with the bounty first. Bounty, however, has no influence on my strategic decision of who to counter-attack. The strategic decision will be dictated entirely by geopolitics, and not by bounty. At the strategic level, bounty exists purely to buy pirates-for-hire. If a human player can afford to slap a million or more on a bounty for some other player, I would be more concerned about that player than the player he put a bounty on, unless for some reason the money involved somehow represents chump change, in which case, why am I risking my neck for chump change again?

Bottom line: Tactically, bounty can influence my targetting decisions, if it's sufficiently lucrative and relevant to my present situation. Strategically, it has no influence on who I will attack. If I attack somebody because he has a high bounty, it will be because I want to hit him while the pirates are hitting him, not because of his bounty, and I would do the same thing if another human player were hitting him even if he had no bounty.

Thanks, Norfleet, that's really what I'm feeling as well. It was such a brilliant idea, and yet it doesn't really quite seem to be working.

I really think a buff for bounty is in order, to make it more attractive for players to go after someone based on the amount of money on their head. Maybe make it pay out more than you put on their head (kinda 'cheating', but I really think that the monetary reward is far too low to make it worth you while). So for every $250 you put on them, someone gets paid out $500 for attacking. The problem I see with this is that it is so easily abuseable by the person who placed the bounty to turn a profit. The other option I'm seeing is to increase the bounty paid out on individual ships or structures so that you don't have to kill as many to collect it all. That way, you could raid someone for their bounty without necessarily engaging in a fixed battle.

Devs, if you're reading this, I hope you have some good ideas. I absolutely love the idea of the bounty system, but it's just not working right now (except for pirates), and I hope you can fix it.

T

^This

Primarily, I think bounty is just in the game as a tool to influence AI pirates to attack one player or another. As far as actually influencing human players, nobody is going to give up their target of strategical advantage to collect the bounty on another player. It simply serves as a bonus to whatever player is most suited to attacking the player you have put the bounty on in the first place. It's also a good waste of your money.

You're missing the point: In multiplayer, you cannot just "raid someone for their bounty". Humans do not simply forget your actions the moment you stop doing them because they stopped being profitable. Once you attack another human player like that, you are most likely at war. In an FFA scenario, such an action means one of two things: Either you have committed a raiding fleet to flying WAAAY out there just to raid a distant enemy for his bounty, thus leaving yourself wide open to attack by your neighbors, or you have attacked one of your neighbors for his bounty. The former may not ignite an outright shooting war due to the outright impracticality of it, but it's certainly not a prudent strategic move. The latter will almost certainly lock you into an extended conflict that will continue after the bounty is exhausted, as the attacked player will likely be unsympathetic towards your protestations that it was merely for the bounty, and simply decide that you are now his enemy, seeing as you've attacked him.

In addition, waging war against a human player is not something you do lightly. You're looking at minutes to hours of strategic buildup aimed at fighting a protracted war. It's not like fighting an AI, where you can churn out a few LRMs and go on a quick raid, and the AI will quickly forget about the incident if you give him the 200 crystal he wants. A human is going to see such a move as an act of war, and will quickly retaliate. Unless you already wanted that war, in which case the bounty still had basically no influence on the matter, you're not going to suddenly open a new front just to attempt to collect a few K bounty. Or even a few 10s of Ks. Possibly not even hundreds of Ks.

Ask yourself: How high would the bounty have to *BE* before you consider it worthwhile to deliberately attack a human player that you are not at war with, necessitating either a lengthy interstellar voyage or the opening of a new front line? How much is it worth to you? Half your GDP? Double? Triple?

I encountered one player who got the Vasari bounty bonuses and then put bounty on someone, recouping it + bonuses when he blew up their stuff. That was a pretty neat strategy.

How about making it so that you can purchase some kind of generic raiding ship, a bounty hunter type of thing. When you kill the enemy with a bounty on his head you collect, but the ships are neutral colored, similar to the pirates, so that the attacked player can't be sure who is attacking him. You could maybe make it so that as you collect more bounty you are able to build more advanced bounty hunter type ships. And also make it so that they aren't affected by your empires tech trees, so that there is a large dis-advantage to using them as well.

And because this would be a fairly large dynamic in large FFA games you could have an option to turn it off or whatever, I personally think it would be fun to make hidden alliances and have pirate ship wars though

Wait - the Vasari can collect their OWN bonuses? Oi, that's silly.  :p  Maybe not completely unfair - they did pay for the tech after all. But silly fer sure.