Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: Pirates Shouldn't Be a Faction  (Read 4799 times)

xenoargh

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 5078
  • naively breaking things!
    • View Profile
Pirates Shouldn't Be a Faction
« on: August 16, 2017, 01:53:14 PM »

Pretty simple concept here, but the devil's in the details.  Basically, Pirates shouldn't work like normal Factions at all, because they aren't a "faction" in the classic sense.

1.  Pirates aren't a Faction, they're a bunch of opportunistic people who will kill you if that seems like a good idea.

2.  For those purposes, the Pirate Faction is always "hostile", in terms of Player Fleet / Pirate Fleet interactions.  If a Pirate Fleet wants to attack, it will.

3.  Instead of making friends with the Pirates, the operating assumption is that the Player is always welcome to trade at Pirate bases unless the Player has accepted a Commission.  Accepting a Commission means the Player can only dock at Pirate bases if their Transponder is off.

4.  Instead of using the "like-->dislike" meter to determine whether Pirates will attack, if given the chance, it should represent your "street cred" within the Faction.  It should be hard to earn "street cred"; basically, you'll have to do something difficult and illegal.  But if you have enough "street cred", then Pirates who intercept the Player Fleet might choose to leave you alone, because you've gotten a reputation as somebody too dangerous to mess with.

5.  Building "street cred" with the Pirates should involve missions that look like Bounties, but are deliberately acts of opportunistic evil; i.e., "there's a fleet carrying necessary medical supplies to Blah World to end the plague there, but Boss Krank bought their insurance policy and wants them to have an 'accident'.  $200K".

6.  No matter how much "street cred" you have, there's no guarantee that Pirates won't attack you.  "Oh, you think you're so tough, don't you?  Well, I think me and da boys are gonna have to prove you wrong, amigo...".  

7.  As an interesting idea, I think that Pirate Bases should be temporary objects, not permanent, Planet-like objects.  Each time a Pirate Base is established, it'll last until it has run out of Supplies or has been destroyed by the local Faction(s).  Then the Pirate Base disappears and will get replaced in a month or so.  Players should be able destroy them, of course, gaining a lot of Faction rep in the process.  If a Base gains (X) Supplies as a result of successful raids, then more Pirate Bases should spawn.  Potentially, that means that a System could get overrun with Pirates, which sounds like a cool mechanic.

8.  There is never a penalty for killing Pirates or their Bases.  These give you more "street cred".  Getting killed by Pirates, however, loses you "street cred", proportional to the size of the loss.  In an Iron Mode game, this would be an interesting mechanic.

9.  You lose "street cred" over time, if you're not actively doing things that increase it.

10.  Killing Bounties increases "street cred".
« Last Edit: August 16, 2017, 01:57:30 PM by xenoargh »
Logged
Please check out my SS projects :)
Xeno's Mod Pack

Schwartz

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1452
    • View Profile
Re: Pirates Shouldn't Be a Faction
« Reply #1 on: August 16, 2017, 04:43:03 PM »

Some interesting ideas here. One problem I see is that positive street cred (pirate missions, criminal acts.. stuff you decide to do with some heavy rep downsides) and negative street cred (*everybody* kills pirates and nobody cares) effectively net you the same benefit. I would like to see a difference still exist between the pirates knowing you're one of them - an opportunistic criminal - vs. them knowing you are little more than a pirate hunter.

1. There's truth to this, but outlaws also have a common denominator. Pirate havens and some measure of cooperation have historical precedents, and some of these lasted quite a long time.
2. I would almost invert this and say the pirate fleets are *never* hostile unless you are their mark. They wouldn't 'fly the flag' towards anyone unless they were seeing an opportunity or moving in on a designated target.
Some juicy thought I just had: Pirates historically were often people who had been or were still employed by a navy. There could be fleets from other factions who kept their rep clean and just turned their transponder off for the occasional act of lucrative piracy.
3. Probably. If a lawman found his way to a pirate haven and didn't start shooting, they would assume he wasn't all that clean and had come to do business.
4+5. Agreed. I'd expand this to illegal acts in general, as crime seldom goes announced nor do criminals keep records.
6. If you are a juicy target. Combat fleets (unless weak enough or expensive enough) are never juicy targets, and that's what most players fly.
7. I like this for smaller pirate operations. There should be a few permanent havens that the other factions won't touch or actually have dealings with.
8+10. See my opening statement. This one's a problem mostly because it's almost a given that a player gets a lot of pirate kills. I would scratch this point and allow pirates to be more sensible than 'he killed us so we're a little bit more friendly with him now'.
« Last Edit: August 16, 2017, 04:52:29 PM by Schwartz »
Logged

DatonKallandor

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 718
    • View Profile
Re: Pirates Shouldn't Be a Faction
« Reply #2 on: August 16, 2017, 05:51:04 PM »

The problem I've got with Pirates is that they don't act like pirates at all. They act like Psychopaths. A Pirate doesn't want to destroy your ship because that means he gets less stuff. He wants you to give him the stuff voluntarily. Any pirate who does kill the person after they've given him the stuff he wants would very quickly find themselves kicked out of any pirate grouping, because killing the people that comply means very quickly people won't comply because they die anyway.

A Pirate wants a reputation for killing the people that refuse to hand over cargo, but absolutely does not want a reputation for killing people who do. The optimal transaction for a pirate fleet is to comm their target, demand a part of the cargo, get that cargo and leave without a shot fired. Only if they refuse does anybody get killed.

I think Pirates having a faction is fine, historically the tended to loosely group up. In an ideal world there'd be multiple reputation bars for pirates - one for how much pirates in general dislike you (are you a known pirate hunter or affiliated with a major military? you get blasted if possible) and one for how much the individual pirate captain is feared and respected (his "this guy is a proper pirate" reputation) that determines how much he can demand and how likely his demands are to be met without resistance. Random murder sprees, killing people that have already given in to your demands and failing to punish refusal would all be bad for your pirate rep.

But Independents having a faction? And that faction encompasing unaligned civilians, military, smugglers, legitimate traders and opportunistic raiders all sharing a single reputation bar? Now that's just wonky.
« Last Edit: August 16, 2017, 05:54:35 PM by DatonKallandor »
Logged

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12118
    • View Profile
Re: Pirates Shouldn't Be a Faction
« Reply #3 on: August 16, 2017, 06:32:52 PM »

Independents as a single unified faction always feel weird, especially with double agents (i.e., smugglers and salvagers) that cause bug-like problems with reputation.

I am fine with pirates being bloodthirsty, because the player is the bigger pirate (with good publicity) that manages to get rich off of killing things.  There is practically no difference between privateering and piracy except the privateer gets better pay and better access to goodies.  Pirates (in Starsector) are just (chaotic) stupid amateurs.

Also, we need low-level vermin to throw as fodder to our growing murder-machine controlled by the player.  Might as well be pirates.
« Last Edit: August 16, 2017, 06:35:12 PM by Megas »
Logged

DatonKallandor

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 718
    • View Profile
Re: Pirates Shouldn't Be a Faction
« Reply #4 on: August 17, 2017, 04:39:02 AM »

Also, we need low-level vermin to throw as fodder to our growing murder-machine controlled by the player.  Might as well be pirates.

Isn't that what deserters - which by the way, just got a huge lore bump (turns out the Hegemony has a big 'officers keep turning into warlords' problem) - and remnants/redacted are for?
Logged

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12118
    • View Profile
Re: Pirates Shouldn't Be a Faction
« Reply #5 on: August 17, 2017, 06:21:34 AM »

As implemented in the game (which may feature obvious gameplay-and-story segregation elements like pre-0.8 Aurora), deserters are mid-to-end-game enemies; they are non-pirate factions with the pirate flag.  (They do not feel like pirates at all, just Hegemony/TriTach/Luddic/League fleets with a color or flag swap.)  Remnants appear to be vanilla's Templars - an endgame enemy.

Current true pirates pilot clunkers, and they do not even use capitals except a Legion (and I only see those in named bounties with "notorious pirate" instead of random encounters).
Logged

Schwartz

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1452
    • View Profile
Re: Pirates Shouldn't Be a Faction
« Reply #6 on: August 17, 2017, 07:40:56 AM »

There could be a distinction between psychotic raiders that fly early game junkers and chase you for the thrill and the scrap / slaves / whatever, and real pirates out to take a bite out of shipping lanes. I'd love a solid pirate faction, and it feels a missed opportunity to lump all cheap threats in with them and declare that the entire faction gets the worst hulls. The player can capture and repair ships from various factions - so could they.
Logged

FooF

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1378
    • View Profile
Re: Pirates Shouldn't Be a Faction
« Reply #7 on: August 17, 2017, 07:56:14 AM »

I'm all for more pirate mechanics and I generally agree with Schwartz in regards to the OP's suggestions.

That being said, I think it would take a lot of work to fine-tune the pirate-side into parity with running with a faction. The lynchpin, as DatonKallandor points out, is negotiating with intended targets. There are true psycopaths out there but the pirates that honored their word were the most successful (even if their word meant "surrender or die.") How that would work in SS, that couldn't be cheesed by exploiting the AI, remains to be seen. We don't need Civilization-level bargaining but it does need to be intelligent to a degree.

Likewise, if you do go the pirate route, you need more than random patrols hunting you down. You, the player, need to have a bounty on your head if you go all-in. Perhaps instead of going after named fleets, named fleets come after you if you linger in one place too long (just like named bounties are "rumored to be hiding in out near X in the Y system.") The more reputation/street cred you get, the easier it is to track you down.

Again, the point of all gameplay mechanics is to get you into combat so the pirate route has to not only be lucrative but continuously push you toward battle. Perhaps the primary difference between being a pirate and not is that you don't get to choose the big battles as much as they choose you. If you're unable to deal with the mark on your head, you might have to lay low or go legit.
Logged

xenoargh

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 5078
  • naively breaking things!
    • View Profile
Re: Pirates Shouldn't Be a Faction
« Reply #8 on: August 17, 2017, 09:32:40 AM »

In general, whether one is an outright Pirate or is a Privateer, one should get chased by enemy fleets of sufficient strength to bring you to battle and win.

I think that the general tendency to have the Pirates act more like the Pathers is preferable to their current behavior; I agree with the critique that they're acting more like suicidal fools than like actual pirates would. 

I agree that there might be better ways to handle the mechanic, but mainly I was thinking, "what would impress pirates".  If you're, say, a long-time mercenary for one of the Factions and you've killed thousands of pirates over the time you've been in the Sector... you'd think they'd be inclined to leave you the heck alone, unless they vastly out-numbered you; unlike, say, a military detachment under orders, a pirate has zero incentive to get into a fight when they're almost certain to take major losses.
Logged
Please check out my SS projects :)
Xeno's Mod Pack

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12118
    • View Profile
Re: Pirates Shouldn't Be a Faction
« Reply #9 on: August 17, 2017, 12:10:28 PM »

@ xenoargh:  I agree.  Pathers are more pirate-y than pirates.
Logged

TrashMan

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1325
    • View Profile
Re: Pirates Shouldn't Be a Faction
« Reply #10 on: August 23, 2017, 04:45:32 AM »

The problem I've got with Pirates is that they don't act like pirates at all. They act like Psychopaths. A Pirate doesn't want to destroy your ship because that means he gets less stuff. He wants you to give him the stuff voluntarily. Any pirate who does kill the person after they've given him the stuff he wants would very quickly find themselves kicked out of any pirate grouping, because killing the people that comply means very quickly people won't comply because they die anyway.

A Pirate wants a reputation for killing the people that refuse to hand over cargo, but absolutely does not want a reputation for killing people who do. The optimal transaction for a pirate fleet is to comm their target, demand a part of the cargo, get that cargo and leave without a shot fired. Only if they refuse does anybody get killed.

True.

Also, I always though reputation with pirates is odd. They don't have a intel network. Unless you do all your killing with a transponder on and transmitting videos of you killing pirates, I don't think any pirate would know who you are.

Pirates SHOULD ask for credits/cargo and (generally) leave you if you comply.
They should be cautious if you have your transponder off.
They may or may not attack you, depending on how lucrative a target you might be (types of ships, number) and your fame (which is something you'd get by great acts - taking part in important large battles, taking out a big bounty, etc.. with your transponder on)
Logged