Starsector > Suggestions

Commisions Reloaded; How Commissions Should Really Work

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Agile:
So I saw a thread up talking about commisissions and how in their current state they are basically free money and not very intuitive.

Well, I have an idea, based on what was talked about, to make Commisions actually do what they are supposed to do: force you to fight your factions enemies.

For starters:

- Base commission pay is removed or made subsidy base. Only enough to pay for your supply usage, and thats it. Should be easy to calculate; commision would be based on your supplies a day used times how many days there are in the current month, payed out at the end of the month.
- Enemy frigate bounty is upped to be more like bounty pay.

This isn't the end of the rework to commissions, however. With a commission, you get access to:

- Faction specific bounties. Instead of pirate bounties, you get random bounties of your factions enemies. They will be located in CORE WORLDS instead of in the outer rim, and pay out better, but would be more difficult because half the bounties will be in systems controlled by enemy factions (hence you have to sneak a lot then move in for the kill or be too big to fail).
- Faction bounties scale based on your REPUTATION with your commissioned faction, and your fleet composition. If you have a high reputation, you get higher paying bounties in systems that are semi-friendly to you. For example, you are Hegemony commissioned and are enemies with Tri Tachyon but you are Cooperative reputation with Hegemony. You get a faction bounty for a enemy fleet the same size as you BUT its located in a system with a Hegemony colony AND a Tri Tachyon colony (so you get backup).

If your rep is lower, however, you get more dangerous bounties (to prove yourself) with a mix of less dangerous but much less lucrative bounties (to gain enough cash to be able to do more dangerous bounties). These lesser bounties will be orders to hit enemy faction trade convoys; they will be found via the below new feature described below.

The next one, however, is a game changer:

- Faction commissions in times of war give you comm sniffer access (which is unrevokable unlike comm sniffers that have a chance of being removed) to a random amount of enemy factions systems. The explanation behind this is that you get access to your factions spy network, aka their hard coded back doors and secret informants, allowing you to choose your battles against your factions enemies. The higher your reputation, the more enemy system's comms you have access to. This is capped, however, so that you don't abuse it by taking a commission, going to war with all factions, and hence getting access to all their comms.

The way this works is if your at war with only one faction, and your at Cooperative with your faction, you have access to ALL of the enemy factions system comms. However, if your faction is at war with 2 factions, you only get half of EACH. This is explained away with "stretched resources"; your faction can't moniter everything through its spy networks.


This suggestion forces you to actually work for your money (like a real commission; your a made man for the military of your faction, not a freelancer loafing off of them), but also gives you perks for being part of the faction besides military markets. The payouts for actually fighting (which is the point of the game; conflict) are huge while doing nothing would barely cover your costs. And it gives the player the tools necessary to fight his commissioned factions enemies instead of just handing him money and pointing him at a enemy, hoping he'd help them.

Takion Kasukedo:
Surprised that no-one responded or touched on this. The faction-specified bounties sounds like a bit of fun, but the removal of pirate bounties doesn't seem all too good, considering that at any time, the bounty may defect to groups like the Pirates and the Luddic Path, or even (mod-wise) the Starlight Cabal, or other pirate-based factions, so maybe the keeping of pirate bounties would be important. Just knock those types down to 10/30% of what they are now.

The comms-commission access seems like a decent one to have in fore and probable hindsight. Being able to pick your battles and take out important commanders, bases and disrupting enemy factions is almost bound to get the gears moving.

intrinsic_parity:
I'm 100% on board with making commissions more demanding.

I completely agree with making the base pay just enough to cover supply and fuel expenses, although maybe that could be capped based on you reputation.

I like the idea of new additional bounties from your commissioned faction, but I don't see any reason to remove or alter pirate bounties when you get a commission. Pirates are enemies of the faction so why would the faction stop offering bounties on them when you joined? As long as the other bounties are proportionally more profitable (based on difficulty), people will do them. Maybe an overall reduction in payment for pirate bounties could be argued for, but I don't think there's any reason to remove them when you get a commission.

I also think reverse scaling on bounties (getting harder bounties early on) is an obtuse and difficult to explain idea. The player will likely take a commission, see a bunch of super hard bounties and never try to go any further with the mechanic. Better to start will easy/low paying/inconsequential bounties and then scale up to the difficult/high paying/meaningful bounties. Usually that's how you gain trust: by doing the grunt work for a while. Then you get the big important missions later on. It does sound super fun to get a super high paying assignation bounty on some admiral deep in enemy space, but I would want that to be an end game challenge, not something you get thrown at you right after you join a faction which could be super early on.

I think comms access would need to do more for the last bit to matter. I rarely bother with them because they just don't seem to matter to me. I could be missing something though.

I've also always thought commissions should be tied to being a colony governor and having the manage the threats on a particular system. That could be part of it as well. Another idea is to have some consequence for not helping your faction. If you take the commission and do nothing, there should be some consequence like reputation ticking down every month or something. Maybe you have a quota of hostile ships or missions that you have to meet to maintain your standing.

bobucles:
Commission scaling is kind of a strange mechanic. What if difficulty rating scaled with your reputation level? The galaxy isn't really being flooded with thicker fleets of more dangerous pirates, instead you are gaining trust and end up getting higher risk jobs as a result.

Fleet scaling also does some bad things if you get destroyed in battle. If you get knocked down but the bounties all stay as super high risk, you're stuck in a pretty bad situation. Smaller bounties certainly shouldn't fall off the map, but they will naturally be ignored by players seeking out the bigger fish.

DatonKallandor:
Commissions are fine right now, there's absolutely no need to nerf them whatsoever. The player isn't even paid that much, it's peanuts. There'd be no reason to take on the risk of a commission for just your upkeep and no more.

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