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« on: April 04, 2021, 11:30:16 PM »
I didn't have any more trouble keeping afloat in this version compared to previous ones, but I definitely agree that bounties pay too little, and the fleets get too big. I did some bounties early on, but many of the mid and high end difficulty bounties, both the random intel screen ones and the contact ones, simply do not pay enough money to be worth it. It's strangely inconsistent though, sometimes you will see very weak pirate fleets paying around 150,000 and on the other hand one of my contacts offered me a bounty against a fleet of eight guardians in the very farthest corner of the map, for 220,000.
I honestly think a lot of these issues come down to the simple fact that bounty fleets just shouldn't get to 5+ capital ships. I think gigantic fleets like that should only exist with more substantial context and build up, like pirate armadas. First of all it feels really weird in-universe. Why are all these random deserters flying around in fleets way more powerful than anything you see in the core worlds? I don't think the bounties fleets should ever get bigger than system fleets or remnant ordos - one, maybe two capitals and a handful of cruisers. Then you can top off payments where they are and they'll feel worth it. This means to some extent bounty hunting might stop being a very good way to make money in the very late game, but I think that's already the case, and players are expected to do fewer missions and rely more on colonies for your income for the late game (when there's eventually a use for that money).
Now how do you deal with end game combat missions against big fleets if bounties top out? Ideally I think you have them be more rare, pay much better, and have more narrative context than a regular bounty. For example, if you wanted to get the player to fight that eight guardian fleet, you could have something like your contact gets word a colony is going to be attacked by it, launching from some outer system, and you can stop it along the way or fight it in the system like a pirate armada, and you get paid better if you kill it before it gets in-system. Here it feels like a major event: it's going to take a little while to complete, and so you could justify something like a temporary monthly payment (letting the player prepare for the fight without worrying about money) until the fleet is killed, with bonuses depending on how you complete it, and no bonus if you fail. You could have similar versions of this for different factions with something like a Hegemony contact getting you to fight against a TT fleet (if they are currently in conflict) that's trying to raid a Hegemony station or something. This is a bunch more work of course but I figured using the already implemented pirate raids as a framework shows that it's possible.
The spy satellite missions are often just brutally hard, but sometimes incredibly easy, so I'm not sure how to manage those.
