I'm not sure how much terrain can solve this. Imagine something like an end-game bounty battle where cruisers or even capitals are legitimately being deployed by both sides. Even when they have a Paragon on the field, the enemy Admiral might be a level 20 officer commanding from an Afflictor, which depending on how the AI feels like flying it is pretty likely to live through the main battle and survive a pursuit scenario, probably either by itself or with some other phase frigates and such. The heavy duty fleet you brought for the primary battle can't and shouldn't be able to chase down a handful of burn 10 frigates, and any scenario where it can probably just means the AI is making unnecessary mistakes or doesn't understand some new game mechanic. Of course, as it currently stands you can't park your cruisers and split off with your own fast movers for an exhilarating chase sequence, so instead what happens is that if the enemy Admiral happened to be one of those escaping frigates then you just don't get paid for wiping out a deserter's band the size of a system defense fleet (or sometimes you do, but only because the AI flew back into your fleet of its own accord for no discernible reason, which isn't really a satisfying way to achieve your goals). "Destroy this large enemy fleet" is a very different job from "hunt down this fast moving enemy frigate" and you probably shouldn't be able to be good at both with the same fleet, but sometimes you come to do one and end up having to do the other and you don't have any way to switch fleets on the fly.
A simple, short-term fix might just be putting the Admiral into the largest non-civilian hull in their fleet. Later on, when you add more detailed mechanics around pursuit etc, you can look at adding more depth to admiral assignments.
Did that. A good thing for now, regardless of how stuff pans out; thanks for the suggestion.
I just got punished -5 for not being hostile with the independents from Hegemony. I thought the idea was you didn't have to pick only one. And I am being punished so frequently I don't have a chance to run around the galaxy picking fights with every single other faction to maintain my standing with one.
You're limited to one, and it opens up lots of hostilities. The point is that
you pick one, rather than it happening through investigations and such. But once you pick a faction, yeah, that's how it's going to go.
I feel like something has to be wrong with smuggling investigations. A while ago I incurred an investigation after picking up a couple of AM blasters and disregarded it because it's just a pair of guns, who cares. Later the investigation hit me with an about 100 point penalty, breaking my almost cooperative relations and my commission, but I was able to load just far enough back to burndrive over and pay a big ass bribe. More recently, I incurred another investigation after offloading 40 units of drugs and tried to go pay the bribe, but a patrol decided to orbit the respective planet for at least an ingame month. I eventually loaded back and went off to do other stuff before returning, where I had the choice of eating a 124 point penalty or paying a bribe of 192,000 credits.
It seems that investigations that find you guilty always set you to about -30 relations and always entail absolutely enormous bribes. I could understand if it was a neutral faction and I was drowning their black markets in drugs, weapons, and organs, but in this case the most I'm doing is occasionally buying the odd rare weapon or offloading some drugs looted from pirates and with a faction that I'm cooperative with and hold a commission. Honestly, the smuggling investigation system right now feels just as random and arbitrary as the old boarding system and likewise only results in frustration.
The bribe amount sounds way wrong. It's supposed to max out at 100k credits when the investigation has a maxed out chance of starting/finding you guilty. If it's just a minor BM purchase here and there, the bribe shouldn't rise much about 10k.
Checked into it a bit - looks like there's a bug where it wasn't being properly capped, but still, to get to 192k credits, the probability of an investigation (i.e. suspicion level) had to go to almost 200%. Which would require selling a *lot* of stuff on the black market, or for the market to be really small. So I suppose it's possible that this is a legitimate outcome - if you sold 40 drugs at a premium to a very small market, then this might have happened, but it still sounds unlikely. I just tried selling 40 drugs to a size 5 market, and the investigation chance from that was 20%. so to get to 190% or so? I suppose it
is possible, with a market with a lower trade volume and high stability. Are you sure that black market ship purchases and such weren't involved?
Anyway, the major difference in effect from selling the same amount on a small vs large market is rather hidden from the player... hm. Something I'll need to look at, for sure. Right now smuggling investigations are there so that there's a real risk to smuggling (plus, sneaking into a market to pay a bribe can be fun, though the issue there is it just interrupts whatever you were doing, and that can be annoying, hence the long duration); but might be able to find another way of accomplishing the same thing.