For a while, I had a bunch of 200k bounties (around cycle 209) until I slaughtered several (with close wins), then the bounties spiked to 300k+ multi-capital slugfests. I am not sure time scaling is to blame, but the old-fashioned fleet kill scaling may be too fast now that ships are more expensive and harder to obtain, meaning slower fleet build-up than before.
But yes, there is a noticeable spike from 200k to 300k. Also, 300k+ can vary from a few capitals that are not too difficult to destroy with a similar fleet of your own, to another with ten or so capitals and the rest filled mostly with cruisers, and because there is no way to deploy that much metal at once even with map size 500, it will be a real slog. At map size 300, such multi-capital fights devolve into 3v3, or even 2v2 if one of the ships involved is Paragon.
Agreed on the scaling. I like bounties that push the capabilities of my current fleet and my piloting / commanding, but as fleet sizes increase to slog-levels, I lose interest.
Starsector has my favorite combat mechanics in a game, period. I recognize I'm very much on the side of combat-as-sport, but I think where that combat shines most brightly is when the player reaches the point where they must contend and consider the capabilities and merits of EACH ship class. Once bounty fleets scale outside of that realm I think the magic of the combat system falls apart, and it either turns into a drawn out slog, or requires the use of exploitative or degenerate strategies to succeed.
I think there is a place and time for slog-level capital slugfests, but I don't think these should be the norm, especially towards the latter half of the game. Battles in starsector that take a long time to complete due to enemy fleets greatly exceeding the battle size cap, and thus trickle deploying a procession large ships for the player to chew through
really start to drag when they become the norm.
If exploitative or degenerate strategies are required for late-game content, I lose interest, because at that point, I'm bypassing the systemic interactions that made the game interesting for me in the first place. Further, this ruins the strategic side of gameplay for me as well. A solved tactical layer means that incorrect strategic decisions will have much less impact on the player, as they can cheese their way through the content that would otherwise punish them for these mistakes.
When battles start to go towards this end of the spectrum, I find myself abandoning my savegame. Fleet building and battling for these purposes is not interesting to me, as I find it lacks any nuance or variety.