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.