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Bounties and spies


Ratatarata
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I have seen a lot of discussions on the different ways to tweak the espionage system in the game and I thought I should highlight what I liked here:

- Alex said something about using the logarithmic scale to tone down the power difference between different numbers of spies.

- Reducing the amount of damage spies can do to military units which are currently overkill.

I would primarily like to write on the subject of bounties. 

Suggestions:

1. Spies should be able to investigate the identity of who placed bounties. 

2. In fact, we could go further by giving it two tiers: Open bounties where the client’s name is visible or closed (anonymous) bounties where  50 spies would have a 5 %  chance of detecting the client’s name.  The closed bounties should cost 25% more while the open one will remain free. I would leave it to the community to decide whether the closed bounties can only be investigated by the victim over like 3 times or can be open to the alliance members with lower odds for detection in each try). 

3. I would leave it the community to debate whether or not bounties should be time limited, starting from 3 months real world time to say 6 months. With the option to renew given to the client who placed the bounty. After like 6 months, the bounty is automatically rescinded. A new bounty would then have to be placed and the money will be lost for the client. 

4. Multi campaign bounties which can be graded as part of a package along with what I call a lower limit. If someone achieves the lower limit, the remaining amount should be refunded to the client.  Say I want to place a $50 million bounty on someone for 5K infra damage. I want  to specify how he should be attacked across multiple campaigns with the money divided between each incremental step/ milestone (aka infra damage). 500 infra is the lower limit here.
Like for 5 K infra damage: 500 infra- 5 million, 1K infra- 10 million, 3 K infra-15 million, 5 K infra- 20 million. 

This way, even if I can only damage 3K infra across all the campaigns, I can elect to receive 30 million and pull out of the campaign. 20 million would be given to the client. Or the game could refund 75% of that. Any way Alex choses. 

I realise we would have to introduce the concept of a campaign. Two wars will be considered part of a campaign if the ending of one war and the beginning of the next are no more than 2 weeks apart.  There would be a  max no of wars that count: say 3.

Please consider the above :)
 

Edited by Ratatarata
Defining "campaign"
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I would really have to strongly object to your proposed changes to spies; right now they are hugely underpowered against military and only really overpowered against other spies... but there, they are really quite hugely overpowered at that. Honestly I don't even know how you could make them less powerful; right now they can destroy a couple of planes 3/4 of the time. Would you have them destroy one plane half the time?

As for the bounty thing, bounties are anonymous for a reason. That reason is to allow and enable indirect competition without forcing that competition to become direct. Having options to attack in secret, even (if not especially) indirectly, helps keep the political environment from becoming stagnant and solidly stratified. The last thing we want is for anyone to be able to "win" with no further potential for meaningful conflict or change.

Still, there may be times when a non-anonymous bounty is something that the bountier wants. Thus, the option to set your bounty as non-anonymous should be there. The issue with having different prices for bounties though is that there's a simple enough way to ensure bounty anonymity against spies or even cursory administrative investigation: Send the cash to a pirate and pay him to place it. Bam, untraceable. This is how the pros place bounties in another game that has a cheap-but-public/expensive-but-semi-private bounty system.

Time limits in my mind are also counter-productive, since it takes a LOT of encouragement to really get pixel-hugging whales to play at all, much less actually risk their precious little numbers on warfare. The way I see it, one million isn't enough at all to get a war started. However, if that million sits around on a nation and is added to over months and years, then eventually it *will* be valuable enough to trigger a war, or at least be valuable enough to give enough extra encouragement to the factions that would be considering war but wouldn't have been quite willing to.

Campaigns and paying out bounty based on infra damage... YES PLEASE! The one problem with that is it would be perfectly possible to missile one city's raw material production down and rebuild to 350, missile again, rebuild... just in order to siphon off the bounty without actually doing real damage. But if we restrict the infra damage considered to only being infra destroyed by conventional battles or beige damage, then that would be tremendously awesome.

Edited by Sir Scarfalot
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