Legal status plus two

[Commander McLane]

A question - I've just tried it and bounty goes down in half each jump, however killing pirates / thargoids does not seem to affect it? Was I wrong in assuming - quoting Reference Sheet: "Performing services for the GCW will repair their reputation." works dynamically? In other words - I thought I can hang in space and keep killing random enemies in order to lower bounty on me and once satisfied with legal status dock?

Nope, it's not that easy.

For the longest time of its existence the Reference Sheet has simply been lying.

However, since Oolite 1.75 there is indeed the possibility to get your own bounty reduced by helping the police. The emphasis is on helping the police. Nobody cares how many pirates and Thargoids you kill out of sight. Killing a pirate or Thargoid while he is in fight with a police ship may earn you a 'thank you' from the police, and maybe a bonus on your bounty. Killing pirates or Thargoids on your own earns you the bounties on their heads, nothing more.

[Tony Montana]

For the longest time of its existence the Reference Sheet has simply been lying.

Ahem. Not the first documentation caught lying.

However, since Oolite 1.75 there is indeed the possibility to get your own bounty reduced by helping the police.
<snip>
Killing a pirate or Thargoid while he is in fight with a police ship may earn you a 'thank you' from the police, and maybe a bonus on your bounty.

There’s a lot of uncertainty in how you’re saying things in your post, I mean: “possibility” and then “may earn you a 'thank you' from the police, and maybe a bonus on your bounty” – can you maybe expand on this instead of me asking lots of question? Does this always work? If no, what governs cops reaction to your actions? Is there a plan to make it work (Reference Sheet way) in future versions? Is there a built-in element of randomness? And so on… As I said: lots of questions.

Nobody cares how many pirates and Thargoids you kill out of sight.

Not to disagree (much) with how this works, but killing “out of sight” works pretty well with getting paid – there seem to be a mechanism that captures kill event, transmits that info to station(?) and rewards in credits immediately. Cops don’t really need to eye witness bounty killing to be able to adjust their disposition (would be nice to have this, maybe negative bounty can be used? with hard cap for balancing?)

(The above is my opinion of course, and has nothing to do with game inner working.)
Thanks.

[Commander McLane]

Well, it seems that (a) being paid bounties and (b) getting a reduction on your own bounty are two unrelated things. Perhaps they are handled by different authorities of GalCop? There's really not much in way of a backstory here, so you can fill the details out with your imagination.

Perhaps think of it like this: if two Mafia families have a shoot-out, and the boss of one family and a lot of his men get killed, that doesn't make the boss and the members of the surviving family any less criminal, does it? If they get caught eventually, this firefight isn't going to get their sentences reduced. At least I wouldn't suspect so. (The US had put a huge bounty on Bin Laden. If Al Qaeda would have killed Afghan drug lords (other criminals), would the US have reduced the bounty on Bin Laden as a token of appreciation? Somehow I don't think so.)

So, one pirate killing other pirates in Oolite also won't make the first pirate any better in the eyes of the law.

That's how it was since the days of Elite. You never could redeem yourself by killing others, and in fact it's not that necessary, because you redeem yourself quite quickly by jumping from system to system. (Elite being originally an 8-bit game, running on computers with just a few KB of RAM, every byte mattered, therefore many of the internal workings were quite crude and simple, not sophisticated at all. I guess your bounty was represented by one byte, and for every jump that byte was rotated to the right, resulting in the rounded-down half of your previous bounty. It's simple and it works, and the player would never notice its crudeness, because the actual number and the mechanism were never exposed to him. Oolite is at its core a re-writing of Elite, therefore it uses the same crude mechanisms.)

The crudeness of this mechanism is exactly what motivated me to write Anarchies.oxp, which replaces the mechanism with a slightly more sophisticated one by script. With Anarchies installed, as long as you are fugitive your bounty is only reduced by 10% per jump, and it is made extra hard to break the barrier down to offender. As a counterbalance, I introduced new means of clearing your status, most of them costing a lot of money. But I also introduced a small chance of bounty-reduction for killing other criminals. Therefore the Reference Sheet was sort of right, but only if you had Anarchies.oxp installed. The bounty reduction was purely randomly, with a 16% chance per kill of a criminal, and it would depend on the bounty of the ship you killed.

It seems the developers of Oolite liked the idea, because they implemented something similar themselves in version 1.74 (not 1.75 as I first posted). It is now part of the fighting code of police ships. IIRC, each time you help a police ship in a fight and get some "thank you for your help"-message from that police ship (which you don't always get), your bounty gets reduced if you make the kill, I don't know by how much. So that's the current state of affairs, and there you have your 'possibilities' and 'maybes'.

The bounty reduction feature in Anarchies.oxp was disabled as a consequence, because if a feature has become part of vanilla Oolite it doesn't need to be mimicked by OXP any longer.

[Tony Montana]

Well, it seems that (a) being paid bounties and (b) getting a reduction on your own bounty are two unrelated things. Perhaps they are handled by different authorities of GalCop? There's really not much in way of a backstory here, so you can fill the details out with your imagination.

Perhaps think of it like this: if two Mafia families have a shoot-out, and the boss of one family and a lot of his men get killed, that doesn't make the boss and the members of the surviving family any less criminal, does it? If they get caught eventually, this firefight isn't going to get their sentences reduced. At least I wouldn't suspect so. (The US had put a huge bounty on Bin Laden. If Al Qaeda would have killed Afghan drug lords (other criminals), would the US have reduced the bounty on Bin Laden as a token of appreciation? Somehow I don't think so.)

This example doesn’t count – Mafia family is an organization, Al Qaeda is a network and drug lords are individuals. Major apples and oranges all around. What would perhaps reduce Bin Laden’s bounty or even let him off the hook is if he’s the only one somehow that could go to the past and whack certain individual (whose name starts with “H” and ends with “r” and the reason we have Godwin’s law) in his infantry. (as suggested, using my imagination )

So, one pirate killing other pirates in Oolite also won't make the first pirate any better in the eyes of the law.

Excuse me, not a pirate here, just RPGing my career as a drugs dealer, really far away from telling cops “say hello to my little friend” (for AQ members reading this – this means I’m too poor to be called a lord and be of any interest to AQ assassins at this moment). Oh I know my crime in US is almost as bad as ‘Nipple Slip on TV show’ but this is a game we are talking about... although based on US mentality game it seems - drug related crimes are twice as bad as slavery(!) and selling weapons, but a game nevertheless, so “umm.. magic” justification still applies.

That's how it was since the days of Elite. You never could redeem yourself by killing others, and in fact it's not that necessary, because you redeem yourself quite quickly by jumping from system to system. (Elite being originally an 8-bit game, running on computers with just a few KB of RAM, every byte mattered, therefore many of the internal workings were quite crude and simple, not sophisticated at all. I guess your bounty was represented by one byte, and for every jump that byte was rotated to the right, resulting in the rounded-down half of your previous bounty. It's simple and it works, and the player would never notice its crudeness, because the actual number and the mechanism were never exposed to him. Oolite is at its core a re-writing of Elite, therefore it uses the same crude mechanisms.)

Yes, I’ve played original on Sinclair (Z80 IC) in all its 64KiB RAM glory, using 16 colour monitor and a tape recorder to boot (pan intended). Elite is the reason I’m playing Oolite now.

The crudeness of this mechanism is exactly what motivated me to write Anarchies.oxp, which replaces the mechanism with a slightly more sophisticated one by script. With Anarchies installed, as long as you are fugitive your bounty is only reduced by 10% per jump, and it is made extra hard to break the barrier down to offender. As a counterbalance, I introduced new means of clearing your status, most of them costing a lot of money. But I also introduced a small chance of bounty-reduction for killing other criminals. Therefore the Reference Sheet was sort of right, but only if you had Anarchies.oxp installed. The bounty reduction was purely randomly, with a 16% chance per kill of a criminal, and it would depend on the bounty of the ship you killed.

It seems the developers of Oolite liked the idea, because they implemented something similar themselves in version 1.74 (not 1.75 as I first posted). It is now part of the fighting code of police ships. IIRC, each time you help a police ship in a fight and get some "thank you for your help"-message from that police ship (which you don't always get), your bounty gets reduced if you make the kill, I don't know by how much. So that's the current state of affairs, and there you have your 'possibilities' and 'maybes'.

The bounty reduction feature in Anarchies.oxp was disabled as a consequence, because if a feature has become part of vanilla Oolite it doesn't need to be mimicked by OXP any longer.

So, let me get it right... to get desired behaviour I’d need either
1.74
or
1.75 + feature enabled (older) Anarchies
is this correct?

[Cody]

just RPGing my career as a drugs dealer,

Oh good, another contrabandista... welcome to the Free Mexican Airforce, sir!

[Disembodied]

I wouldn't worry about trying to find some overarching morality or even logic in Co-operative law. The RL explanation is, it's the way it is because it's derived from a game that had to run in 32K (and the moral background is that of two geeks in their early 20s in Thatcherite Britain, so there are bound to be a few ... oddities, to say the least ). My own personal in-game explanation is, it's the way it is because it has to apply to more than 2,000 different planets, with their own cultures and their own domestic political and legal systems.

Trading in slaves, narcotics and firearms isn't illegal: you can bring in as much as you like. The only illegal thing about them is shipping any quantity of them out of a main system (i.e. GalCop-controlled) station. If you do that, if you leave a main station with just one measly ton of purely medicinal megaweed for your own personal use in your hold, you'll get an Offender tag. It will then be totally legal for anyone passing by to blow you out of the sky. They'll even get a reward for doing so.

The Co-operative barely hangs together: 2,000-plus planets, a huge number of totally different species, human colonists sprinkled all through the mix, endless variations of local politics and separate cultures ... Co-operative law only runs above the air, and it's stripped down to its barest essentials. To call the Co-operative legal code "rough and ready" is an understatement. Commit any crime at all, and you're an outlaw: everybody is against you, anybody can gun you down, pick up your bounty and scoop up your cargo. The plus side, though, is that no matter how dreadful your crime, there's a pretty rapid statute of limitations. Stay out of the way for long enough and the slate's wiped clean again. Nobody has the time, the resources or the inclination to worry about what's fair or what's right, or to see that anything as abstract and culturally specific as "justice" is done: as long as the trade keeps flowing, who cares? If you want justice, head to a Seedy Space Bar and see how much you can afford ...

[Lone_Wolf]

 Elite_Rating


Background

The Elite Federation, an independent body linked to most of the major organisations in Galactic space, introduced the Combat Rating in a drive to spur pilots towards self-defence. The Galactic Co-operative, at the time stretched to the limits of the police force by pirate activity, fully supported this move, even introducing combat training into thier flight training programme.

Over the years, the Combat rating, now more commonly referred to as the Elite Rating, has become an integral part of any pilot's spacefaring life. Various organisations and departments have offered perks to pilots who attain the top rank that has given the system its name. Elite combateers are considered to be honoured veterans amongst pilots and non-pilots alike.

[Commander McLane]

It seems the developers of Oolite liked the idea, because they implemented something similar themselves in version 1.74 (not 1.75 as I first posted). It is now part of the fighting code of police ships. IIRC, each time you help a police ship in a fight and get some "thank you for your help"-message from that police ship (which you don't always get), your bounty gets reduced if you make the kill, I don't know by how much. So that's the current state of affairs, and there you have your 'possibilities' and 'maybes'.

The bounty reduction feature in Anarchies.oxp was disabled as a consequence, because if a feature has become part of vanilla Oolite it doesn't need to be mimicked by OXP any longer.

So, let me get it right... to get desired behaviour I’d need either
1.74
or
1.75 + feature enabled (older) Anarchies
is this correct?

I think my first parenthesis was confusing. What I wanted to say is that the behaviour outlined in the paragraph is the standard Oolite behaviour since version 1.74. (In my first post I had mistakenly written 'since 1.75'; I just wanted to correct this error.) This only means that the change was made a little earlier than I had first thought.

Bottom line: if you're running the latest version of Oolite (1.75.2) you will get the occasional bounty reduction if you help a cop, without any OXPs at all.

[Eric Walch]

It seems the developers of Oolite liked the idea, because they implemented something similar themselves in version 1.74 (not 1.75 as I first posted). It is now part of the fighting code of police ships. IIRC, each time you help a police ship in a fight and get some "thank you for your help"-message from that police ship (which you don't always get), your bounty gets reduced if you make the kill, I don't know by how much.

Its 20% reduction of the bounty. It seemed somehow stupid to thank a ship but do nothing in reward. . But, after the police is ready it will scan for offenders again and still will find you. Adding special code to exclude such pilots from being found in the next scan was a bit to much trouble.

[Commander McLane]

It seems the developers of Oolite liked the idea, because they implemented something similar themselves in version 1.74 (not 1.75 as I first posted). It is now part of the fighting code of police ships. IIRC, each time you help a police ship in a fight and get some "thank you for your help"-message from that police ship (which you don't always get), your bounty gets reduced if you make the kill, I don't know by how much.

Its 20% reduction of the bounty. It seemed somehow stupid to thank a ship but do nothing in reward. . But, after the police is ready it will scan for offenders again and still will find you. Adding special code to exclude such pilots from being found in the next scan was a bit to much trouble.

In other words, the well-behaved cop

(1) thanks you,
(2) reduces your bounty by 20% and
(3) attacks you, in that order.



At which point your bounty goes up again, because in order to defend yourself you have to kill the cop.

[Cody]

Yep... that's the 'fun' part of helping GalCop's finest.

[Commander McLane]

I have to admit that I never encountered this in-game, because I'm usually totally clean.

[JensAyton]

At which point your bounty goes up again, because in order to defend yourself you have to kill the cop.

That’s not actually the only option. :-)

[Commander McLane]

At which point your bounty goes up again, because in order to defend yourself you have to kill the cop.

That’s not actually the only option.

Well, I'll call it the natural option.

[Switeck]

Other options are docking with a nearby station, hyperspacing away, fleeing on injectors (hopefully), or forcing the cop to flee...though sadly the last one can only be done by jacking your bounty way high.