Oolite Bulletins

For those unwilling to go down the full-on  Random Hits route, I've been thinking about possible ways to make bounty-hunting a bit more involving and (hopefully) interesting, without making too many changes to core gameplay.

Basically, the only difference would be when the player scoops an escape pod carrying a pirate. When docking, instead of immediately giving the rescued criminal up to GalCop, the game would generate a system where the pirate is Most Wanted. The player would then have the option to take the criminal that system for a large payout, or decline. If declined, the pirate would be turned over to the local cops as usual; but if the player accepted, the pirate would then become a sort of passenger mission, although without a time limit. On arrival at the destination system station, player gets a substantially bigger bounty - probably in the Cr1000–2000 range.

This could also involve an extra piece of equipment. The simple version would just be a the need to purchase (and keep renewed) a Bounty Hunting licence. If you have a valid licence then you get the option to keep wanted pirates onboard as 1-tonne special "cargo" items. A slightly more complex version might be to have a Holding Cell/Ship's Brig as a purchasable piece of equipment (instead of? along with? the licence), which would take up space as per a passenger cabin but which could hold 4 (?) pirates for the space of one passenger.

Further refinements might involve generating a few random "revenge" attacks - one-off muggings by a pirate band who would announce their reason for attacking the player. Not for every pirate delivered, but occasionally: small injections of consequences would help give the game a fuller experience, I think.

This is nowhere near the complexity of Random Hits, with target ships to hunt, seedy space-bars, etc., but it might make bounty-hunting more interesting for those who see it as an occasional sideline and not a full-on career …

Further refinements might involve generating a few random "revenge" attacks - one-off muggings by a pirate band who would announce their reason for attacking the player.

You could very occasionally capture a pirate boss, worth substantially more. In which case, you might have rival bounty-hunters on your six too.

The Bounty Hunter's License already exists in GalCop's Most Wanted. As for the rest of it, unique ideas that read well to me and would be well worth implementing. Check with phkb to see if he would be interested in implementing them into the aforementioned OXZ as it seems a logical place for them. Cannot hurt to ask.

I'll put it on the list...

I can certainly see the cross-over to GalCop's Most Wanted, but I can also see this operating as a standalone, as I can imagine many players might like the extra pieces without the overhead of the Bounty System and Most Wanted. It should be possible to make such an OXP co-exist, though.

I certainly like the idea, specially to add a brig for your prisoners. While personally I am not much of a friend of the Bounty System I do like GalCop's Most Wanted. In the past I did some test-runs for a more flexible handling of scoped escape pods but I never succeeded, I guess phkb had a similar experience. It seems currently impossible to handle customized pilots after arrival to a station in various ways.

montana05 wrote:

It seems currently impossible to handle customized pilots after arrival to a station in various ways.

The  Escape Pod Tweaks OXP does customised handling of scooped escape pods. Were I to put together something like what is described here, I'd probably start with with OXP.

phkb wrote: ↑Fri Sep 28, 2018 2:25 pm

montana05 wrote:

It seems currently impossible to handle customized pilots after arrival to a station in various ways.

The  Escape Pod Tweaks OXP does customised handling of scooped escape pods. Were I to put together something like what is described here, I'd probably start with with OXP.

I respect you and learned a lot while reading your scripts so no offense meant. My basic idea was kind of simple. depending on the station you dock you got different choices for your rescued passengers, keep them in the ship until reaching a save station or hand them over to their enemies for a nice reward.

With a brig on board filled with prisoners I could think about a small chance that they escape, maybe even take over the ship

montana05 wrote:

so no offense meant.

None taken, all is well! I was just pointing out that everything described here is possible right now - pulling scooped offender pods out of the ship prior to dock, putting them back in as escape pods after launch (if required).

The only thing not possible right now is interrupting the default escape pod processing. If you "hide" an escape pod from the process when docking, you can't stick it back in afterwards and get the processing to occur. If you wanted to ask the player some questions about each offender escape pod, and the player said "no" to transferring them to a brig and instead wanted to offload them now, the credits would need to be manually added to the player. Not hard, but worth knowing. And in the core game, the default handling of credits is a little fuzzy when it comes to insurance and bounty amounts. I'm not sure it would be possible to completely replicate the same system (or even if you'd want to).

I toyed with the idea already when I started to rewrite Galactic Navy, so, to my shame, some years ago. It became more interesting with System Guard Navy (actually just an expanded module of the original Galactic Navy new) where the idea was to drop of an officer at his home system, hand him over to a hostile government or just leave him at a GalCop station. Needless to say my (more experienced) approaches failed as well so, for now, I better concentrate on the ship script again.