Oolite Bulletins

Dear all

Vampire pirates, which are often horribly beweaponed (multiple lasers, and cloaking devices) always seem to have (but only when encountered in deep space?) small bounties (under 30 credits or so). This doesn't seem right, given the amount of effort it takes to kill them.

Somewhat relatedly: why do some NPC ships seem to have a kind of double cloak, such that they don't show up on the scanner (a la the old bit of kit call 'M.A.S.K.) *and*, when attacked, they start to flicker on and off on one's main display?

The bounties are set at 1000cr but i think there's some inbuilt limit that stops that?

that effect is two different pieces of kit - the cloak (the flicker) and the scanner jammer (the non-appearance on your scope).

The limit kicks in if they're created as generic pirates by the system populator. If you change the roles definition to make it extremely unlikely for them to appear automatically, then add vampire pirates to specific systems via script, the bounty shouldn't be overridden anymore.

This limitation was put in place ages ago following a bug report on this forum, and it's also meant to encourage oxp makers to be specific when designing unique baddies, if I remember correctly.

You might want to change the Vampires roles from pirate to pirate(0.01)...to at least make them very rare as random enemies.

Kaks wrote:

The limit kicks in if they're created as generic pirates by the system populator.

When I remember correctly, I made a small tweak to the populator code that when auto_ai is false, it not only keeps the original AI but also the original bounty. That makes bounties for the populator added ships also consistent with script added ships.
So, in order to keep your high bounties, you have to create a ship with only a pirate role and an explicit "pirateAI.plist" with auto_ai to false.

I'd probably just script a death-action to yield bounty, but that would likely be considered rather oldschool and crude. :p