As you can probably guess from the title I think a bounty system should be implemented. It would be fantastic if you could pay an empire or pirates to declare war on an empire or even just attack (capture) a planet for you. I recommend payment be in a half now half after the job is done, in order to avoid human players taking complete advantage of the CPU AI. However, what makes this different from other games is that the puppeteer would remain completely anonymous, at least for a period of time. Of course in the diplomacy screen there would have to be a feature where you can contact pirates.



I think there should be benefits and drawbacks for choosing to hire pirates or an empire.



If you hire pirates you get to remain completely anonymous even if they fail. I say almost because after so many turns of a pirate onslaught the person being attacked will receive a notification that some empire has placed a bounty on them. That's it, the actual player who placed the bounty will not be revealed, though perhaps looking through relationships and who has enough money etc. can decipher who placed the bounty. Unless the bounty states the pirates capture a planet (instead of destroy) on the empire's behalf. In which case that would be a dead giveaway. A huge con though is the pirates may betray you can capture a planet and not hand it over.



The pros of hiring an empire to do your dirty work is just that, you have an entire empire fighting your war and you don't have to. However, while you're not at war, the person who accepts the bounty immediately declares war on the player the bounty is on. The main con is that if the bounty hunting empire is losing the war, a new trade option is available when trying to get a peace treaty and that's giving up the empire that hired them to declare war. If this happens the relationship between those two empires will drop to dangerously low levels.



What do you all think?

Sounds like a lot of programming but gotta love the idea! Would have been a great addition to the single player game imho.





PS. guess the thread should be moved to Design Proposal forum

Good idea sounds alot like what they do on sins of solar empire

That would be fun, probably a combat re-work expansion/dlc.

good idea- name could be a bit better though.



I think in general the devs have chosen names very well. Setting aside a few like sophons, UE, Sheradyn, & Horatio that don't play by "the rules", pretty much every race's name follows the same set of convetions:

• each race name is a single word noun
• the noun reflects the nature of the race
• the noun is not the perfect literal description of what the race does(for example the sowers aren't just called "the terraformers" or "the industry-eaters")
• the noun chosen is uncommon enough that it feels right for a race rather then a fairly common archetype of organization.
  
  

Other names I could see fitting the idea fairly well include:



the Renegades, The Unfettered, the Blackguards(ok, maybe a bit overdramatic), The Charlatans, the Privateers, The Rovers, The Unrest, The Outcasts,The untrusted.





Well I'm sure someone else can come up with something even better- but Bounty Hunters just doesn't feel like it has quite the right ring to fit in with the other races- good thematic idea though.

sounds like a shameless rip fron Sins to me too. Doesnt have to be a bad thing tho.



Such a feature would make certain builds pretty hard to beat tho. Picture a dust-heavy race being able to simply "swamp" you with pirate-funded attacks making it a 2 versus 1 affair. I dislike the fact that you "have" to have certain traits in multi-player matches in order to stay competetive. This would just make the issue bigger IMO.