In the stock scenario, no matter how many traders you pirate or craft you destroy in a system, the local authorities never seem to do anything to combat the problem.

So I was trying to think of ways to remedy that.

One way wold to have bounty hunter "missions" where when you land at a stellar where your legal record is bad, there's a chance of triggering an unrefuseable mission that says something along the lines of "as you land in the spaceport, you notice a squadron of heavily armed men conversing with a station attendant. You realize suddenly that the station attendant is gesturing toward your ship, and you see one of the men reaching for a holstered blaster. You think now may be a good time to make a hasty exit." And the mission spawns a bounty hunter ship that chases you until you destroy it. Perhaps you could have multiple copies of the mission with harder and harder enemies requiring greater combat rating and lower legal rating to simulate more heat being poured on as you get a worse reputation.

However it would be nice to have a mission as well that generally increases the number of patrolling ships if too many freighters/military ships get destroyed. Figuring out how to trigger it is a bit tricky though. You could have random mission ships from a cron started mission that appear like background ships but when they get destroyed it starts a heightened security mission for that system. There's a couple problems with that, though, first, mission ships can't be boarded so a wise player can defeat that by simply not destroying the ships that aren't boardable, and second it seems like it would take up an awful lot of mission resources--one for each system that that's supposed to happen in. Unless there's a simpler way to do it than how I'm thinking of.

So... any thoughts?

It would take lots of time and effort, but this would probably give results best meshed with the Nova universe as is.

Make one mission PER SPÖB (that's the tough part) that triggers if the player's legal status is low enough. When you hit that status and land, a mission goes off that swaps the system in question out for one with heightened patrols.

Of course, that's an immense amount of effort. Here's a much easier, more across-the-board solution. You'll need an understanding of counter cröns to get it.

Make a counter crön that fires on, say, b2000. Make larger freighter ships (leviathans, pegasi) set b2000, bumping the counter crön up one. Once it hits, say, b2020, all systems of the appropriate gövt will switch over to more heavily patrolled systems. As an alternative to system-swapping, you could instead make some new instances of large government warships (Carriers, Cruisers etc.) that are identical to the originals but with, again, say b2020 under the "appear on" field. Then, place them in düde files along with the other, smaller craft that tend to patrol systems (and give them a high %chance within that düde). When you hit that particular bit, those ships will be interspersed into the düdes you modified, and with their high %chance, they will become much more common. Of course, in systems with few patrols to start with, this will have less of an effect; it will just make what patrol ships there are larger.

In going with the mission that makes a bunch of guys appear, I would suggest that you make it invisible. That way, it will be a surprise when you blast off and encounter 8 angry Carriers. Of course, there's also nothing stopping you from combining these ideas as well.

P.S. I like your mission description. You've got a good handle on Nova writing style. :laugh:

There's something like that, but with dominated planets or somesuch. Still, I think it is a good idea.

përs 1150 is the bounty hunter. Comes after the player when at least one spöb is dominated.

I think Timmy's referring to the "you see a bunch of ultra buff dudes with guns and decide to GTFO" missions that pop up time to time. A stronger Bounty Hunter would be a nice addition though. Like Unrelenting quality.

Ah. Actually, I was referring to both. Got them mixed up somehow.