Bounty hunter script ideas

I have not coded bounty hunters yet, but I wanted to post a few ideas on that script.

Bounty hunters should need some information to track the player. Right now we track every attack the player make (to credit reputation). If at the same time we put a permanant waypoint called “players last attack” at that position then the bounty hunter script can use it to move to nearby stations.

Once nearby it just waits for the next fight to break out, and moves closer. Sooner or later, it will end up at the same station as the player.

The player can delay the arrival of the bounty hunter by refusing to fight. Then the bounty hunter tags along a few stations behind the player. If the player ends up doubling back, he encounters the bounty hunter.

The bounty hunters are not suicidal and won’t move to stations that are hostile, or areas that have a hostile government. So the player can flee if they want. But it should still make the player feel very hunted.

I am thinking there should be fairly regular emails threatening the players life. That’s for the basic script.

A couple of varients:

Mercenaries: Instead of the hostile faction launching its own bounty hunters, they hire out with one of the mercenary factions that are in the Middle States. They tend to be able to go where opposing governments cannot.

Assassin: No threats from this script. It moves faster. Has less ships. Maybe ships with higher stealth value. Uses an “independent” IFF code. Sneaks up to point blank range and tries to kill the player.

We have two different ways to handle launching these scripts. The first is the standard way. If the player has a hostile faction rating, the script gets launched.

There is a second possibility. Because the reputation code now tracks the amount of damage the player does in any one day, we could launch the script when the player does some really horrible one day killing sprees. Or takes down a station or something worth a lot of points.

Or it could be a mix of these two.

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