I love pirates. I hate the min-max pirates going for the ore silo, killing everyone and generally being wannabe Nukies.
1728 Space Pirates
Recently I had the idea of making a scuffed wooden shuttle version of the pirates.
These pirates would have a subpar shuttle (a scuffle if you will) with four sets of blast doors to manage the visibility of the turrets. If you have both of them open the turrets in the back may fire on the other turrets in the front.
This then expanded to then having a third tier of pirates.
Increasing Pirate Threat
Currently people dislike how you are effectively able to pay antagonists to never spawn. I want to solve this by making multiple tiers of pirates, with the 1728 Space Pirates being tier 1 who will demand a low sum of money and the existing default Space Pirates being tier 2 who will demand a moderate amount of money. When you pay off the first pirates you’ll be free from the threat but they’ll then come back for more with a bigger shuttle, it will allow Command to decide whether they wish to show the pirates they are capable of defending themselves or not. The lower the tier the less they cost to pay off and the less time you got to respond.
The final tier 3 Death Pirates I have only been thinking about a bit loosely but I’d like to have it be a “final boss” kind of thing that will demand more or less ALL money on the station, including IDs and lose change (with a small window of error) and give you a good amount of time to collect it all (which in of itself will lead to interesting RP situations). If you fail to pay these pirates off you’ll be met with some OP pirates meant to bring the shift to a close via brute force.
Death Pirates Gear
I know I want to include a mech in their ranks but what kind and what effect it’d have I have no idea. I want the crew to be able to have enough time to arm themselves properly if they are to face them. I think these would be comparable to actual Nukies but still have the proper goal of gathering money. The Death Ripley would be a VERY fitting mech for this seeing as it can pick up crates to easily steal things and move them.
In addition to this they would get some higher tech machines like a Bluespace Launch Pad to encourage stealing or teleporting team mates into the station.
Win Condition
Currently there is also the problem that people are being sold or attempted to be sold as that used to be a thing. Generally taking people and RRing them shouldn’t be rewarded, I wish pirates to be rewarded for taking hostages alive and selling them back to the station. I am thinking of doing this by nerfing the value of everything but actual credits to the point where you’re better off taking peoples ID and removing all its money and dropping it.
Problems
I’ve spent the entire day working on this and gotten next to no where code-wise due to Pirate shitcode and my general DM coding incompetence. Currently I’d be happy to just have this variant of pirates to have a 50% chance to be able to spawn in place of the default pirates and be a more challenging version of the pirates for those who are robust.
Currently even regular default Space Pirates are capable of robusting the entire station to their knees so they would quite definitely see nerfs in terms of available gear like the quantity and quality of explosives and the quantity of freely available milk, maybe forcing you to actually use Ol’ Betsy and milk her for once.
