It appear that when a PIR GP captures a position the Phoenix program looks for the political of the player running said GP and neatly attaches the new acquisition to it. This of course immediately flags the captured position with the true affs flag thus completely negating the use of PIR. This needs to be fixed and checked for other types of positions as well.
| QUOTE (nortonweb @ Oct 22 2003, 02:08 PM) |
| Then how would the captured position loose its PIR status??? |
good question... it would be stuck on PIR for keeps wouldn't it?
How does it get re-flagged? The owner re-captures it or the Pirate sells it on.
Geoff
Geoff
| QUOTE (HPSimms @ Oct 22 2003, 03:13 PM) |
| The owner re-captures it or the Pirate sells it on. Geoff |
Can you do this with PIR ships?
Surly this can't be right?
The issue with PIR ships is slightly different because they are mobile, so could then move to a quiet location - you also wouldn't know if the person who got it "back" was the original owner or not...
Pete
The whole PIR ownership thingy seems to need to be looked at. If I managed to capture a nice PIR warship in open battle I'd certainly want to be able to use it without having to stick with a PIR flag. This is especially the case if the ship captured once belonged to me. This is gonna be a tricky one to work out without loopholes a mile wide.
Then, a PIR can drop the flag if it wants, but anyone it's trespassed against will still know what ship it is and can keep it posted.
As far as running out of numbers goes, when a number is picked for a new ship that has already been used for a ship before then just stick a letter 'A' at the end, then next time that exact number is generated again change the 'A' to a 'B'.
I dunno exactly, but something like that.
Once the PIR ship reverted back to it's original aff then it could just go and dock in an aff starbase, knowing that it could rely on the other aff positions in the area to support / defend it if it was attacked.
| QUOTE (Sam_Toridan @ Oct 23 2003, 11:15 AM) |
| Hmmmm - Can - Worms - Opened The whole PIR ownership thingy seems to need to be looked at. If I managed to capture a nice PIR warship in open battle I'd certainly want to be able to use it without having to stick with a PIR flag. This is especially the case if the ship captured once belonged to me. This is gonna be a tricky one to work out without loopholes a mile wide. |
It's tough to do.
If you captured a PIR ship and it referted to your aff, then a non-captured PIR ship could arrange to meet at a quiet starbase, deliver all it's personel / weapons then simply have an aff ship (owned by the same player) board it and thus - no more PIR flag.
Looks like were stuck with what we have...
so if you see a PIR ship in battle, even one you used to own, just make it go BOOM instead of boarding
Captured pirate ships cannot be cycled into affiliation assets.
Ships captured by pirates become pirate ships (and see above point).
It limits the involvement an affiliation can have with pirates.
Fleets cannot masquarade as pirates for a short time in order to attack ships and then return to legitmate activities. Allowing this would lead to abuse.
Affiliations cannot masquarade as pirates, capture ships and then have them boarded by their regular ships. Allowing this would lead to abuse.
Yes there are excellent 'real world' arguments for allowing ships to loose the pirate flag, they are not however in our opinion good game reasons.
How about an "Apply PIR flag to captured" setting. This way when a PIR position captures its target it has the option of flagging it as PIR (and it forever having that flag) or applying its true aff flag. I know the program is capable of making the distinction as that what caused this in the first place.
Another option is to give a PIR flag an initial life span of say 1 week. Any position flagged as PIR can be switched to your aff flag as long as no more than 1 week has passed. After that deadline the PIR stays for life. This allows a PIR force to capture a ship, move it away and then reflag it as their true aff. OK its ID number is still a give away but it may escape notice if kept out of the way or in increadibly crowded areas (or even sold on to an unsuspecting third prty
). To prevent abuse of this have a new "Clear PIR" order which takes 200TU to issue as you verify with various registry bodies that the ship is not PIR.Obviously the above is only useful for capturing positions or if your running a PIR force. Ships long lost to PIR will just have to stay lost.
| QUOTE (Sam_Toridan @ Oct 23 2003, 03:54 PM) |
| 1:How about an "Apply PIR flag to captured" setting. <snip> 2: Another option is to give a PIR flag an initial life span of say 1 week. <snip> Obviously the above is only useful for capturing positions or if your running a PIR force. Ships long lost to PIR will just have to stay lost. |
The first one invalidates the main reason for PIR in the first place - deniability. any ship captured by a PIR would be tainted by having been a pirate-owned ship in the past - so any aff owning it would have either been behind the pirates, or dealt with those who were behind them (directly or indirectly)
The second one allows the "go PIR to attack, then recycle back to aff" loophole, as long as the action is fast enough.
I can see a case for fixed installations being allowed to be recaptured and set back to an aff flag - they can't go anywhere, so it's a lot harder for them to get lost in the noise so to speak. But I agree with Mica that keeping PIR ships PIR for life is the only sensible option, as anything else is either full of loopholes large enough that you could fly a baseship through, or so hedged round with complex conditions that it's totally unworkable within a game.
Yes, that means that people can't recapture ships that used to be theirs but were genuinely captured by pirates. But that is far preferable for the game in my opinion, than a player being able to run a PIR fleet, then strip them of their crews and board them....
Dan
Another possibility is to require a special action to unflag a ship as pirate, with the justification for doing so clearly and concisely stated. For instance: The AFT might be only able to take back ships which had been taken off them in the first place, wheras the CIA might be able to take over a ship which had been captured by a 'covert operations team'.
TonyH
Take a (highly improbable) example of the AFT wanting to hit a position. Here's one way how:
1. they arrange for somebody else to know of the location of a convoy with the military/naval equipment needed, plus some freighters being escorted with goods that are valuable enough to be payment and "make a mistake" with the enemy/support/defend lists
2. that person captures the convoy, and uses the ships to attack the target
3. later on, once the fuss dies down, the AFT discover and recapture ships, one or two at a time. But they do it with long-TU pending order patrols that the pirate player happens to get unlucky with
4. they issue a SA to Mica to get the ships un-PIR'ed when they recapture them.
ANY possibility of a pirate being recycled to fly an aff flag has the potential for abuse. So Mica has made the sensible (in my opinion) decision to rule out the possibility
Dan
| QUOTE (Dan Reed @ Oct 23 2003, 06:31 PM) |
| The second one allows the "go PIR to attack, then recycle back to aff" loophole, as long as the action is fast enough. |
Thats why I suggested a 1 week grace period and a 200TU "Clear PIR" option.
A ships ID number is unchangeable and always reported so briefly flagging your ships as PIR is no bloody use to anyone. As soon as they are spotted in their true colours the game is up. The above suggestion allows for a quick recapture of a position in an on-going scirmish.
Personally I'd like to fly which ever aff flag I want to, when I want to. Should be a simple matter of hacking into the EEM database and changing some details and turning up in my own personal IMP fleet
Hell I'd like to have ships with no ID code for true annonimimity by I know the game program won't support that. Under these circumstances I find it hard to see any potential for 'abuse' in the use of pirate positions at all. If the AFT go through the lengths described by Dan above then they still might have lost their good name because the whole thing is highly dodgy. But it should be possible.
Another point to consider is that PIRate positions are usually posted on sight. And the affiliation's posted list is always kept up-to-date on the current affiliation of the positions, i.e. if the PIR turns into AFT it will be seen by everybody who has posted the attackers.