What Are Bounties

Starting bounty, is the price on your head, that others can collect by doing battle with you. Once you are in game, you can increase bounties on other players to get the pirates off your back, and to try and entice another enemy in the game to attack them instead of you.

So when you attack someone who has a bounty, you get cash for it? Is it by damage done, or by killing ships (planets / structures?), or what have you?

You get the bounty by destroying the ships/structures of the faction with the bounty on them.

If so, why do you not get the whole pot when you wipe them totally out? You'd think that would be worth the bounty.

The pot is split between all of their ships and structures. I'm not sure how the actual breakdown is done.

Why only destruction? Why not have it done by damage-dealt, that way even if the enemy can't destroy my units, at least he gets credit for having damaged them... that way, I don't end up with bazzillions in bounty simply because my units don't get destroyed (much). See this thread for others concerned about the (existing) bounty system.

Oh, and while you can award bounty by damage dealt, don't place all the credits there... weight it so that damaging does pay out bounty, but the "big bucks" come from killing. That way, simply damaging an opponent doesn't do any good unless his bounty is already so high as to be un-matchable.

Because then you could just milk the system by firing a few shots and running away.   Plus, damage heals over time, so just damaging a ship and leaving doesn't really accomplish anything.

True, but that way at least pirates would *eventually* wear out the bounty I recieved at the beginning of the game. As things stand, I keep that bounty... forever.