Basically if you kill enemy units that have bounty attached to them, you gain some money for the kill. and that money is deducted from the total bounty amount.

If their bounty is going down really fast, They are losing a lot of ships real fast.

What about the Advent's Karma ability, where bounty is placed on them for killing your trade ships?

You can easily rack up hundreds of thousands of bounty if an enemy player gets Karmic Retribution.  It would be hopelessly rigged if the owner could claim that bounty.

Thanks, so scuttling ships of my own will lower my bounty? I'm playing a game right now where I have been ruthless with the bounty against the other player (hard random) and now my bounty is incredibly high because I haven't had many casualties. His bounty is now very low and it would bankrupt me to keep placing bounty on his head so now the pirates come after me. They are suicidal fortunately and my mine fields make quick work of them.

Er, I don't think that's right.  You can claim bounty you placed on your opponent.

Try it in a 1v1 and dump some bounty on your enemy. Bounty should never drop provided pirates or militia forces do not claim it.

Ya, you only lose bounty on you if your ships gets destroyer only

The way I see it, the not losing bounty against yourself is a check against one person controlling the pirates for an entire game.  I.e. you might be able to send the pirates in 1,2 or 3 or more times against a person (assuming 1v1) but after a while if you haven't lost anything, the bounty against you would be so high as to be prohibitive, and you would have to face up to a pirate attack.

Personally I would love to see the pirate code re-written anyways.  The way it stand right now, pirates are the most un-pirate like group imaginable.  Pirates exist as a group that seeks maximum profit for minimum risk.  As it's written now, the pirates in the game are ALWAYS suicidal.  Therefore none of the pirates in a given raid ever survive to spend any of the profits earned, so why would a pirate risk his neck to raid in the first place? 

I imagine a pirate code where the pirates when they raid would pick the least defended system (based on sometimes bad intel) of a given player (still influenced by bounty), jump into a system with a vasari like phase gate system (or maybe an unstable worm hole type thing that players could see if they were paying close enough attention) and run in to destroy support structures and steal resources from the planet.  If successful after a few mins in grav well then they would beat a hasty retreat out with their stolen loot.  If the player managed to intercept them before this they could get the stolen resources back. 

Something a little more realistic like this would make them more interesting, would cause players to invest a little more in defense for non front-line systems.  Would still make later game pirate raids have more meaning than just xp farming for low level cap ships too.

I thought it would be interesting to make them a playable faction. Others have modded for it and in looking at the Forge Tools data they are set up as PlayerPirate.entity but the line "isSelectable FALSE" I was going to tweek that in a personal mod and from the looks of it pirates would simply play as a different TEC faction.

But it would be interesting to set them up as playable but not colonizing. They would only capture and convert other ships. Imaging a fleet of pirates made up of ships from all the different races. They would never build ships only capture and control. That's my idea. It's a whole different matter actually implementing it.

allow them to jump between stars when the first faction to research the ability is able to do so.  The same for wormholes as well.  also you can give them a clokeing ability as long as they are out side the grav well, allowing them to by pass systems they dont want to attack.  but as soon as they enter the grave well, they would be visable.  they would have to extend the distance outside a grav well ships are allowed to travel too i think.

also this has nothing to do with lowing your bounty so back on topic.