- Edited
It has been refreshing to find and play with Cosmoteer, which encourages creativity and experimentation at every turn. Each ship in a bounty mode game is like a puzzle to solve, and getting there has us moving other pieces around, building a puzzle to solve a puzzle. Thank you, Walt Destler!
Game balance is an art form: what is hard for some players is easy for others. I'm impressed by the thought that went into the base game's balance, which has to keep the new player in mind at all times. It may not go as far into the deep end of the pool as a more experienced player might like; players who want to make a little more trouble for themselves turn to modding 
I don't claim these changes are "better" than anyone else's, but I hope they are different enough to be interesting.
This mod adds an "Admiral's Challenge" difficulty level to the list of choices when starting a new bounty mode game, which should make your play-through more challenging than stock "Admiral."
My modding adventure started while searching the forums for more info about how to change bounty mode, 'Ranked Up Bounty Hunter' was the first working example I came across. (Thanks ZyerFire! And everyone who helped you.)
Using ZyerFire's mod.txt as a guide, I've made many changes (look into the mod.txt for more notes) one of which is to "downgrade" from that mod's 7 ranks to 6, in order to affect the ranking distribution of locations on the map. This helps address some comments I've read that there are too many Amateur-ranked sites on Admiral / Hard. I could make more ranks to create a 'bell curve' distribution of rankings across all locations, but the best solution would be a method - or me understanding how - to directly adjust the distribution of location ranks. What I've done is a work-around, that just makes mod.txt bigger by adding new ranks to it.
I didn't make new ranks for really expensive ships new players may not have added to bounty mode; this mod does not include any ships. So the enemies it can serve up to the player top out at 5.2m.
The 'Legendary' mod by WillieSea is going to go way beyond this effort, and is planned to include many more tiers, ranks, and player-submitted ship designs to fill it out.
From the mod description:
- New bounty rank icons. Number of pips in the shield tells rank level. (The new icons only appear in the added 'Admiral's Challenge' difficulty level.)
- Larger icons on map view and info window.
- Tougher enemies appear sooner, beginning with the 'Professional' ranked areas. (Because ship Bounty tiers are changed to include more expensive ships. Note that this particular change affects ALL difficulty levels.)
- Spend more carefully: Vanguards pay 10% money and FTL fuel compared to stock 'Admiral' 12.5% money and 25% fuel.
- Six threat level ranks: #6 is named "Headquarters", and it has a unique icon.
- "HQ" threats can include 1.6m - 5.2m build-cost ships: Be prepared, a challenging Terror may appear.
- Vanguards will appear nearly twice as often, slighty reducing the number of other threat level ranks you will see on the map.
- This mod does not affect AI or parts.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jc25d3m256pt178/Eventied.Admirals_Challenge_v1.0.zip
More details -
Bounty mode looks at all ships it knows about and sorts them into tiers based on their build costs. Then a number of ships from selected tiers are assigned to each ranked location on the map, where you go to have explosions. I substantially increased ship values starting with Tier 6, which makes its first appearance in "Professional" ranked locations, so that the player will see bigger ships earlier in their campaign, than normal Admiral / hard mode. You can see the numbers if you read mod.txt, i'll just highlight 2 examples, with some commas added for readability:
T8 - ships that may appear when randomly selected from this tier (Elite and Vanguard sites) will be substantially bigger than normal 'hard:'
MinBountyBaseValue = 1,000,001 // (original value: 825,001)
MaxBountyBasevalue = 1,625,000 // (original value: 1,200,000)
T10 - new tier so players can "finally see" 2 stock ships, Valor (2.7m) and Terror (4.9m) that don't appear in bounty hunter mode. This tier is assigned to the "headquarters" ranked locations. Terror should be truly terrifying for a new player, I think I understand why it was left out.
MinBountyBaseValue = 2,600,001
MaxBountyBaseValue = 5,250,000
If a fleet is chosen to appear instead of one of these, the value of ships in the fleet will add up to Valor or Terror. What you see could vary over a wide range.
The base number tier values scale up where each tier value ends about 1.5x larger than its starting value. These revised numbers scale up with a multiplier that is roughly 1.6x. The final tier has a range of 2x in both the original T9 and T10 in this mod.
Because what you can fly determines the level of threats you are able to take on, nerfing payouts slightly forces you to get more done with less money (which sounds an awful lot like working, in real life.)
I have gone into debt for repairs, due to... umm, "piloting errors" in some of my play-throughs, which never happened to me in the regular "hard" mode. Sometimes I have to leave a location because the last enemy ship is more than I can handle, and come back later after I've made some upgrades. Generally speaking, a bounty mode game feels 'done' when you have the money and ships to take on Cerberus... and with this mod, Terror most definitely.
Icon notes:
I designed these first for my own benefit, because it can be hard to make out the differences in the stock icons, especially between shades of red in Elite and Vanguard. After the fact, I found this discussion on the forums talking about problems and a link to a roadmap work item to make a change at some point.
Strong shapes and contrast should help identify each one at a glance, even without color. The color scheme preserves a sense of progression toward Red.
I would like to know the simplest way to override ONLY the rank icons, so they can appear for ALL difficulty levels. I attempted various Replace and Override syntaxes, but hit dependency-type errors most of the time.
Using a Replace action and including ALL base game difficulty levels in 'bounty mode.txt' works, but seems like overkill, just to offer an icon replacer mod.
