[PR] Spy rewards adjusted by target difficulty

[github_bot]

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[INPUT][BALANCE]

About the PR
Spy rewards are adjusted by the estimated difficulty of the target's job or how difficult the item/machinery is to access.

Why's this needed?
Prevents being offered lawn darts for the HoS ID.
Reward tiers (minimum and maximum TC value)
Tier 1
value_high = 4
value_low = 0
Tier 2
value_high = 6
value_low = 3
Tier 3
value_high = 8
value_low = 5
Tier 4
value_high = 99
value_low = 7

Old logic:
**Organs** - 7% chance of being Tier 3, 93% chance of being Tier 2.
**Personal items** - 10% chance of being Tier 4, 90% chance of being Tier 1-3.
**Big station objects** - 15% chance of being Tier 1-2, 85% chance of being Tier 1.
**Photos** - Tier 1
**Station items** - 10% chance of being Tier 1-2, 90% chance of being Tier 1.

New logic:
**Organs**
HOS/NTSO - Tier 4
Heads/security - Tier 3
Other jobs - 7% chance of being Tier 3, 93% chance of being Tier 2.
**Personal items**
HOS/NTSO - Tier 4
Heads/security - 10% chance of being Tier 4, 90% chance of being Tier 2-3.
Other jobs - 10% chance of being Tier 4, 90% chance of being Tier 1-3.
**Big station objects**
Hard - Tier 2-3
Medium - Tier 1-2
Easy - Tier 1
**Photos** - Tier 1
**Station items**
Hard - Tier 2-3
Medium - Tier 1-2
Easy - 10% chance of being Tier 1-2, 90% chance of being Tier 1

Changelog

Code:

(u)Flappybat:
(*)Changed spy thief reward logic. Rewards are now more proportional to the target's job or difficulty of accessing the object.

PULL REQUEST DETAILS

[Katzen]

The big complaint with spy thief is crap items for how difficult they can be to get. This should overall give better rewards.

The old system had most rewards at 0-6 TC with a 10-15% chance of being better rewards. The only distinction between objectives was the type, so a staffie ID was treated the same as HOS.
The new system assigns a difficulty rating to jobs, giving heads and security organs/trinkets a higher minimum TC value, with the HOS being guaranteed at high value.
Station items/machinery are also given a difficulty rating. I have based this off number on the station/difficulty of access. The more exclusive and harder to access of these can now be worth up to 5-8 TC.

[BatElite]

I was under the impression that the rewards were previously distributed entirely randomly, but seeing that's not the case I'm actually fine with these changes assuming it's all sound code-wise. I do feel like things are weighted a bit heavily towards looting sec though, even if they're the main anti-antag force on station.

I feel like for thematic purposes you should bump the cap's stuff up there with NTSO/HoS. I know that captains are a very mixed bag wrt difficulty, but lore-wise the syndicate would probably pay well and game-play wise the cap is already sort of a walking loot bag. It might give a shy or newb spy a shot at getting something expensive. :P

Also (and I'm not good at probability or statistics) I'm not sure how much this changes in practice for organs and personal stuff. If regular non-sec crew get picked nothing changes in the new logic, and I suspect those will be the majority of bounties. If the problem is that the bounties are often crap (which I thought is the complaint) then maybe we should bump those percentages a little?

Also going into specifics, I've taken a cursory look through the ranking lists and there's a few ones I find odd:

-robotics control as easy is odd, as it's often located near the bridge or near the AI upload and both of those draw attention to break into. They're also usually protected by one or more turrets. I admit that few people care about it going missing though.

-portable flashers get set up wherever goddamn greytiders might try to break into sec, and as such they tend to be relatively easily accessible (or not far enough into sec to immediately get tasered). Not worth medium difficulty IMO.

-Spaced Rum is usually only found in the HoP and/or RD's office. Might be worth medium for rarity.

-Maybe bump up a couple of medbay objects. Medbay stuff getting stolen is often the first sign of spies. I'd suggest one of the cloner parts (computer I think is most important? definitely not all of them) + the port-a-nanomed and/or the port-a-medbay. Also like I implied, I'd like non-sec to be worth stealing. ^^;

[Katzen]

Can move things around, it was largely an estimate. The cloning equipment gets stolen/bombed a lot and people tend to get away with it so I moved it down.

My thought process:

We could raise the rewards by just making them pick from a bigger TC range with better chances. But, I felt this would be too drastic a power level change and still result in silly bounties. So I went with a difficulty rating that mostly resembled the original range for the item type, expanding them upwards for difficulty and improved the low end a bit.

Items and machinery are straightforward to convert as you can just glue a rough idea of difficulty to them.
Bounties based around players are trickier. Limbs and trinkets are not very subtle unless you talk your way into it. You are less likely to get away with taking a limb from security than a botanist so I assigned a higher reward.

The second big issue when dealing with TC is that actual value and TC aren't that closely related. The rewards above 7 cost that are allowed in spy thief aren't actually very good. The 1-3 TC range includes some great items like fibre wire, mindslave but also stinkers like spy sticker kits and extra large shot glasses. What it really needs is a list of "value" and to use TC as a fallback for unrecognised items, tt would also benefit from some kind of checking that the generated bounty list has a good distribution of value. This is pretty subjective and I didn't feel like trying to get that into my first rebalance because it will just sit around for weeks while I want to get some better logic merged to start with.

So part 2 is most likely going to be implementing a measure of reward that isn't based off TC, probably just three buckets great/good/average

[Katzen]

Swapped captain and NTSO so cap and HOS give highest rewards.

Increased:
Prisoner Beret to 2, you have to be in a sec area.
Spaced Rum to 2, exclusive to head offices.
Robotics to 2, likely in a secure area.
Cryocell, cloning pod, cloning computer and operating table to 2. Want some better rewards out of sec and medbay tends to be busy.

Added:
Champagne, tier 2 always(?) located in the bridge.

[Studenterhue]

ZeWaka merged this earlier today, so this is in the game now. Title says it very well: more difficult (e.g. secure area, busy place where you might have witnesses, targets that are very capable of defending themselves) bounties get better rewards. (They get better as you do more of them too, but you probably already knew that.) Not much has changed since the original version besides the stuff Katzen mentioned. Per usual, it's a good idea to make a thread if you find some bounties too hard for such a small reward or too easy for such a big reward.