I had the worst experience with pirates i have ever had while playing this game, here it goes.

I started out a bit slow, i wanted a fairly sized fleet for my first encounter with the pirates. Once i built it up i also began making (or planning to make) trade/merchant orbitals. Soon i managed to take my "breadbasket" asteroid system and before you know it i had a total of 4 trade oribitals (2 at each system) a large fleet around 4 research stations (i modded the logistics cap, disregard this) and things were going swell. I had a fleet of aproximately 50 ships, 30 or more of these being (modded) arcova's and 10 cobalts along with my capital ship. I thought i would finaly be able to survive a game of Sins.

I thought wrong. less that 15-20 mins into the game the pirates came. Not with a small fleet but a HUGE one, were talking about 15 kodiacs 5 flacks and another 5 "cobalts" I quickly and desperately fought to kill the 3 or 4 pillagers invading the system but it was not enough, My capital planet was decimated and a battle was ongoing at my asteroid base. les than 5 min's later another pirate force (this time with about 8 or so pillagers) came and killed off my entire fleet and all my capital planet oribitals. They waited 5 minuites before killing my asteroid base. I had no bounty by then and was far from the computers.

My assesment:

I would (and should) have survived if the pirates had not attacked my asteroid base. The only reason they did was because of my markets there. Does that really warrant a full blown invasion force (That i may add, was powerful enough to kill 15+ defence platforms).

The community needs that patch and we need it yesterday, things like this are happening all over the Sins beta community and its getting ridiculous. i cant survive for more than an hour in this game ! something must be done !