One of the things that I love about this game is the Bounty system. It encourages me to attack certain empires and encourages pirates to do the same. The thing that struck me as odd is that the pirates almost function as just another AI.
Think about it for a second. Imagine yourself as a pirate. Would you attack a highly defended planet losing most of your ships in order to get a bounty, or would you look for ships that are isolated. If I was a pirate, I would look for an area where there's only a few scattered ships, attack, collect the bounties, and leave at the first sign of back up arriving.
In short, short the pirates need to execute guerilla tactics and increase the frequency of their attacks. So, what do you all think about this?