Gameplay.constants may yield some clues:







Judging from this, it looks like pirates don't start raiding until 1200. This could be 1200 ticks, which would be faster than you can blink - and thus I find unlikely. It's more likely to be 1,200 seconds - 20 minutes into the game. These first lines in particular seem to be the most relavent, with the rest being details of the composition of the pirate fleet at early, mid and late games.



Presumably, the MinSpawnTime is 300 - a minimum of five minutes between raids. Not sure what Min and Max Total Supply means, but I think it means the resources of the planet in question are taken into consideratino, and means that the latest the pirates will raid is from six minutes for a heavily-stocked planet, to 10 minutes for an exhausted one.

The raidchance per cargo ship is pretty self-explainatory - every four cargo ships are worth a +1% to the chance the pirates will choose to raid - I'm not sure if that is to choose to raid a given planet, or to raid an empire. The raidChanceIncPerBounty is pretty clear - every credit adds 0.002 to the chance of a raid. Every time you press the button to add bounty, you're adding a half a percent, so if you hit it 200 times - IE, jack the bounty to 50,000 or more - you've basically garunteed a pirate raid.

Although I don't understand supply per planet and per cargo ship - I suspect they add to the supply total the pirates bring to the fight, though whether it means the pirates' cargo ships/planets, or yours, is unclear, the supplyPerBounty pretty clearly adds .004 to the supply the pirates bring to the fight - IE, the more ships they can sustain in their fleet. Every 250 credits is worth a point, so 25,000 credits maxes the pirate fleets out at 200 supply.


Which makes no sense, since we've seen pirate fleets much larger than 200 points. I've had to wax so many pirate fleets that I've taken stationing fleets of four carriers around my sun, ready to bomb incoming pirate fleets to snot.

So perhaps RaidStrengthThreshold has something to do with it - maybe it's in addition to the pirate strength from other factors, leading to a maximum lategame pirate strength of 450 - more in line with the fleets I've had to bomb to dust.

In regard to the carriers placed around a sun to intercept pirats, worked fine for me, until I noticed 2 times now, that pirat warp directly to two of my asteroid belts. I'm not sure why they do that, but I have put some jump inhipitors in place on the coneting planets, so maybee thats why they do it. Only thing else to add, is that the pirat raid a VERY VERY small...think 5-8 ships or so, but normal big raid have many more ships.

Just done with clearing out MY planet system and my little fleet is now parked at the sun around 680 supply points of ships and no pirats are passing them except if they jump in and right out right away

Prates spawn at the beggining of the game, or from the sun. However, if the enemy researches "Insurgency", your own trade ships can "defect" into pirates.

One of your enemies must have researched insurgency against you... Otherwise the rest of the pirates usually come from the sun.

quote]One of your enemies must have researched insurgency against you... Otherwise the rest of the pirates usually come from the sun. [/quote]


the game didn't get that far. unless they didn't build any radio stations