While I'd like to see pirates have capships and torpedoes (or capships that have torpedoes?), what I REALLY want to see is the Pirate Base wells buffed up.  Minefields.  Their base should act like a buffed-up starbase with lots of hangars.  That sort of thing.  Right now, they're just far too weak; once I get to the late-game, it's trivial to send one of my 4-cap fleets in to clear the whole place out with no risk.

And that brings us to another issue: tech.  Pirates don't ever seem to improve over the course of a game; they don't get anything resembling the armor/weapon/HP upgrades that players can buy, so while an early-game pirate raid can inflict heavy losses on a defending fleet, a late-game pirate force will get wiped out without even scratching the paint of my heavy cruisers.

On a final note, I do NOT want to see the pirates continue to get renamed TEC ships.  It's lazy, and it's not very balanced.  If they do get torpedo ships and capships, they should be custom designs, not just reskinned Ogrovs and such.  And the abilities should be a mix of Advent, Vasari, and TEC styles, implying that the pirates have been looting all three for a while now.  Imagine:

CORSAIR: Battleship class.  Has the Disruptive Strikes passive from the Kortul, the Gauss Rail Gun from the Kol, and the Subversion ability from the Antorak Marauder.

MOBILE BASE: Carrier class.  Has Malice from the Progenitor Mothership, the Heavy Fighters passive off the Sova, and Gravity Warhead off the space egg.

REAVER: Planet destroyer class.  Radiation Bomb off the Marza, Provoke Hysteria from the Revelation, and the Assault Specialization passive off the Vulkoras.

Notes:

> Pirate capital ships would have more hull and less shields than any of the player races, but their repair/shield recharge rates would be very low; once you damage them, they should stay damaged, especially as pirates have no repair ships.

> Pirate capships shouldn't have a level 6 "ultimate" ability that matches any of the other races' ones.  Instead, all pirate capships would have the same level 6 ability.  This ability would basically be a torpedo, a very long-range single-shot ability dealing high damage to structures; use whatever style you want, but that's the basic effect.  A high-level capship supported by a lot of pirate flunkies should be a threat to anything short of a fully-upgraded base.

> Pirate capital ships wouldn't level up through XP; their level would be set at spawning based on the threat level you wanted.  That is, if we tied it back to bounty, then a bounty of 2k could buy a level 1 ship, and each 500 extra might buy an additional level, so that a bounty of 6500 or higher would guarantee a level 10 cap.  Or split it along the way, so that a 5k might buy two level 2s instead of a single level 7, and so on.

Anyway, that's just an idea.

Kind of a funny story, but definetely shows there is not a major relationship between money spent and severity of the pirate raid. I was playing on Triumvirate against all unfair ai's and it was late late game. We had been fighting over this one system for probably 2 hours during which i amassed hundreds of thousands of credits, metal, and crystal. So, just for kicks i thought i would place large amounts of bounty on each of the two remaining ai's. I just kept clicking and i got each one a 75,000 credit price tag on their head. I actually held the sun with most of my forces which was directly linked to the pirate base and i always was intercepiting their raids. Lots of free xp, but i was eagerly awaiting the pirates that would come out after 75,000 credits was placed on another's head. Ending up, they got the equivalent of 20 or so kodiaks, 10 or so cutthroats, and 5 krosov's. My planetary defenses including 16 bomber squadrons and a PJI and a handful of caps wiped the pirates of the map and the bounty moved down to 73,000. I was thinking that the whole pirate community would come out with that much money, but no dice. Pirates should become directly related to money spent on bounty.