Not a bug, siege frigates now have long-range anti structure weapons. I'm still a little puzzled on this because they never actually target structures so they only shoot them if they pass by, but I digress.

They'll never officially get caps, however. You can always add your own pirate caps in a mod, just work it into their raid defs in gameplay.constants

I work for the Distant Stars Mod team

Yes we did add Caps

And I have a minmod that makes them nastier

Was very much needed with Entrenchment

Which it is, and is still a bit too easy. For all their buffs, the only way they end up with more ships at their base is returning successful raids. Even though their base gauss turrets got buffed, they still won't hold up to a mid/late-game fleet, especially since there will most always be very few ships to kill in their grav well.

I think, the range plus the amor over 42 is a little bit unpirate like. Because i play it without the diplomacy part, using fixed teams, my fleet has a max of 12 amor. But i have research-center, not the pirates.

Because i played on a middle sized map, i had a limit of fleet-size and to fear my foes, i was not able to harm them.

So i don't belief you this game part any more.

I just wiped out the entire pirate base with maxed out fleet supply, 40 points of fleet supply didnt make is back home , let them be with god now.-po

I was shocked to see that a pirate gauss cannon had a 50 point damage, and something like 4500 hp 0_o? where can i buy one of those? lol

The Pirates are uber powerful now but predictable. I do not even try to fight them off anymore. I just build up sacrifical planets.

They always attack your closest planets. I do not invest in those planets anymore. No starbase, no research centers. I  colonize them, build them to reduce the negative tax rate and then max the planet slots. I build LOTS of trade centers and hanger bays. I figure I might as well make as much money as possible before it is destroyed again. The hanger bays will handle the lighter stuff that comes to threaten them.

Once they destroy the colony, I wait till they leave, drop in that cheap colonizer that I have hanging one planet away and then restart the whole procces.

The pirates are now so powerful that unless you stash a large percentage of your forces nearby you are gonna loose. Period. It is not worth the loss in territory expansion opportunities to save something that is gonna be lost. It used to be that a decent starbase, a well placed defensive ring of turrents, and lots of SC support would chew up just about any pirate attack. No more. You max that starbases and all you are gonna do is waste resources. These pirates will chew it up so fast that you might as well have given you resources to the enemy for all the good it will do you.

Once I get into later game, I build a novalith or two and pound the pirate base back into the stone age. Then you do not have to worry about the pirate raids from that base anymore. If you try to take that base all you are gonna do is lose ships. Just detroy the base itself and the pirate ships that are there are goning to remained bottled up and no threat to you.

Tactics change with the patches. The pirates are too valuable to play without them. They are a realitively cheap WRECKING ball that you can use to knock the snot out of your enemies.

You can't.

Mercury Joe,

I agree a change in tactics are called for. I also noticed the pirate habit, however as I expand the territory there is a good chance the pirate target will change and that is not usually obvious until they charge in. The other dreadful thing I have encountered is if you are between the pirates and their vicitm. It is a sinking feeling watching them pillage through several systems to reach their uprepaired foe and then to have them wander back through when they are done.

The first change is to either out bid all the AI or help gang up on a single AI to ensure you are not the pirate target. The new pirates seem to be handleable for the first 3 maybe 4 raids, after that they are too buff unless a major fleet engagment is craved, and expect the engagement to last longer than the pirate raid cycle. It shows up on the pirate screen as a scimitar symbol against players that still have active pirate raids.

Pirates will camp in a system as long as there is something of their victims there, so a system with a steady stream of merchant traffic or with a mine field will cause a camping behavior, otherwise they will return to base after a dwell time. The pirates in Diplomacy will and can glass an entire system.

The pirates will cause more damage than it cost to hire them so it is always worth the credits to hire them, the target almost doesn't matter provided it is not you. It is entertaining however to see the AI try and stop the hoard. Two maybe three successive raids and the poor AI is ready for plucking like a ripe fruit. The challenge at that point is to be the one doing the picking.

As to ending the pirate menace only 2 ideas come to mind. 1) Use the TEC uber gun to sterilize the pirate colony, 2) kite in large carrier fleets and flee before to many ships can close. Using 2 fleets at opposite ends of the grav well also helps breakup their strength as most of the time is spent crawling across the grav well as bomber passes pop at least one ship with each run.

Darvroth

I never said that. I just said that the base could be taken over with 3 to 4 full maxed out fleets

its call sarcasm

and if you had noticed my post in the other pirate complaint thread I completely agreed with the complaint

IMO the pirates are just ridiculously broken. If they were as good as all that, they would be the dominant government in the region, and the TEC, Advent, and Vasari would all be bitch slapped in every star system.

This pirate crap is broken. Strong pirates are one thing... pirates turned into the thing chasing the Vasari is bullshit. Infact, I bet they could beat whatever that is, too.

Pirates lack the infrastructure to be as powerful or more so than a faction... it's why they are "pirates". Until they are nerfed, I'll just be turning them off - which is a shame, I was hoping to have some beefed up pirates.

Furthermore, with those armor values? Their mass should be ridiculous, they should CRAWL across a system and take forever to turn if they have armor plate stacked on like that.

-Itharus

there is something wrong, really really wrong... about a bunch of shieldless, cobbled together, non-symetrical ships, that somehow have more hitpoints and armor than the most advanced piece of equipment the glorious vasari empire can produce (max research, max upgraded vasari starbase only has 30 armor, comparde to the 48!!!!!1111 armor those pirates have.

wtf? are they solid blocks of steel or something? how come the faction with the best armor in the game (TEC) cant even get close (max of +6, without pacts) to the 3 layers of quad-ply repellon these pirates are packen?

when is the expansion pack for stealing the civil and material engineers these pirates have workin for them?

Well the pirates need truckloads of hull strength since they don't have shields, and thus never get the damage reduction from mitigation.  The main problem is the weapons and armour keep going up without limit too.  Eventually even fully upgraded HCs are little more than canon fodder against them.  It would make far more sense if they cap out at around 2x the strength of a fully upgraded human ship, and simply came with larger numbers at that point.  The pirate base becomes invincible if you wait too long into the game, so you can never remove them once they get too much for you to handle.

To reduce the potential lag caused by too many pirate units, simply delete the pirates from a sector once they've killed the planet and all structures.