I'm wondering if rather than nerf or un-nerf pirates to match every player's optimum... they could just have a difficulty setting. Easy--->insane. My only interesting thought is doing the same for neutrals. I like the occasional slow game and fast game. Some things make little sense... pirates being insane in difficulty with no scaling of the defences in neutral gravity wells. If you could control both I would be happy. (I'd regularly set neutrals to hard/insane and pirates to hard probably... balancing is still required, easy being the old default pirates, insane being un-nerfed and nerfed... somewhere in between)