Pirate strength is a little better, but still needs some minor tweaks.  The real problem with them is that the raid and mission timers are not really taking how powerful they are into account.  By the time one raid gets fought off, another will be forming.  If you lose the bidding war again, you will never be able to expand unless you can get the pirates to repeatedly attack a starbase.  And this is someone who's played the game since day 1; there's a good reason why new players are constantly complaining about getting overrun by pirates.

I think it would be best if:

-Leave strength alone, though maybe limit how high they can upgrade as 30+ armour pirates are simply silly.

-the standard raids need to be on a 18-20 minute timer instead of the ~13 it is now.

-Misson cooldown needs to be ~15-20 minutes.  Late game you can just keep throwing pirates at people, and because they upgrade after each mission it doesn't take long before they are far stronger than anything you could have sent yourself.  Team games in particular can quickly send pirates up to alarming levels very rapidly and will take over the universe as no one can deal with them unless a TEC player nukes the base.

-AI still doesn't seem to use the pirate mission option despite 1.01 patch notes.  They need to have access to this to keep up with players late game, or the pirates just become a second fleet for the player.