i hope you don't completely nerfed

and i hope the AI has been beefed


i am playing with 3 AIs getting 30-40 pirates per attack. i have also had them run through my system to attack one of the AIs

that is until i put in a phase disrupter of course.

usually my cannons and hangers can handle the pillagers and then i just have to wait for the fleet to arrive.

yes i only build one fleet at the moment because fleet flags don't move they stay at the time of the screen and when you 10 or more grav wells i just don't want to waste a lot of time wheeling up and down that list


and on that pirate attack kill the pillagers first

I'd just like to point out that that is only one of 3 fleets that were smacking me around at that point in time. The ice world in the upper left also has a pirate fleet (as can be seen in the screenshot). The asteroid connected to it also has one (can't see it because they blew up everything I had there). The unowned asteroid connected to the desert world with the massive fleet was also freshly conquered by the pirates. The fleet that blew up that one may have joined the one at the desert planet to form the mega fleet but still, cut that in half and it is still a MAJOR force to be reckoned with.

They quite simply have me outgunned. I can't build that many ships. Just the ones in the screenshot would require 664 fleet slots to build (check my math). I was capped at 477 (as you can see in the screenshot). Add in the other 2 pirate fleets roaming around and that probably adds another 40-60 ships so something like 300 more flees slots... I just can't compete. A fleet that size can bomb a planet to death in seconds flat - even with a shield. Then I have to recapture it, re-upgrade it, start rebuilding the defenses, and before those are half done another fleet comes in and wipes me out again.

Hi

i currently have a game in progress with a large galaxie and it is down to me and 1 AI around a particular star system.

I played normal AI, 10 of them.

Pirates where a breeze at first and i found them usefull to ensure that AI profileration was controlled (prevent the "rush for planet" with colonisers without defense).

Now howver, i got a bounty of 125K on my head and the pirate fleets seems to pop up everywhere and anywhere.

There seems to have 2 types of fleet. The "apear anywhere" fleet. Smaller but still able to pack a punch. Then there is the "UBER FLEET" with is much larger then any and most likely all of my ship combine. This one seem to follow the "normal" jump path but always bypass (it seems) the enemy planet (maybe logical since the bounty onhiim is low).

Anyway, even with 5 capital ship in 1 planet, 12 gauss, 3 hangar with bombers and a planetary shield i am seldomly able to prevent the obliteration of my planets when the later fleet comes in. Doesn't seem very "pirate-ish". Pirate should be few in numbers, have pretty powerful weapon and do damage and maybe bypass the jump preventer. In and out, steel money, tech, sell it to other, etc.. I seem to not understand of a bunch of pirate obliterating planet. Pretty counter-productive (for a pirate) in my opinion.

Also, maybe if there is insurgency as a weapon (if some of these pirates are insurgents) there should be some-counter insurgency options.



I am going to try a game without pirate to see if it is more enjoyable in the later game as right now, my main foe is not the AI but the pirate fleet left, right and center.

great game still so far. very stable

which brings up the question (two, actually)
1) where the hell were your fleets?
2) did you allow different groups of pirates to aggregate?

because if EITHER case was true, I have to say this was largely your fault.
but I know you wedge, neither is true is it?

the difference is in technology, stop them by using better ships.

also: rely completely on heavy defences, even if you have to sacrafice a couple of planets to pirate raids in the process: focus on turning one planet into an absolute FORTRESS (with a phase disrupter) and then when nothing more can be done, move on to the next one.

I comment again that I've never had these issues. and I'm not playing under much different stats than you guys...

finally, the possibility is simply that you guys dont expand enough to make the type of cash flow nescessary to build quick enough.

I know all of my advice is condescending, but I dont know how else that I'm not having these types of issues...

either way the pirates do apparently need to be nerfed, but make sure there is an option to keep them this powerful at least!

The problem is pirates really aren't suppose to have some form of mega-fleet due to their name alone, they should pick on weak planets and small numbers of ships. They shouldn't even try to blow the planet up, unless I've got it utterly wrong pirates aren't an army they're a rag-tag group of people preying off easy targets.

They shouldn't try to duke it out with entire milatery fleets.

When I get groups of 30 pirates attacking me continously, every 10 minutes or so on one planet It's annoying.

I can easily defeat them yes, but I have to take consdierable time doing so and resources. I'm only playing against 4 hard AI, and I have a bounty of 100k on my head so I continously get assaulted by pirates.

I should be getting this pressure from the other AI players, not randomly spawning thugs who are after my shipping trade. Right now I've not seen the AI even launch 30 ships at me, but simply send repetitive lone frigates , sometimes cruisers over and over.

The problem is that the AI is dealing with crazy pirate attacks as well and isn't as good at handling it. When he isn't getting mobbed, (or he gets better at handling it) he will be a little better at sending fleets at you.

OO, I must try it without pirates next time and see if your right!

Should be interesting anycase.

I'm still doing something right... I just played a small map with 3 easy enemies, still no difficulty with pirates. I had such a long time I was able to super-fortress 3 planets and 3 asteroids, I even use these places to train my capitol ships! (although the pirates now avoid them instead of going through, damn...)
and finally: you could not have done your math right. I'm quite sure I didnt have too many more planets than that and I had a full 620 ship slots. unless the devs released a patch when I wasnt looking, that doesnt make a hell of a lot of sense. not to mention you have TWO (two!!!) volcano planets which each has a max capacity of 200 ship slots. thats already 400 ship slots... perhaps the issue is that you arent upgrading your planets sufficiently fast enough?

seriously, the picture says several things.
1) you have quite a few ships out there (at least 5-6 bars worth) at 310 points (unless you are using too many capitol ships...)
2) you dont have a lot of ships, you only have 2 bars worth (see the contradiction?) unless of course either they are all capitol ships (bad idea) or are offscreen (worse idea...)
3) you dont have a lot of planetary defence up, I'll assume this is due to a combo of resource limitations and pirate raids (although you seem to have plenty of money and resource)
4) you have a rather large money/resource ratio... and large ammounts of both in general (this tells me this is way way late game, or you're trading in your resources a bit too much)
5) you have two huge fleets of pirates... ones of size I have never encountered (suggests that something is different between our games...)
6) you have well over half the solar system, nearly all of it (excluding what the pirates reclaimed) (means the AI is probably pissed at you)

and you're telling me some other things
1) you have a huge bounty on your head (100K? ok, maybe that wasnt you, but obviously you have some equally rediculous large bounty on your head. build a few ships and send them to the AI, let him scrap them and WAMMO, you lose some bounty)
2) you had to contend with about 4 massive 5 bar fleets. (thats about 50 ships each I assume) and thats 200 fricking ships, although I still think with a 477 points, you can engage and beat them seperately (yes, even the 100 ship group)
3) you're saying you are incapable of creating more than a 477 fleet, which isnt exactly true, it would just take some resource allotment (and hopefully they wont stomp on you in the meantime) its not a pretty picture, but its possible

I seriously dont know what to think wedge. on the one hand everything that has happened to me says that this info is absolute nonsense. my best guesses are that either you didnt act fast enough to stop the pirates, the pirates make a huge number jump when you have rediculously high bounties (which you can easily fix by losing a couple of... fleets), or you photoshopped those numbers in...
seriously, I'm absolutely flabbergasted by the data. you have to either be extremely unlucky, or be encountering some sort of strategy that I have not. I'm quite sure that this wasnt your fault, so dont mistake anything I say to mean that.

Okay.. Schem , your advice on bountys is to simply sucide Your fleet? GREAT ! That's horrible, and utterly anti-logic I wouldn't do that in a million years. I've had bountys reaching 100k and it's not nice I like my ships I don't want to sucide them , My defences can usually handle the fleets, but they sent 2 fleets at me within 5 minutes of each that's a pretty horrid number of pirates to deal with specially when you have 10 or so of those siege ships bombarding your planet.

And I also suggest play on Hard - I believe the pirates probably come in different numbers on different difficultys of course on easy it's going to be easy that's to be expected.

And obviously he didn't photoship the numbers in, Sometimes if you don't manage to kill the pirates fast enough another fleet comes in. I mean once again this is never enough to take the zone as you can always build more ships but it's a bit annoying though it does produce glorious battles.

I'm going to go try the game without pirates now, to see if the AI is a bit more effective .

the other option is to counter-bounty, which probably wont end YOUR pirate problems, and will be far less cost-efficient

keep in mind that bounties are apportioned out by percentage (supposedly)

well that there's your problem.
if you want to survive, make the most cost effective sacrafice. either that or stop conjuring up so many pirates, how DO you do that?
seriously, dont be arrogant and sacrafice the bigger picture because you dont want to create a few more ships.

if you look at my earlier comments I played on hard mode then, they were even easier than they are now.
its because the ai is apportioned out on a hand-to-hand basis, so choosing easy for all the ai wont make the pirates easy.

'twas sarcasm charon.

seriously, I'm not having the slightest issue. what are you guys doing wrong that allows the pirates to do that? maybe you wait way too long to build up? maybe you dont fortify enough? piss the AI off a little too much?
speaking of which, how do you get those 100K bounties on your head... I've even tried pump-priming the AI into bountying me, nothing works.

I might have to mod-boost the pirates to see what you guys are doing wrong, because it isnt working for me to try to dummy down my strategy...

I have had a problem where I did 20 planets 1 star with 3 AIs. Basically with pirates and Insurgency going at the AIs, before I was even close to taking over one group's section of the star all the other players had lost all of their planets and stations, which for some reason will still considered controlled by them anyway.

My thought on a way to solve this problem is probably have some sort of way to limit the pirate/insurgent fleets. For example, if you are a huge star spanning empire, then it's ok if you get some large fleets to attack you, but if you only control 2 or 3 planets then the pirates and insurgents should be less inclined to attack you, and also the ones that do attack you should be few in number to reflect your reduced status. After all, from what I can see about the Insurgent research, the insurgents are essentially your trade ships gone pirate that attack you, so if you only have a few star systems, then you shouldnt have to face 20+ unit fleets of insurgents.

Also for pirates, if you are a small time empire, then groups that attack you should be a little smaller becuase pirates would think about the bounty of attacking you. If they bring 10 ships which might do the job, then all the bounty is split between them and they get rich off your planets death. However if they bring 30 ships to attack your 3 or 4, then they might just cover their fuel and ammunition costs in attacking you.

What should probably happen to massive Insurgent and Pirate fleets that assault a particular empire, is that once your empire has been reduced to a certain level, they will leave you alone (partially at least) because there would be no further profit in assaulting you.

and would instead attack the larger target.

way to go mazen, you just found a way to make the end game a lot more interesting (although as long as it doesnt create issues like the current pirate fiasco) especially if bounty on empires was multiplied by a "size factor", probably just X number of planets x the bounty on the empire, that then giving you the "I want to go attack this empire" number.

finally, I think insurgency should begin to turn against you in the late game (especially if its still so strong)
I never use it because I dont want to wipe out the AI, so tender, so fragile.

this is HOURS into the game, and the biggest groups of pirates I've seen is a barely-30. then again the faction with the 30K bounty was completely decimated by the green guys without much of a trace of him left.

That image dosn't really show us anything atall, apart from a few purple planets.

I'm not exactly sure what triggers continous fleets of pirates to attack, I know I had a planet right opposite of the sun and I'd get continous waves of 30+ fleets assaulting my planet over and over again every 10 or so minutes.

I killed them everytime but It wasn't very smart or piratey of them.

Pirates shouldn't stay and fight to the death against military fleets. There is no profit in it. Nor is there any profit in wiping all life out in the galaxy.

What should be done is increase the income benefit of Trade Stations. Then set pirates to attack trade ships and trade stations above all else (like what real pirates would do). If there are none present, the pirates should go to the next system over.

When significant military forces show up, pirates should try to flee. They should only fight to the death when a Phase Inhibitor prevents their leaving.

Also, pirates should only come from pirate bases. I can't stand the game's present 'Pirate Fleet Creationism'.

a Pirate base might be coming soon...

hmm... from your responces I have come up with a solution... an option that, instead of limiting pirates based on some arbitrary pre-programmed number, will let you limit max pirate based on the fleet sized of players and AI
perhaps something on the order of:

max_pirates=X*total_ships

where max_pirates determines how many pirates can be active in the game
where X is a percentage determined pre-game by the player
where total_ships is the total of all AI and player ships added up

the max_number of pirates would also limit the size of pirate attacks
so like maybe one forth of that number? (meaning that there would be a max of 4 pirate fleets attacking, as no others would be allowed to spawn)

not only would this solve the problem people have with pirates wiping them out early in the game, but since it would increase with the total number of ships they could stay interesting later in the game

this system of taking max pirates from total number of ships would slightly bias the system against the weaker players, as they would have a smaller percentage of the total ships, but hey, pirates are meant to go after weak targets anyway!

and that there are almost NO enemy fleets in my territory

I have given this some thought and I think the easiest way to fix the pirates is to just remove the Pillagers from their fleet. It does not make sense that pirates would wipe out planets as that is what produces the plunder they are after, and insurgents would not want to wipe out planets or kill off populations.

Cheers.

how do u know if pirate bases are coming soon?

Absolutely....why would Pirates or Insurgents intend to wipe out entire planets? They're pirates, not Borg...
Anyway, I have only dealt with pirates for a short while (just started playing) and I certainly don't want to see massive pirate fleets spawning behind my lines just because...
perhaps operating from a base, and they get tougher as you get closer...would make a LOT more sense

Yea agreed and they should have ships capable of taking over smaller vessles cos thats what pirates do take over ships and sell thier plunder

yes, why would insurgents want to wipe out entire groups of people?

why people do things will always be a mystery, but people still kill on a mass scale for little reason.

besides, there are plenty of reasons that pirates would wipe out a colony, they could easily force the remaining people to pay tribute, worship them, have their way with their women etc.

keep in mind, bombing a planet to shreds kills the occupying force, not everyone on the planet.

no way, that completely breaks the way the pirates work. they wouldnt even be worth trifling with if all they did was attack your fleets.

I have the same problems with pirates, i think the insurgency is the problems.
i did this, i wipe out 3/4 ais and the pirates stop the atack on me. i think the ai researh insurgency max level and that is the reason that they no respon to bounty.

my advice is to wipe the ais before they fully researh insurgency

SchematicNinja,

I have to disagree, we are talking about pirates and insurgents not Terrorists.

I think that they should be a part of the game not your main opponent I want to battle the AI players and that is just not happening. In 6 games so far I have only come accross 1 decent AI opponent and even then after a couple of battles the pirates finished him off.

If the pirates just took out defenses and logistics and not wipe out planets they would still have to be delt with but leave the players still able to fight each other.

Cheers.