Don't press the little striped orange button at the bottom center of the UI.

if you have a spy or diplomat unit in the game... and ideally you should have both... then you should be able to use that unit to coop pirates... give them a letter of mark... basically deputizing them as agents of your empire to kill, pillage, and cause havoc against rival powers with the same legal authority as your own military. Only you don't have to pay them and they pretty much keep whatever they kill. Though by selling their booty in your territory you get "some" of the loot just through trade.

hm. hmm. well, the problem with these pirate mercenaries suggestions that I see is why should they attack others and not you? if you say "well they keep the profit" then you are just as good a target as anyone else and you do not offer better conditions than other people. besides mercenaries are by definition paid for their services and that way we are back at the bounty system already in place.

the only thing I can think of is giving the pirates specific mission. like pay them a little extra cash and the attack a specified time and a specified place which you can plan accordingly with your own attack. of course it wont be much of a secret to the other player then who hired them in the first place but that a different issue.

for noncombat ships you may take a look at call to power, they had a bunch of non convential war units. I think something of a slave keeper would be kind of interesting. you might even order a pirate to not destroy a planet but take slaves which you can then buy on the black market and add to you planets. hmm, but then ... will they pay takes. in any case they could bring some benefit or another.

I also agree that spies would be welcome, but I remember the response.

Do you mean letter of marque?

Well, actually the bounty system indirectly makes pirates "friendly" as long as you keep the bounty up high on other players. But it would be nice to be able to by a pirate coven structure that creates you own automated pirate corsair. These pirates would not attack other peoples ships or structures but only prey on enemy merchants and resource ships.

Or maybe not. What i really want is a way to make pirates stronger. But reading the forums it seems like I'm the only player not having any problems with them. I have actually never been attacked by them on my last 3 games. That's probably because the bounty on my opponents have constantly been much higher.

I also would like to have safe havens for pirates. As it is now, once you clear out the pirate asteroid in your system you get rid of them. Once that happens, a really cool game mechanism for indirect warfare is gone and you can feel much to safer.

Cheers

Pirates aren't that tough, theleif. They're beyond the power of a single system's defenses to take out (and boy do they hurt the system in question...) but a little mobile support and most systems can hold their own decently enough, even if the losses incurred by the trade ships tends to hurt.

Now, upping the defense of their asteroid makes a lot of sense, IMO -- lets do that Place some tactical structures, maybe buff up their mobile defenses... yum.

yes...

I don't know about adding to the pirate's asteroid defense, I've run into the case of almost 100 pirates in their lair, they eat fleets that try to root out alive and leave a pile of bones at the entrance to the phase jump lane. I've been trying to figure out the logic, when I go into a new, uninhabited star system the pirate base has ~10 ships and it stays that way until I colonize all the planets/asteroids. When I go to clean them out, there's still 10 to 20. When you go to an established star system, the numbers can get quite high. I guess 10 is the base and they ramp up quite steeply from there.

pek

I like this idea , over the current ships that they have defending... also, shouldn't the pirate base have a construction yard to make new ships???

Well, i would still prefer "untouchable" pirate bases. After all where playing a game in space where there's a million asteroids where a pirate cove could be hidden. Actually pirates as it is don't play anything as pirates would do. More like rogue nations. "Real" pirates would satisfy themselves with hit and run attacks on trade ships.

So maybe I'm actually talking about a completely different thing.

Im of the school of thought clamoring for an increase in pirate strength. Maybe if dead asteroids were unclaimable and had a chance to spawn one every x amount of time. Or better yet, it would be nice to be able to seed them some how to create a pirate stronghold. As for controlling them, I dont agree. There should always be a risk in dealing with pirates.

stealthed pirate bases might be interesting... perhaps only discoverable by the spy ship that we should have.


Edit: pirates are not supposed to be able to go toe to toe with government forces. They never were able to do that and shouldn't. It's a silly concept.


Pirates survive by hiding, lying, and sneaking around.

The best pirate ships are ones that look like something else. For example, a pirate ship that looked like one of your trade ships... only the sides could open up to reveal a hundred missile ports.



Pirates should always be outnumbered and outgunned by governments... because historally they always have been.


having them ally with a given faction is one of the few ways a pirate could protect himself.

While I agree pirates shouldnt be able to go toe to toe with an actual empire, I have found more often then not...that they cant. Sure they can raid a planet or 2, but they never have enough forces (or desire) to adequately destroy a system (like the empires can). I tend to think of them like the pirates from exo squad. They were cool pirates.

well, pirates should be able to "raid" a planet in that they pretend to be merchants or traders... land or dock... do some bit of crime... and then escape before anyone find them. But pirates are NOT vikings.


Vikings could and DID raid whole towns. But they were more then pirates they were a whole barbarian society. Pirates are not. Pirates are a lose collection of criminals. They can become wealthy but their wealth will probably never rival that of even the smallest countries. They can have per capita wealth higher then the richest countries but in those cases the actual population of the group is always very small. Pirates when all is said and done are just criminals with boats.

I wish I could get your pirate bases

Is it just a case of an impending pirate raid that hadn't taken off yet?

Don't act stupid!
Don't touch yourself that way in public!
  

Err... Pirate ships in the past often outgunned the government ships. In fact it was often the case that when a ship was commondired that the pirates would enhance the firepower and thus out power the same class of ship in a governments Navy.

I was thinking that but then I guess that the pirates just buy new ships so don't need to build their own

Typically not. Mostly because pirate ships must not look like military ships. And at a certain point you can't hide a fast hull, heavier armor or construction, and lots of extra gun ports.



Pirates typically claimed to be "merchants" when they went to port. If they had 60 cannons or 100 cannons then they're not merchants.


And ships of the line had that many cannons.


So they are outgunned. I don't think you were contradicting the outnumbered bit...


A good example today is that most pirates disguise themselves as fishing boats. Well, fishing boats don't have fast hulls. They're wider and stouter. Furthermore, how many deck guns can you hide on the deck of a fishing boat? Typically one or two.


These boats are TOO slow to outrun so much as a cruiseship and almost any coast guard ship is more then enough to smash them.


Now perhaps you want to focus on old sail and mast pirates... well... fine they had comparatively more formidable ships but they were still nothing to the ships of the line. The only ones that had really top notch ships were the privateers... and that's because they had access to military shipyards and carried the right paperwork to dock with a military ship.

Merchant ships were typically wider to give them more cargo space, had fewer gun ports, and had less bracing to hold the frame together. You can't hide all that. You might get away with having thicker bracing or a slimmer hull... but the gun ports especially would screw you.


Pirates survived by preying upon the weak and using tricks and guile. That is they picked on merchant ships that were more poorly equipt then themselves... and tended to get near them with some kind of ruse.

I was refering to the old days of pirates, they hid in safe harbours and the ships they used were ships they commondired, they did not build them, so they did look like "regular ships".

true they did not compare to a "ship of the line"" but they were rare. Other then that i would say we are on the same page.

yeah, I don't think that works.


How do you sell the goods or buy new supplies? Remember most of the time they didn't capture chests of gold.


and even if you did those ships can't just sail into port anymore then I can drive a Bradley fighting vechile with the machine gun turret to work every day... I'm going to get pulled over...


likewise you pull into a port it's going to be owned by someone... and that someone is going to need some papers that authorize you to have that many cannons. Why? Because ships like that are really only good for fighting... so you're not getting grandma some cookies...


As to ships of the line being rare... compared to most ships in the water... sure... but they were typically "around"... I mean what you mean by "outgunned" is "place the nation states in the worst possible position against the most powerful and unlikely pirate vessel"... then yeah...


The reason pirates were tough to track down in those days was because it was impossible to find them. They'd go out on the ocean and then who knows where they are... They'd dock somewhere under assumed identities... sell their wears and move on.


Most pirates in those days as I said posed as merchants. Many of them had houses and wives in what you would think are respectable towns. They'd come back to town at the end of the season as respectable ship captains... sell whatever was the hot trade item at their last port of call and call it quits for a few months. Then go back on the sea and do it again. Very common in those days for pirates to kill everyone on the ship they raided... no witnesses... then either take the ship as a prize if practical or sink it after raiding the cargo.

No, I've seen the AI go into a lair after a 50+ ship raid left and they still got their butts handed to them by 50 - 60 pirates. And another thing:

/bug report?
The AI needs to reduce then colonize the pirate base if they go in and clean it out. Just killing all the pirates doesn't mean that they can't use the base as an originating point for the next raid. That's one the stupid AI things. Unless they were just using the pirates to level up, I've done that. The pirate AI seems to be quite a bit different than the player AI.
/bug report?

The algorithim for the pirates seems to have a lot of wild variables.

pek

You probably showed up at the pirate base just as they spammed in a fresh raider fleet to go out on a pillaging raid.

So, add that fleet to the defending fleet = lots of pirates.

OK, im sure my idea has been discussed before, but what about a MOBILE pirate base?

Something even 2-3 cap ships would have trouble against on their own, it doesnt attack and is not used to attack but acts as a mobile rally points and shipyard for the pirate forces, this way it moves around from GW to GW or system to system and launches attack forces, it doesnt attacvk unless fired upon and just floats along ominus until lyou have the forces to huint her down. Also it would have the scout ships ability top ignore FTL inhibitors.

Thisway its more "realistic.." as a pirate base wouldnt necisarily want to be pinned down, maybe the thing would idle in a dead asteroid feild, build some ships send out raiding partys and then move on before the forces could be tracked back to them.

ANOTHER idea i like for pirates is OBJECTIVE RAIDS. they run in grab resources from you and money from the bountys then move off, or strike your research stations to get different techs, like upgraded missles or lasers and then you loose that tech and have to re research it. I would like to see the pirates attack for some reason other than to just attack...

In the beginning, I found that their system has way too many ships and their raids sometimes send too many ships. So it was cheaper to pay them off and direct the bounty on someone else first.

Correct me if I am wrong, it seems as time goes by and the pirates raid systems, it takes away from their home fleet. After, I am able to build 4 capital ships, their weak enough to wipe out completely. And that would be the end, until you research rebels.
Their home asteroid base should be able to hold some population. Maybe turn it into a planetoid?

I would like to see:
If you leave pirates alone, they will be able to rebuild their fleet.
Maybe have the bounty reflect the pirate raid size.
As RaGod, suggests have options to pay pirates to do more mercenary work.
Some covert operations would be fun to pay with.