*shrug* there are people who say that they should be reduced, I guess thats what we're arguing against.

What? I thought it was perfectly possible to turn off the pilot in the random map generator? Or is that just the galaxy forge? Or am I speaking through my forehead?

Schod, how big are your fleets late game? I have been playing some random 3 player maps lately (~25 planets), me vs 2 AI normal. Games have been taking a few hours and yet I only have to upgrade fleet size twice, rather than units I just expand over most of the map, a strong financial/cultural empire with a few teched out ships seems a very viable strategy vs opponents. But the pirates will still wipe out an entire defended planet from me every time they attack, as they usually show up with 30+ ships. Really the only thing I can do is hope I get lucky and outbid the AI so they don't come for me.

Now with enough cash this is just a nusiance, as losing one of my many planets is not that big a deal, but the pirates are certainly not fodder, and would eat most of my troops in a head on fight. A few times my assault fleet would try and skirt around the edge of the pirate grav well (grr at the random map for sometimes putting pirates at chokepoints) and those are death sentances for my troops.

I suppose for the player who goes for tons of units in a RTS style could overpower the pirates, but the fleet taxes make that seem like a less viable option.

hey look, he's got a stain on his head!
silence it, quick! with the tide bleach pen!

they tend to number in at least the dozens, I usually assign at least 1-1.5 upgrades per fleet (150-220 fleet points, usually)

so usually I can handle pirate fleets, it only really takes 1 decently leveled cap with some defenses and a healing platform to halt them and suck them dry of momentum, which is what I usually do (is nice for the cap as well, hoorah for high level advent carriers!)

While my opinion is based on a mere 4 hours of play (thus subject to change once i understand the intricacies more), I do admit that the only thing that i really disliked so far in this game are the constant pirate attacks. while i like the general idea, just the constant barage of attacks every 10-15 minutes is quite annoying and if there was an option for it i'd definately take advantage of that quite frequently until i get the hang of this game in more detail.

I can definitely see where people are coming from who don't like the pirates. It would be nice to have a button to turn them off when making a random map. I know you can go into the map editor and make a game that doesn't have them, but some people just want to sit down, click on random map, and get right into the game.
If you don't know you can make your own or are inexperienced in making them (I haven't tried to mapmaker so I personally don't know how complex it is), and have had bad run ins with the pirates, it can be a bit frustrating.

To the game, maybe not.

But some maps are designed and balanced around pirates. Or not pirates.

I've been reading this post and wondering if if a few options in the random map generator wouldn't be good. I'd say to be put the following:

Enable Pirates Yes/No (If no the other options could would be disabled)
Pirate Strength (so it scales by the resources AND this option)
Pirate Frequency (so you can choose how frequent pirate attacks should be)

Am I missing anything?

I liked the pirates in the MP game that I played even though they were generally used against me. Bribing the pirates to attack a specific player just added one more thing to think about in assessing your strategy.

A key factor I've seen in the three games I've played is that you need to be very careful who you call bounty on if you own the systems near the pirate base.

In both my second and third games I always kept a huge bounty on the heads of my main eneamy, outweighing any computer bounties by about a factor of 5. This worked great, until in both games I gained control of a system between the pirates and their target. Suddenly the system (and others of mine) were continually being raided, even though at all times I kept the bounty on my enemy thousands of credits higher than the bounty on me.

Does the bounty just set the pirates raiding path and then they go a raiding towards the chosen foe?

The current game I am playing, I have got pirates nailed just right.

***** Early game *****

Outbid your opponants only if they start puting bounties on your head. Don't feed the pirates unless you really have to.

Pay special attention to the map (you have auto explored nearly all of it by now right?). If you have to bid on pirates, send them towards someone where the pirates wont have to go through your space to get to them. Idealy, pick a rival you want to slow down but wont get the pirates using your space (otherwise your AI auto engages them if you aren't careful and they take pot shots at you on the way through).

Pay special attention to covering your structures with platforms. I covered a planet with 4 gause platforms only for the pirates to fly around the back and start beating up on the undefended civilian structures.

***** Mid game *****

Your economy should be competitive now and your forces growing well. It depends on your priorities but if you aren't in the middle of a war with someone, why not let the pirates come to you? I had 3 capital ships waiting for the pirate fleet which meant they got some nice experience before going up against the rest of the galaxy.

Intelligence is the key! If you know someone is bigger than you, a nice fat pirate raid while your main fleet attacks the other side of their empire works wonders.

***** Late game *****

Not sure I've even got their yet, I am such a newbie to the game. Let's just say my current fleet is considering making a raid on a pirate planet as I hear there are some nice bonuses if you win.

My first few games I thought pirates where a silly big distraction put into the game without much thought. After a few games and getting used to things now I can see the benefit. The ability to change the timer might be nice but I haven't seen even 5% of what the game has to offer yet so hold off any changes please so I dont get lazy and start saying 3 hourly pirate raids lol

I think they are a good idea, but perhaps a bit unbalanced.

One thing I noticed is that if the raiding pirate fleet is not completely destroyed, the remaining ships go back to their home base and sit there. New raiders are spawned, attack, return and sit.

At least I think this is what happens. I never lost the bounty war and between me and the AI and the AI never had a chance between me and the pirates. The downsides is that there was a huge pirate fleet at their base as they rarely lost a ship. When I went in for a look, I could muster 4 capital ships. They had as follows:
21 corsairs
8 pillagers
20 reapers
40 cut throats
10 rouges
Most of these were in a giant death cloud of ships that destoryed anything in its path. In the time it took for my fleet to turn around and run, I lost an Advent battleship
(I know me having 4 cap ships is not a good time indicator, it was a small map (9 planets?) Maybe the pirate AI should be better and try to take over the system since it was the most powerful player for most of this game )

ZOMG! pirates!

seriously the pirates in the beta werent to bad, they showed up every now and then and for the most part i squashed them like a grape.

so i get home from BB, pop the disk in, wait like 30 min for the thing to install (holy crap that took long) and jump right into game 1 of single player.

and OMG pirates bent me over every horzontal surface!

I managed to squeak out a second capital ship by scraficeing virtually all my built up metal and crystal, and had it not been for that i would have been toast 3 or 4 times over.

not to mention the "local militia" in the beta was 3 maybe 4 ships, nothing "serious" i land at my first planet and get met by a fleet of like 8 ships!

so my out of box experience went like this.
-show up at first planet, run
______build small fleet
-show back up with small fleet and capital ship
(settle small out of way astroid (do nothing with it except gather resorces)
-retreat to homeworld due to pirates (local militia not killed yet)
-defeat pirates, move to first planet, wipe out last remining malitia, settle
-build basics on first planet
-SHIT more pirates, back home, reinforce homeworld with more plantary defences.
-kill pirates, head to second world
-holy crap! local milita, need rest of fleet again (hold please)
-HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, another pirate warning! WTF!
-dont get to settle second planet yet, home to fight off pirates. (GD, were do the bastards get such a huge fleet!)
-land my second planet (do nothing with it because guess what)
-YEP MORE GD PIRATES.

i kill off my 5th wave of pirates (takes me the better part of 10 min to do so, both captials are sitting at level 5) i have 4 total bodies under my control, im looking at my 6th wave of pirates ive been playing for 2 hrs now.

see screen shot below for wave 6 (26 ships, i hung it up not even bothering to try) as i have yet to battle the real enemy AI and 2 quick scout ships tell me he has a MASSIVE fleet just 1 planet away.

http://www.snjschmidt.com/pics/ZOMG_pirates.jpg

i guess from the thread... i need to up the bounty on my enemy so im not number uno target!

Sounds like them Rats got paid alota money.

First map I made I put 2 pirate bases in. I love em. They are very nice for grading up your capitols. They cant really hurt you if you know the game. Oh sorry if that upsetted someone

I completely agree with Blair on his "I loves" about the pirates...it really does remind me of Catan (Cities and Knights Expansion) when the pirate ship and robber are making their way towards land...you damn well know they're coming. Managing the pirates, at least when you begin playing SINS in my opinion, has a lot to do with strategic management of "sheer panic" (that's the technical term :P). That being said, I LOVE this crazy psychological dimension of the game whereby one's ass can be handed to one when he/she is too tied up (both cognitively and with their actual game resources) to implement useful strategies that can influence how the situation unfolds!  

I think it was Craig who said "easy to learn, hard to master"   

Well done guys, you rock!

Ironfuzz

Easiest way to not be attacked by pirates... keep the bounty on the others higher than your... Simple

And it just happens to work. Pirates are not the as irritating as most believe, even then a few defenses can easily take care of them.

When I first started the game I was also like holy shyte the pirates are bleeding me dry. After a while you get to learn how to use the pirates to your advantage.

pirates feature in most space RTS games these days such as Star Wars: Empire at war... they can be annoying but I must say they make excellent target practic

A pirate config options section would be the best for all methinks. I believe I suggested this during the beta since I love the pirates and wanted super beefed up baddies.

Do these two things and the game is perfect. The current setting is just a bit annoying, and only three predesigned maps without pirates is ... well ...

They may scale their fleet strength with economy (through bounty) but we're not asking to adjust their strength, we're asking to adjust their frequency. Also, excluding pirates on the random maps shouldn't have any impact at all, given that we can already design maps without them.

Thanks for the heads up on how to change the interval time on the pirates. I can now see the reasoning behind including them in the game, but they are really annoying coming in fast and furious at the preset level. A good portion of my strategy is tied down in simply warding off pirate attacks, rather than attacking opposing players. I'd really prefer less frequency on the pirate attacks, but that's my personal taste. Now that I have a way to dial that in, I'm all good.

I think the pirates are a really great addition to the game. My only problem is that they're so weak. They appear with a fleet of 40 ships, but get decimated in seconds by my forces, yet their bounty on me is 15,000. Not much of a challenge. I'd love it if the pirates were more powerful, having their own capital ships and all. Sure, a button to switch the pirates off from the random maps might be good if you want to please some of the people here. But then again, it's the game the developers wanted to make, no one forced you to buy or play it. For that, I applaud them. The less the developers listen to the commercial trends of the day and the more they use their own imagination, generally the better the game.

Sorry to be a stick in the side but it is more important for people to say what you did wrong so you can fix it as soon as possible, and good word spreads about the game instead of "Yeah these guys released a game, aren't listening to what we say or reply to things constructively.. They just ignore the bad and go with the good.."

NC Soft release that assault game, did the exact same thing.. Heh, it no longer exists.. No really, it no longer exists, they completely removed any function of it now, check up if you'd like lol.

Don't worry, criticism is not ignored on the Sins forums. If you read the other Ironclad posts in this thread you'd see we are already addressing the issue

We've been in public beta since March - Sins is basically built on people's constructive criticism. I doubt you will find any company up to this date who was listened more to what the community has said (both good and bad comments) than we have. Nor will you find any company that has implemented more things suggested from the community. 1000's of beta testers can back this up.

I know a lot of you are probably used to being treated a certain way in developer forums but I assure you that isn't the case here so you can afford to relax, be cool and make some interesting, detailed analysis posts without fear of persecution or being ignored. We love well thought out suggestions and criticism as it only improves the game.

I'm actually finding the mission requests more of an annoyance than the pirates

That isn't right lol