Hiya folks! With the recent release of Sins there have been a lot of posts on the forums about the difficulty of dealing with pirates, and AI siege frigate raids. Instead of arguing in each and every post, I figured why not make one with tips on how to deal with them, instead!

First, let me give you some background. In beta, the AI sucked to put it plainly. It was a walk in the park, and it barely did anything. We badgered Ironclad so much to improve it, constantly offering scenarios and feedback of the "well, this is what the AI should do in this case" type. And, Ironclad listened! The new AIs are sneakier, deadlier, and much more fun than the beta AI ever was.

I encourage everyone to realize that the AI was made difficult purposefully, and that new players should not expect to be able to beat it right off the bat. There’s a lot to this game that you can only figure out through practice and experience – especially if you deal with Hard AI.

Having said that, here are some tips (both "strategic" in terms of gameplay, and "combat") on dealing with both sources of frustration for our newer players:

Siege frigates

- First and foremost, make sure to Upgrade your front-line planets with Emergency Infrastructure. This helps immensely and will save you a lot of hair. Most planets can have 6,000 hp (asteroids have 2,500 max) fully upgraded. That’s a LOT of HP for siege frigates to chew through.

- Try not to have asteroids as your front line planets if you can avoid it! Because fully upgraded asteroids only have 2,500 hp compared to 6,000 for planets, they are a lot easier for roaming Siege groups to destroy. Look at the map, try to find a nice "choke point" planet (ideally this would be a planet that’s the only entrance to your inner empire around the area). Don’t expand past it at first. Get your fleet there, colonize it, upgrade it so it has maxed hp.

- Watch the phase lanes and build defenses! Scout ahead, know where your AI enemy is. This makes it easier to predict where he’ll be coming from. There is some variation of where attacking ships will come out of phase space, but it’s ALWAYS somewhere around the phase lane. Build lots of defenses very close to your planet around that area. The AI is not going to maneuver siege frigates to go around your defenses. He’ll charge right in, and get blasted to bits.

- Most planets have 35 tactical points for defenses when fully upgraded (asteroids get 25). Use them! 4-5 gauss turrets (or equivalent for other races) is not enough to defend your planet from a siege raid if you don’t have a stationed fleet there. Build up 15-20, some repair stations, and a few hangars. This is a pretty heavy investment of resources, but you’re in no rush against the AI, and believe me it’ll pay off in the end when you can see 15 siege ships get plastered before they can take out your 6,000 hp colony. Remember to place them where you know the siege frigates will be.

- Try to keep a small defensive fleet on your front line planet. The AI isn’t going to go past it and bomb some undefended planet. A small fleet + defenses will make the AI siege frigates run away quickly. They’re not suicidal, and the AI will want to save his ships if you have an advantage!

- A little later in the game, look at the civic research trees! Races have various ways of helping against siege frigates. These are planetary shield structures, weapon jamming structures, disabling structures, and passive planet upgrades to reduce bombardment damage and the like.


Pirates! ARRRR!

This section is smaller because a lot of it is shared with siege frigates. Pirates aren’t that smart, they’ll plow straight into your defenses, and they also go for your edge of the empire planets, they’ll never bypass a front line planet to go deep into your territory. So all the stuff about defenses and planet upgrades applies to pirates. Know which phase lane they’ll be using, and build defenses on that side of the planet. Do NOT ignore repair centers against pirates. Two repair stations will prolong the life of your defenses very, very, very considerably! I’ve been able to beat back level 4-5 pirate raids and only losing 2-3 turrets because they kept getting repaired.

As far as bounty goes, here are some tips:

The AI will place bounty on each other, too. Pick whoever has the highest close to yours (if you’re the target) and pump his bounty a bit. After all, you usually don’t care who the pirates go after as long as it’s not you.

If you’re low on money, on the pirate target list, and don’t want to fight them – go fight the AI instead. Every one of your ships destroyed decreases the bounty on you to decrease (and awarded to the AI that destroys your ships, but oh well :P). This way, unless you need to lose a lot of bounty, you can usually push the AI back and decrease your bounty at the same time, since you always lose a bit of ships in fights.

Don’t ignore the racial techs that deal with pirates! Advent techs give you a bigger return on placing bounties. Vasari techs scare pirates away and cause them to attack in fewer numbers. These are important if you keep getting harassed by pirates!

[UPDATES]:

"As far as pirates go, the majority of their ships seem to go directly for Trade and Refinery stations, no matter where they are in system. You can set up overlapping guns and repair stations around them and chew the pirates up. Use the trade stations/refineries as bait." - Thanks, Hrett!

"Defense hangars are underrated in a lot of the tips posted, especially if you're playing as the Advent since they have a nice 'buff' for them in their tech tree... Unlike platforms they have unlimited range and as long as you keep the hanagar itself safe they'll keep replenshing themselves. So, cluster a bunch of hanagrs around a repair facility and use up the remaining logistics space for a few platforms to add some extra defense for the hangars and you'll have worry-free defense against most AI and pirate raids." - Thanks, Seven05!

"If you use an asteroid as a "choke point" surround it with about 5 defense structures (gauss, laser, missile). Place them all as close to the asteroid as possible. When sieges show up they will b line it straight to the rock to bomb it, and come into the range of ALL your guns. Hangers, use them to build fighters to take on enemy bombers. Let the guns take care of the ships. I never build more than 2 hangers on an asteroid. Build at least 1 repair platform. More if you have the slots. You are gonna need it. Dont bother with phase jump inhibitors on an asteroid unless you have your own fleet stationed there, and dont want the enemy fleet to run away." - Thanks, Major_Stress!

"Do the trade port/refinery bait trick for pirates. Pirates will almost always go after civilian ships, and structures 1st ignoring any defenses or ships. Nice distraction for your fleets and defenses to take care of them. Civilian ships are auto replaced free anyway so you really lose nothing except the credits/ore the ship was carrying. Make sure your trade ports, and refineries are in range of repair structures, and defenses. In an asteroids case i build the port as close as possible to the rock so the pirates get nailed the same way sieges get nailed. Park capitols at your choke points, and keep them there. When pir8s hit its free experience for the cap ships. " - Thanks, Major_Stress!

"A setup like this is usually enough to wipe out any medium pirate planet: 1 cap ship of choice (preferably carrier), 3 carrier cruisers, 3 heavy cruisers, 6 1st level frigates, 4 LRM frigates. Remember to set your fleet on hold position and stay out of range of the turrets (To do this, set hold position before phase jumping, then right-click on the planet itself. Your ships will automatically jump to the outermost area of the planet. Stay there, the further you are from the enemy, the more damage he has to endure before he reaches you.). Once you finish off the defensive fleet, just go do something else while your bombers wipe out the turrets. If you want to save time, manually ask your bombers to take out enough turrets so you can bring your cap ship in to bomb the planet." - Thanks, duhman02!

"Another point is that if you don't have a convenient buffer system to place your fleet in to defend, say you have 2 systems, then withdraw your fleet back 1 system down your phase lanes to somewhere which links to both, and place a scout in each system linking to the ones you want to defend. When you see ships coming in, just have your main fleet jump to the appropriate system." -Thanks, Thomas Bloxham! [Alternatively, you can research the tech that shows phasing ships from 2 jumps away, each race has them at various points in the tech tree. -Annatar]

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I hope this helps a bit, if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to post them, and again, please realize that you’re not going to be good at smacking the AI around on day 2 (or 3, or 4) of the game. It’ll take a bit, but soon enough you’ll just be able to laugh when you see 15 unescorted siege frigates jump in to attack one of your colonies I promise!