Why are the Pirates harder to kill than the Empires?

Erm, I've never found the pirate base to be too tough, but I don't know if the number of ships there is constant or changes with the size of the raids.

Mind you, I don't use 'spam' fleets of a single ship type. 50 heavy cruisers is 500-600 fleet capacity. A mixed fleet worth the same amount of fleet capacity (with a Capital ship or two, and a mix of frigates and cruisers, including support types) will generally be a lot more effective and durable.

Oh, and you're right - you shouldn't need 20 heavy cruisers to fight off pirates every 10 minutes. For a start, they don't attack that often (;)), and unless you deliberately want to be raided to level up a Cap ship, you should be able to avoid the raids most of the time by playing with the bounties on your opponents.

Even if you do get attacked every raid, your static defences should be handling most of it, with maybe a small fleet to back them up.

With all that said, there is a valid design reason for the pirate base to be fairly well-defended - if it was too easy to destroy, you might as well take pirates out of the game altogether, which I think would be a shame. They're an interesting mechanic.

Are you only using one type of cruiser?? I just dominated a pirate base with 2 caps 7 guardians... cause they own, 5 drone hosts, 14 crusaders, 7 illuminators, and a couple of the 3 subjecators. I lost one Illuminator...

I've found that pirate raiders who survive and go back to base will add to the pirate defenses (I've seen 50+ kodiaks and more then double the other ships). If a large number of raids resulted in surviving pirates, I could see loosing 50+ heavy cruisers easily. However, if that is not the case, a smallish force of mixed units will easily take any pirate base with limited losses (unless you get stupid with them).

The AI doesn't always respond to a pirate raid, i've seen one fleet going back to the pirate base while another is headed to attack another planet.

Surviving pirates will return to the pirate base and reinforce the pirate fleet.

Also make use of support ships, i had returning armada and sent in a fore without support ships (you have to actually build support ships) and it got chewed up good.

Use a ton of frigates around your support cruisers, and set everyone to hold their position - it'll take awhile, but at least you won't lose any expensive units while you take out their 30+ defensive turrets.

I like using 20 (?) capital ships to soften them up. Go back and repair, then send in the entire fleet.

13 cap ships can equal a 3 ship loss.

I'm playing my first "real" game right now, and the pirate fleet protecting their base currently contains 53 Reapers, 47 Pillagers, 99 Cutthroats, and 149 Corsairs.

This seems, well, kind of overwhelming. Is this normal?

I've had the same problem with the pirates before.
You know on the bounty screen it shows how stong the pirates are and when they are at severe sometimes when I go to their base they have like 120 kodiaks waiting for me plus about 20 of all the other pirate ship types.

The last Pirate base I took out had nearly 200 ships and I dont think I lost a ship (if I did it was minimal). Later tech's and fully trained capital ships with a diverse fleet backing them up pawn pirates bad.

You guys play singeplayer/comp stomp too much. Yeah they're hard when the pirates have lots of surviving units. (Which is generally what happens when you sick them on computers), computers are smart enough to cut their losses, unlike humans who I notice first reaction is to try to hold onto every planet instead of looking at the strategic longterm - but also because its much easier for humans to fight off pirates (unless others are attacking them as well).