Late Game Pirates

Well, if you expect to take out a heavily fortified and reinforced (it sounds like a bunch of finished pirate raids got back to reinforce the mobile fleet) without suffering any losses, that's probably why you're having trouble.

What race are you playing, with what ships? The Advent have obvious advantages against masses of weak ships since they can do AoE damage absorb and AoE shield restore.

Im using Vasari, I pull out when my auxiliary ships die and my capital fleet loses sheilds, and the pirate base is heavily fortified. I have something like 7 cappies, but theyre not totally upgraded yet so that might be my problem.

Make sure you bring along some Vulkoras Desolators with Phase Missile Swarm, and if you can get a Kortul or two with Volatile Nanites (their level 6 ultimate) that will also help a lot.

Both of those abilities are for killing several ships at once, and they are quite good at it.

Also bringing a carrier or two will let your ships live a lot longer with their AoE hull repair abilities. You don't really need to worry very much about support ships against pirates, since the Vasari ones mostly focus on disrupting enemies, and there are too many pirates (and most of them aren't worth disabling), so you're probably better off getting more heavy hitters.

Make sure you have all the shields, hp, armor upgrades done (or as many as possible). Having done the culture techs is a great help with +15% damage, assuming your culture spread through the pirate base

Hope this helps!

man it is easy to invade the pirate base late in the game. the trick is to use the fleet engagement option and set it to "HOLD POSITION". once that is set for your fleet move them to the pirate base and they will sit on the edge of the gravity well and won't get chewed up by all the point defense cannons

take 30+ carriers with you... the more the better. fighters for taking out the individual pirate ships and the bombers are good on the tactical cannons. with the hold position trick your ships will never get hit by the cannons and once all the pirate baddies are dead your fighters/bombers will take care of the planet defenses...

holy crap...my cappie fleets are severly undersized if i need 30 carriers. thanks though.

I have found that you do not really even need to use the hold position. Just jump in and remain at the intersection of the Phase lane and the gravity well. The Pirates vessels will all move to engage you right where you are.

After you destroy them, then move on to the defenses, and then bombard their planetoid and that will end the Pirate scourge.

careful, Raban was referring to the carrier's you need to research, not the capital-carriers.
you only can build (without modding the game) up to 16 capitals, but a lot more carrier's and stuff. they only can tage one squad (fighter or bomber) but its simple mass you can bring into fight if needed

you have to understand that capital ships are more durable, but lower DPS then frigates and MUCH lower then cruisers...

Get 30 attack cruisers in there and they will SHRED the pirates. each capital ship is 50 logistics and 1 captain... each attack cruiser is 10 logistics.
So you get 5 of those or 1 capital ship. They cost 500-600 credit plus a good amount of metal and crystal. And they each have about 2/5th the health and 1/2 the damage of a single capital ship. So 5 of them do tremendously more damage. Sure they take losses, but overall they still win.

Capital ship support abilities also become much more prominent when you have a huge fleet.
And lastly, as those ships slowly die, you can replace them and bring in reinforcements from a nearby planet while the battle still rages.

So get more regular ships... MUCH more.

I don't know what game your playing, but it obviously isn't sins. Cap ships have MUCH higher dps than frigates and even HIGHER dps than cruisers, infact, most cruisers (barring the combat ones) have little to no dps at all. Whereas caps can have upwards of 100 total dps, most frigates won't even reach 20.

If your the vasari, keep the bounty up on other players in your system, then, once you've conquered the system, just keep the bounty off you and build 6-7 kostura cannons and shell the pirate base, eventually you will destroy the gauss cannons and severely weaken the pirate ships (this is how i take care of pirates as vasari) not to mention if you can time it right you can jump in while the ships are still disabled.

i keep them around as cheap muscle

Taltamir was obviously referring to DPS per supply point required. In which case his assertion that Capital Ships have less than Frigates or Cruisers (again, it's fairly implicit that he is referring to COMBAT cruisers) is true.

He means DPS/Supply, yes. For their supply cost, heavy cruisers do more damage and use a better damage type than battleships, at least until the capitals reach a significantly high experience level. In fact, LR frigates statistically have the best DPS/Supply ratios there are, better than heavy cruisers, battleships or even carriers.

Kostura Cannons will never kill anything on their own because they do 10% of target's remaining hp worth of damage. In this anti-pirate respect though, the Kosturas are even better than Novaliths(which won't get rid of the Pirate ships, just their colony). Since they disable ships and turrets, but not strike craft, it would be simple to just go into a pirate base with a fleet of 30-50 Lasurak Transporters supported by a barrage of Kostura fire and wipe the Pirates out, and then siege their base once the ships are gone.

those pirate bases can get pretty impressive after a long game, but if you've got a big enough fleet, you should be pretty well off when it comes time to take care of them

at the end of my last game, I was finishing securing my 4th of 5 stars, and I jumped a scout ship to the pirate base, to find over 900 pirate ships at the base. something like a trio of desolators, a quartet of devastators, an evacuator, and a pair of capital carriers, all at level 10, as well as 40 enforcers, 20 carrier cruisers, and 25 or so assailants, and that fleet was able to take out the base on its own, with very little in the way of losses. I had to warp out a single desolator when its hull dropped to 50%, but otherwise, it went off quite well. damn fun to watch in cinematic mode, especially.

I've seen it destroy the pirate gauss cannons (despite not having los), 5 or 6 explosions (the same ones gauss cannons exploding use, i'm not getting confused with the kostura effect) a few seconds after the kostura effect happens (starts, not ends) and when I jump in, poof, no gauss cannons. I've seen this both times I invaded a pirate base with vasari. Maybe it's a bug, I dunno, but it happens.

Pirate bases are free exp, simply bring enough assailants/lrm's.
Since the rats will move in tight groups, its like them lining up to be shot.

Advent can simply cast a few abilitys and be done with it.

At the end of huge maps I've seen pirate bases with over 400 ships in them; and over 100 heavy cruisers. When you've had 10 hours of returning pirate fleets, they can build up. If you're wanting to take out a pirate base, the end of a smaller game would be a better bet.

I played Advent recently and sent a tremendous fleet of Illuminators and Crusaders at them, backed by some cap ships. Wiped the floor with them.

Never seen so many beam weapons fire at once in my life.

Pretty, though..

oh, most definately, there's something magical to seeing a fleet of over 100 ships wiping out a fleet of over 800 pirates, over 200 of which were heavy cruisers. it's just, so beautiful.

I never have much problem with the pirates as I usually just buy them out and have them attack someone else. Maybe near the middle to the end of the game I might stop in the pirate base with 7 or so capital ships and then just micro each pirate ship (takes awhile as there are about 100 or so). At most I have lost 2 of 7 cap ships, usually no more than 1.

Before I knew what I was doing, (like increase the cap crew complement for more cap ships..lol), I once cleared out the pirate base with one cap ship and a provision level 1 number of frigates. I just herded the pirate ships around, microing each pirate ship, then retreating and re-entering several times. I did eventually have to resupply with a few more frigates. I think I went through four or five pirate raid cycles until I had neutralized the base. The pirate base fleet appears to be static in number, and although the raids seem to spawn in the same space as the static fleet, the raiders don't stop to fight there, even if you are trying to kill them off as they pause to jump out of the system.

Since the pirates only attack your first base on the shortest path from their base to your homeworld, it is pretty easy to load up that frontline base with enough static defenses to kill off the raids, so your main fleet can stay to finish off the pirate base.

However, I wouldn't waste time with the pirate base though until you have severely weakened your real opponent, as the pirates are actually very useful. If you are building your econ right you should be able to keep your real opponents busy fighting pirates while you mass your capital ships in peace.