Pirate Bidding Strategy

rather put your money on defense

The pirates are cruncy yummy exp points for your cap ships. The only time to bid them up is when you want to atatck or defend against your neighbor.

Just don't bid. 5 turrents and a repair bay or two was enough to hold off the pirates for an entire game for me. This was on Razor's Edge and they were attacking the same planet every time.

The way I look at it is this, most people probably only bid on the pirates so that they themselves arn't attacked. So they are only going to bid the least amount required to win. What I've read online makes it sound like the higher the bid, the more pirates which will attack. Keeping this in mind, if you get into a bidding war and lose, instead of only 250 credits worth of pirates to deal with, you are now having to fight off 5500 credits worth of pirates and you wasted 4700 of your own credits trying to win(random numbers there). If you hadn't bid, then you ot only would be saving your own resources, but you would only have to fight 250 credits worth of pirates.

Sometimes I will bid on the pirates to keep them away from a team mate who is not doing very well, but I prefer to just not bid on them at all and save resources.

Against the A.I., you can either measure the time between the last two pirate raid-related messages (which will be the same every time) and place a bid at that point, chain-bid fast enough (usually 1.5-2 seconds between bids) to stop the computer from getting a bid in at all, or just build a wall of turrets with a couple of repair bays on the planet that they're most likely to attack, which shouldn't be too hard to pin down.

It's a pain either way but all of those work for me reliably. Beyond that, I haven't yet heard a better way.

Do you really want to know? Kinda makes the game too easy if you do.

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Really.


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Either:

1. Bid x+250 on two different factions at once. They'll continue to bid each other up, instead of you. X is the value of the current bounty on you.

or 2. Bid a massive amount, all at once, on a single AI. Early game: 1000-2000 should do. Mid-game maybe 2500-4000.

Also, the AI will sometimes just bid on each other from the beginning. If you step in, they somehow 'know', and will bid against you. While you are a bounty virgin they may continue to leave you alone. At least, that's been my experience. Certainly if you only put 250 or 500 on an AI they'll always bid back against you. How do they know it was you? I dunno, but seems they do.

My pirate strategy: let the pirates splatter themselves on my defensive grid. If it's strategically important for whatever reason to have pirates attack your opponent, you need to camp the pirate screen and keep raising the bids over your opponent until the raiders launch. Like you said, the AI tries to outbid you with about a second left so you need to be quick about it.

Only thing I found working is to sit and watch the screen for 30 seconds to be sure you outbid the Al as soon as "he" outbids you. Wastes a lot of time on it though. However I prefer to let the attacks come in the beginning, just make sure to have scouts out ( or the Phase Jump monitor research ) so you know where they hit, and have your forces waiting for em to gain some XP.

Fighting the pirates seems pretty counter-productive. It takes most of your fleet and a good ten minutes (assuming you either want the XP or don't have the defenses.) That's time that could be better spent expanding.

I have not played a lot, but the one game I avoided bidding to keep the pirate threat low, that strategy just didn't work. With no bidding at all, the pirate threat increased each time, so that by the third wave of attacks, it was maxed out and they were sending huge flotillas. Fortunately I had a chokepoint well defended by then or I never would have survived.

Making sure that you aren't the target of the first couple of pirate attacks is a must, since the pirates ensure that at least parts of your fleet can't be engaged elsewhere (capturing planets in the beginning phase of the game). Later in game, they are at most a nuisance, and if you're well prepared, a pirate attack against you can be turned to your advantage by having a few caps stationed at their target planet to give you some easily gained experience.

A few tips when it comes to bidding wars:

- Always coordinate with your allies. Agree who to bid on based on their percieved military strength and who they are opposite. Don't bid on the player who looks more than capable of fending off the pirates unless he's about to attack or you're about to attack him elsewhere. Finally select a player to call out when to start the bidding so they won't all have time to react.

- In FFAs you can start bidding wars between two other players by placing fx 250 on one player and 500 on another. The second player will almost always place bounty on the first. It helps if they are next to each other and you're not.

- If comfortable with receiving the pirate attack, try to make the enemy increase the bounty needlessly by pretending to engage in a bidding war. Remember that you'll be the one to get those resources back later when you fight him.

- Don't overspend on bounty. If there's a relatively large bounty on your head, don't even bother. Know when to pick your fights.