Pirates are a great way of training capital ships. I always send three into the system the Pirates are raiding. The Pirates are not strong enough to destroy the Capital ships and you easily get 1000+ experience points by destroying them.

Love the pirates, not a huge fan of the implementation. My main complaint about them is the way they work with bounty; if the pirates are to be mercenaries then they should have their own secret bids.

If at all possible,I would like to see pirates reworked with a secret bid process and bounty more focused as a FFA enticement for other players.Should this occur, pirate raids should occur with no warning on a semi-regular time table to make them more Pirate like instead of like clockwork harassment. This prevents the bounty hawking that currently occurs when the raid is about to launch and also makes people bid what they will pay, not just an over at the last second. In their current incarnation, pirates are too predictable and a touch too easy to defeat.

I like, they are a part of the game so use them for your advantage.

Bid or kill. Early game they can be good to hammer on of your enemys door, bad thing is that they cap will get some good exp. but it will slow there expansion/improvment.

Or kill them to get some good exp.

I like the pirates. Pirate ships are free experience points for my newly built, inexperienced capital ships. Frequently, you'll find that there is a small cluster of worlds that the pirates will normally attack when they come after you. Put static defenses in these systems and park a new capital ship there. The cap gets some easy leveling.

dont know how it would be in practice but seems an interesting idea!

I've never attacked the pirate base, but from the number of pirate ships there it looks like it would be hard to conquer. Do you get anything for taking the pirate base? Once defeated do they disappear for good or pop up again later?

I like the pirates, I just wish there fleet was larger though (especially late game)...
I played a game the other day and placed a 150K bounty on a computer opponent and was of course greatful when the computer reciprocated the bounty in return because I always see it as a way to level up my caps. The problem is that the pirate fleet never seems to get any bigger than the size of a 30K bounty fleet. On my custom maps I always make sure to put at least 1 pirate base for every player This way you can always fly in a couple of caps, kill a few pirates and fly out with more experience. Then hit up a repair center and fly them back in for more action. Caps get elevated much quicker this way.

Well the ninja in me doesn't get along with them. I know how to manipulate them, but they are just annoying in my mind.

I don't like Pirates...


I LOVE them!!!

The problem is that a player can be almost completely eliminated from the game if the bounty is high enough. Either the pirates will eventually muck up his empire while he's out colonizing other planets or fighting the enemy or he'll need to keep the bulk of his fleet at the point of the pirates attack to defend against them.

I dislike the pirates for the most part because the only way to get the bounty removed from you is to allow your ships and structures to get destroyed. You'd think that real world pirates would want to avoid someone who'd just wiped them out. Instead, in this game, when you wipe out the pirates they come back for more on the next raiding cycle unless the bounty ends up being higher on someone else.

I'd like to see the Pirates changed so that when the pirate ships are destroyed, the bounty on your head decreases by some amount, perhaps less than it decreases for when they destroy your ships and structures. Alternatively, the length of time between pirate raids could perhaps be tripled.

For now I'd prefer to play with pirate off though I'll join games with pirates on since there are so few games to choose from at certain times of the day.

I hate them. Mostly b/c I'm a n00b at this game. It's usually right at that time when I start to get a somewhat decent fleet (that still sucks, btw) then pirates come and take 3/4 of it away from me. Never fails that 2 raids later the enemy decides they can invade my empire.

So to me they're an uber annoyance.

I like the idea of Pirates, but dislike the implementation of them in game.

I like
- the idea of marauding bands of enemies as an annoyance.
- the fact they can be used as an experience factory.

I dislike
- pirates turning up with 50 ships (it's just not going to happen)
- non random attack patterns of the pirates
- the fact that they can always be bought for money
- that you can't buy them off once they launched (I would have thought that pirates would allow you to buy them off when they got to your space, after all, it's win-win for them; no ships lost, double the cash, etc)
- the fact that they have a magical fleet that just magics ships into existence for them


Consequently, I always play with them turned off.

I second this idea.

I enjoy Pirates in a 1v1, or even a 2v2 game. The reason being that I can build up while feeding my capital ship. A tripple hanger base rarely has issues with pirates, especially with mixed squads. If I assign a capital ship to that area, the experience increase usually amounts to at least a level for the first 5 or 6 pirate attacks (depending on size, obviously).

I, personally, do not find the small to medium attacks all too annoying. If a well planned defense squad is sent prior to conquering new colonies, then actual pirate "effectiveness" is near immeasurable. Also, the computer at the harder levels is generally much better than you at placing bounties, but the way bounties provide a "definite" pirate target is kind of annoying. Perhaps pirates should calculate the forces of each side, then present a "critical bounty" value, if the critical bounty is met, then the attack occurs.

For example:
actual_bounty = offered_bounty - (military_value * modifier);


Recalculating the bounty in a slightly more realistic fashion, IMO.

Big or small maps, pirates have their place and fit well with my play style. I like 'em.

I'm going to second/third/fourth the like them in concept but do not like the implementation.

The biggest problem is that the AI on Pirates seriously needs to be worked on, because the ability to kite them with strike craft makes them pretty ridiculous. In a game I am playing on I had a pirate fleet invade and get kited for almost 1 hour of game time by strike craft from hangars. Never even had to send a fleet to deal with them which, in this case was a good thing as I didn't have a free one.

I would like to see more secret bidding and less regular (not less frequent) attacks so that you can't always just plan for them.

However, if the system is to stay the way it is I DO think that the interface needs to be more visible. Even with the current system of alerts and warnings its REALLY easy to miss a pirate raid, and worse its a pain to do the bid war with the bidding interface blocking out half your screen.

I just had a thought, that could be fun. You enter a bidding war for pirates, you can see other peoples bids, but not who they are. You are allowed to place any bid you want, and if you loose you don't have to meet the bid. However, if you do win you have to meet the bid, and if you don't they come after you instead.

Could be fun.

Anyways, there are a lot of possibility with pirates, but I think they still need some work.

I like the idea, and I like them in the early game in Sins. In late game though I find them useless, its not worth bribing them because they can do so little damage against an upgraded fleet.

Maybe if they were smarter and did hit and run tactics against enemy installations, rather then sticking around to get owned.

I like the idea of them but hate how they are implemented in the game.

It would also be interested if in late game you got some seriously huge pirate fleets get sent out. That would be pretty damned awesome to watch. Like a pirate capital ship or something like that.

I like them in all games except 1v1s. They make great annoyances to your enemy and great experience points for your capital ships.

Was discussing it earlier and there is another huge issue I find with pirates, how they attack. A pirate raid has to go through other worlds to get to its target. While that's fine when the target is one jump away, it's not fine when the target is past several worlds with fleets or a modest defense as the pirate fleet gets picked apart.Ideally to me the pirate raids should work like the TEC rebel attacks-- anywhere, anytime and without warning. The pirate worlds should not be a launch point so much as an accumulation point after a raid.The accumulated fleet could also be modified to be a second raid unbound by bids once it hits a critical mass, giving incentive to completely destroy pirate raids.

For behavior, pirates should show up, destroy tactical, then logistic structures and try to get the heck out of dodge when a decent sized fleet is incoming/arrived.I also really like the suggestion of any raiding taking into account the power of planetary defenses/fleets.

Also, I'm not so keen on destroying pirate outposts actually destroying pirates. If pirates are enabled, all players involved agreed to it. Pirate worlds should still be valuable to take i.e. a percentage of raid gained bounty added to the owner's coffers but the faction itself should endure until game end no matter what.

That would be more accurate, but it would be completely infuriating if the pirates never engaged a planet that was defended, and constantly searched out your weakest planet to hit. You'd spend the entire game chasing them around and building phase jumpt inhibitors instead of fighting the enemy!

Pirate bases can badly damage a trio of, say, level 6 capital ships, but yous simply pull them back when they get damaged, then come back once they repair. Or you just send in more capital ships or send in an actual fleet. The bases are surprisingly easy to defeat once you have gotten a few capital ships, and make for good experience.

I personally like the pirates, but think they should be changed in a few ways. First, there should be a capital ship of some kind in the severe attacks; either a Pirate-type Kol, or some ship unique to pirate raids, and they would be level 4 at least. Pirate bases should also have at least one capital ship.
Also, the bounty on yourself should impact your relations with pirates. If you have minimal to no bounty, pirates shouldn't bother attacking, as long as they are simply large-scale bounty hunters. Trade ships and military should also affect relations.

One thing I think would be really cool would be being able to hire mercenaries to either defend a player, attack a player, or raid a player's trade and refinery ships. Those mercenaries would have the same symbol as the player who hired them, but half of their symbol would be white to help distinguish them. Their ships would look like pirates, but would have blue, red, or yellow lighting rather than green lighting to distinguish mercenaries.

Playing vs. two hard AI last night, I built a Novalis and got insta attacked by two huge swarms of bad guys. I fought well for the planets for about an hour before switching it off cuz it got boring. I recognized a big mistake when I let the bounty slip...what crippled one of the two sieged planets was the extra pirates that came in with the red team. They each came from a different side of the planet.

I would suggest that later in the game if you want to save the credit dump that you take out the pirate base. Mid-game it's really not that hard. I would prefer to use them until one AI is dead though.

They're a good idea, but not implemented as well as they could be. As many already said, they feel more like mercenaries than pirates. They should be attacking more randomly, with the option to pay them 'protection money' or something to leave you alone for a while.

If they're going to stay more as mercenaries, then you should have more control over them if you win the bidding. Simply being able to tell them where you want them to hit would make them a lot more useful. The strength of the pirate fleet should also scale up a bit faster. A few defences can usually hold them off all day long. They need to start bringing their own capital ships with them after 3 or 4 raids.