I gotta admit, when I first saw this thread I thought it'd be about making them weaker It's refreshing to see a thread about making them more than a minor nuisance like they are now.

Still, I think it'd be a tough sell. There have been many suggestions written up by mostly the past beta testers on how to beef them up and make them a little more fun and less predictable. But the pirates received a pretty huge backlash when the game launched. Originally, the game had no toggle for pirates on/off but they had to put one in because a lot of people complained that they didn't like them.

I still hope some of those suggestions make it into the second expansion (the non-combat one, most likely candidate for something like this), but we'll just have to wait and see!

In the meantime, though, at least we can mod pretty much everything about them except their behavior.

It would fit well with the theme. For example:

While the battle lines have been solidifying, the pirates have been picking over the wreckage and carrying away military grade shields, weapons, designs, and equipment. Looting the battlefields has resulted in pirates with advanced technology capable of holding their own even in the mid-late game. Combined with purchasing upgrades for their base defenses on the black market and deserters/mutiniers swelling their ranks and shoring up their tactics, pirates have become more than a minor annoyance to the clashing militaries.

While the ability to take territory may be a bit much, giving them some special abilities might make things interesting. For example, the ability to capture the occasional frigate or carrying off a world's resources would be neat, especially if it resulting in beefing up the pirate's fleet with captured tech. Also, making pirates retreat after the bounty is depleted or run away and raid the player somewhere else if they are clearly being wiped out during an attack would go a long way towards making pirates feel more like, well... pirates!

November 18th for Entrenchment.

Putting in pirates as what is effectively a 4th race would be counter productive. If the devs want to go that route, expanding the role of neutral planets would be more effective. Pirates aren't that interested in controlling territory, especially in a warzone. In doing so, they would go from pirates to warlords (a subtle, but important distiction). Instead of siezing planets, they should be doing stuff like hijacking frigates, cruisers, and (possibly) capital ships that go off on their and holding them for ransom, taking planets hostage, raiding trade and refinery ships, etc. Some of this would be better suited for the diplomacy pack, but the stuff i covered in my previous post would go well with entrenchment.

With the toggle working fine for those who do or don't wish pirates to attack them, I think it's certainly time to revisit their difficulty.  I can't speak for everyone, but those of us who play with pirates on I don't think would mind if they were transformed from minor annoyances with cardboard defenses at all levels of bounty into something tougher.

What would be great is that at the smaller bounty levels, pirates only sent what we're mostly seeing now.  A few planet bombing ships and a harassment fleet.  But with significant spending, they could send a massive fleet.  Additionally, no amount of ships will be enough to make them more difficult without some refinement of their attack routines and the decision-making process for which planets to attack.

Perhaps pirates could be more likely to go after systems with large trade income and low defenses.

I'd like to see several things with pirates:

• I'd like to be able to choose from one of several different types of pirate missions when you pay the pirates. Right now it seems to be random destruction based upon bounties. In addition, I'd like to see the pirates:
  • Occasionally expand the number of planets they hold, maybe sending out raiding/settlement parties.
    
  • Destroy Flag ship missions - When a player submits bounties, they could choose to have the pirates go after the flag ship of a certain race. The pirates would throw everything after destroying that one ship and any fleets that are protecting it.
    
  • Destroy metal/crystal operations. Maybe instead of sending their entire fleet to one system, they divide the fleet up to strategically target the metal or crystal mining and refineries in all systems owned by a player.
    
  • Destroy all ship production facilities of a player.
    
  • Destroy all trade operations of a player (trade ports and ships).
    
  • If you are playing with several star systems, which contain a pirate base in each system, the ability to send one pirate band after another pirate band.
    
• To help with the above missions, pirates would need to play more like a race:
  • Retreat when a mission is accomplished (i.e a flag ship destroyed, or all mining operations within a gravity well).
    
  • Retreat period when the number of ships in a fleet goes below a certain number. I think of pirates as opportunistic and greedy, but not suicidal.
    
  • Pirates would need to send out scouts. Available missions could perhaps be availale based upon how far they've scouted... you could limit the number of missions against you by destroying their scouts.
    
• I know that I and several others have asked for assult ships of some sort that would allow a race to capture the ships/platforms of other players. How cool would it be if pirates staged a raid with assault ships with the sole intent to capture a player's capital ship? They would then retreat to their heavily defended base to refit the ship. The next time they raided you, they could come after you using one of your own cap ships. You could use your assault ships to attempt to capture it back from them.
  
• I'd like to see additional ship types (cap ships, carriers etc.) from the pirates, not to mention hangar bays around the pirate bases.
  
• I'd like to see the size of the pirate fleet grow/shrink based upon the size of the bounty. I've seen several large pirate fleets for 250 credits. I'd like to see massive pirate fleets for huge bounties.

Well I'll hop on the bandwagon and give my info of what I'd like to see come of the priates. Right now it seems like nothing really changes the more credits you give them short of threir threat lvl so let's expand on that. When the priates get X amount of credits from bounty then unlock a new technology, like a new ship type or weapon upgrade, possibly even some new planetary defenses instead of the ludicous amount of turrets they always have. This would also make them a bit more handlable early game but a much larger threat late game.

That's "miniature giant space parrots"! Not just any old parrot would do..

There are many things I would like to see added, but the most relevant to this topic would be changing the pirate asteroid base to be more like a unique pirate starbase i.e. packing a ton of firepower and very hard to take down. But no longer capture-able (makes sense that pirates would rather die than allow their stuff to be captured sort of like the Turanic Raiders in Homeworld).

i'm not trying to be a dick about it but i think most of you have pirate fetishes...i usually see the pirate base as a choke point and usually have them disabled.  i think effort to make the pirates anything more would be a waste.  maybe one or two tweaks but nothing major

only thing i would like to see in pirates are different race pirates...umm i'm sure those evil aliens must have renagedes of their own...?

Not to mention it's pretty hard to imagine the Vasari allowing dissenters among their ranks.  The TEC on the other hand have the problem because as long as it's less costly to allow the pirates to roam around, they'll do so.  It's only when they make a mess of things that the TEC seems to care about removing them.

It's true that pirates are pretty much cannon fodder against even the weak defenses currently available. At best, using pirates to attack an enemy will only force them to spend a few resources on upgrading their defenses whenever the closest world to the pirates changes. Even then, you're going to spend far more bribing the pirates than the defender will defeating them, especially if the defender leaves a capital ship in the area to level up. With the exception of the few games where the pirates end up with a single outrageously populated base, they really aren't a threat (and even then, its not a problem if you're willing and able to lose a few ships taking a worthless base). Hopefully we'll see some improvement in Entrenchment.