Worthy of quote.

      Yeah..It strange that the devs made the most minute changes in patches to keep the game balanced. But the pirate problem seems to be using a shotgun when a scalpel is needed. The devs and publishers seem to have forgotten how the in the begining they kept us informed. Either a big announcement is coming or they are a victim of the economy.

So many good ideas around here. I posted already somewhere on this forum but this seems more the right place for any ideas about pirates...

Normal Pirate raids and bases can be slightly stronger than they were/did in entrenchment, but not much. The raids were merely a nuisance after the opening stages of the game were over and thats ok by me because I agree with Rincewind pirates are after all...just pirates. No match for fully beefed up (teched) Solar Empires' fleets and starbases. The pirate bases were hard enough to kill in entrenchment (took some real effort) but its ok if the effort is made a little harder. Like a player really needs to have a BIG fleet (1500+ supply?) with many many armor and weapon system techs developed.

The missions may be as strong as a player is willing to pay the pirates for. After all, the player bleeds credits for it. It should not be cheap. A good ship you buy for them pirates could be depending on the the best techlevels and ship types taken from all players who have been given missions to the pirates so far. No superships.

Simple mission example: Im a TEC player and I want to pay the pirates for a mission. Before me, an advent and later a vasari player payed the Pirates for a mission. During those private dealings with the pirates (including the current one, being mine), the advent player had the best techs + shiptypes at the moment of the dealing. Thus, the Pirates will equip themselves with the advent shiptypes available to them at the time of their dealings with that race. Let this be Aeria drone hosts and Illuminators (The advent and vasari players may already have teched up to better ships but the pirates dont know how to make those...yet. that is, untill one of those players again gives the pirates a misison). As the pirates can get by metal and crystal on the black market a bit cheaper than we can, they can buy the needed resources to produce a drone host for say 2600 credits, and an Illuminator for say 725 credits (Illuminator bought for 380 credits + 60/100*better_marketprice_metal + 55/100*better_marketprice_crystal). The Pirates then ask the player 3325 credits (2600 + 725) per 2 ships, as it is planning to build those types 1 on 1 base and not telling what ships that might be...they decide that themselves. I think deciding shiptypes and what mixture is something the AI can handle. So if I wish to send around 30 pirate ships to my enemy I must pay them pirates around 50,000 credits.

When the Pirates sortie to the target, their fleet exists (in this case) of 15 drone hosts + 15 Illuminators, having the armor, hullpoints, shields, damage, abilities and antimatter that the advent techdevelopment allowed at the moment of their dealing with the Pirates (not their current techlevel, however that might be the same). On top of those 30 'good' ships the pirates can include their usual raiders (what can be seen in entrenchment nowadays, not diplomacy lol).

Well you can basically do anything with that. Either the pirates build from all races that dealt with them, creating a fleet of TEC, advent and Vasari ships or they just build from the tech and ships of the paying player of this mission(so the target has some clue about WHO send those pirate bastardo's) or they build like explained in the example or...or...

Of course any system should have a maximum, a cap. Because so many ships do not pop up just like that and pirates too, need supply let alone command.

Late game pirates suck... I did a marathon game too, just to see how bad they got. That was insane.

One thing I noticed I didn't see mentioned here is, the pirates can shoot 360 degrees. while my ships are turning to fire the pirates are going after whatever they want and firing 100% of the time.

Pirates flying through a planet on route to another planet will annihilate stuff along the way. Don't own the planet that is the next in line to their exit. Not unless you want to be "Target Practice" every launch.

With power like that, they are not pirates anymore.

I also agree with others that mentioned, how the heck can they all live on that one asteroid?! How can they afford all those ships on such lousy money. I understand they can be collecting from what they destroy but how many resources does it take us to build a fleet only to watch it get man handled by these tiny little ships, shooting in any direction no matter which way they are flying. Tiny little gnats, pain in the arse to target, takes 100+ ships quite some time to kill one of these little bugs and all your abilities spamming away.

And no one else can figure out how to put turrets on their ships.. just some dumb pirates?? They are so OP in late game it's not funny anymore... it's just stupid. I like having pirates difficult, it makes for more interesting play, but that was just lame.

I don't mind games that are amazingly difficult to win... even once you "master" the game. It still can be extremely difficult and I will still enjoy it. But that level of power is just stupid... oh and if you are in battle... and because other things are being said, you never get the warning that a pirate raid is eminent... That should be fixed... or at least an option to have a warning flash on your screen. ANY Leader of ANY nation would want a fail safe warning on a threat like that... they would do EVERYTHING in their power to be WARNED!! Staring at the pirate meter is an unacceptable warning. You need a "RED ALERT" signal for OP like that coming at you!!

Just some thoughts...

I'll add my voice to this.. if it even matters.

Pirates are much, much, much too overpowered at this stage.

I have just 'finished' a marathonish game, where I just turtled up within a system (Destroyed my local pirates) and let the resources accumulate.

I had maxed fleet supply, and research, and a fully devved starbase along with my entire armada just sitting in the bottleneck system.
Obviously, nothing broke me and when I returned all my caps were level 10 and I was ready to destroy the infidels.

Until I hit the first pirate base. It had 5-600 ships. Fair enough, I thought, the game has been going on a long time, and the AI has been bidding them up. I engaged them with my entire fleet. (Advent, 200 strike-craft, half n' half.) all caps available, focusing mostly on carriers and the like, and the rest filled with all other available ship-types except for defense vessels which I always ignore since I use fighters instead for anti-air.

I did not manage to kill a single pirate vessel, as far as I could tell. If I killed anything I didn't notice from the fact that my entire armada was just entirely decimated by the pirates. I managed to escape, rebuild and attempt again. Same result. I tried many differing tactics, tried spamming the planet and just sitting there but to no avail. The lagg was so horibble that micro-management was just impossible, and my strikecraft were dead in seconds between the pirate turrets, which I am envious of by the way, so the rest of my army was just cut to pieces by these pathetic pirates.

I have always enjoyed the 'surpirse' feature of the pirates, but no more. I am done. Until something is done they are turned off in my games. It's just.. horrific.

Yea there are some good examples here lol. Its definitely a little OMGWTF. I just recently bought Sins Diplomacy and have been loving it so far. Im not completely a noob cos I owned Sins vanilla for months but didn't have the download capabilities to update it.

So getting used to the stabases and keeping AI allies happy with envoys and all that. A lot of fun, great game. But this is where it gets a little WTF.

A played a 2 v 2 as TEC with a Vasari ally. We were against an Advent and TEC with all AI set to Hard except the TEC enemy who was set to Unfair. I had already played 2-4 games and had heard all about the tough Diplomacy pirates so I did my best to keep the credits flowing and managed to continuously out bid my enemies to keep those filthy thieves off my front porch.

But, after an 1 hr and a half I had barely seen a single ship baring the TEC markings approach my worlds. Me and my ally had seen plenty of the enemy advent and had fought them well enough but I saw nothing out of my big bad Unfair AI. So I sent some scouts to investigate. The TEC opponent had 2 PLANETS LEFT when I found him. The pirates were raiding his homeworld when my main combat fleet arrived.  

DAAANG! Hell, why send my people off to die in a vicious war when I can throw a few pirates some coppers and let them decimate all my enemies?

Ok yea so there is something wrong. I love this game a lot, heck I'm a science fiction writer cos I love all this stuff. But I mostly turn off the pirates nowadays. Otherwise the game turns into 'who can bid the pirates high enough and suddenly fleet is only a back-up if the pirate negotiations fail'.

Yeah def is a huge thing in my current game vs. 3 unfair AI's with unlocked teams.

Pirates beat everything as it is, Since i dont play a lot i onyl realized today just how broken they are in diplomacy.

I played TEC.

I used pirates (thinking they would get softened quite a bit) to break through a -massively- defended planet (Max mines, on max upgraded station, plus a large defense fleet), so i could go in next with my main fleet (16 capitals ships, all lvl6, about 3-4 of all classes) and finish the job.. and it was a  big mistake.

I buyed 2 maxed waves. Sent them both on the same target.

They arrived at the targetr weakened, since they had to go though 2 systems protected by my stations, hence losing around 15% of their health when they were leaving the systems. Each wave had something around 100 ships.

The first wave obliterated the AI station, mostly ignored the mines (their Kodiaks dont trigger them) and vaporized the AI fleet there and took low casualties. ..Then the second wave arrrived.

It didnt look good. still, i moved in with my fleet, curious at how the pirates would behave against 4 MarzaMissileMasscre.. and it was useless. I lost my whole fleet in minutes with minimal loses on their side even if they were all damaged (due to the MMM). Their numbers were high, but i already beaten a pirate fleet of a similar size before with less ships (in vanilla  i thnik).. its their stats that are so high that they chewed through my ships in seconds.

Lost all my fleet to 2 waves of pirates that can be buyed once every five minutes? Broken. Badly broken. Pirate are off my games until ther are fixed.. IF they are.

yes, but only from capturing a corsair with domination

it's annoying that you can't use it with a captured corsair because it requires a nonexistent research

Wouldn't it be fairly easy to have in Game Setup screen a simple drop-down list: "Pirate Strength": Very Low, Low, Normal (default), High, Very High -- something like that? Would that be terribly hard to do?

Hi all,

Sorry to be out of touch for so long. Focus was put squarely on Elemental, and now that things are starting to return to "normal," I'm able to start returning to Sins.

I can't say too much in detail yet, but I wanted to give folks a heads-up on our tentative plans (I say tentative because nothing is set in stone yet).

If things go as I hope, we should be able to start working on a Diplomacy update in the next couple weeks. I'll be skimming the forums for suggestions that have been made previously for this, however, one of the key features will be to revamp Pirates. I am not happy with how they ended up in Diplomacy at all, so they'll be getting reworked.

So what does this mean?  Without going into too much detail, I want Pirates to be behave more like you'd expect:  They don't have overpowering force of arms (until late game by shear numbers), instead they use ingenuity to overcome obstacles. I've read a couple posts on player suggestions on the forums and was happy to see that players have already come up with some of the same ideas.

Whatever ends up happening, I hope to implement the changes via an optional beta first for playtesting before making them final.

Excellent news!  I hope to see (and participate in) discussion about this upcoming patch over the next few weeks.  There were some good posts in the strategy forums in July and August, and a lot of the ideas being tossed around were actually tested in a mod... let me see if I can link em...

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/389170/
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/389189
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/390140
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/386879
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/386320

There is also this bit of research that has been done...