Overwhelming Pirates.

Dont let the returning raiders get back to their base.

You have a couple options if they do build up.  One (won't work for TEC) is to distract the pirates with a scout while you send in minelayers to put up a trap in the corner of their gravity well.  Rinse and repeat and you can clean up the pirates without a fight.  As Advent, you can use the repulse ability to keep the pirates out of attack range and just blast them from afar.  As TEC, you can remotely end their threat by shooting two simultaneously novalith shots at the pirate base, turning it neutral on the spot.

I'll have to remember that one for Vasari, though I've not encountered too many problems with pirates alone (I tend to scale up my fleet about the same time they do) and try to get in a pre-emptive strike once I've got a good planet killing fleet going. My major problem though is that if I allow myself to face a pirate fleet I tend to be attacked immediately afterwards, especially in the mid-late game when the pirates are powerful enough to cause real damage to my fleet/defence structures. Two fleets of powerful ships one after the other tends to be pretty damn difficult to face if I don't have a fully upgraded starbase to help out.

EDIT: If you can get a Vasari starbase set up in the pirate gravwell (or any starbase really, but Vasari ones build quicker, which helps a lot) you can drop a new cap ship in there when a pirate raid is due and have it level up without having to move around much. Support cruisers may be necessary once the threat level has gotten high enough, but since the Orkulus has Debris Vortex it likely won't need them until the very late game).

The pirates get stupidly powerful in 1.01 if you allow them to last beyond 6-7 raids.  The turrets can cover the entire well and also get flak burst, making them immune to strikecraft.  I've taken out the entire defence force before, and the pirate base, and still not colonised the empty base because the turrets were too strong to bother with.  It's also important to realise that the pirates are no longer part of the standard counters system, heavies are all that is good against them, apart from capitals.  After 8+ raids the normal force would destroy a starbase.

I only attacked the pirates in that instance because it was a 1v1.  Other than that I can't imagine it being a profitable activity, so if you hadn't won the game already I wouldn't attack the pirates unless with a novalith.  For all that the pirates have acquired super-powers, the reward for defeating them is still one dead asteroid with built-in emergency facilities... just don't.  If you want to watch the game as the pirates destroy your enemies, have them in, if not, switch them off. 

Before the pirates received their ridiculous abilities, the AI used to attack them occasionally- what happens with 1.01?  What if the pirate base is the only link between two halves of a random system?

I've played a few games now, and the same thing seems to happen over and over again.

The pirates get so incredibly powerful that I just feed them 20,000 credit missions to send an overwhelming force to wherever the enemy fleet is and they annihilate the entire planet, leaving me to mop up effortlessly.

Double Post.

I must agree with you.

I played a match yesterday and the second pirate wave in the game after half an hour was over consisted of approximately 10 to 12 ships and all i had were one captial and 27 light frigates. I stopped playing this match after a while because almost my entire fleet was destroyed. The pirate wave before went out to an enemy who managed to get 3 captial ships up and runnig, plus a lot of frigates, and he barly surived the atack.

You should realy lower the priates armor to a more realistic amount. How can it be that a stupid pirate force has far superiour battle technology then any military of the three races. It should be the other way around.

Amen to that!

If there is reluctance to weaken the pirates further, perhaps a stength adjustment can be added to the game options for them.

I like that the numbers increase and can see some upgrading over time, but when a corsair starts to rival an upgraded and leveled cap ship that gets ridiculous.

In real life, pirates flourish in situations where they can avoid the authorities and prey upon situations that are high reward and low risk.

As such, pirates should attack with a medium amount of strength, but they should be able to attack any system in the game without going through phase lanes. Theres no reason why a pirate might not be lurking in the darkness of space, or why they would stick to conventional modes of travel, or why they would go straight through your Battle-Hardened forward systems. They are not zealots, they are not out to die for a cause, they are there to swoop upon weak prey and feast!

Having to worry about pirates raiding your flanks would definitely spice up the game, add a tactical element, and reduce spam as they travel from system to system on the way to their target.

Yeah, it's pretty well known that pirates are ridiculously powerful. I think (hope?) the devs know it, too. Not much you can do until they decide to fix it, except play without pirates.

Pirates are weak now.  They are good for easy experience.  But to please everyone as other have suggested, they can allow pirates to have a different range of difficulty.

Are you playing diplomacy with pirates, JJ? Because reports are pretty much unanimous that the way they've changed pirates made them over powered, not weak and pathetic like they used to be.

I play with pirates in single player.  I'm working on beating 4/5 vicious locked all against me.  I get hit with almost 3000/4000 supply fleets from multiple fronts.  Most cant even take 1 single vicious.  i liked them before the patch.

Well, there's a topic killer... dang.

just an opinion, but the "slider" difficulty level thing would give everyone an option. Players like me that are low to medium can dial the pirates at medium to low strength and play a game and have the pirates "nipping" at my heels, or frustrating my fleets as i try to take out the other major races.

Or for those that can handle the "vicious" levels medium to high or extra high, say they get massive pirate fleets in while they still outfight the other races.

Its obvious of course, but this way everyone wins. 

Heavy players get massive killer pirate fleets, and the rest of us, can survive and enjoy it.

Just my vote, thats all.

-Teal

The Pirate Slider is probably the easiest idea to implement, and would make the most amount of people happy.

well pirates are suppose to be thiefs of the galaxy so there for they have stolen armour tech from othe races that is far suporior than that of yours. beside they are suppose to be hard to be there not suppose to die easy

Well no, pirates shoud be defeated easly because they are thiefes and no fighters. They are sneaky fellows who atack fast, take what they get and leave.

and thats another thing i wonder, why don't they take anything from you. They should be able to drain credits and recources from your planet and extractors instead of atacking with brute force.

well these pirates have tons of fighting expirance now the story says its been a 100 year war so far now. and they have the loot ablity they can suck income by taking out any of your trade ships that they see it might not be much but its there besides if your having a hard time go straight to starbases and set one up with full wepon upgrades and hit point upgrades then you'll be all set

I cannot even anhilate their base anymore, ugh...and before I could easily wipe it out with the Vasari without losing a single unit. (gotta love their abilities, lol)

Though I am very reluctant to use mods, they can be useful to illustrate gameplay options.  So I have created a mod to demonstrate how the pirates could be... http://www.datafilehost.com/download-448aad49.html

I've tested it for a few hours, though it meant playing Advent, hmm.  I noticed that the v1.01 pirates are meant to have a couple of abilities that don't seem to be working correctly- an incendiary shells ability where the icon is wrong [bug], and sprint for their cruisers.  They don't seem to be able to research these abilities, nor could I get the pirates to research anything other than the standard weapons, armour etc when I tried.

The changes I implemented should make the pirates sneakier, but more standard with regard to basic values, they get the same sort of level of upgrades as the AI.  Also, they are not as quick to build up at the earlier levels, but also more responsive to bounty.  They are more effective against trade, because I halved the speed of trade and refinery ships.   Even at the higher levels, anything more than a very low level starbase is too much for them.  The damage they have to take to pass starbases erodes their effectiveness very quickly, but altering this might take code.

The pirate ships have to have their abilities from the start, because the ability research doesn't seem to work.  The abilities are useful, rather than powerful.  However, the pirate base does function as an effective block at the start of the game, as it never used to in Entrenchment.  You can still get past with this mod, but it's.. chancier.   

Install to your 1.01 mods folder, then enable the mod.  If you like it, then perhaps we could convince the developers to use this sort of approach in 1.02?  One or two gameplay examples might be more valuable than dozens of opinions...

The details on what I attempted in the mod-

-I slowed the trade and refinery ships from 300 to 150 to give the pirates more chance to destroy them, though I still consider that they might have too much health.  I also increased the rebuild time from 12s to 300s so that the destruction of a trade ship had some sort of financial impact.

The pirates can then be directed in small groups to attack remote trade planets rather than the front line, the outstanding problem being when they have to pass starbases.  I would have made them immune to damage from jumping out of starbased wells, if I could.

-I couldn't place the pirate base in a plasma storm as I wanted, but as I considered allowing the pirate turrets to have flak burst to be too strong (and there should be a graphic upgrade) I went for jam weapons instead.  If only they could have a phase jump inhibitor!

-The pirate armour modifiers were silly, with pirates only vulnerable to heavies, I made them more reasonable, typically 0.5 rather than 0.3.  I also limited them to 8 upgrades at 0.05, rather than 10 at 0.1, which prevents the ridiculous armour figures and makes the turrets destroyable in a reasonable amount of time, even late in the game.

-The ability research doesn't seem to work, so I couldn't copy it.  I added abilities as follows:  all pirate ships gained unstoppable phase jumps, all but the cruisers became able to cloak.  Scouts got Detect Mines, Timed Charges and Sacrifice- though I couldn't add a comment like 'Made it Ma, top of the world!'.   Mediums I added an antimatter cripple,  Siege Subversion and Flak Flakburst, though this is very heavy on anti so they get only one shot.  Cruisers had to have Domination for the pirate captures!  This can be very tricky because of the potential for Rapture abuse, but I made it so heavy on antimatter that it couldn't be used after a single jump, so that the cruisers can only block gravwells. 

-I reduced the pirate raid sensitivity to planets and upped sensitivity to trade and bounty, so they they appear in greater numbers only when it is warranted.  I also cut the heavier cruisers and siege out of the smaller raids entirely.  However the pirate missions can still be very effective if targetted properly, and not used as a temporary second main battle fleet.

...What's the best way to take out their base with the Vasari now? Just wondering, had my fleet capacity fully maxed out and had about 20 overseers (maybe more, can't remember) and they still easily outnumbered me when raiding their base. (even fired two shots from my cannons)

2 consecutive Novalith shots solves the problem