To clarify, I dont find the pirates too powerful, just that wave after wave after wave that I cant out bid or turn to a different player takes it's toll, especially when I am doubled or tripled by enemies.

I think he means when the timer is down to 0, but the pirates have not launched yet. I think how it works is that each bid will prolong the amount of time before the pirates launch (but a little less each time). Watch carefully and put a bid in whenever the AI does. I almost never lose the pirate bid to the AI. Against human players, the lack of this timer till launch makes Pirate bidding fun imo. I think they should keep it as is.

The trick is not to outbid the AI by one increment, but do it by two or three.  If the bidding is tied, the attack still goes to whoever the previous target was.  Thus if you have 250 bounty on you, and throw 750 on the AI they now have to bid up to 1000 on you to get it off them.  The AI is more likely to 'think about it' when there's a larger gap in the bidding as opposed to only needing one bid to beat you.  Generally the AI likes to go up by 500 or so at a time, so this makes it much more unlikely to AI will snipe the bid at the last second.  If they tie you without beating you, throw another 500 on it just to be sure.

On a side note, never throw thousands of credits on AI bounty at once.  With large numbers, they actually become MORE likely to throw thousands at a time back at you

well actually AIs got their own limit too, by far the pissed-me-off bounty countered by AIs goes up to 50K, too bad they don't have any money left when i increase to 100K