While I don't think the pirates are necessarily fine. Here is a replay in Diplomacy FFA against 3 Hard AI's with 2 allied victors only. I basically setup two starbases and locked down the planet to deal with the pirates. I didn't bother with outbidding for pirates and just let them attack my planets with the starbases.

http://www.filefront.com/15991297/FFA-3Hard-Diplomacy-MediumRand.record

Haha, ya I probably spent way more than was actually necessary on those starbases and the defenses around them. At first I thought the Vas AI might try attacking while I was hitting the TEC on the other side. Since that didn't happen I started empire building since my economy was so much stronger than the others. Plus deploying and upgrading star bases is fun IMO!

I'm glad the replay helped. I probably could have got away with out the capital ships at the planets but I kinda left them as a rear guard plus they synergize well with the static defenses. The Mothership keeps the shields up and the Halcyon bumps up the rate of fire on the starbase and turrents effectively increasing dps.

As far as the extra static defenses the shield extension from the Hangar bays adds shield mitigation to all structures nearby and the turrent upgrade adds up to 50% damage and extra shields to the turrents.

Vasari and TEC could do similar things with the Pirates, but Advent's synergies are pretty nice.

So to answer my own question... here's a game I played today. It's a Diplomacy 4 player FFA, Vasari vs 3 hard AI's on the map Double Cross, standard start, normal speed everything, no allied victory, diplomatic victory on.

Dip-Vasari_vs_3H_DoubleCross.zip

Some comments on this:

• As in Zombie's game, I had to spend all of my early resources and most of my overall resources on pirate defense
• Later in the game, pirates continued to attack me, even though I had the #1 military and the #4 economy. Why would pirates attack the poorest group in the first place, even ignorikng the fact that poor group had the biggest guns!
  
• I didn't finish the game, but was well on the way to winning after 2 1/2 hours. In that time I was only able to complete one or two missions for the AI, so I was only friendly with one of them. That AI (green) took out one of the other AI (red), which allowed me to focus on fighting purple. It was tough to make headway, because of the constant pirate attacks, I was either spending on pirate defense, or defending against one of the AIs on either side of me (sometimes both). I wasn't able to make a real offensive push for a very long time.
  
• Static defenses were sufficient to hold off even large end-game pirate attacks, provided they were bunched up, included a several missile and a couple repair platforms and a hanger, had some juicy targets inside for the trade ship hating pirates, and included a fully offensively upgraded station, also with the upgrade that prevents losing the planet to bombardment. Without all that, some ship backup is required. Even with all that, the pirate target planet is under attack pretty much constantly throughout the game.

So yeah, this is why I call it "Pirates of a Solar Empire," because you can throw out the window any strategies that don't deal exclusively and aggressively with pirate defense. Makes the game a lot less fun for me.

They only shoot at structures in passing, their primary target is always the planet. Make sure to throw the government upgrade on your starbase to prevent loss of colony from bombardment, and they'll happily sit there and bomb the planet while you demolish the rest of the pirate fleet and then pick 'em off with fighters.

Actually that was a volcanic planet, and I intentionally did not colonize it until after I had the terran planet, enough fortification research (including enforced loyalty), and full static defenses on the terran planet. It took a while to get all that set up. If I'd tried to colonize it earlier, I would have spent a lot on imperial labs that wouldn't have really paid off for some time.

I was trying to go through the star to grab the terran planets. Two of them had 3 resource asteroids, and the volcanic planet next to me only had 2 metal. As it played out, I just got the static defenses built when the first pirate raid appeared. I started building Imperial labs after that. With Vasari, I like to prioritize Enslaved Labor over trade. It requires less labs and provides discounts on almost everything.

The static defenses still needed cap ship help when the 2nd pirate raid arrived, and at about the same time purple hit me from the other direction, so I had to shore up defenses there. That further delayed the Imperial research. After the 2nd raid was cleared up, I tried an attack on one of the inner terran worlds, but I had to turn right back around and defend against pirates again.

I did research volcanic occupation in there somewhere, but by the time I was able to free up forces to take that planet, Red had already claimed it. I lost my asteroid world to Purple because I didn't have a starbase with loyalty quickly enough.

By then (a little over an hour into the game) I was #1 military and #4 in empire & economy. I could have gone for trade earlier, but I think I might have had to sacrifice a logistics slot on one of my 3 planets for the 4th imperial lab, and not put a trade port there.

It actually turned out better than I had hoped. Eventually I was able to build my fleet up enough that I could push Red back, and Green helped there. The problem with Vasari is that Empire stuff is so damn resource expensive early on, especially on a tight map like that where you have to field fleets right away.

Now to watch your replay.

Good replay. You did handle the pirates well but as has been said in the OP the pirates didn't bother with anyone else but you. They made it easy too by hitting the same planet over and over.

Here is my replay from a match with 3 cruel unteamed AI plus pirates. Just grab the planets really fast, build chokes, boom andt tech up.

My game will continue to finish teching and getting to the tiresome process of building lots of strong ships and a mega-fleet to conquer the rest of the system and the other suns. Quite a tedious task... The rats did not mind me much by the way.

 REPLAY ON HTML

@maxiwill same thing here. FTP link is asking for a password!

looks like i could fix the link. please give feedback if it worked right or not...

My diplomacy version is 1.011. You got the same on? Or maybe this is a hidden Trinity bug?

I just downloaded the linked file, put it into the record-folder and watched my game.