That is until their fleets get larger then yours.

You could just change the game settings to "Pirates Off".

The problem with that logic is pirates are a great and awesome feature in the game and generally speaking I don't think people want to turn them off or at least they don't want to "have" to turn them off. I know I don't.

Heck I'd rather they get put back down to the level they were in original sins even though they were crap and essentially cannon fodder... at least you didn't have to disable them to play the game.

You shouldn't have to disable a core feature of the game because the core feature is tweaked badly and actually disrupts the gameplay as it stands right now.

Imo pirates should never be able to be used to completely flatten opposing players. Even if you had 50k credits to spend on pirates and pirates alone... you should end up with a massive pirate force sure... but the only way the pirates should "beat" the player is through numbers not actual ship strength. Right now given enough time (Only an hour or two in current games) the pirates do both. Even a small force of pirates outmatch the player ship to ship. Throw in the fact that they have more numbers than you and any planet they attack is pretty much screwed.

But if you have 40k credits to spend on a huge pirate force you should have that option. After all you're wasting a ton of credits to get pirates to attack a single player on a single planet. They are meant as an alternative means of attack. Ultimately they should balance the game out not imbalance it. IE a person with a lot of money might not have the military might to directly attack a military player but through use of pirates it should tip them into balance. Whereas without them military players could overrun an economic player.

It's all about balance... but right now the pirates themselves are not balanced.

create a mod folder in your mods-diplomacy v1.011 folder, make a folder inside it called gameinfo

copy the frigatepirate*.entity files to the new gameinfo folder, convert the files to text

in EACH of the entity's look for the line 'ExperiencePointsForDestroying' , the number at the end is the experience points

and the line 'MaxHullPoints' affects their hull strength

while the line 'DamagePerBank:' is how hard they hit for that weapon and in that direction.

after altering the file you want to, then load diplomacy go to options click on mods, enable the NEW mod you just created and apply it then test

hope this helps

harpo