Actually sins runs better on XP if you have it than Win7

I haven't tested the bounties (they may not work because the tradeship entity has no resource costs), but the earned resources and income decrease are real (though tradeports will generate a reduced amount of credits even with all of them destroyed). I'm surprised you haven't noticed it by now.

Where did you get that number? The tradeship has a build time of 12 second and the trade port has a cargo ship respawn time of 25 seconds, according to the game files.

No beta seems a pity, we look forward to the patch though, good luck with finalising it.  I appreciate that you want to focus on relations this time, but I do believe that both mines and trade deserve examination at some stage.  I know that mines were a subject for discussion but nothing further seems to have emerged?

The trade ship timings may have changed from the time I last looked at them?  Anyway, the situation I want to avoid is where the pirates can be effectively defended against by using trade ports, because the pirates cannot destroy the trade ships before they leave the well, and because when they do destroy trade ships, after the first one they rebuild faster than the pirates can destroy them.  Trade should never be a defence against pirates.  If trade was readjusted in the manner I asked for there might also be the potential for better gameplay even without pirates, though this would be situational.  I don't believe most players pay any attention at all to trade ships currently, as it is almost always necessary to destroy the trade port to have any appreciable effect on trade income.

Perhaps the health of trade ships could be reduced but refinery ships left tougher, as part of a general boost to refineries as compared to trade?

I would love to see Trade Ships have a larger effect when destroyed... but honestly... I have no idea how it could be accomplished without making them absolutely imbalanced. Ah well, c'est la vie.

Three things I will point out that have bugged me recently.

1) AI Players will under no circumstance on there own accord will attack Pirate bases. So in the end its completely up to Human Players to wipe them out.

2) When Pirates are raiding, they go after trade ships only??? So there is a huge armarda of Pirate ships and they are getting successfully picked off one by one, because they are not attacking things like the defence platforms, star bases and hangers or the local fleet ... why are trade ships there top priority?

3) No ships capable of bombing enemy planets are sent with the raiding party? Has anyone else experienced this, I am sure the Pirates use to be able to bomb planets and wipe out the local population on a raid.

Any advice or help with tackling the above for mods etc is appreciated and here is hoping these things are fixed in the upcoming update.

P.S. Many thanks to the Dev's for creating and improving such an awsome game!

No pilagers in early raids was set due to many complaints that pirates are to strong especially early on. Majority of people wanted pirates that disrupt only.

Well you can't expect the Devs to change things just to make your mod work better. Pirate bases are almost never worth attacking, and by default the pirates will never acquire new planets. The easier way to set up your mod would be to leave the original pirates intact and just make a mod where the player controls a separate, pirate faction, that way the AI doesn't have any trouble handling it.

Well there is an easy way for your mod fix that problem. Just give the pirates an ability that prevents trade ships from moving (like the Sova's Embargo). That way they will be quickly destroyed and the pirates won't be running all over the gravity well hunting for them.

This was a bigger deal when the AI would almost always team up to bid on the human player. Early on the pillagers can do a lot of damage because usually the player's fleet would still be busy expanding and thus wasn't available to destroy them quickly. Now that AI's base their bounties on diplomatic status the player isn't always swarmed with pirates so its debatable if that is still necessary, but I'd rather they'd only be in late raids only. Its one things to lose all your structures to the pirates early game, another to have to turn your colony cap around to recolonize a world you already cleared thanks to the pirates.

I uderstand what your saying GoaFan 77, but why do AI Players completely ignore Pirates and not treat them like an opposing Player? I.E. attack there base when there are no other immediate threats other than Pirates nearby? In Maps with a lot of Pirate bases this is especially a problem (not talking about my mod) you can have a lot of Pirate Bases in normal maps especially with the map creator, so for AI Players to just ignore them??

I have never tried this but maybe create a map where every planet is a Pirate Base, apart from your Home World and any other AI PLayers Home World, I wonder what would happen? Would AI Players be forced to start clearing out Pirate base after pirate base or will they just ignore each one and send there fleets to attack your home world instead?

 Does anyone know the lines of code which need to be edited to enable AI PLayers to attack Pirates?

That Ability would definately help concerning Trade Ships, but really I think the coding needs to be fixed and they need to prioritise Tatical Structures as the top priority, followed by Fleet, then things like trade ships etc.

Back in diplomacy 1.00 when pirates were very strong and it was often better to let them destroy planet and then retreat after a while when there would be 1000 ships in pirate base gravity well my AI allies were often giving me please help us destroy ....... (pirate base) orders. 

I don't think you do. Standard Sins maps do not have a lot of pirate bases and thus there was never a reason for the programmers to code AI for it. Thus the programmers didn't want the AI to consider the pirates like another player. Now the AI will clear out pirate bases if its the only way to your homeworld, but if it has another path, no matter how long, they'll take it.

There is no such line. You cannot program the AI to do things it doesn't do already. You can change its priorities a bit, but no more. That's why I'm telling you to leave the original pirates alone with your mod. You can have all of their ships, buildings etc., and you won't have any AI problems. If you really don't any other pirates around you can get rid of them entirely.

See there are two camps on this issue. One has always wanted the pirates to be commerce raids like their real life counterparts, in which the trade ship focus actually makes sense. The other wants them to basically be bounty hunters, attacking worlds for money and getting paid to just blow stuff up. Currently we sort of have a hybrid of the two, and while not ideal there are many more things I'd rather the Devs fix before pirates. Also the ability is something you can do right now, while the Devs have already confirmed there are no trade ship changes in the patch tomorrow. Thus you might be waiting a while for a "code fix" that might never come.

In fact, yes.

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/410219

I've played a few of the preset maps and have never seen more than 1 pirate base... and the "random" maps never seem to have more than one either...