I'm absolutely in favor of more diverse pirate fleets. And a pirate capital ship would be great!

Goa has a valid point there though, the Pirates should not become overpowered.

I normally have them inactive.

They extend the game when turned on so I use them as a fine tuning for game time adjustment. I'm a 1,2 maybe 3 hour start to finish FFA type player. Rebellion has now brought me online and am trying to help with this beta release if i can.

Plus, the position of their planet effects strategy. Sort of a Berlin wall to be scaled when desired.

I say keep'm. But no capitals for'm.

i think it would be cool for the pirates to have their own cap and maybe some more ships and such as long as they dont become to powerful

I know I've mentioned this before but Pirates should be a separate AI player and should have a toggle-able difficulty setting with the lowest being "Inactive" and a few more on top of that.  Personally, I would like pirates to start out somewhat annoying (a step down from where they are now, even though they are manageable) as opposed to becoming giant fleets of intermittent death when leveled up.  

However, some people like unreasonable corsair hordes so they should be able to have their cake too.

I know this would be a big change, but perhaps if the pirates split up and attacked everyone with bounty (proportionally based on the bounty each player has) at the same time, that would take the cheese out of being the last person to bid b/c you weren't babysitting the auction. 

TEC Rebels would still have an advantage in a 1v1, though.  If pirates were not considered "neutral" but a distinct "player", then "Honor Amongst Rogues" or whatever could be moved up in the tech tree and apply only to pirates.  A new tech like "Colonial Friendship" or something could remain at tier 3(?) and apply only to militia.

Another option would be to throw in the target's credit income into the calculation so the pirates send fewer ships to attack a poor person.

I'm just throwing out ideas that might make the pirate idea more appealing to a broader base of people.

If they got a cap... it should be/like the new TEC cap. Then they're stealing ships like good pirates and not just razing worlds for kicks.

Anyone can make a map with Galaxy Forge and beef up the pirates with enough capital ships to make them happy.

I was able to give them one of each ship from each of the races having 15 cap ships in their pirate base as a test.

Now as I had the pirates on the other side of a wormhole cluster with link to all player starting locations I was disappointed to find that pirates can't (or won't) use wormholes even when provided the artefact that allows wormhole travel.

you can even add structure from races as well. 

This is simply a mapping option and not a mod, which I thought was quite cool to play with.

I'd like an explanation of that.

These are pirates in a 25 year long war. Crippiled capitals will have been left behind countless times in places the pirates could have grabbed them. Not to mention it would be fairly sensible for one or more factions to provide a capital direct to help turn the pirates on their enemies. In the old days of sail, providing freebooters with equipments and sutioble documents was pretty much par for the course, (though of course they mostly got bigger ships by capturing enemy ones). The only way pirates would never get a capital is if they delibretly destroyed them on sight, even when they could freely salvage them.

A lot of other settings are granular- why not make pirates as well? No pirates/low/normal/high/extreme? With high having caps, and extreme starbases?

I'm inclined to agree, Pirates having capitals being against the lore made sense in Entrenchment, and even Diplomacy, but in the age of Titans, they need to adapt or die, and they've had more than enough time to salvage capital ships for parts, or even a husk from which to model new ships.

If we also take them apparently being an active part of the TEC Rebellion into account, they have even more reason to be fielding something heavier.

How about die possibility to select a difficulty for the pirates during the player setup? Or an expansion rate, oder upgrade rate in the game options. The option to make them mercenaries only, passive, completely random raiders or even standard sins pirate behavior ( ). I would probably add a whole "Customize your own pirate faction" chart to the game setup.

I see lots of potential fun here. And nobody can complain about pirates anymore.

http://pastebin.com/xuzB4mkt

Major Yar!  Even more Yar for the GSDEF would be:

"PlanetOwnerIsPirate"
"PlanetOwnerIsPirateWithChance"

This would make it possible to give pirates a set group that would spawn and groups that might spawn based on the param percent chance.  It just changes the fleet composition up a bit.  Would give the option that a group with a capitalship might spawn, even if chance is set to 5 to 10%.

Well there is a difficulty setting for npc's you play against... Why not integrate multiple pirate difficulty settings too? That way newcomers can still have weak pirates, while experienced players can choose to have harder pirates a titan can't just kill solo.

Also there is the possibility of just strengthening the pirate base itself to defend against an early titan, though no idea what you could really put there that could withstand a titan .