Quoting minidump-hellboy, reply 17
Quoting KarlBar99, reply 13@minidump: in a 3 hour 4 player game i see a total of about a 100 pirate ships accumulatte that way. Trade ships are a bigger issue than pirates.
I dont play 4 players games. This game was made to be epic. I play 10 player games that last for 2 days.
I'm sure you could, buit it's kind of irelevent.
The devs have explicitlly stated that after about 3 to 4 hours the AI code just starts producing too many decishion points and thing start spiraling downwards performance wise. That game just can't handle single matches longer than haklf a day or so without going tottally gah gah.
Enevn more practiclly, the AI's should be killing off the pirates around 3-4 hours in anyway, (they allways do in my games, ushually via novaliths, (yes this is in diplomacy)). So more than a hundred ships is very unlikliy period.
If your seeing more than that it's because your reguarly throwing all your money onto bounty's from the game start and playing against easy economic/researcher AI's. Those just can't defend themselves and huge bounty's spawn huge fleets, as a result you'll see a drasticlly longer timeframe before they kill the pirates, and many more ships per raid, and many more raids surviving to come back.
um...no? I almost NEVER spend money on bounty. They attack even when there is no bounty on anyone. They attack the last target. Maybe I spend bounty to get out of one raid in the beginning. By the time I have my fleet up, it's all trivial. And I when I play a tough AI I set it to random. I don't know who's doing what or cheating how. AI's do not kill pirates unless they attack.. They will leave a pirate base alone the whole game, regardless of it's strength. I've never seen an AI kill off a pirate base, never once.
All I care about, is trimming the unnecessary fat from this game so it's playable after 6 hours. You guys can argue all the details. I just play the game.