LOL.  I find it pretty stupid to have alliance with pirate and rebel factions in the first place.  Not sure about Maelstrom, but 7DS pirates can send 2-4 capitalships out, but what's going on with Rebellion is just funny.  Funny disturbing, not funny HAHA.

Pirates "Beacon" to their planet and go out to attack worlds.  The only thing that is constantly at the pirate base is what's in the GalaxyScenarioDef file.  It might be better if there is no pact with pirates or rebels at all, but raider xenophobia research that just reduces the strength of the pirate force sent against them down to 10% (They are pirates after all and some just don't follow orders).  How the rebels get 2000 ships is beyond me, but good fun for area affect weapons.

It is by %10.

yeah im pretty sure the pirate always have built up on there base as there threat lvl of high

Are you talking about the original Sins?  The pirates did not build-up at the pirate planet.  Always about the same number.

When the pirates went out on mission, the planet spawned the raid automatically...

Easy to take out the pirate base with a half fleet in about ten minutes.  

"Every time the pirates succeed on a raid, the raid ships return to base and remain there, if there has been a large build up, it's because they've been doing their job unchecked."

This must stop. 

I've been playing "cruel" to start...it's more than every 15 minutes.  I was getting raided two at a time.  It's not that I can't handle it..I can. It's the fact that it drains resources to have them accumulate.  Send out a raid..if it succeeds, they go back to base and disappear, keeping the number of pirates at their base a constant.  No reason at all for such a build-up.  You can kill the pirates easily with a novalith, but all of those damn ships are still there slowing the game down for no reason.

I cleared about half out already before this screenie:

"AI Difficulty has no effect on pirates.


Also those are rebels, and that is a blatant problem, there is no problem with pirates accumulating forces from successful raids, though I agree with NHD that they should actually do something with those forces.[/quote]"

No problem in terms of game-play or eating needless system resources to maintain the literally thousands of pirate units that accumulate at their base?  There is NO reason for the pirates to accumulate.  

There is no way to use all those pirates for a balanced game play experience.

They came from nothing...they should go back to nothing.

They don't collect resources to grow.  They don't cap planets.  There are not manufactured in factories...they just appear out of nowhere. If there is a limit cap on players and gravity wells, it's only logical that there should be a limit cap on pirates and rebels.

And anyway, I don't care if there are a million pirates there...as long as they don't slow my game down.

Yeah trade ships need to be changed somehow. I constantly click on them when I have the map zoomed out and aim for a planet or "ship ring" around a planet. One of the most irritating things in Sins if you ask me.

No I didn't! You have no idea how much you just improved my Sins play experience.

Technically, they do collect resources whenever you or your opponent gives them bounty to attack somebody.  When you look at it from this perspective, they don't come from nothing, so why should they go to nothing?  Also, yeah, trade ships are a much bigger burden than pirates just sitting around a gravity well.

Sarcasm maybe?

Growth proportional to the resources they take? Negative.

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.