oh my god, i hope they will fix this.

I tried with my entire fleet once.  Even with my titans AOE spell fully lvled and my titan being at lvl 9 and all my cap ships from lvl 6-9 there were sytill way to many. there armor value makes the AoE not do much to them, i was only able to kill maybe 50 of the ships before i started loosing caps myself.  Either the amount of ships need to get lowered or there stats do because a combanation of both makes it almost impossible to clear out these wells without taking heavy losses.

A scuttle timer might be helpful indeed. If the had one nobody could complain about some buffing in other areas (if needed) either.

But pirates should only collect on the pirate base to my knowledge, they go back there after a raid afterall... if you are a TEC rebel you can't be raided so they shouldn't collect on your planets either... I could see your enemys being lucky and investing money into a pirate quets for the same planet at the same time, but let's be serious, how likely is that to happen?

So how the hell did you end up with them "expanding" all over the place like this?

Edit: those massive stats could result from one too many successful raid boosting the pirate research too much, maybe looking into the way they upgrade their ships is neccsary as well?

Thats what im not sure of,  i didnt even relize it was happening because i was focusing on the advent at the time.  when i got them down and done with and started focusing on the TEC Rebels this is what i found, it was a total suprise to me.  They are all on Rebel worlds so it couldnt be that they raided those planets then just stayed. it was more like they were defending the planets for the rebel player because he still had his own tactical and logistic structures on the planet as well.  I agree that once a targeted planet has been successfully raided that the ships in the raid should have a scuttle timer go active.

Their armor and damage increase as they collect bounty, so assuming that game was going on for a long time they got fed plenty of credits, especially from trade ships.

Well, personally, I'm not a fan of self destruct timers. (I'd rather them just fly back to their home base first) Now, playing as the Rebels, I've seen them gather at my planets before. I think it's because of either a bounty or a mission.

Now, this does bring up an idea. They aren't going there to defend, they're going on a glitched mission to attack my planet. They should never have left for that mission in the first place. However, shouldn't I be able to issue missions to them to go to a planet in order to defend it?

simply turn off pirates if you dont plan to finish a game quickly, 10 hour is a ridiculous amount of time to be playing, and when you send pirates to other factions, such as tec rebel with truce amongst rogues, its a waste of money on your part, and they'll just defend the grav well, gotta think who to really target these days, else you're only helping someone :]