Pirate Balance

The whole point of the pirates is to act as a nuisance. They are supposed to harass you. Not destroy you.

The pirates were pretty evil in beta 1, because your bounty determined the size of the pirate fleet. They got nerfed because of that.

How many trade posts do you have? The amount of trade going on in the galaxy plays a big role in how strong the pirate attacks are.

I build 1-2 trade posts per planet. They aren't even a bother, planet defenses can easily deal with them. Even late game they don't effect gameplay at all. They are simply there, and not a harassment at all, at best they can harass one their first two attacks to unprotected systems. Otherwise they usually all die before they even get to where they are going.

Is that what it is? To me it always seemed to actually be tied to the bounty, but usually bounty grows as trade grows as well, so it would be easy to mistake one for the other

Course I guess given that by late game my culture has usually taken the pirates over maybe I just don't notice. In that case, maybe place their system farther away from the sun, like instead of 1 jump, make it like 3 or something. With astroid belts before hand.

i noticed something wrong with the pirates in my current game.


they attacked an astroid. they didn't have any planet bombers.

when they finished destroying my mines. and couldn't do anymore damage they should have moved on.


i also think that they need to have some kind of carrier.

Nothing wrong with pirates early game, size wise anyway. They really are free experience, but that's only so with the correct circumstances.

They do however amount to nothing later on. If I defend against them after I've got stuff set up, it's because I have a capship to level. A 200 point fleet two hours into the game might be a little much, but I'd aim for there.

That said, pirates aren't entirely free experience. If you have a spy in the star gravity well, you can track them, find out which planet they are hitting, and tag one on the opposite side shortly after to catch them away, or follow them in a little behind and catch the enemy fleet between them and you. I wiped out some of a heavily fortified planets infrastructure and caused significant damage by sending a lone sova in behind a pirate fleet once. The pirates took all the hits and I got all the credit for wiping out the enemy bombers and killing the reinforcements. The pirates themselves could have been ignored or used for xp, but with a high level sova playing havoc on your defenders you have a more pressing concern.

Haha, piggy-backing on pirate raids is a ton of fun

I had a funny thing happening. our more or less defeated enemy put massive bounty on me and sure enough soon they came. but then their fleet went straight for the trade ports and largely ignored my three capships and missile platforms taking them apart in the meantime. maybe its an error (sry, I don't think I have a replay, but I may a savegame, wherewhith a replay can be created) but while it is good they go for trade station, that should not get such a high priority to get them killed while they could have won the battle.

In singleplayer, I agree. In multiplayer... well, they are nasty.

Yes, say if Ron Lugge pisses me off i post a bounty on him. Then piggy back behind the pirates

i build trade centers as anti-pirate defences. basically , the tradeship are designed as free decoys , inoder for exp gain or just to gain invulnerablily to a pirates. try to setup a systemw ehre tradeships go thorugh the pirate base and you be invulnerable to pirates.

as it is , pirates are decent strogn . any more and id be pssed. any less and i wouldnt have be persuaded to place bounty , its perfect. stop being a noob an dstart plaing mp.

I would not want them to be stronger. At this stage I feel they are just right.

However I know some people like more pirates. May be we can have an option of how man pirates we can have? Like in Civ games you can regulate the amount of barbarians in game setup.

I agree, they seem fairly right. they could be a bit stronger towards the end, but then I don't think they are supposed to be any real threat in the late game.

oh, and a strong pirates/ weak pirates option would in fact be pretty cool if it is feasible in the time remaining.

An option is biggest thing I am asking. They are also the closest thing to a random event. A large factor in 4X games. There was no better way to shake the game up than have some crazy event happen. Rebels taking up arms, a sun exploding, ancient alien warship found, etc, etc... I don't expect a whole slew of random events, but it'd be nice to be able to use the pirates to that kinda degree.

Actually, a while back the devs said they were working on/considering randomish events as well, just that we shouldn't expect them in beta

The pirates used to raid until everything was destroyed and then leave didnt they? It was viable to just take your licks and then rebuild.

I think they just sit there forever now if they win. Not too big a deal, but its something to watch for.

In a sense... It used to be they'd destroy a system, then move on and destroy another one until stopped. Now they just sit in orbit for forever

Edit: Which actually makes them more survivable (not ignorable!) rather than less. If you have to, you can leave them be while you deal with more "urgent" matters elsewhere. Like defending your borders from hostile "aliens"

except in my last game which was a single star and opponent. the pirates were a bigger threat than the other empire was. specially after that empire lost his flag.

Someone brought up Civilization 4's barbarians, and that is a good example of how we could possibly adjust the pirate difficulty/frequency of attacks.

Add a checkbox at game setup "raging angry psycho" pirates, or something like that to switch the pirate AI from the current back to the old beta 2 AI. Where size of the pirate fleets was determined by size of bounty's. Then let the mayhem begin

Why are pirates so mean?...., Because they Yarrrrrr!

Just start a political discussion if you want a raging angry psycho.

That is a good idea in my opinion.