I've been doing 4-player FFA on a random medium map. The "kill ship" missions are generally impossible to complete--at least in the early going. Many times you barely get your fleet in contact with the target before the timer is up...much less kill 10 ships.
Fighting the pirates seems pretty counter-productive. It takes most of your fleet and a good ten minutes (assuming you either want the XP or don't have the defenses.) That's time that could be better spent expanding. I have not played a lot, but the one game I avoided bidding to keep the pirate threat low, that strategy just didn't work. With no bidding at all, the pirate threat increased each time, so that by the third wave of attacks, it was maxed out and they were sending huge flo
I've seen a few posts that say... "Pirates are easy. Just make sure you always outbid the other guys." Unfortunately, I don't find that this works well...at least against the computer. The AI player will always just throw a higher bid in, usually within a second or two after mine. This leads to an escalating bid war with the winner determined by the random timer. Costs a lot of money and I still lose the bid at least half the time. <
