I dont know if this is a bug, but I noticed in the 1.00 deplomacy patch that pirates have got immensly powerful, so much that 6 seige frigs nearly destroyed my starbase, as the range and wepaons they had were incrediable.
DEAR LORD LOOK AT THE ARMOR IN THAT SCREENSHOT! That lvl10 cap has 9 armor, all the pirate ships have 40+ armor. That means your strongest weapons are doing as much damage as hurling a pebble at a tank. There is no race unit in the game that can even come close to that kind of armor. Ima call bug on that one. I can understand having increased HP and all, but DAMN thats a ridiculous amount of armor. I mean, fully upped starbases can get up to about half the armor of just 1 of those ships.
First Diplo game, 30 minutes in, the Pirate HCs already have 2.7k hull. Luckily, they were headed to another empire's planet and just passed by.
At that kind of growth of power, the only way to remove the Pirates late game without devoting exorbitant amounts of resources is to enlist the help of two Novalith Cannons.
There is a limit on pirate upgrades, but it's way high. Here are the numbers:
Pirates buy 2 upgrades before each raid, each of the following upgrades has 20 ranks:
Armor: +2 armor.HP: +20% hp.Regeneration: +45% hp regen.Weapon damage: +20% damage, +5% range.Weapon cooldown: -7% autocannon/laser cooldown.
So, basically, you have pirates running around with +40 armor, +400% hp, doing +400% damage with double the range and virtually no cooldown and with 900% faster hull regen.
Granted it takes some time for all of these to build up, but since they're random they could well end up with a 40% damage bonus and +10% range on the first raid and only get worse from there.
How and where did you get this data, and is it moddable at all?
For example make it so that...
Armor: +0.5 armor.HP: +10% hp.Regeneration: +5% hp regen.Weapon damage: +2.5% damage, +1% range.Weapon cooldown: -1% autocannon/laser cooldown.
Or reduce the ranks from 20 to 5? Or something like that?
It's in the entity files, so of course it's moddable. It's just research files for pirates, same way as players have them.
Hmm, interesting. I can understand they wanted to make the pirates badass again after being a joke for years, but it seems they didn't really take into consideration what happens during a really long game where the pirates get to buy 20+ upgrades over of the course of the game. The large increases in power are actually fine, as they need to remain relevent in large team game settings. However they need a more reasonable cap on the number of upgrades. 20 in each category is simply too uber. 5 upgrades in each category would keep them more consistant with normal ship stats, while still being strong enough that a few turrets can't fight them off anymore. Or maybe 10 per category with slightly reduced bonuses from what they have now.
Alternatively, have them scale with the number of players if that's possible. ie in a 4 player game they're capped at level 5 upgrades while in a 8 player game they can buy up to level 10.
How about setting an option for the pirates, for example easy, normal, hard, cruel and viscous options for the pirates, by the way i aint complaing that the piarates are too hard, I kinda like it, but the seige frigs range is WAY TOO LONG!
i STRONGLY DISAGREE with the line they end up with more ships with their surviving raiders return to base. the fact is if u play 3 star maps with a pirate base on each of its system (3 pirate base on that maps)with 1 pirate base grows STRONGER than the other regarding players on that star system MORE ACTIVELY placing bounty on each other and by anyway u WIPE that pirate base, u'll found the other (randomly) pirate base SUDDENLY became as strong as that pirate base u just wiped
found it a bit confusing?lets simplify it.lets just say u got 3 caps A(lvl 10) B(lv 6) and C(lv 1). the strongest one is A and it gets destroyed, so u USE B (a progen) to use Resurrection on C making C's level matches A's level
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