Ok, im new to this game and i found it alil incredibly hard since i come from most standard RTS's like Warhammer 40k, Company of Heroes and the such. Now im thrusted into SOSE and i figured the best way to play would be to give myself a nice boost of resources at the start.
**Prelude: Skip if you don't want it**
I played a couple of hours in and was acquiring a huge fleet, well maybe not that huge. It had about 5-7 capital ships, loads of Kodiak Heavy Cruisers, many Flak Frigates and the like. I made the best friend out of my Ally and was bridging connections, living the life of an Emperor and Commander In Chief.
A couple more hours in (about 10hrs into the game?), the battle got a whole lot more intense as my enemies grew stronger. Now , by this time i have fended off nearly a whole load of pirate attacks. The pirates are VERY POWERFUL, i could put like a TEC Star Base that was fully upgraded, with 8 Gauss platforms and 2 hangars and 80 mines in a single Gravity Well. And there would still be a few pirate leftovers or it would be barely standing.
((End of Prelude: READ THIS FOR MAIN PROBLEM 10hrs into the game))
After many pirate attacks on my main system. This time, the pirate attacked a planet of mine, I saw that my Kodiaks had "Average Autocannon" damage of 28 when my research tree was fully filled. But when i saw the pirates attacking me, their Pirate Reapers/Cutthroats had auto cannon damages of 98? and laser damages of about 90. With 4k Hull hp.
Thats A LOt, my kodiaks were 1.5k hp with 1k shields and 28 autocannon dmg, and they were the baddest thing in the TEC right?
Can someone tell me if im doing doing something wrong? Am i not upgrading the kodiaks or something? Cos i maxed out all 3 branches of my military tree. And awhile later, Pirate Reapers had 128 autocannon damage. Kodiaks still 28 when veteran.
The newer stronger pirates are a feature of the new Diplomacy expansion. Probably very few of us can answer to your satisfaction right now. I myself plan to get Diplomacy in a few days when I have the time to play it.
What I can tell you is that in the original game and Entrenchment, pirates were considered weak fodder that weren't worth much consideration. If anything, being attacked by them was a good thing since it allowed your capital ships to level up. One of the features of the Diplomacy expansion pack was that pirates would get stronger and scale better with the game. What seems to be the problem here is that pirates are scaling indefinitely and don't appear to stop improving, even after the human player has long since maxed out his fleet size and upgrades.
There are several ways to beat pirates, but first thing it's important to understand their three huge weaknesses. The first, and most glaring, is that they don't have shields. Even units with small amounts of shields get a special bonus called "shield mitigation", which in effect is a 60% damage reduction. Pirates don't have this, so they usually take more than twice as much damage as your units would take. Their second weakness is that they will charge your defenses directly, running into very obvious death-traps. The third weakness is that they lack a versatile fleet, neither having carriers nor support cruisers of any type.
Faced with a pirate fleet like you describe, I'd probably have three or four different defenses on hand:
One thing I will say is that ten hour games are extraordinarily rare. I've never played a game that ran past seven hours, personally, and I've played massive multistar games.
Ten hours isnt unheard of. I know Darvin you play alot of MP and those games are fast and brutal. Im sure you play on the fastest setting even against the AI. And you know the game very very well. So you can whip out games faster.
I remember my first game taking 7-8 on a small random map and thats b/c I died. Since then Ive gotten faster and better but my usual style of play is on slow settings so I have 16-36 hours games often.
Haha good luck with that in Diplomacy!
To the OP: The thing you are doing wrong is not winning the pirate bidding war. If you fail you need to put up a strong defence or lose 1 planet, not the end of the world. The Pirates have been beefed up to make them an actual element to the game countered by more than just a few hangers and gauss cannons.
Yes, in Diplomacy, the pirates come in a HUGE Fleet. You should see it.
A Horde of them pour through into the system with loads of ships, Pirate Reapers, Cutthroats, Siegers and what not. The siegers whoam your planet first and the rest just rip you to shreds.
I have got LOADs of mines, 1 maxed out (both research and upgrades) and a battery of gausses with hangars in there.
I had to send my main fleet (also called my only fleet) and it was always a bloodbath. Wish they allowed us to enable "Weak Pirates"
Researching Auxilary Government can help
Well i keep winning the pirate bidding war late game but that just makes the planet they invaded nearly un-re-takeable. The pirate fleet just loiters there with extremely high damage ships. When i was 10hours++ into the game, they had 128 damage, while my kodiaks were 28dmg with just half the hp of pirate ships.
Im DEFINITELY going to edit them. I find it stupid that:
1 - Theres a huge pirate ship fleet just hanging there waiting to kill anyone, shouldnt a proper empire possess the ability to ward off pirates?
2 - Pirates are... pirates, They have never massed in such great numbers or possess the know-how to manufacture weapons that are 5x better than properly researched and manufactured weapons.
3 - Resource for them should be scarce, let it be that way.
Well... Pirates ARE strong.
I've send following force vs pirate base:
10 capships (4 Kortuls, 2 Skinatras, 2 Vulkoras, 1 Jarrasul, 1 Marauder, all on lvl 5-7)
~50 Asilants
~25 Enforcers
~25 Overseers
~10 subverters
1 Migrator to deploy starbase
I also had:
- ALL battle-oriented artifacts (weapon buff, shield buff, hull regen buff, AM buff)
- ALL Vasari upgrades
- ALL Vasari Pacts active
- ALL Advent Pacts active
- Pirate system was under my culture
I've entered Pirate base gravwell...
There were only two pirate groups in gravwell (other were on mission)...
I've moved to border of gravwell to evade gauss cannons...
Then first group come...
More then Half on my fleet (excluding caps, they all were alive) died before second group engaged me.
Rest died just after second fleet arrived (note how "long" take passing Gravwell)...
Pirates casualties? ~40% of first group, ~5% of second group. No single gauss turret was destroyed (My plan was engaging them ater destroying enemy fleet - which didn't happen)
Well... I think Pirates are little too strong.
I will throw-in my 2 cents by saying that I play Sins in a heavily modded state (the Distant Stars Mod). In this modded state we allow for 160% total HitPoint increase (hull+shield), higher armor, greater firepower (40 to 60%) and I still have difficulty in dealing with late game pirates. And this is coming from someone who developed the Powerful Pirate mod due to the overly weak pirates of Entrenchment. These pirates can get too OP.
It need further tests, but I bet 2000+ supply fleet of fully developwed empire with all upgrades, all artifacts, all Pacts etc. etc. will not be able to take single lategame pirate base (Note pirate base I tried to destroy was not fully developed and there were only 2 pirate groups in their system...). So... It is probably OP.
They really need a cap on how much they can upgrade. They shouldn't be completely outclassing a fully upgraded HC by a factor of 200-300% I understand they need to become strong enough to be a threat to a fully upgraded starbase so they don't simply feed you XP. However they shouldn't be able to take on your entire late game fleet head on and win. They're raiders/mercenaries, not the damn Antarians.
I wouldn't be a fan of "infinite building" for them but I like uberpirates--simply turn the pirats active option off if they are too much? I do like the idea of a "weak pirate" option--we could call it the "wimp setting"
Pirates should (mostly) grow in numbers, not in upgrades. 300% upgrades? WTF?
ATM facing lategame pirate base is like facing 100-200 fully upgrded 10lvl caps protected by ~20 turrets with health and damage of starbase (EACH!). Pirates should be much stronger then they were in entranchement, but Diplomacy pirates are (unlimited power)*(unlimited number)...
What was the pirate fleet ?! I don't have diplomacy yet and it is hard to imagine a fleet that can beat you so badly ! Was it something like 100 Kodiaks at 4k HP ?
It was ~100 ships total (all pirate types) in 2 groups (~50 ships each) in different parts of gravity well - And Kodiaks weren't at their 5k level. There were also ~20 Gauss platforms (~7k each), but I was not attacking them.
First Group was enough to destroy my forces, second group changed nothing.
Note I was waiting for pirate raid to lure most of pirate forces to attack "unprotected" pirate base...
Attacking a Pirate base can be suicide in Diplomacy. The pirates do have another weakness: Small Ships. Easily killed/mained by a Mazra missle barrage. However you really need 2 barrages, preferably from 2 Mazras to keep your losses low.
Wow that is a big pirate fleet! I just played a 6 hour diplomacy game against cruel AI's and the pirate fleets never got that large. I usually kill the pirates when they invade my gravity well. I'm assuming you or the AI let the fleet return to the pirate base adding to their numbers?
I do think the pirates are a little crazy powerful though. I pulled some stats listed below!
Funny thing was it was more fun defending my starbase against the pirates then it was the AI that was left. The AI's fleet just looked puny and couldn't really attack my starbase like the Pirates could.
Pirate stats (6 hour mark)
Name Hull, Armor, Experience (lol), DPS
Pirate Rogue 2880, 22, 15, 65
Pirate Pillager 2610, 21, 30, 86
Pirate Corsair 4620, 26, 50, 106
Pirate Cutthroat 3510, 24, 35, 28 and 83
Pirate Reaper 3975, 24, 25, 136
Pirate Turrent 10500, 34, 50, 101 (mini starbase!)
It was custom scenario with 4 pirate bases total (i had so many artifacts for a reason), and game took ~5 hours. Anyway, I had ~120 ships including 10 capships and starbase and all upgrades, artifacts, vasari pacts and advent pacts for this fleet. This fleet failed vs ~50 pirate ships... second 50 ships group just finished the job. And these pirate ships still werent on highest level...
So: I outnumbered pirate group ~2.5 times and I had almost all boosts for my ships in entire game... AND I LOST TO THIS GROUP.
Why the hell these guys don't just conquer the entire galaxy?
These pirates sound like real Buttpirates.
agree completely. even the reapers were easier to kill than the pirates.
Darvin I understand that you are trying to bring solutions to this problem, but we are not looking for way around this, we want IC to fix the damn pirates. They are not the freaking Antarans from Master of Orion II. They are PIRATES, low level ships that are suppose to be RAIDERS and a nuisance at best, not the bringer of death/destroyer of worlds that they are right now!
I did not want to be part of the playtesters for diplomacy (like I was in Entrenchment) because I wanted to be suprised! Well guess I have to be careful what I wish for...
I wont make the same mistake twice and next time I will make sure IC hears what I have to say before the next game/expansion is released. Who playtested this???
Change "Pirates" name into something like "unstoppable world-annihilating fleet-eating death armada of terror, doom and ultimate destruction" and problem is fixed
Pirates are not supposed to be so strong.
Me.
Maybe the pirates in your neck of the woods, but over here its a way of life.
Ok on a serious note. They are not that bad. It just takes a mentality change, IMHO. Many of yall were use to use to using a few ships and/or a SB and not lose anything. Or playing a map and never losing a planet. But with all that said, I do think the rate of upgrading for the pirates is a bit high. Its brutal. And most people dont like brutal. *shrugs*
Im liking the fact I can rely on the pirates killing things. Even a Vicious AI.
I agree with this... However, I'm not sure the pirates will ever STOP increasing in strength. While there is a cap to how powerful my fleet can get it appears the pirates just keep leveling up based on some timed increment. I watched the replay just to watch the rate of increase in the pirate strength and it appeared to function on a timed basis rather than money, etc. I would actually be fine if the pirate strength was based on the money thrown at it like the pirate mission seems to imply.
Like I said in this thread and the other, it was fun, just not very believable. If you plan on playing a LONG game, you will want to take out the pirate base(s) before they get uber powerful. Otherwise they are still fairly easy to deal with with the right strategy and structures.
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