Is the only solution to pirates just blowing them up?
Does anyone else think there should be alternative solutions to dealing with them, particularly non-militarized empires:
I generally don't build military empires and find pirates annoying (not game changing, just persistently annoying to have to micromanage my ships to all go around) and it seems to me that there should be multiple avenues for dealing with the pirate issue.
Perhaps in a future expansion/DLC pirates could be an expanded and more fully built feature of the game - but until then, it just seems like a non-military way of dealing with pirate aggression should be available... Even just building a starbase module "pirate market" or something whereby pirate starbases within the influence range spawn ships that are not hostile to the starbase owner would be a decent solution.
cheers
You don't need to have too many ships to take out the pirates. I think of it as a little mechanic to make sure I have at least built up the minimum defenses for my civiliziation. Besides, even if you go peaceful you should have a military. Otherwise, you will be taking diplo hits for having a weak military.
Well, this kind of gets back to another issue that I've run into - playing a gigantic map with all races + one custom, I seldom run into anyone, so investing in military isn't something that I've had to prioritize..
I think thee are some good ideas for future DLC/Expansions
Guns for hire - pay them to attack specific targets - disrupt trade routs of race x
I play on very large maps as well. If you do nothing you will run into them while sending Colonizers, Constructors and Trade ships out. Kill em now!
I agree. At the moment they are little more than the barbarians from a certain other 4x game...
Well, some may not have a problem with them, but in a test game I have been playing on a large map (normal) with just the Drengi and common pirates, it took me 150 turns to get them out of my half of the map. It may be partly me. I tend to play a massive force combat game and I only lost about 4 ships to pirates. I was sending over-sized fleets with 4-600 HP to kill them off.
I ended the game with an Alliance V just to see the stats. They had been giving the Drengi pure hell. The Drengi were way behind and had lost over 75 ships to pirates and they were pretty much stagnated. The Drengi had killed way more than I had but it was obvious they were taking them as they came and not trying to finish them off.
I was progressing slowly, and by the time I ended it, I was at a point I could play normally, but they had been so distracting, I had a hard time developing my empire properly and I was very unhappy with the overall game, and with what I had accomplished. I was more or less disgusted with myself and the damned pirates.
I don't know if anyone is playing with the bastards on common or more, and liking it, but my hat is off to anyone who does.
After Huge you will need to create custom races or import the ones from the contest and other players to make the galaxy populated. These are really large maps. To give you an idea the larges galaxy size was created to handle 128 players.
You can always set Pirates at lowest setting, altho even at uncommon there seems to be a lot of them and given engagements with pirates have caused the majority of game freezes it gets quite annoying!
Haven't played for a while, so been plugging around on a couple of 'gifted' AI games. Have to say the pirate nerf to sensor range = 2 was a really nice tweak to make pirates a whole lot less annoying...
The pirates may be a lot different now than they were in May (I only started playing a month ago). I really like the pirates and play with them on "common". The pirates give you motivation to build some initial military.
Yes, it would be nice to add in some other things you could do (bribe them to not attack you for X number of turns, hire them to harass other races, etc). Overall they are a great feature and if you don't like them you can always set up your game with "pirates=none".
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