Pirates

Appeal to thier fatherly instincts.

Link

Your link Fued brought painful memories of the Super Bowl back. Memories that I was trying to surpress.

I wish there was. I ended up simply quiting one campaign as they overwhelmed pretty much everyone. At that point it was no longer fun or worth playing, so I started over anew.

I have seen two kinds of pirates. The first kind aren't that powerful They just have a huge number of hit points that don't seem to repair. (maybe they do but they never stop shooting long enough to find out) so early on they are unbeatable but eventually the hit points dwindle and they can be beaten. The ships I have seen use low power mass drivers and lite armor. I think they come along after the the first player gets medium hulls. If you have well defended and armed starbases they can easily handle the pirates if attacked.

They can be a real nuisance until they run out of steam. They have never attacked me when I was involved with a war but if they play hell with your un armed starbases and defenders. If you had transports on your doorstep on top of the pirates it would be more than a nuisance.

The second kind I have seen are a bit tougher they appeared later in another game and have a limited number of good ships and a fleet or two. they were well armored and firing missiles. I lost a couple of poorly defended starbases and some single ships to them when I was the top military power. I had the tech and logistic to match them so I sent a fleet of 4 laser ships after their 3 battleship fleet. My fleet had combined fp of about 70 with all bonuses and heavily shielded but no point defense. My combined boosted hp were nearly 200. They might have out ran me but they stood fast and I blew them out of space losing one ship to their 3.

I had previously killed a single pirate fighter and after killing their fleet they never appeared again.

For me, the evil pirates came after the pirates from the prison break. The pirates from the prison went down pretty easily, but then the second group spawned out of nowhere. They had 3 or 4 battleships, and around 20 smaller crafts, took out my whole fleet, several starbases of mine and the CPU opponents, every transport that got near them, and then started taking out planets. I couldn't take any of them down, and could not build up a fleet fast enough to hold them off. Also, the CPU players sent pretty much every ship they had to attack them, the pirates wiped them all out and never lost a battle, so I had to restart that game.

Yea... I wish stardock would take a look at this... pirates are supposed to be the rabble of society... sure they can strike a blow at an unprepared, illequipped force. But there is no way they could possibly be completly dominating every single galactic power in the universe at the same time.