help!! Pirates are too hard

I have never seen a pirate fleet in all the games I have played. I have played over 50... the last have been on th epainful level... it's tough.

The pirate fleets that I encounter are no where near that kind of strength. Whenever I fight the pirates they usually are somewhat easy.

yeah what pirates ?? I've yet to see the buggers.

I've run into a few fleets, your best bet is to steer clear of them if at all possible. That is, unless you have some bonuses, 2 fully upgraded military mining bases worked for me. Then it's killing time

I usually have no problem with pirates, but I did lose one game because they showed up in a 15 ship fleet and started rolling up my starbases and fleets with weapons that I hadn't even aquired yet.

For the most part, don't tangle with pirates. Unless they're right on top of your planets or on a major trading route, it's best to leave them alone.

If you do have to take them on....

You basically have to custom design a fleet (or two or three) specifically created to take on that pirate fleet. If they have missile weapons and shielding, design ships with heavy point defense and nano rippers (or better).

When they spawn -

They will have weapons, defenses and engines equal to the latest generation that you have researched. Or maybe equal to the most advanced race, but that's usually me, so who knows...

They will have insane logistics that you cannot match. They will have insane miniaturization that you cannot match. You'll just have to have enough firepower to blast through their escorts and kill the heavies.

Either use heavy fighters exclusively or use 1-2 frigates/battleships plus heavy and light fighter escorts. Use your most devastating weapons that aren't countered by their defenses. Or if you have Phasor VII or higher, you can pretty much ignore any shielding they might have, as long as you pack enough emitters onto your ships.

This is what works well for me:

Logistics = 43
Dreadnought x 1
Frigate x 2
Heavy Fighter x 5
Escort Fighter x 6

Make certain your dreadnought/battleship's defense/attack ratio is higher than your frigates, that your frigate's is higher than your heavy fighters and that your heavy fighters' are higher than the small fighers. In other words, the smaller the ship, the less defense it can have compared to firepower. This is so that the enemy shoots at the smallest ships (the escorts) first and hopefully never shoots at your largest ships.

You have to be careful when you put defenses on an escort. If you don't match up all the ships in a fleet just right, the AI becomes confused and comes to the conclusion that you are using a massive hull vessel with 100+ hit points to escort a horde of tiny hull vessels with 10-15 hit points. When you put them all into the fleet, the smallest ships should be listed higher than the larger ships and your really heavy ships should be right at the bottom.

Out of the limited number of games I've played, my biggest fear was a pirate fleet of 11 ships. The combined mass driver attack was 125 and their shield rating was about 50. I had been focusing on beam attack so I was quite shocked when I found them. I quickly teched up to nano rippers and upgraded my heavy cruisers with about 3 or 4 each. It cost me about 7-8 turns with expensive upgrading and researching. Fortunately the pirate fleet didn't move (every turn it said 0/0 moves remaining).

With enough armor, I didn't lose a single cruiser.

I've seen the popup announcing the pirates a few times, but I've actually only seen them flying around once. I ignored them and let them go about their business, but I noticed that they were powerful, far more powerful than anything I had. Perhaps that is why I left them alone.

ive seen 3 pirate fleets. 1 was 3 small ships, total of 25 of each wep and armor stat. easy.
the next had a whopping 19 large sized ships (i did the math of the logisticts) and another 20 frigates.
ridicules. i thought there was a bug, cuase thats insane. a total of
249 beam 456 (!) sheild
345 missile 219 point
178 mass driver 136 armor
im all like but it spawned next to the thalnes and their boasting went outta the window, as well as any traces of them
i died anyway.
the third was a average fleet. (145 armor and wep ALL put together)

I had a pirate fleet showed up with some 400+ attack in all 3 areas. I was like whoa... finally time to pull out my blackhole erruptors (I was just cleaning up the end game at this point). The turn afterwards they dove into my fully fortified military base and all died. Damn it, so close to a challenge.

I had the pirates popping up a couple of times.

I noticed the pirate event is related to the UP-council-event where the Terrans get selected to hold the 'Universal Prison' . (I usually play Terran alliance)

A year or so after you get selected for this universal prison, you get a meesage stating a couple of 'transports' are stolen by a group of escaped convicts! These are the pirate ships!

Never actually tried to vote against having this prison on my territory...

Pirate fleets in all my games have immidiately been stamped out by the other race factions. This thread kind of makes me laugh because I 'd like to tangle with pirates, but they're always killed off before I get to have my fun with them.

Two rules to any fight:

Destroy: Link

Distraction: !Link

Nuff Said!

Good Hunting!

I have once seen 27 pirate ships massed together but luckily not as a fleet (phew). I had the prison planet so I had to beat them down, bit of a pain but luckily I wasn't in a war (fighting proxy wars) !!!

EZ

AR

Hrm,... only in my last game did I actually see a pirate fleet. It got stomped by a standard fleet of mine quite easily.
Never met anything near what you guys are discribing in neither mass nor strength.

The only pirate fleet I ever saw was super weak, but it snuck in a blew up one of my economy starbases . Suffice to say I was pissed off and proceed to obliterate them

I always get the pirate fleets. Usually they're no problem, but when they show up at the endgame, their fleets have huge logistics. During one game, I was dominating the galaxy in everything when they showed up and went on a rampage. When they were done, they were only ones with ships! They wiped out most of my stations and all of my freigthers, and wiped out every fleet I sent against them. It didn't help that they had over 1200 in Mass Drivers and around 500-600 in missles and beams. Can't remember their defences, except that they were pretty high.

I never got to finish the game due to my savegame getting wiped by a trigger-happy little cousin trying to save his game while he was over...