I am a new player and the pirates are driving me insane!
I had the day off work yesterday and was really looking forward to getting into a good game. I was about 2 hours into a game on Beginner level, I was well ahead of the AI in research and could pretty easily build ships to counter anything my opponents had. Now sometimes the AI sends in just a few pirate ships and I can normally handle these. But for the second time now I have had a game where it sends in hundreds of Pirate ships that are light years ahead of my current techs. They have max logistics - so they sometimes have over 20 ships in a fleet. They kill everything in sight and just basically camp your planets, making it hard to produce a fleet even if you get your techs high enough to counter them. Yesterday was the worst, because I had Galactive Privateer researched and about 9 trade routes established - so every turn I would have to wait literally minutes as the AI pirates tried to attack my freighters and then realized they couldn't. It really bogged the game down. I did keep hitting the turn button though (while playing my Xbox so that I could actually have some fun) and about 5-6 hours later I produced a fleet of battleships that seemed to be able to handle them. Then the next turn the AI churns out more pirates with totally new technology (instead of Mass Driver they had Beam)! And I am talking doomray or something close to it - so my research was again nowhere near being able to handle them.
Is this considered a Mega Event that I can possibly turn off somehow? I like an AI that throws in surprises - but this is so far off the charts that it is sucking the fun out of the game for me. Am I missing something here?