Aaaargh! *&%$! Pirates!

yeah the pirate event sucks. you have to turn off the mega events to get rid of it, which is a shame since the rest of the events are fun.

It would be nice if they switched this to the Dreadlord event and changed the old dread lord event to the making of a hostile Pirate planet or something.

Pirate and Spy Infestation events both suck - and I like 99% of the megas, but those two just ruin it.

The spy one makes me hoard spies and never use them...just in case.

On the other side however it is nice when the pir8ts attack the most powerfull civs on the board if it isn't you, ;o) I have had to sneak and attack the planet on the other side to keep the pir8ts from killing me before I can conquer the planet.

From the Desk of Sugien CSK
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@###{ ]::::::Cyber Striker Knight::::::>
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Hi! I'm a new player to, but I've learned how to defeat the pirates. The biggest pirate fleet I encountered so far was 66 ships with thousands of points in attack and defense. To defeat them used a ship to spy on them outside there detection range of 15 so I could figure out the largest attack and defense of their individual ships. Mind you I'm playing DL not DA, so I'm not sure how this applies. But, anyway,I designed a ship with a base defense greater than or equal to their largest attacking ship in each catagory of defense, which I usually found to be frigates. I put 1 of my largest damage weapons and the rest were engines. In one case I had finished research with the Yor, so I had a tiny hull with 2 zero-point armor, 2 areon shields, and 2 ultimate invulnerability, and a death ray with 2 Mk 3 hyper-engines. This gave me 5 points damage per shot, with 25 movement points due to engines. One ship wiped out 9 of 11 pirates in a fleet - which took the fleet battle simulator 2 hours to complete. Other races beside the Yor have slightly different results, but the effect is the same. A small fleet of 3 ships can easily wipe huge investments in large ships when balanced like that. each combat turn your ship attacks 1 time for each movement point and the defender only attacks with his defending ship - at least thats my impression in DL. Of course when ever I got caught by my enemy I was destroyed easily, so it was a first strike senario. I calculated the amount of damage I did in each engagement and it was way beyond 5 points when I attacked. I suspect that it was 5 points per movement point during the attack. I was killing dreadnoughts with 115 hp's, 50 points armor, 30 points areon, 80 points ultimate invulnerability with just one doom ray on a tiny hull.

Just to clarify the Yor was a tiny hull against 11 pirates with 11-20 points of offensive missle attack, the 66 ship pirate fleet, I was the Terran with a blackhole missle that did 25 points of damage per shot, on a huge hull with lots of hyper-engine. Hope that helps.

Hey dsq2 I can help you to handle with the pirates.Actually it is very easy.You have to research only beam weapons and rockets for awhile.Look the pirates won't get near you if you have Phasors VII or Disruptors II and of course some Photon Torpedoes II.This will keep them away from you race.  

Sorry, but this is a completely different situation than what you're used to. The Pirate mega event in DA is alot more drastic than the regular one that you're refering to. Any approach you might have for the regular pirate event is not necessarily going to be meaningful with the mega event.

Another new player here. Using the beta version 1.6.

My last two games have ended with large pirate fleets destroying all my starbases, trade freighters and corpse-camping my planets. Every ship I would try to build, these fleets would destroy. I am going to assume I just had bad luck for this to happen in back to back games. My military is usually weak, since I prefer the diplomacy, influence and trade parts of the game.

Would really like the option to be able to negotiate with the pirates and pay them off to move on, or have friendly races come to my aid. Or influence them into attacking someone else! Seems like this would give a boost to the non-military aspects of the game, and put some nuances into the diplomacy/influence tree.

Hmm, I'm pretty new too but this event actually seemed to benefit me in the longrun.

My military was lagging behind the other races that game when the pirates spawned and wiped out pretty much everything that wasn't attackable by transports. Everything but asteroid mines. Since I was behind slightly, having all ships wiped out was slightly better for me than the other races.

What I did was observe the types of ships the pirates used and researched the counter armor and large ship hulls. That, along with the 2x ship hitpoint building, allowed me to finally survive and get back into space. Eventually I had a fleet of a few capital ships like that which cleared out all my space. But the large ship hull seemed crucial - you can only produce one ship at a time, so it seemed wiser to save up to produce one very powerful ship rather than a bunch of little ships that died too fast to do anything.

The AI did far worse (similar to some of the people in here actually, with it trying to trickle units out.) So overall the pirates ended up helping me win that game, even though they kicked the crap out of tons of starbases I'd set up.

That's just my personal experience with it though. I'm sure the event's difficulty changes depending on universe size and everyones' tech level at the time the event starts.

What to build: A huge engines with a transport module

Cheap victory, AI cannot handle this event at all.