I like this idea. It will give the game a little bit more reality and more depth.

I think pirates should steal a large number of a ship's fleet and a couple of transports. It should happen due to the low morale of a planet and the planet's angry pop would fill the transports. They might even conquer the planet and make it a pirate haven.

The pirates, in my opinion, should be like mercenaries that you can hire. Say you want them to attack an enemy's trade routes. The ships would be unmarked, so the enemy couldn't attack the pirate planet directly. So the enemy would be forced to protect the transports or just leave the transports to die.

Pirate ships should not be dreadlord ships on steroids. Pirates should be what pirates use most: Speed. In hit and run attacks you don't want to sludge away at the speed of smell, you want to be fast. After speed should come weaponary, and then defense.


In the random event, I don't know why the pirates would be more powerful than all of the most races on the game. That would be like pirates showing up today and they would be more powerful than the United States, Russia, North Korea, China, Great Britain, and Japan combined. How does that work?! I mean would the pirates just solidify out of the dirt with laser guns and start vaporizing everyone? If that is the case, then they are not pirates, they are some kind of---something else--but certainly not pirates.

Yes, maybe in the corner of the galaxy somewhere where you would have to get through sectors of sectors of asteroids. If we had wormholes they would have secret wormholes that they could get around the galaxy and fulfill their evil deeds. Maybe they could have wormhole stations set up around the galaxy. Since they would only have one planet or starsystem, their home planet/star would be heavily fortified.

Maybe they could be paid conquer a planet and if they win they would give it to the race that paid them.

Pirates should be more like pirates...

They should be able to hide on uncolonized planets and pop out to wreck havok.

I've never had the pirates event, but in general the pirates i've seen are a joke. (they often don't even move)

I like the idea of pirates being able to conquer planets for players.

But it would have to be unprotected planets with low population since the pirates should not be that strong.

Why wouldn't they? In reality you could just grant them the spore technology if it were possible to do so.

Well then these "things" wouldn't be pirates, they would be a sort of super race. Like I said before, why would we call these incredibly powerful foes pirates? It's like calling the army of god's warriors "pirates"! Or better yet to be in context of the game lore god would be the dreadlords.

Coming soon! Galactic Civilizations III: Pirates

How about different levels of pirates?

1. Pirates - low tech =weak
2. Mercenaries - medium tech =not so weak
3. Raiders - high tech - spore ships =strong
4. Avatars - all techs - terror stars =very strong

I agree about the name, at least for the mega-event. That's something that feels much more like a sudden invasion by a previously unknown super-race... not something I'd ever call a pirate.

I'd like to see pirates in the game as a minor and continuing harassment, with a tech level that auto-scales along with the general tech advancement in the galaxy (or maybe one level below the average). One thing that bothers me a little about the GalCiv2 overall design, is that in most games it can take a long time before there's any opportunity to send a ship into battle. Fighting the occasional pirate as a "free target" with no diplomatic consequences in the early phase of the game, could be a fun way to test early ship designs. Maybe you'd get some diplomatic points if you remove a pirate from another race's area of influence.

But it has to be carefully balanced. In the recent Total War games you get spontaneous rebel/pirate spawns. It's fun in the early game, and it's a good way to train up your armies. They probably also serve as a brake against the player or the AI factions expanding too fast in the beginning. But then it starts being less fun when you control more of the map, and you're dealing with rebels and pirates popping up everywhere. It just becomes a micromanagement headache. So I usually mod down the spawn rate in those games (easy to do, it's just a text config files). If we get this type of pirate put back in the game, I'd hope we could adjust the spawn rate to taste. There should also be an option in the galaxy setup screen to turn them off, if you don't want to deal with it.

The idea of a hidden pirate base is cool, but it might only work well on the larger galaxy sizes. It's not easy to hide anything on a small or medium map.