Finished tech tree still getting pounded by pirates

Hi,

New here. I searched the forums but found my self outside of GalCivII in the results. Don't understand why my search from within the game talk would do that.

Anyway - I have maxed the tech tree and can build the biggest, baddest ships with the highes logistics settings (58 i assume).  But when I come up against pirates (on the easy setting) they have like over 100 ships in their fleet and I can only have like 6 or 8 (due to huge size of ships) but against these odds I wipe everytime. I have tried to build new smaller ships that would allow me to have more than 6 or 8 in a fleet but they wipe without doing any damage. I don't expect to just wipe them out all at once but this goes on for hours and I can make any progressa against them. Oh yeah I am checking there ship settings and trying to build against their weakness but nothing seems to work. Plus how come they get to have so many ships in one fleet?

Thanks for letting the noob rant. Any insight would be appreciated.