Drunken pirates invade!

Or is there another explanation?

I picked up this game on Steam after not playing it for several years. On challenging difficulty with a small map, I had a peaceful universe and I was building up my navy for a gigantic surprise attack. (Heh heh. Evil chuckle.) Then I got the mega-event where giant fleets of technologically-advanced pirates mysteriously arrive around every single world. (Grrr...)

The pirates quickly destroyed every starbase in the game and then every fleet. I salvaged one fighter by running away to the corner of the map. I tried to be philosophical about it and not disappointed, as some of the other forum posts suggested (https://forums.galciv2.com/321552) and (https://forums.galciv2.com/428835).

I thought: While the pirates were rampaging around space they would suppress the AIs, allowing me to tech up a master fleet that could destroy the pirates *and* my enemies! That was the plan. Sure enough, the "military" progress chart tanked to basically zero for everyone as the pirates had their way with the universe.

Funny thing though... shortly I noticed the "military" progress chart started to creep back up again for some of my AI enemies while I was still nowhere near pirate-beating strength. Since I was slightly ahead of the AIs in every capacity at this point, how were they doing it?

I researched sensors to see what was going on, and as soon as I could see into enemy space I found the strangest things. This led to three observations that make no sense to me. Maybe other people have some insight as to what is going on?

Strange thing #1: The pirates were ruthlessly suppressing all space travel... but only for *me* and for one other race. They were mostly leaving the other races alone, but this was inconsistent. That's why the "military" bar was going up for some enemy AIs. Several pirate fleets were one or two squares away from planets that were filled with orbiting ships of all kinds. These pirate fleets seemed stuck. (Mind you, as soon *I* built a ship at this stage the nearby pirate fleets would attack and destroy it.) Were those fleets damaged somehow? Or is this a bug?

Strange thing #2: After many turns I saw one of the AIs start beating back the pirates. But they did not tech up the way I was doing it. They were hopelessly outmatched, sending a fleet of three small ships that total 6 offense and 0 defense vs a pirate fleet that had 50 offense and yet the enemy AI fleets were winning against the pirates. Is there some game mechanic that explains these results? In other words, why were they clearing out the pirates with totally puny ships but my puny ships were defeated at this stage? Is there a "super-effective against pirates" trait or something?

Strange thing #3: After I teched up my engines, I noticed that the pirates have a marked tendency to lock-on to uncatchable targets (my fast ships) while ignoring unarmed constructors and freighters right next to them. I think this could be explainable by the way the AI chases things though. So maybe a feature and not a bug. It sure does look strange though. They also do things like have an enemy ship within sight and an attack is within their move range (4), but then they move toward it and then veer away at the last square so they cannot attack it.

It is kind of like the pirate fleets are an impaired cat and I am a laser pointer's dot.

So is this part of the design or are these bugs or what? I guess there could be a random element in the pathing to simulate... I don't know... drunken pirates?

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DivineWrath

Join Date 05/2006

+136

Well, I do not pretend to know what went wrong or differently in your game. I'll make some comments and hope those help.

Typically, a pirate mega-event is where the pirates swarm the whole galaxy that they overwhelm and destroy everything with overwhelming firepower. Typically, they get all the technologies of all the civs and get ships designed using those techs. I'm not sure if they get civ abilities as well. They tend to get more ships in sectors with ships that have more firepower and stuff, so usually such sectors end up being ravaged the hardest. They are hard to clear out because they usually kill all fleets real quickly, and once they succeed, then its easier for them to kill ships as they are built. Killing these pirates works best when you have fleets, not lone ships.

Yes, hunkering down to do social production and research is a good idea. Unless you have the ability to kill enemy pirate ships, you shouldn't be fighting them. Each victory for them increases the experience of the pirate ships in question. This leads to more hit points. If they had good defenses relative to enemy firepower, they could gain more HP faster (by leveling up and passive repair) than their enemies can deplete them. So research weapons until you can be confident that you can deal enough damage to be worth building ships. Sadly, the AIs are really bad at this...

By combat effective ships, I mean you should design ships with all guns. Ships can roughly match 50% of their firepower in on-type defense might work as well. The intent is that if the pirates can kill your ships in one turn, you should not be using defenses and instead put nothing but guns on your ships. The intent is to kill the enemy until you have a sector free of pirates. Once cleared out, you can then develop proper fleets.

Starbases might be able to survive well during these events. Though I haven't tested it yet (I can't control when the pirates do show up), I believe it is possible to have starbases strong enough to survive a pirate mega event. You see, the starbase fortification techs do not give ship weapons, only starbase modules. If pirates get ships built using all techs that other civs had, then maybe an advanced starbase could exist because it does not give ship weapons or defenses. The modules given could be way stronger than what anyone else could build. So in theory a starbase could be developed well beyond everyone else, even the pirates.

I have on rare occasions I have managed to clear out a sector using ships that have been around since before the pirate mega event. That required that I send all ships I had to a single sector and then clear the place out. This would work best if you some how managed to clear out a sector that had good ship product capabilities for you. Having a cleared out sector and good ship production abilities can build fleets quickly to clear out other sectors you own.

Pirates have been known to follow ships outside their sectors. Once the ship they are pursuing is destroyed, they will consider whatever sector they are now in their new home. This could be a way to clear a sector of pirate, by having them follow ships to another sector.

Pirates have been known to ignore fleets that are really strong. If you or the AI somehow has access to ships stronger than pirate fleets, those ships might be left alone.

Statistically, ships with low firepower can kill ships with really good firepower. The odds are really low, but not 0. The combat system relies on random numbers, so a ship with an attack of 100 could end up rolling a 0 for all attacks. It isn't likely to happen enough times for a weak ship to kill a strong ship, but it can happen.

Ships in orbit are stronger than in normal space. Combine that with a planet improvement that allows all ships in orbit to participate in orbital defense, and you can get fleets much stronger than normal. Such fleets might be able to kill fleets of pirates.

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Thanks, DivineWrath. It worked out well in the end for me, I was just curious about these strange things I saw. It sounds like most of it can be explained by the dynamics you describe. And your answer was so detailed. Thanks again, I appreciate it.

It was a pretty fun game. I did not mention this, but the pirates did the job against some enemy AIs just as expected. In fact, it was entertaining to build super-fast ships and then creep around behind the pirates to gather all of the new anomalies in the enemy's territory. My goal was to leave the pirates alone over there so that the enemy AIs could continually suicide into them. At least two of the enemy AIs seemed to really enjoy suiciding into pirates.

So I feel like the mega-event is sort of like getting the entire universe into a giant war, which distracts them while you win the game by tech-ing up.

I also enjoyed building an incredibly fast (though inefficient and likely wasteful) freighter which was able to reopen my trade routes even through sectors still filled with pirates. The pirates never caught one of these freighters that I noticed.

As a side note, my strategy was to build extremely fast ships. That eliminated the need for clearing a sector where I could form fleets. I found that if I build, launch and then immediately fly out of the pirate's field of view they will not follow me. So I did not need to fight my way out of anywhere. I just formed fleets along the map edge. (Clearly this requires sensors so that you can tell where they are from a long way away.)

I still suspect that some of the pirates might have been "stuck" (bugged) though. The game has had a lot of bugginess for me. e.g., crashes to desktop and there is this recurring problem where sometimes an AI-controlled ship will freeze during a move, the scrollability of the interface will stop working, and the "TURN" button will stop working. Some of the tech tree looked messed up with blank boxes in it.

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if pirate ships got no defense(like armor, shield, point defense), then a swarm of small ship can damage them, assuming their health points are relatively low, it is entirely possible that the numerous small ship can defeat a lone powerful ship.

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