Pirates are a great way of training capital ships. I always send three into the system the Pirates are raiding. The Pirates are not strong enough to destroy the Capital ships and you easily get 1000+ experience points by destroying them.

I like, they are a part of the game so use them for your advantage.

Bid or kill. Early game they can be good to hammer on of your enemys door, bad thing is that they cap will get some good exp. but it will slow there expansion/improvment.

Or kill them to get some good exp.

dont know how it would be in practice but seems an interesting idea!

I like the pirates, I just wish there fleet was larger though (especially late game)...
I played a game the other day and placed a 150K bounty on a computer opponent and was of course greatful when the computer reciprocated the bounty in return because I always see it as a way to level up my caps. The problem is that the pirate fleet never seems to get any bigger than the size of a 30K bounty fleet. On my custom maps I always make sure to put at least 1 pirate base for every player This way you can always fly in a couple of caps, kill a few pirates and fly out with more experience. Then hit up a repair center and fly them back in for more action. Caps get elevated much quicker this way.

I don't like Pirates...


I LOVE them!!!

I hate them. Mostly b/c I'm a n00b at this game. It's usually right at that time when I start to get a somewhat decent fleet (that still sucks, btw) then pirates come and take 3/4 of it away from me. Never fails that 2 raids later the enemy decides they can invade my empire.

So to me they're an uber annoyance.

I second this idea.

Big or small maps, pirates have their place and fit well with my play style. I like 'em.

I like the idea, and I like them in the early game in Sins. In late game though I find them useless, its not worth bribing them because they can do so little damage against an upgraded fleet.

Maybe if they were smarter and did hit and run tactics against enemy installations, rather then sticking around to get owned.

It would also be interested if in late game you got some seriously huge pirate fleets get sent out. That would be pretty damned awesome to watch. Like a pirate capital ship or something like that.

Was discussing it earlier and there is another huge issue I find with pirates, how they attack. A pirate raid has to go through other worlds to get to its target. While that's fine when the target is one jump away, it's not fine when the target is past several worlds with fleets or a modest defense as the pirate fleet gets picked apart.Ideally to me the pirate raids should work like the TEC rebel attacks-- anywhere, anytime and without warning. The pirate worlds should not be a launch point so much as an accumulation point after a raid.The accumulated fleet could also be modified to be a second raid unbound by bids once it hits a critical mass, giving incentive to completely destroy pirate raids.

For behavior, pirates should show up, destroy tactical, then logistic structures and try to get the heck out of dodge when a decent sized fleet is incoming/arrived.I also really like the suggestion of any raiding taking into account the power of planetary defenses/fleets.

Also, I'm not so keen on destroying pirate outposts actually destroying pirates. If pirates are enabled, all players involved agreed to it. Pirate worlds should still be valuable to take i.e. a percentage of raid gained bounty added to the owner's coffers but the faction itself should endure until game end no matter what.

Pirate bases can badly damage a trio of, say, level 6 capital ships, but yous simply pull them back when they get damaged, then come back once they repair. Or you just send in more capital ships or send in an actual fleet. The bases are surprisingly easy to defeat once you have gotten a few capital ships, and make for good experience.

I personally like the pirates, but think they should be changed in a few ways. First, there should be a capital ship of some kind in the severe attacks; either a Pirate-type Kol, or some ship unique to pirate raids, and they would be level 4 at least. Pirate bases should also have at least one capital ship.
Also, the bounty on yourself should impact your relations with pirates. If you have minimal to no bounty, pirates shouldn't bother attacking, as long as they are simply large-scale bounty hunters. Trade ships and military should also affect relations.

One thing I think would be really cool would be being able to hire mercenaries to either defend a player, attack a player, or raid a player's trade and refinery ships. Those mercenaries would have the same symbol as the player who hired them, but half of their symbol would be white to help distinguish them. Their ships would look like pirates, but would have blue, red, or yellow lighting rather than green lighting to distinguish mercenaries.

They're a good idea, but not implemented as well as they could be. As many already said, they feel more like mercenaries than pirates. They should be attacking more randomly, with the option to pay them 'protection money' or something to leave you alone for a while.

If they're going to stay more as mercenaries, then you should have more control over them if you win the bidding. Simply being able to tell them where you want them to hit would make them a lot more useful. The strength of the pirate fleet should also scale up a bit faster. A few defences can usually hold them off all day long. They need to start bringing their own capital ships with them after 3 or 4 raids.