When pirate is enabled, I find it quite distracting that every time a raid is imminent, one has to keep monitoring the bounty mini-window for a couple of minutes until the raid is launched, to make sure he/she is outbidding the opponents.

A suggestion is to make it such that when a player places a bounty, it is not added to the pool immediately and is not shown to other players.  Instead, every 10 minutes the (secretly) placed bounties from all players are added to the pool at the same time, and the raid is launched immediately.  This should free the player from the having to camp the bounty mini-window.  For the AIs, if they can be implemented to remember how much bounty was added in the last round, they can guess how much bounty they need to place in the next round to make a difference.