A fleet of pirates has parked at my homebase. I cannot even scratch them. They've got a proton that just eats all my ships every time I get a full fleet and try to get out. I've got no options and can't do a thing. Game loss. That really stinks, completely out of my control.

weird. i have had my fair share of pirate problems for thing like expansion but never a complete lock down.

lolplayer101 wrote:

weird. i have had my fair share of pirate problems for thing like expansion but never a complete lock down.

If he has a lot of minor nearby then that might be the case. Once i had 5 minor beside my capital and it is completely chaos.

Yeah, yesterday I was playing Vodyani on the new Spiral-8 map with Many minor factions and Large map size, and 7 minor factions were all crammed into one galactic arm with nobody else, right next to me. It made them mostly irrelevant to the rest of the galaxy because the other factions took so long to visit that one oddball location, while I had a gold rush to get ships across the gap to kill pirates, drain worlds, and court politicians for fun and profit.

In a different game I ended up taking too long to explore the galaxy because the Vodyani initial quest placed both pirate fleets at the only exit from my constellation. On an Ovoid map, the whole galaxy was a constellation so the pirates were at opposite ends of the map, behind other peoples borders.

They've replaced the number of pirates with the severity of pirates.  Before where you might have ten little pissant fleets each of one destroyer, now you have a single fleet of two to three destroyers and a cruiser, which at game start is a serious threat.

It also seems that unless you assimilate or conquer a minor faction it will always spawn aliens.  I've had a few minor races that I didn't want assimilated but I still find useful (the HIssho were great for generating mercenaries but too warlike for my Lumeris), but I ended up spending far too much resources just keeping the pirate problem down (for example, I'd buy a mercenary fleet, only to see it destroyed next turn by a new pirate spawn). It gets to the point where if you're not a major military power, they're going to cause serious problems, so you're better off just assimilating them.  Maybe that's the intent, but that feels like a shame. It seems to me that Amplitude did a good job giving us a third option (sort of an unassimilated alliance), but this pirate problem shoots it in the foot.

FreedomFighterEx wrote:

lolplayer101 wrote:

weird. i have had my fair share of pirate problems for thing like expansion but never a complete lock down.

If he has a lot of minor nearby then that might be the case. Once i had 5 minor beside my capital and it is completely chaos.

true, hadn't really though about it since it never happened to me. i should test this with max miner factions next.