I’m getting a pirate fleet appearing in the same system nearly every turn for the last 30 or more turns. i wondered if there was a base or something generating them so i went looking, and the pirates would appear instead on the adjacent systems i moved to with the same frequency. i vastly outgun them but it is just very annoying.

Also, when strategic resouces overflow, are the excess of 999 being sold each turn or are they just lost?

CZER wrote:

As far as i know, pirate ships are spawned from minor civilization planets that have not been assimilated (or conquered) yet.  Once the minor civlization is assimilated, it will cease to spawn pirate ships.  The longer the minor civ goes without being assimilated, the stronger the pirate ships get.  If you do not want to assimilate a minor civ that is in your constellation for whatever reason, but also don't want pirates causing trouble, you can simply park a fleet of ships over the minor civ and destroy them as they spawn.

As for the strategic resource overflow you mention, as far as I can tell anything over 999 is simply lost, not sold.  That also goes for luxury resources as well.  This can get annoying in the endgame where you are almost forced to sell every turn or risk losing the excess, but it is what it is.

Thanks for the reply.  That definitely explains it - the two places where I was getting pirate spam was on 2 minor civ systems - I had fleets parked there already.  They both had difficult assimilation goals (one requiring colonsing an adjacent system, but I'd already colonized all these except for one colonized by an ally (Unfallen), so I wasn't going to war over it).

Frogsquadron wrote:

No. In the current design, "pirates" only spawn from Minor civilizations, on their systems. 

I meant minor civs - are there any other types of minor civs than those that have not been assimilated or conquered? As far as I'm aware, assimilation or conquering removes minor civs from the game.