Is it just me or is Pirate Mark spamming a bit excessive on harder difficulties? I seem to spend a majority of the early game defending my star systems during constant pirate marks. I check the cost of pirate marks and it is over 500 Dust, but the AI seems to have no problem affording this while also spamming endless fleets. Perhaps a higher early game cost of pirate marks would be in order, or a decreased AI obsession with them?

Hi,

Pirate Mark placing is very dependent on context so it's hard to give you a clear answer. The AI is more likely to place a Mark on you if it doesn't like you, if you're its neighbour or if you're stronger than it. What difficulty are you playing in?

Best,

This is the sort of thing that you want to intuitively tie to inflation.

Don't! There is a better 'clock'!

In Endless Legend, the costs of these would increase (as would pirate strength) by the 'age' - the highest tech level an empire had reached. If you're going to scale pirate mark cost, scale them in the same way (perhaps by one quadrant's progress).

jhell wrote:

Hi,

Pirate Mark placing is very dependent on context so it's hard to give you a clear answer. The AI is more likely to place a Mark on you if it doesn't like you, if you're its neighbour or if you're stronger than it. What difficulty are you playing in?

Best,

I just beat my first game on Serious and had little issue with the Pirate Marks. Kicking it up to Impossible and all I encounter is early game Pirate Mark spamming. I have started games with UE, Cravers and Sophons (my 3 favorite races) and the amount of Pirate Mark spam seemed consistent between all attempts. I am very limited in exploration due to constant need to defend my systems from Pirate harass.

This is tied to the fact that endless AI outproduces your ridiculously, it is a way of what some might call "lazy" programming where instead of spending years of development on super hardcore genius AI, you basically get *average* AI with OP resource pool to spam diplo actions and pirate marks at you. Which is a perfectly reasonable solution and you should just go to MP if you seek a challenge.

Just get fleets and turn pirates into dust and science. Them spamming marks on you is essentially feeding you science and xp. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

Also note that buyout on pirate marks decreases overtime, so by the time it gets serious, you can probably buy it out at half price.

its probably the basic problem with all 4X games the AI cheats, it gets massive percentage modefiers to everything it does which works as a cascading effect.

lets say that the difficulty jump that you did aplied an additional 10% boost, now the AI get 10% more of everything, normallly it might use the dust it gets this way to boost production, but production is now 10% quicker and thus the AI doesn't need to use dust to boost, so it has a massive surplus of dust but what to do with it? well they can buy these pirate marks...etc..etc...

in principle the boosts that they get just results in them having to spend even less time/resources on things that they normally would use to boost their own empire and now they have more stuff to throw at outside threats.