It's been 30 turns since I've taken care of them, I lost my system while my fleets were busy somewhere else and I didn't see the pirate invading my new system right after I colonized it, so it wasn't well colonized at all.

Also I wouldn't call a 12CC fleet I build some 50 turns ago a "strong fleet" (And yes, it's a custom faction where I just removed the -1 Movement point and added 2CC).

Pirates attacking my ships were during a non-agression pact (you can buy those on lower difficulty pirate settings), so I doubt it was the relationship degrading over time, and the option to cancel the peace treaty wasn't immediate in my game.

Finally, I respectfully disagree that pirates shouldn't be a mid, mid-late game threat. It should only be on the condition that players feed them a lot of Dust, but right now they're too easily dealt with and pirate diplomacy isn't useful as a consequence of that (on top of the pirate marks being a waste of time and Dust).

EDIT : They came back to blockade, here's my current relationship with them :

And here's what happened when I tried to send a population out of the system to a new colony :

This seems more bug worthy than anything, but maybe it's intended?

Well, the new patch changed the cost to buy back the pirate marks but I didn't see much of a difference :

>Turn 40~ish
>Buy a mark and place it on my Craver neighbour

>He buys back after 2 turns

>Buy another 2, same thing happens

>In the end pirates came back to bite my ass with their new big ships they could afford thanks to me dumping thousands of dust on them and because I'm not interested in having to buy a mark every turn just to send them away even if I could do so.

So, again, great feature, needs a lot of polish. I still think we should be able to decide the price of the mark somehow.

Planetary defenses in SoaSE , especially with a starbase, were enough to deal with pirates even in the mid-late game from my experience.  Nothing quite like the Advent starbase bringing down an asteroid field onto their heads...

Anyways, what I don't get about pirates yet is how to improve your relations with them and to get non-aggression treaties.  My relations with them are always abysmal and I can't find a way to improve it.  

Hey jhell, no, those were pirates and I'm sure of it, as I attacked them in the end (I don't even think my second game had any vaulter). I've already overwritten my saves, so sadly, can't help you there, but if the problem arises once more I'll post my save files. Nevermind, here you go, the second game with custom RB : cutebots.sav

@lo_fabre: For all the things it did wrong, I still liked SoaSE's pirate system. Yes, pirates were more powerful than your regular armies but it also gave you tons of experience for your flagships in exchange, and they never stayed longer than they had to. Once they had destroyed enough of your ships/installations to complete your mark, they would go away on their own.

Also, I must point out that letting us pay what we want for the pirate mark is also my favorite solution, I only proposed the other 2 because they might be easier to implement.

Now, let me begin by saying how much I love the new gameplay elements of the DLC, pirate diplomacy is something I really enjoyed in other games like Sins of a Solar Empire and it was a feature I really wanted to see in ES2. 

With that said, after a full play through interacting as much as possible with the Pirates, let me tell some of the glarring issues I've found :

• First of all, pirate marks are utterly useless. Not only does almost EVERY AI in the galaxy is BFF with the pirate leader (read : they keep buying non-agression pacts throughout the game) making marks unusable, but even if I use the marks on one of the few AI that didn't buy a non-agression pact, they get rid of them the next turn because the cost for doing so is ridiculously low.
• Secondly, even with all the galaxy literally throwing mountains of Dust at the Pirate leader, his ships designs remained awfully bad, and I went ahead and didn't buy back one of the marks the AI sent me to see how bad things would turn out, and the pirate faction only spammed me with 3CC Fleets, which died one by one on one of my single medium attackers. This isn't right. If everyone is feeding the pirates Dust, they should be the most powerful military faction in the Galaxy. This needs to be noted but I was playing on Normal pirate difficulty (with the AIs on Serious) as I felt a bit rusty, maybe this actually makes them dangerous on Hard/Endless, but Normal definitly feels too weak.
• Lastly, I couldn't find any use to wasting money in order to get a better relationship (Support action) with the Pirates as I could, for a much better price, buy a 10 turn immunity whenever I needed it, even after having some territorial quarrel because they decided to put their lair on the Auriga faction while I was playing the Aurigans.

I think a few easy fixes for that would be:

• Don't allow players to buy back marks for the same price, or allow us to use as many Dust as we'd like to set the price when buying the marks, so that the enemy has to buy an equivalent amount back to remove the mark.
• For immunity (Non-agression pact), either :
  • Don't allow players to buy immunity all the time, or at least make it require being in friendlier terms than the one setting the mark (For example, I'm Friendly with pirates, Cordial and lower can't target me).
  • Don't let it affect Marks. Make it a free-pass for going into pirate systems in early game for exploration, but once someone puts money on your head, business is business, nothing personel, etc and pirates attack you
  • Give it a huge cooldown.
• Make the pirate AI smarter, currently it throws lots of small fleets at you when it could group them. I had a case of 20+ ships attacking in groups of 3 against my medium attacker, spamming me with attack messages when they could have taken me down had they grouped up.
• Make the pirate AI meaner if everyone throws money at them, that's actually one of the points I liked the most about Sins of a Solar Empire's pirates, trying to get rid of the mark in early game could lead to Empires throwing lods of money on the pirates which in turn made them grow WAY faster than empires, which created nice situations. Basically, make it a tradeoff : I buy favors but I also make them stronger when they could their new and shiny ships against me next.
• Lastly, could pirates maybe get Large ships at some point in the future and maybe pirate specific modules? They really don't scale well in the mid, mid-late game, this was always a problem with marketplace ships too, so this would be a nice addition imho.

I'm gonna end it repeating myself, it's a great feature and I can't wait to use is it in MP, but please, you need to tweak heavily.

Well, I had another game with Pirates on Endless difficulty this time. I don't want to brag or anything as I don't consider myself that good, but they were still awfully easy to defeat as soon as I had my medium hulls and 12 CC, and they never upgraded their ships beyond that point, even with me literally throwing dust at them.


On top of that, it seems they're bugged : while I was fighting with my Riftborn neighbour to decide who is the most mathematically perfect being, we both lost 1 system each to the pirates. Now, with the new DLC, when pirates get a System it transforms into a sort of "Hunting" grounds except this time it's pirate grounds :

Well, after building and sending a new colonization ship, I thought I could easily recapture both systems. Turns out I couldn't because "an empire" won't let me :

So I thought, hey, let's befriend the pirates then. Well, after maximizing my relations with them, it actually did nothing. Is it me being stupid and not understanding a mechanic? On top of that, they keep being dicks and blockading/guarding my systems so I have to degrade my relationship with them somehow to clear my systems, because otherwise I can't even attack them turns out  the option for cancelling a non-agression pact appears after a few turns, so I can remove them, after wasting all my dust trying to befriend them :

I had that happen when playing on normal pirate difficulty as well, after buying a non-agression pact they would still be douches and kill my civil ships transporting populations around. Is this intended?

Sublustris wrote:

Just a patch before people complained pirates are too hard, and now you want to buff them again? Pirates should be nuisance on normal difficulty, not a major force to reckon with.

And I believe they got nerfed too hard, or that the normal setting should be renamed easy. Also since the pirates got changed heavily with the DLC features, I believe a good way to change them would be to increase the effect of giving them Dust and/or to make the AI a tad bit smarter.

Groo wrote:

JaquierKhader wrote:

I bought a few pirate marks in my previous game and on the next turn from buying those marks they returned with an empty report saying: "The contract was bought out".

Sounds, as if the targeted faction did choose to pay dust for to get rid of the pirate mark ?!

But the problem isn't the fact that you or the AIs can do it, it's that it's too easy to do so and that you can do it the very next turn the mark is placed on you making it a waste of Dust and time.