Working with pirate non-agression pacts are great - especially when able to use discovered pirate bases as Vaulter jump points.


The Problem

That said, maintaining them is really tedious and an injection of stress every ten turns as:

  1. A ton of your systems are given pirate marks.
    1. At minimum you are artificially and unintentionally setting back your AI opponents N amount of dust per targeted system.
  2. Whichever pirate fleet happens to be orbiting with you will attack.
    1. This can lead to loss of resources, throwing off lots of plans.
  3. Flight paths set up to include a jump from a pirate base turn into warping from it in stead.
    1. If discovered late, can prompt a complete save game roll-back as you discover your main fleet out on a 30 turn voyage.

So it's a, stressful, mad dash through turn-start dialogs to secure a pact renewal.


Solutions

Pirate non-agression pacts running out is much more serious than minor faction praise doing so. There should be system-side guarding against it. The experience should be more like government laws - only failing when associated resource spend breaks the budget.


Sticking with an "every ten turns, drop a lump sum" makes sense - particularly to support brief pacts. However it would be *very* nice to have a "recurring" toggle somewhere. That would lead to:

  1. Still supporting the current non-agression pact flow.
  2. Recurring pacts will at the end of their ten-turn run attempt to self-renew at whatever the current cost is and terminate if that cost exceeds available resources.
  3. At any point a recurring pact can be switched to non-recurring, making it not renew when it runs out next (the number of turns to that event still displayed in the "forced, N turns" standing label).


Aside from this, jumps should just *never* be automatically translated into warps. I would rather have my fleet stuck somewhere, prompting me to do something about it, rather than discover it automatically on its merry way on a generational voyage.