Pirate hives - edens

Shagmeister, what about a cyclic event where all player paid Luxuries (if you clic on the pay button, it will remove 10 from the luxury you have the most), and the one that is not the last but the 2nd last get the most attention from Pirates ?

4 players :

- Player A pays 100

- Player B pays 60

- Player C pays 50

- Player D pays 0

--> pirates would attack player C the most, then player D, then sometimes player B then a few times player A

Another case :

- Player A pays 30

- Player B pays 0

- Player C pays 0

- Player D pays 0

--> pirates would attack equally players B, C and D and rarely player A.

:)

(if only 2 players, then it's the last A pays 10, B pays 0, then pirates goes for player B).

Pirates could build fleet with these luxuries : if A pays 400 and B 250, then pirate would have 650 worth of pirate ship to throw mainly at player B :)

Say this is a 20 turns cyclic event like elections ?

Those cloud belt / asteriod / ... systems are AFAIK all the ones that gives +X FIDS when they goes under a player's influence. Putting them there is the idea (since you have strictly no interest in visiting them).

If the system is under nobody's control, those pirate hive/eden/mothership/whatever can pop there, so preemptive destroying those may have little to no value (unless, say, hives only pop after the "pirate elections" described in post 2 and 4).

Not giving the bonus when the system pass under a player's control may be a little harsh to me but it can perfectly work to "nerf" passive influence growth (ie : having to work toward those bonuses instead of passivly gain them through stockpiling semi-automatic influence) : with great power comes great responsability :p

Maybe the bonus could go to :

- those who have the biggest military force sitting there. In this case, the pirates, until someone kill them.

- if there is nobody there, the bonus goes to the empire that have influence over it.

Visiting those systems, if they are clean of pirates, could bother an enemy, because you could "steal" someone's bonus. :D

("to give to which system of yours" is a problem to solve though : your capital, maybe ?)

Additional ideas:

Instead of poping a random number of ships (I don't really know what are the laws behind the pirate pop), pirates could buy ships on the market via a few ways :

a- they sort-of could "transform" the bonus in the asteroid/cloud into dust to buy ships on the market (say for example, 50  / turn transforms into 50  / turn).

b- after the "pirate elections" (see post #2 & #4) they could sell the luxuries all players gave on the regular market.

c- what they pirate serves to buy new ships too (pirates routes, or when they blockade a system).

With a part of this dust, they could buy ships on the market.

When they buy a ship, they stockpile the modules and scrap the remaining hull for more dust.

Then, they can complete their basic fits with the new modules.

The Pirate hulls are not free for them but very cheap. They comes with a very basic fit that they can complete with the modules they got on the market :

Adding a laser here or a plate there because they bough a laser and a plate (coming with a useless hull, but they can scrap it for dust and then buy new ships again).

=> benefits #1: the market moves.

=> benefits #2: pirates would always use mid level tech (the one that is sold).

=> benefits #3: the game doesn't invent or import too much free stuff for its pirate AI : there would be always a reason if the pirates are too strong (it would be because nobody is buying from nobody aka lategame crisis).

Now for the Hero market... You can't freely sell heroes on the market (yet ?), but if you could, I could see them being those hives :)

Aka after "pirate elections" (post #2/#4), some of those heroes would say "o-sht, let's go pirate".

Shagmeister's ideas (post 2) deserve better attentions, my post 4 is only a tiny % of what he spoke about.
He speaks about pirates as a faction when what I tell is just pirate as bots.

All those ideas could transform into a superb faction #9, I'm confident on that.