Pirates are blood thirsty outlaws, right? Looking out for themselves, right? Looking to make profits as fast as possible, right? Looking to scavenge and steal and get rich, right?



Well, if you answered yes to all of the above, you should see where I'm going with this. What I'm proposing is diplomacy with pirates. You give them large sums of Dust, they focus their raids on a single species, or a few species, of your choice. Maybe you could even buy systems from them!



And why would they keep their word? Well, it's simple. They're a bunch of lousy pirates. If they betrayed an empire as powerful as yours, they could end up dead. Not to mention that your empire has a steady source of income, and to get repeat customers you need to keep them satisfied, right?



Simply, I'm proposing diplomacy to pirates. You can negotiate with pirates, buy their systems, buy their ships in a panic when you're being attacked, and 'hire' their systems, for, say, a thousand dust a turn, depending on the severity of the attack you're buying. And then they continuously attack the empire(s) you tell them to, as long as you have enough dust to pay their fees. Of course, a rogue pirate ship may very rarely attack you, but generally paying them will keep the heat off you and throw it onto your enemies.

The idea about pirat-mercs is quite god, but i think buying systems or ships from them would be to easy, even if you have to pay many . Instead it would be good to hire them to distroy the outposts(not colonies!) of other factions.

The pirates could probably do cheap outpost raids. But they're greedy pirates, so they don't go 'full war', they just casually raid enemy systems. It'll cost 1000+ dust for them to raid colonies as well. Best thing is, nobody will have any idea as to who sent the ships against them.



Also the systems and ships would be VERY expensive, and sometimes the ships would be the wrong model (ie an inferior model) or with lowered hitpoints, etc.

Yep these sorts of ideas are definitely being banded around. I've gone for making them a Playable Faction in their own right as a Proposal. Then maybe Mercenary Like features are playable extras on the Diplomacy Screen too as part of their Tech Tree. Kill Missions, Invasion Missions, all those kind of opportunities are being discussed on the forums where you could have alot of fun playing against a Pirate Faction or playing them. Yarrrr!

Would be very difficult to put them in as a playable race, although I approve. You'd have to play them as scavengers, maybe?

At any rate, I definitely think you should be able to use the Pirates as an extension of yourself - and if the planet being attacked is too weak to fight back? 10k dust should get them to spill the secrets - who attacked them, and stop their attack.