Is it possible to farm the pirates for the cravers science trait?



Seems like it might be good strategy for cravers to enhance its tech (And heroes) early game on the pirates before tackle ling the potentially troublesome Hissho and other such empires.

Add in Saboteur and it should be great! Not sure if the Pirates spawn rate isn't too low to make it worthwhile though...

The easiest way to level up fleet-heroes when there is no war, is to just assign them to star-systems. If you engage a pirate and the hero is movable, then of course put it on the fleet before to gain the extra-XP.

Pirates upgrade after a while to different weapons.

I have seen pirates with beam weapons. But that was usually pretty late in the game.

But admittedly I've only used "normal" pirates not the really bad ones.

Normal pirate ships start a few tech levels behind you, and the larger pirate ships are even more behind.

It is possible to use the pirates for science/dust farming yes - but it requires a slight bit of semi-exploit to do effectively. Pirates will only originate in systems that there is no vision on, so to make best use of this method you need to deliberately ensure that at least one of your nearby systems you do NOT settle (try to pick the worst/harshest planets system a decent distance from any of your systems which will have significant influence) and then station your picket fleet in a system on a direct path from that "non-vision" system to your homeworld system. This should cause a reasonable pirate spawn rate (as long as neither yourself nor another race has vision on the "source" system) while allowing you to immediately interdict them when the move from that system towards your populated systems.