just stumble over the the Assets_17 Affinity entry

You can enable the pirates affinity but you will see some strange things, for example all ship types are unlocked on start and they may or may not have research icons. The good news is, yes it's possible to customize affinities or add new ones. The bad news is, you have to touch a lot of files in order to do it properly. If you just want another faction to look like the pirates faction, you can change that faction's "AffinityMapping" descriptor to "AffinityMappingPirates" (this also affects the hologram in the diplomacy screen BTW, among other things. Not sure if the pirates have all of those assets set up properly).



But if you want to set up a real playable pirate faction, you'll have to copy the AffinityPirates descriptor in EmpiresTraitsDescriptors.xml and set up the starting stats you want to have there. Then you have to:

1. Copy TechPlayerStartPirates in Technologies.xml to a new technology with the cheat benefits removed.

2. Modify the prerequisites for all of the ship-granting technologies so that your new affinity can research them, they should look something like "$(AffinityTerran) or $(AffinityPirates2)" when you're done. This is also where to set up any faction-specific technologies you want this affinity to have access to.

3. Add new versions of TraitStartingShipScoutPirates and TraitStartingShipColonizationPirates in Traits.xml which create pirate-specific starting ships (prefab ships are linked to an affinity for some reason). Those starting ships are defined in ShipDesigns.xml and CivilianShipDesigns.xml and new versions of these have to be added as well.

4. Add affinity-specific modifiers to each tax rate in EmpiresDescriptors.xml to make the tax rate work. If you want tax-based affinity bonuses like the terrans and sophons, this is where to set those up as well.



Once all that's done, strip unnecessary characters from the xml file and hope it's smaller than the original file. You can pad the end of the file with spaces if necessary. I'll post some sample files if anyone is interested in how to do this.