Pirate ships should never hit 3-4k health, no matter how long I play the game. They are damn pirates. If I spent tons of money to build fully upgraded starbase + tons defenses in selected system, this sytem  is supossed to be safe from pirate attack. Forcing me to send my entire fleet to save this system, and letting me loose half of this armada + SB + amost all defenses during pirate "raid" is not funny. I want to be able to focus on war against other empires, not on evading/countering/hiring pirates. Pirates are only one of game aspects. Not only game aspect. Not even one of the most important aspect... Agree, Entranchement pirates were joke. Buth they should never reach to Diplomacy level...

I like the new Badass Pirates.

I do think they are bugged on the upper end of scale.  Their strength should scale with the bounty or the level of researched fleet capacity... something like that.  They should not be tied to time.

The pirates should be able to take on a medium fleet, or an unguarded starbase... but not a full fleet or starbase with a defending fleet.

Bounty FTW!

Pirates =/= AI

Uh, did you play the game before Diplomacy?  800 HP pirates is why they sucked.  A starbase with maxed weapons can do ~450 DPS to, what 6-7 ships at once?  Hell, you could hold off late game raids with 3 turrets and a repair bay, no tac upgrade required.  That's why people turned them off, they were a joke.  4000 HP in the endgame is fine.  The problem is armour and weapons on them need to stop at a sane level, or be tied to something besides game time.  You shouldn't need to outnumber them 3 to 1 with a starbase and repair bays to stop a raid unless people have been giving them tens of thousands of credits in bounty and missions.

Interesting news.

I do not have Diplomacy, but I have Entrenchment and I ended up turning Pirates to OFF because of having to spend too much time in a bidding war to keep the pirates off of me.

Has this changed in Diplomacy?  Does one still have to "babysit" the pirate bidding to ensure one is safe?  Or did Ironclad change the bidding process for the better.

>That said, I've never liked the EBay bidding system.  Far as I'm concerned, if two people bid super high, pirates should attack both targets, whether or not one of them bidded a little extra pocket change at the last second.

No kidding.  IMO, it would have worked better it the bounty remained hidden until they launched.  You have no idea if your opponents are bidding or not.  You could drop 2000 in bounty only to find your opponents spent nothing.  I understand the bounty system was meant for FFA players in general, not just the pirates; but it's rather annoying that the system encourages you to drop everything and watch the bidding for a good 30 seconds or so.

I think there should be an auto-bid option with a maximum bid limit you can set, and it automatically tops your opponents and keeps doing it until it reaches a certain minimum money limit that you can also set. It should probably have 5 second breaks between bids so there wont be an ultra-fast bidding war between AIs that escalates to 1 million in a few seconds.

What concerns me about the expansion is that it may not mesh well with the existing game.  Having pirates that pose a real threat to the player is fine, but if the pirates overwhelm the AI might that not destroy the point of the expansion? 

The pirate ships start without shield mitigation, so vastly increasing their health because they don't have mitigation will mean that they become more powerful in relation to the AI than they were at the beginning.  I would limit them to the increases the AI can have, that is max at something like +6 armour, +30% health.  The current weapon damage increase is crazy... +20% per upgrade with 20 upgrades, what possible logic could justify that?????  +5% with 10 upgrades is rather more than most AIs get.  20 levels of range upgrade and weapons cooldown is just silly????

Sensible change is always best.  The TEC envoy cruiser had a charity power of 10 credits a second until it was pointed out that this was as bad as this version of the pirates.  Envoys have become 2 credits a second, this is still more than a trade port, so it is still wrong, it just means that TEC can win any small map where they have an ally.  The changes have to relate to what already exists.  

It is a shame that the pirate steal ships ability didn't make it, but it may have been difficult to implement.  However the pirates could be improved without having to boost their ships and turrets directly.  Slow trade ships down to 1/3 speed so trade isn't a defence against them.  Add inherent defensive powers to their roid- if novaliths can't take out starbases, why should they destroy the armoured pirate roid?  Why not add the powers of a starbase to the roid in terms of phase transit damage, as well as an inbuilt phase inhibitor?  Have the gravwell as a plasma storm or magnetic cloud, or a combination of both?  If the well was a plasma storm it would look good and protect the turrets.  These solutions seem to me to be more satisfying than starbase-turrets..?

As there is an option to pay directly for attacks on planets, it might be an improvement to reserve direct attacks on planets to that option.  Then the regular pirate attacks could be a different type of attack aimed at soft targets like trade, refinery or envoy ships and not be restricted to a single grav well, they would just continue to the next attack.  The dynamic would change to protecting trade from pirates, rather than having trade ports on a 'front line' for extra defence.  With the regular attacks, anyone with a handy dead asteroid just had to recolonise it occasionally to suffer no other effect at all from pirates- and I was never sure what the effect of relating the bounty to pirate damage done was meant to be?  All this would take would be slower trade ships, plus an AI instruction to move to the next gravwell if there were no targets... this wouldn't be difficult?     

We should expect teething troubles with the expansion, though it is somewhat of a concern that the pirates and envoys have started so far out of line.   I hope the new victory conditions aren't as problematic?

Im a new player and i barely know the game. A friend said it was awesome and what not so i thought, might as well give it a try. After only about 2 hours of playing, i havent even got close to the enemy npc, which is not the problem. Ive only got like 4-5 planets spread out, yeah its lovely being new. Anyway ive bid against pirates for a while but stopped doing it so see what happened. I got this little fleet and defense around my planet. All of the sudden this HUGE pirate army appears. They lose a couple of ships to some mines, but its like firing a water gun at a swarm of mosquitos. They tear my defense down in a matter of minutes and my army is destroyed like it was nothing.

I look at the pirate stats and they are far better than my ships and far more. Yeah, im a complete noob and ive only played for like 5-6 hours in total. Ive always lost my encounters against the pirates so far. At first i do fine but after a few hours have passed they just rip me apart and i dont stand a chance against them.

Ive looked for some help how to play the game cause ive been thinking im doing something seriously wrong. The tutorials are lacking because they dont explain too well how stuff acutally works. I had to visit sites and write down what exactly the ships do, what their weakness is and so on. Then i just read that the ai is suppose to be "smart" so i dont have to target ships manually.

It just feels kinda old having to write stuff up on a paper because the game doesnt show it in the interface. Like for example that the pirate cutthroat is a offensive cruiser and rogue is a light frigate. But then again thats not suppose to matter right, since your ships on auto should "think" by themselves? It really dont do much difference, looking at the ships it just looks chatotic when they appear to be firing at whatever is the closest target...

Dont get me wrong here the game is pretty cool and all that, its just that i get owned and that is kinda frustrating. Not by the enemy npc but some damn pirates. Ive yet to actually made contact with the npc! Well, i guess the more you play the better you understand the game. Anyway i just think the pirates seem very powerful. I have no idea how they were in earlier versions of this game.

I'm completely new to Sins (just bought Trinity) and am using the Distant Stars mod.  After two games, I turned the pirates off.  They ended up being my most dangerous opponent, which is not what pirates are supposed to be.  It sounds like they just need to have their upgrades stop, preferrably just below the three factions max upgrades, instead of infinitely increasing.

I have been playing the DS mod with Entrenchment, and thought the pirates were pretty powerful.  However after a few games I was able to change my tactics and have been able to handle them with little effort.

With the straight Diplomacy the pirates are much harder than in Distant Stars.  Time will tell if I can adapt again to where the pirates are controllable, or not.

Because, of course, there are no obvious alternatives such as making the pirates have 'stealth' properties to reflect a strategy of blending in with innocent civvie ship traffic, a preference for kidnapping future slaves off planets and boarding cargo freighters instead of attacking major military installations head-on, and additional speed to reflect a tolerance for wildly unsafe levels of engine radiation if that means outrunning the local authorities. 

The only possible approach is making them unusually tough forces with a direct-assault mentality and a completely magical economy that if actually wielded intelligently would let them dominate a quadrant, so instead they have to be controlled by idiots.  Right?