Or so I thought....... It was my first time playing CivII and it being a while since I spent the best part of 24hrs playing a game on CivI I decided to play it safe and have a CakeWalk game to blow the dust off! How I cackled like an evil genius off Bond when the super good alienskept giving me tribute and "Let's be friends" as I spent it on an all powerful military space station in their sector. Just so everyone can get an idea of who I think during the game, I end up with the evil menu's about 1/4 into the game. I'm in it for the money and the power people!!! Then all of a sudden, "As the galaxy is expanding" blah blah skip to the end of the message, is the population growth gonig up again?? "Space Pirates". Oh well, no hard there. Those simple little fighters are no match for the vessels I control. And it'll do some damage to my opponants. But, NNNNOOOO, they only appear in my sectors of space and destroy TWO of my mining bases, a trade route and pretty much every thing I throw at them!! I even build an Uber-ship that bankrupts me by buying three, about 15 mill each, where talking moding and hard-core protection. They get, not only a can of whip-ass handed to them, but a whole damn frieghter full!! Can anyone tell me, apart from running like hell and hiding.... How do you beat the damn pirates?????????