I think it would be interesting to implement some form of lvl format before your game starts for the pirates.

Easey- not as bruttle of an attack force. 

medium- average attack force.

hard- difficult attack force. 

Personally, I'd like to see the pirates finally get a capital ship for when they reach maximum threat, just the one...one big spanish galleon that is!

I know that pirates arent meant to have access to such and such tech, cant have that ship or that one, that they have a pretty small diversity of ships, but surely once enough has been invested into them to get their max threat, they'd find some way to have a fleet composed of more than just frigates and cruisers.

Yes this isnt a realistic hope because we are way too late for that, but it'd be nice if they could have just a little variety, to give em a bit of a challenge after you've just burnt through most of your defences budget to make someone else the target of a raid after they've X amount on doing the same to you.

Just gimme one ship, one carrier as its not unreasonable for pirates to have a bunch of strike craft, and pirates are perfect to me.

I advocate for them having a 'makeshift capital ship' at maximum threat level. Like salvaging an obsolete asteroid-cracker miner ship and tweaking it for offensive capabilities. Being a miner ship, it is a tanker hull by design, as it must both carry heavy loads and resist unintentional impacts, being an obsolete piece of junk which has no shields.

Tractor beam: disables ship engines, prevents ships from jumping/turning.

Mining laser: high-powered laser used to atomize rocks retooled to atomize hulls.

Berzerk!: pirates take (highly toxic and addictive) chemical stimulants to fight better, faster, and put weapons on overdrive (lower weapon cooldown, higher damage, faster turning and ship speed)

Boarding parties: Avast me hearties! Only effective against corvettes/frigates/cruisers. % chance of taking over ship.

That IMO fits completely with pirate lore, and would be a nice adition.

I also think that the Pirates should have difficulty levels. It couls be a simple 3-level, or go along with the empire AI difficulty, going all the way to cruel.

The only thing I would change is delay the first pirate wave by ten minutes.

Pirates should be feared, maybe pirates alone should have gotten an uber ship to terrorize the universe.

Thing is most of the time people still play with pirates off. They've got a little more than a month to finish the game and a good chunk of that will be fixing bugs and desyncs. They don't have a lot of time to flesh stuff out with, let alone add new stuff, and IMO pirates should not get any more attention because anything they do change will likely be less appreciated.

If you want unique and/or powerful pirates it needs to be optional, so that's why mods will always be the best way to enjoy this feature. Distant Stars and Maelstrom both do some cool things to them, and ZombieRus' Rogue race can apparently control pirate ships, steal capitalships and all sorts of other low life goodness for you to play as.

Sadly, I agree.  I even wonder if the default game should start with Pirates ON?  (Or for that matter, default to Unlocked Teams, since 'diplomacy' seems unpolished)?

The Ebay style bidding on pirates is just plain annoying.  I can't be bothered with baby sitting a ('rigged'?) bid timer, while I'm trying to play the game.

And pirates are easily exploitable:  just scuttle all, and the pirates will leave (without killing the planet, since they seldom include seige frigates now)!