Request of Devs: Pirates... Please Read

I gotta admit, when I first saw this thread I thought it'd be about making them weaker It's refreshing to see a thread about making them more than a minor nuisance like they are now.

Still, I think it'd be a tough sell. There have been many suggestions written up by mostly the past beta testers on how to beef them up and make them a little more fun and less predictable. But the pirates received a pretty huge backlash when the game launched. Originally, the game had no toggle for pirates on/off but they had to put one in because a lot of people complained that they didn't like them.

I still hope some of those suggestions make it into the second expansion (the non-combat one, most likely candidate for something like this), but we'll just have to wait and see!

In the meantime, though, at least we can mod pretty much everything about them except their behavior.

Most of the time, pirates are just experience for your capital ships

It would fit well with the theme. For example:

While the battle lines have been solidifying, the pirates have been picking over the wreckage and carrying away military grade shields, weapons, designs, and equipment. Looting the battlefields has resulted in pirates with advanced technology capable of holding their own even in the mid-late game. Combined with purchasing upgrades for their base defenses on the black market and deserters/mutiniers swelling their ranks and shoring up their tactics, pirates have become more than a minor annoyance to the clashing militaries.

While the ability to take territory may be a bit much, giving them some special abilities might make things interesting. For example, the ability to capture the occasional frigate or carrying off a world's resources would be neat, especially if it resulting in beefing up the pirate's fleet with captured tech. Also, making pirates retreat after the bounty is depleted or run away and raid the player somewhere else if they are clearly being wiped out during an attack would go a long way towards making pirates feel more like, well... pirates!

That would be good and does anyone know when entrenchment will come out?

November 18th for Entrenchment.

why don't you just an AI in if you want the pirates to take their own territroy and attack trade ships and such...still it's an okay idea...just needs some tweaking

Putting in pirates as what is effectively a 4th race would be counter productive. If the devs want to go that route, expanding the role of neutral planets would be more effective. Pirates aren't that interested in controlling territory, especially in a warzone. In doing so, they would go from pirates to warlords (a subtle, but important distiction). Instead of siezing planets, they should be doing stuff like hijacking frigates, cruisers, and (possibly) capital ships that go off on their and holding them for ransom, taking planets hostage, raiding trade and refinery ships, etc. Some of this would be better suited for the diplomacy pack, but the stuff i covered in my previous post would go well with entrenchment.

It can't make Entrenchment at this point, though. It launches in a couple weeks, and was likely feature-locked a while ago

With the toggle working fine for those who do or don't wish pirates to attack them, I think it's certainly time to revisit their difficulty.  I can't speak for everyone, but those of us who play with pirates on I don't think would mind if they were transformed from minor annoyances with cardboard defenses at all levels of bounty into something tougher.

What would be great is that at the smaller bounty levels, pirates only sent what we're mostly seeing now.  A few planet bombing ships and a harassment fleet.  But with significant spending, they could send a massive fleet.  Additionally, no amount of ships will be enough to make them more difficult without some refinement of their attack routines and the decision-making process for which planets to attack.

Perhaps pirates could be more likely to go after systems with large trade income and low defenses.

I'd like to see several things with pirates:

• I'd like to be able to choose from one of several different types of pirate missions when you pay the pirates. Right now it seems to be random destruction based upon bounties. In addition, I'd like to see the pirates:
  • Occasionally expand the number of planets they hold, maybe sending out raiding/settlement parties.
    
  • Destroy Flag ship missions - When a player submits bounties, they could choose to have the pirates go after the flag ship of a certain race. The pirates would throw everything after destroying that one ship and any fleets that are protecting it.
    
  • Destroy metal/crystal operations. Maybe instead of sending their entire fleet to one system, they divide the fleet up to strategically target the metal or crystal mining and refineries in all systems owned by a player.
    
  • Destroy all ship production facilities of a player.
    
  • Destroy all trade operations of a player (trade ports and ships).
    
  • If you are playing with several star systems, which contain a pirate base in each system, the ability to send one pirate band after another pirate band.
    
• To help with the above missions, pirates would need to play more like a race:
  • Retreat when a mission is accomplished (i.e a flag ship destroyed, or all mining operations within a gravity well).
    
  • Retreat period when the number of ships in a fleet goes below a certain number. I think of pirates as opportunistic and greedy, but not suicidal.
    
  • Pirates would need to send out scouts. Available missions could perhaps be availale based upon how far they've scouted... you could limit the number of missions against you by destroying their scouts.
    
• I know that I and several others have asked for assult ships of some sort that would allow a race to capture the ships/platforms of other players. How cool would it be if pirates staged a raid with assault ships with the sole intent to capture a player's capital ship? They would then retreat to their heavily defended base to refit the ship. The next time they raided you, they could come after you using one of your own cap ships. You could use your assault ships to attempt to capture it back from them.
  
• I'd like to see additional ship types (cap ships, carriers etc.) from the pirates, not to mention hangar bays around the pirate bases.
  
• I'd like to see the size of the pirate fleet grow/shrink based upon the size of the bounty. I've seen several large pirate fleets for 250 credits. I'd like to see massive pirate fleets for huge bounties.

then put an AI on!!!! but i do like assault craft ships to capture ships and structures...thats been on my list for ages...

Well I'll hop on the bandwagon and give my info of what I'd like to see come of the priates. Right now it seems like nothing really changes the more credits you give them short of threir threat lvl so let's expand on that. When the priates get X amount of credits from bounty then unlock a new technology, like a new ship type or weapon upgrade, possibly even some new planetary defenses instead of the ludicous amount of turrets they always have. This would also make them a bit more handlable early game but a much larger threat late game.

I agree that Entrenchment is almost certainly feature locked. Changing the way pirates work beyond whatever they've already done would require a great deal of testing and probably at least some rebalancing. Some of the stuff listed is very good, and I'd like to see it in the diplomacy pack, but we'll see what they do with Entrenchment. The rest of this stuff would probably go well in the third expansion pack, which doesn't seem to have a theme at the moment beyond "More stuff for everyone".

I don't know what they plan for that expansion, or even if they have a plan yet, but making pirates into an intriguing and potentially game shifting force would be very nice. At the moment, all they are is a nuisance. Find where they're likely to attack, throw a few cruisers and some LRMs there with some repair platforms, and even if you play without capital ships pirates aren't a problem after the earliest stages of the game.

Of course, a sense of self preservation and tactics, along with everything else listed above, would be a great way to expand their role. Plus, the option to create your own "missions" that the pirates (and potentially other players and AIs) could take would go a long way. It wouldn't even be that hard to do, considering the computer can already assign missions for you.

"Pirates have siezed one of your trade ports!"

"Pirates have taken one of your deep space mining platforms!"

"Pirates are demanding a shipment of parrots as ransom for your colony!"

That's "miniature giant space parrots"! Not just any old parrot would do..

Of course not regular parrots! What type of fool do you take me for?

There are many things I would like to see added, but the most relevant to this topic would be changing the pirate asteroid base to be more like a unique pirate starbase i.e. packing a ton of firepower and very hard to take down. But no longer capture-able (makes sense that pirates would rather die than allow their stuff to be captured sort of like the Turanic Raiders in Homeworld).

I agree that pirate bases need work, but I like being able to capture them. Maybe give them more options for what the base consists of; ie, derelict starbase, asteroid field, moon base, abandonded dreadnought, etc. Make the cost of colonizing after taking it go up as the game goes on, as the pirates have time to booby trap the base and upgrade its defenses.

i'm not trying to be a dick about it but i think most of you have pirate fetishes...i usually see the pirate base as a choke point and usually have them disabled.  i think effort to make the pirates anything more would be a waste.  maybe one or two tweaks but nothing major

It's true that in terms of pure content value, pirates are far from the most important part of the game. However, they go a long way towards providing the game with polish and dramatic flair, so to speak. Sins has plenty of eye-candy, and a good foundation, but in some areas it lacks depth. Pirates both have the potential to add an important strategic and diplomatic element to the game and also make the game feel more authentic. Right now, they're little more than a cheap, safe way to level your capital ships, but with a little work, they could be a lot more.

I've noticed a few maps where the pirate base served as a choke point, but the maps were small and still had alternate routes. That said, if i saw a randomly generated map with a pirate base acting as a chokehold dividing the map up, I wouldn't be happy. Of course, in that case the problem is that the map generator didn't create enough routes through the map. Still, if you've played more than a half dozen games of Sins, maurading pirates shouldn't be causing you problems.

only thing i would like to see in pirates are different race pirates...umm i'm sure those evil aliens must have renagedes of their own...?

But the game is set in TEC space. The Advent are basically a telepathically linked Unity, so their pirates are highly unlikely. And the Vasari is basically a colony fleet that's been on the run for a couple thousand years, so they wouldn't really have pirates either.

Not to mention it's pretty hard to imagine the Vasari allowing dissenters among their ranks.  The TEC on the other hand have the problem because as long as it's less costly to allow the pirates to roam around, they'll do so.  It's only when they make a mess of things that the TEC seems to care about removing them.

Well, thinking back to the newbie uproar about pirates being entirely too strong at release, the stated reasons for their being was to have both a late-game money sink and an alternative avenue of attack for those who preferred a more economy-based approach.  At present, neither of these are the case as they're far too easy to stop at any threat level and thus, not worth spending the money to manipulate beyond the first one or two waves of the game.

I agree with the OP.  I think it'd be nice to (optionally) buff them enough to satisfy their stated purpose.  Right now, they're just a minor nuisance at the beginning of the game and a dismissable popup anywhere beyond that.  Three turrets and a repair bay or two will ravage a pirate attack of any size with very little (if any) noteworthy damage to the defender. 

It's true that pirates are pretty much cannon fodder against even the weak defenses currently available. At best, using pirates to attack an enemy will only force them to spend a few resources on upgrading their defenses whenever the closest world to the pirates changes. Even then, you're going to spend far more bribing the pirates than the defender will defeating them, especially if the defender leaves a capital ship in the area to level up. With the exception of the few games where the pirates end up with a single outrageously populated base, they really aren't a threat (and even then, its not a problem if you're willing and able to lose a few ships taking a worthless base). Hopefully we'll see some improvement in Entrenchment.