[bug(s)?] Confused about pirate behaviour

Pirate fleets ignore logistics, and ignore easy target starbase

http://i.imgur.com/jaljh1z.png
from GalCiv3 Forums

Today I've been fighting my way through another Tough galaxy (i.e all enemies on Genius, does that have an effect on pirates?), and am faced with the following pirates: 

 

 

This starbase, which has about 0% chance of survival against that pirate fleet, has been sitting in their 'chilling' spot, 3 hexes south of their own shipyard (you can see it at the top of the screenshot) for 40 turns or more. Are pirates just not interested in stealing valuable strategic resources? Do pirates not want to raid the unarmed drone mining ships/transports which carry the stuff?

 

While they don't pose much of a threat (after all, they ignore the starbase and still only move at 2 hex/turn, rendering them incapable of catching any ships passing by), their numbers make them somewhat challenging to take out.

 

This huge pirate buildup seems to have happened because they don't care about logistics, having 30/10 in fleet. All tiny ships. A little ways away there's another fleet like it, from a different pirate base:

 

Again, 34/10 logistics.


That's one issue which I actually think probably isn't a bug, but a requirement for pirates to be a viable threat without having actual technological progress. Still, they're prevented from actually being dangerous by still not being able to move, and I'm not sure if that's a bug or a ship design decision - low movement is something the Drengin gimp themselves with also to fit more guns after all.

 

In any event, reporting this in the hopes of more scary pirates!

4,758 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Someone else said, "they are not pirates, they are terrorists". They usually only destroy your colony ships and constructors. You can't deal with them to buy them off or bribe them to harass your enemies and they are not profit motivated. Random explosions of a small percentage of your ships would be the same as pirates.

They are no more than a nuisance that some enjoy and others choose to omit.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Klepart and Lantern in my game are minor races, not pirates.  Did you defeat them?  That would have turned their remaining ships into pirates, but there might be a behavior difference with the regular pirates.

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Publius, reply 2

Klepart and Lantern in my game are minor races, not pirates.  Did you defeat them?  That would have turned their remaining ships into pirates, but there might be a behavior difference with the regular pirates.

 

Yes, I took over their planets with the benevolent 'everything in your Sphere of Influence becomes yours' ideology. (3 colonies to 10 in a turn... the hard part was getting ideology points with so few colonizations).

 

Dunno how that makes the surviving ships behave when they're pirateified. For that matter, do minors act differently dependent on difficulty settings?

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I don't know if it would affect their aggressiveness, but it might explain the large fleets - if the minors had researched some logistics techs they could have put the fleets together legitimately, but then lost their logistics bonuses when converted to pirates.

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Publius, reply 4

I don't know if it would affect their aggressiveness, but it might explain the large fleets - if the minors had researched some logistics techs they could have put the fleets together legitimately, but then lost their logistics bonuses when converted to pirates.

which could be the reason they do not move? there are more ships than they can control in that fleet, if attacked they will still fight for their lives, but they can't properly make a chain of command to plan their actions, therefore staying put due to lack of logistcs. otherwise, since they lost all thei bases and shipyards, maybe they are 'out of range' to everything and simply cannot move, because the game do not allow one to order a move outside their range. those would be my guess