Pirates for fun and profit!

Interesting

I think there should a good spin as well, I propose a missionary. One that goes into allied territory and gathers arms from every planet it crosses to fuel your war, the more missionaries in a fleet the more chance you get a ship in orbit from passing a planet.

Nice idea! I think it should be balanced so that especially smaller factions can use this feature to compensate for lack of money, military etc.

Larger factions could also use privateers, but for them it would be less valuable. Maybe this could be arranged by limiting the power of privateers or the income they can provide, which seems realistic.
It reminds me of Sid Meier's Pirates! (the recent one), a great game!

Or maybe you could limit the value and trustworthyness of privateers by making them revolt (if there is too many on one side that is) and say they want there own nation because there making too much  .

I propose a missionary. One that goes into allied territory and gathers arms from every planet it crosses to fuel your war, the more missionaries in a fleet the more chance you get a ship in orbit from passing a planet

Are you confusing missionary with mercenary? My knowledge of missionaries is they go around trying to "do good", let's not politicize that one, do they not? I think a mercenary option would be interesting and could probably be considered to be privateering/pirating couldn't it?

I like the original posters idea, too. Everything except the part about recalling them to your fleet. I think once you live as a pirate, you die as a pirate.

Balancing them would of course be the hard part. Like shadowmaster said, it should be valuable to a small race, and useless to a powerful one. A weak race would have to decide whether the increase in bc is worth the risk of angering another race. Once you are more powerful than the other races, it would have to be made so nobody could cheese it to start a war. For example, sending a bunch of pirates into a weaker enemies territory so they declare war and you won't appear militaristic to the other races.

confusing missionary with mercenary?

Evil S, maybe Shadowmaster K is talking about the recruiter aspect of missionary work, not the social services side. AFAIK those roles are are always combined, although balance and focus differ. During the first couple of centuries of Jesuit missions, the SJ fathers both saw Euro-style facilities (hospitals, schools) built in the colonies and recruited local powers into alliances with the eventual goal of wholesale conversion to Catholicsm. Modern missionaries seem to say away from the guns side of guns-and-butter, but most (all?) of them still aim at conversion, which can be seen as a form of aggression to those outside the faith of a particular missionary.

I think in GCII terms, the different mechanisms might be Pirates=BC and Missionaries=Influence (kind of like the talk I saw recently in another thread about adding "interesting" new ship components).

Do you code-smart folks think it might be easier to build options like that as a special status for ship units rather than new ship components? I can imagine the CPU overhead being lower if there's some formula that begins with a yes-no for "Is Ship In Enemy Space?," ducking the whole question of merging starbase ZOC math with mobile hull math.

Like shadowmaster said, it should be valuable to a small race, and useless to a powerful one.

Hey, wait a minute, I said that!

This could very well be G.W., as I thought about it a bit more after my original read. Either way, would definitely add some spice to things.  

Hey, wait a minute, I said that!

My bad, Sidemancer. I can't seem to edit it, either.

i like it but remember a privateer takes care of his own ship

he is an independent contracter(a pirate) like the rangers in space rangers

and said ship/s should be able to be influenced over to another side just like planets


i am just wondering if the map is big enough

oh and remember it was the big countries that used the priveteer more than anyone else

the priveteer would be treated just like a pirate if captured

also for those of you who havent seen my post in the ship design about the mall go and take a look it is already set up to fight pirates/priveteers or whatever

I think missionaries should be deployed for the purpose of defending innocent empires and colonies, when they defend planet the colony is idepted to the missionary and one of the ships from your defecive fleets joins the missionary movement.

i just thought of this

the current ai pirates need to be able to increase their numbers as long as they fight and stay alive they should be able to get more ships thus making them a more of a menace than a navigation problem

making them a more of a menace than a navigation problem

I like the idea of the pirates growing stronger until they are defeated. If they appeared in a very weak AI's space, maybe the could even conquer territory and become a new AI player, kind of like the schism events but with a process that the players (AI or human) can interrupt.