pirates to strong?

If you have that kind of cash, you've won already.

only had it because of the massive amount of medal i had

Yes, and if you hadn't had that massive amount of metal, you wouldn't have been able to spam pirates.
But as you said, you had alot of metal lying around, begging to be sold to the black marked thingie.
So basicaly, you had allready won.

I disagree, if just because you have enough money to buy pirates doesnt mean that you have already won.... For instance 10 stars 100 planets.  You are reasearching and exploring getting your money comming in is great.  Lets remind you of TEC's new money ability.  I think TEC should be penalized for offering missions due to the fact that they are now a money powerhouse.  Once I gett worthy cause its a done deal......

Tec should be looked act like the money doesnt have as good value as other races and therefore maybe there should be a % increases to tec offering missions to pirates to help balance this issue.

Money doesnt mean anything, if i am a tactition and I know how to use my army, just because you have money doesnt mean a thing.  Well placed defenses a SB and a minor fleet at home can repeal an invasion at home.   Take all planet bombers out have fleet waiting at phase point all.  Then regroup on the SB.  They will follow and pop goes the pirates.

We've had to tone down the Pirates a bit, since they were killing the game's performance by spawning too many units.

 It's going to depend on how the AI or if the AI uses the pirates against you. If they can't create superweapons the small details of diplomacy will be lost on the ai. The pirates should have a capital ship that turns the shape of the war, it should be that fearsome. Something that would take the combined strength of 3 fleets to take it down.

Also regarding tec money advantage with pirate raids, did anyone think that not every race should be able to do this, pirates would have some races that they would not work for regradless of money.

Well how they get the blueprints for a super ship and how come none of the other races have super ships?? I can see pirates having Caps. Heck we did that for Distant Stars, but in no way should the pirate ships be better than anything you can build.

    The pirates would steal the best techs of the other races, plus the pirates might have aquired techs from races we don't know about yet. Plus whats the reason pirates don't colonize? It would be fun if they branched out and had mutiple points to launch raids.

So make less more powerful units = Pirate Caps

Pirates would most curtainlly be able to aquire so pretty good hardware and designs. But they are pirates, not engineers & scientists. Haveing something is 1 thing, being able to use it is another.

Also the way pirates are funded by a faction, that faction is wanting (except in 1v1 games) anonymity. If the pirates rock up to attack your world with another factions ships and or technology, really that anonimity is lost. And factions are not likely to want to give pirates some of thier best technology for fear that it would be used against them in future raids.

I'm not against pirates having capitals per- say, and like you say, perhaps haveing them would reduce the number of other smaller craft they need. But they should be somewhat less powerful than what the factions have. More or less with the weapons and abilities they have now.

In Distant Stars we gave them ships from all sides (well the battleship is unique) so there is no comment as to who gave what, plus generally the ships were weakened a bit with changes in weapon effects (like no phase missiles for Vasari looking vessels)

 I envision their cap ship would be a one of a kind beast, like a marza on steroids. Besides then you wouldnt need pirate HC's with 3x the hull points as their TEC counterpart.