Pirate missions break the game

Pirates still need a lot of work yes

recommend turning them off

30,000 credits should give you 750 fleet supply.  But the pirates also get a big boos from it.  With multiple players launching such raids, the pirates become godly.  They currently don't have a limit to stat scaling; so more bounty and mission pay equals stronger pirates.  If enough people make some rumblings about pirates, they'll likely be tweaked.  I also think that Diplomatic Points should accrue more slowly.  Give it a few patches and see where things end up.

Not only just the Pirate Missions.  The Pirates seem to be overpowered in the early raids as well.

I mean, I'm not the greatest Sins player out there--I usually play Medium-Large maps with 5 other AI players, 3 on hard.  I can't even get out of the early game cause the Pirates are just killing me.  Every raid they attack me, unless I spend tons of cash on the bounty war in the last couple second and then I'm hamstrung money-wise for the next 15 minutes and then have to spend more money then cause now I have a high bounty.  None of the other AIs seem to offer bounty on anyone except me.  And the Pirate fleets are devestating for the early game when I'm sporting one (maybe 2) cap ship and a fleet of Desciples.  After 3 rounds of Pirates I'm usually done cause they've killed off my fleet and my cap and now I'm just funneling any ships I make into the slaughterhouse.

Is there something I'm doing wrong?  I want to play Diplomacy and I think the Pirates are a good way to get your fleet up to fighting form in the early game so I don't want to turn them off, but it just seems that they're a bit too overpowered at the moment.  Entrenchment was OK in that the first two or three waves of Pirates weren't laughable so you had to pay attention, but after that they were a non-factor.  Diplomacy is a bit too tough, though.  Or maybe I just suck.

Nah, you don't suck. The Pirates are just unbalanced at the moment. The only options are to turn them off and wait for a patch or look for a mod that fixes them. I've switched them off and the games way better for it. The dev's are still releasing patches and hopefully they'll sort the problem out fairly soon.

Well, good to know that I maybe don't suck.   Will look for a mod and hope for some dev-love in the coming weeks.

Against the early raids, a starbase and repair structure nestled directly behind it are enough to beat back the pirates.

In later raids, they have too many anti-structure buffs.  Corsairs cripple the passive regen of starbases and other structures, and pillagers count as Ogrov Torpedo Cruisers with like 270 degrees of coverage thanks to the arrangement of their weapons.  So by that point, a developed defense fleet will need to work in tandem with structures to hold the pirates at bay.

Do note too that bomber strikecraft seem to do a decent job against pirates.  Send them after the pillagers first(the pirates use their own form of armor now, so no sense using easily destroyed fighters).  If you bust the pillagers, your starbase will have a fighting chance againt the Corsairs and other ships.

Yeah, I noted this in another thread.  You don't even need 8 player games, even in a 2v2 the first team that can afford a major pirate mission strike will win.  No questions asked.  Combined with the normal raid, you can easily have 2000+ supply of ships that are better than yours smash someone non-stop.  Even if the person lives, it just gets worse and worse and the pirates keep upgrading.  Eventually not even fully upgraded starbases backed by other tactical structures can hold them off, and the pirates just take over the galaxy unless a TEC player nukes them.

Turn them off until another Diplomacy balance patch gets released.  There's no reason to go back to Entrenchment, as there's nothing wrong with the pacts and envoys.

Yeah, I would stick with Diplomacy, just turn pirates off. I've never had a real problem with the pirates. I guess I haven't faced a 20k (I think that is the limit now) pirate mission against me before.  Nonetheless, I do know that the pirates use AI and the AI is dumb as rocks. Pirates to me are free exp to a minor nuisance. They attack my planet and then leave. I recolonize it. Kill the pillagers before the planet goes down? Great. They can spend their time killing my trade ships and structures. If I am on the offense when this happens, I just let it happen. No point losing tempo over it. While the other player spent 20k credits to knock one of my planets out, I just took out his planet and colonized it and I don't need to spend another 20k to attack another planet.

You have 8-10 players, someone is bound to be TEC. Set up self-destructing Starbases. Kill the pillagers and Starbases will hold up fine against pirates. Put up more than one on a planet if you have to. Auxiliary Govt will keep the planet from getting killed by pillagers. Putting turrets up will keep the pillagers where the turrets are not. If they are on the other side of the planet bombing a planet (away from the Starbase) they cannot kill, well, their loss. Pirates have no shields and thus, no shield mitigation. Mines will do a lot of damage to them. They can be fighting you and you build mines out of their range and then just lure them into it.

If you are engaging the pirates with your own fleet (which if the other team has just spent 20k, you'd better have a sizeable fleet or send 20k pirates of your own), then you should have no problems at all since you are within your own repair bays and can Advent Battleball, TEC mass Hoshiko heal/disable and Missile Barrage (!), Vasari Subverter Disable into oblivion. If the other team has the same size fleet as your team and has 20k of credits to spare each, well, you guys were probably going to lose anyways. Heck, you can be gone for 3 hours defending a chokepoint using only a Starbase, turrets, hangars, repair bays, and your fleet of only ~1700 (set on hold position) against 2 Vicious AI with maxed out supply attacking me separately or together and losing only 36 supply the entire time I was gone. That is how bad the AI is.

The pirates were buffed in Diplomacy because of just how useless they were before. In fact they were free exp. You used to be able to defend Pirate raids with 1 capital ship, 1-2 repair bays and a couple turrets--if that, since they are so easily distracted by trade ships and still are. Now pirates can actually potentially take down a planet that. They certainly won't breach a fleet supported planet. But what they can do is to hit an econ player who is vulnerable. What Diplomacy has done is to allow the econ player on the team to not only provide feed for other players, but also provide support with Envoys and pacts, and use pirate missions to aid the frontlines without increasing their upkeep. And to be honest, you clear out territory quite fast using pirate missions in conjunction with your own fleet. Still, the pirates are nothing compared to a real fleet controlled by a human player. You've played Sins for years, you must realize how bad and predictable the AI is. If not gather up your team of 4-5 and play a 4-5 v 4-5 Vicious AI. If you can win those games, pirates should be of little concern to you.

tldr; Diplomacy made the pirates actually worth something, if you don't like it turn it off.

Here is a pirate mod you could try, just put it in your mods folder in Document and Settings/... and enable in-game: http://datafilehost.com/download-448aad49.html

I like the pirates and I like the IDEA of missions (and the first times they swooped down to savage the foe).   Ideawise, besides representing real pirates, it is a rough substitute for minor powers that could be subsidized in proxy wars against other players.   The actual execution is a bit heavy handed - the reason is probably that the playtesters are supercompetent compared with those of us who play this recreationally.

Wny do pirates destroy planets completely?

Logically speaking, why would pirates destroy a planet rather than suck it dry and then come back later once it rebuilt?  Meanwhile move on to other planets.

Why kill the cow that provides the milk?  Currently it's a sneaky way of clearing out planets without going to war with their owner - "Oh, pardon me, my good ally - since you aren't using this planet any more I think I'll colonize it."  Very "unrealistic" from a diplomatic point of view.

Auxiliary government should not be necessary as an anti-pirate measure - it shouild be to keep other powers from knocking out the planet itself easily.

Thanks for listening

They aren't exactly killing the cow that provides the milk . They are hitting one planet of an entire empire. Similar to the vikings pillaging and burning down a town in a raid. On a raid, you want to hit fast and hard so that your target does not have time to react--typically involving smashing things apart to get to the loot quickly. Also might involve killing the witnesses and grabbing all the women .  Unfortunately Sins pirates are dumb as a post because it is AI.

In Sins, I don't believe bombing a planet to 0 health and pop represents no one is alive on the planet (the numbers are way too low). Instead planet infrastructure represents the planet's government capability to survive siege and the pop is just a representative number for tax payers. When a planet goes to 0 health, it is basically in a state of chaos that is unable to be considered part of an empire (the government is dead). If you were pirates ransacking a town, you would probably either kill or kidnap the mayor too. This would also explain why Auxiliary Govt works with no health on the planet and no population--the people of the planet are not paying their taxes and the govt is maintaining control remotely. When the planet is in chaos and you've probably looted all that you wanted from the planet, itself, and orbiting structures, you leave...which is what the pirates do.

And using pirates to take over an ally planet is just another example of the AI being clueless. If you did that to me, that would be worst diplomatic move you could ever make. If your ally was willing to give you a planet, then just ask them to scuttle it and all structures on it. Saves both you and them grief.

Now that I am done bashing the AI, I would like to say I am impressed with the improvements to the AI in Diplomacy. Though they are still dumb as a bag of hammers, at least these hammers have some significant weight to them and can be of a threat.

For those who are having trouble with pirates, keep playing and getting better at the game, and they won't be so bad anymore. You just need a little micro...not even close to the amount a lot of RTS games need.

I've had some ridiculous pirate raids on me to a point where I just turn them off now. I'm talkign about raids lunched with 250 credits at the start of the game taking out starbases   I want pirates to be strong, but it's ridiculous now. Also I ahte the planet bomber raids myself! So annoying. I got the starbases with loyalty upgrade only have the pirates to slaughter my starbase then kill the planet anyway.

A raid from the begining of the game took out your Starbase ? Well, I suppose pirates are particularly good at taking structures (namely pillagers). In the first version of Diplomacy before they nerfed the pirates, I had 40k pirate mission run into and pass by my full hull Starbase. Half-killed it. But still, imagine spending even 20k on anti-structure cruisers. Same result. The only time I've ever had the pirates kill my Starbase was in the first version of Diplomacy...ever since the patch, no problems.

Even now, I've fought off pirate raids more than an hour into the game with a few repair bays, turrets, a trade port, and a single cap ship (was the Sova).You don't get as much free exp anymore though. I only turn them off sometimes because they can be a nuisance every 20 minutes.

Still, I keep reading stories of people losing bids to the pirates at the last millisecond (I always win if I am paying attention to the bid against AI) and people having way more trouble with the pirates in general. I'm beginning to wonder if the AI is implemented better on better PCs since my laptop runs Sins not as well as I would like it to.

I ran into the problem of pirates staying in systems that have mines in them even after all others things are gone. Basically brought my game to an end because they where in the middle of the map and one one could clean them out.

ps i will put my 2 cents in for the pirates being to strong as they currently are.

4v4 (or 3v3 or whatever but imagine its 4v4 with diplo we've been doing non-locked with certain number of allied victors so just imagine the alliance system gets it to a 4v4)

4 x 750 fleet supply vs 1 player, every 5 minutes

Also consider 8 player games can go for 4+ hours sometimes and 1 slow pc slows it down to an absolute crawl so small fleet sizes is all u can do and hope to not play a slideshow.

I mean is this seriously an argument at any level? Thats just a broken game mechanic. We literally play every saturday, sometimes twice in a week, and we all jump on ICO and play single player as well. I don't think any of us have had any serious complaints (ok we all moan about fighters or other things from time to time) that would cause us to run screaming to the forums that the game is broken. Personally I have been playing this game since beta.Its broken completly at the moment, Maybe single player works ok cause the strategic ai doesnt know how to exploit this but mplayer is pretty much done for. Were also still getting crashes just bam straight to desktop with a windows notification of a crash (we got desynchs before but never crashes like that, still happening after latest patch)

I know alot of people don't play this game as much as me or my friends and most people play single player and other people more  twitchy play the 30 min micro 2 jump from home planet 1v1 ( or essentially play out 1v1 in a larger game). We play the game as its really designed for multiplayer and Diplomacy just doesn't work at this level with pirate missions. There is another serious problem with how allied victory works also with diplomatic points versus relationship points for victory but I'll write that up in another thread.

When I say how its "meant" to be played let me qualify that statement, I mean from the point of view of playing the game in its entirety, using the full tech tree and having a begining, middle, and end game. I don't mean were any "better" than anyone else but I do think we get a full playtesting experience and thats the best way to playtest/balance a game, if it works for us it should work for anyone.

I know like 80% or something near just buys this game for single player and in the end this is mainly about multiplayer. But understand right now diplo doesn't work at any level, pirates, pirate missions, diplomatic victory, allied victors, etc for competitve multiplayer.

Pirates throughout history are hit and run and kidnapping specialits. The barbary pirates went almost exclusively the kidnapping route. Carribean pirates were mostly disaffected military and privateers gone rogue after  wars ended, most of them were actually offered pardons and gave it up willingingly, the ones who didnt went on to write several legends though. They were all cuthroats and murderers and they did it as a means to an end as well as a lifestyle which assured a quick action packed life and a very early death. In this game they should prey on the weak slow undefended trade ships whereever possible if one thing is true about all pirates its that when a large deteremined navy shows up they go away pretty quickly. They also rarely attacked fortified positions.

If it were my design decision I would take out player control of piratescompletly they would be a reaction to a person who went econ and diplo, i.e . you don't build military ships and/or you have undefended sectors of space where your trade ships travel the more likely pirates show up in those sectors

 less tac strucs = more pirates

more sectors of space trade ships travel through with no military  ships or structures present = more pirates

less military research = more pirates

small number of overall military ships (by supply points and fleet size game setting) = more pirates

increasing cargo capacity on trade ships = slower trade ships and more pirates

You could also add non controllable (like the trade ships) passenger ships,  make the diplo ships non-controllable but appear like the trade ships (maybe add a diplo station ?) , maybe culutre ships originate from culture stations?, well just more non combat non controllable ships that function like trade ships and apply the same rules to them as I listed above.

You could add a kidnapping element so the more ships you lose to pirates maybe you lose total supply points and have to ransom them back from the pirates (money sinks are always good). To up their impact I would have them more drastically affect trade income which might require the rebalancing of techs and the way credits are generated altogether (i.e. make income much more trade centric less population centric and give the races trade tech earlier, maybe by bumping them all 1 tech level.

P.S. Also Vikings killed Men Women and children not because it was efficient but because it was part of their culture. It was essentially part of their religion thefact that it terrified everyone they encountered was merely a side effect. In other words it was ruthlessness for ruthlessnesses sake it was not a means to an end. It was  an almost pure warrior culture and religion where heaven itself was the promise of battle every day followed by heroic death only to repeat the cycle for eternity.