Diplomacy pirates are fine? Let's see a replay.

Ive fought in games with 6 hard ais ffa and I dont have a problem (most times I can get a ceasefire with all but one or two) unless I get lax about bidding for pirates. You can almost ALWAYS outbid them. Hard ai's dont start sending specific bounties to your planets for pirates till late game and by then you should have the fleet and deffences to handle it, unless enemies come in with pirates. Even then though fleet + starbase and defenses will win out though you will take heavy losses (might even lose a couple cap ships) Sorry I never save replays cause they have never worked right on the playback on my comp. Harder than hard is trickier and many times ill get anialated, but that usualy by the ai not pirates. I sugest making your own maps in Galaxy forge that allow you and other players/ai's to have several planets behind one central defencable location you can concentrate your rescores on. Added bonus it will make attacking enemies more fun and challenging. and always outbid on pirates no matter what it costs you. Its always worth it, even late game (especialy now)

While I don't think the pirates are necessarily fine. Here is a replay in Diplomacy FFA against 3 Hard AI's with 2 allied victors only. I basically setup two starbases and locked down the planet to deal with the pirates. I didn't bother with outbidding for pirates and just let them attack my planets with the starbases.

http://www.filefront.com/15991297/FFA-3Hard-Diplomacy-MediumRand.record

Thank you very much for that replay!

Watching it was very... illuminating (sorry, couldn't resist). It gave me some ideas for improvements to my game. You still had to spend a ton of resources to deal with the pirates, but it was interesting to me that you were able to accomplish it mostly with static defenses.

Looking forward to anything anyone else has to share!

Haha, ya I probably spent way more than was actually necessary on those starbases and the defenses around them. At first I thought the Vas AI might try attacking while I was hitting the TEC on the other side. Since that didn't happen I started empire building since my economy was so much stronger than the others. Plus deploying and upgrading star bases is fun IMO!

I'm glad the replay helped. I probably could have got away with out the capital ships at the planets but I kinda left them as a rear guard plus they synergize well with the static defenses. The Mothership keeps the shields up and the Halcyon bumps up the rate of fire on the starbase and turrents effectively increasing dps.

As far as the extra static defenses the shield extension from the Hangar bays adds shield mitigation to all structures nearby and the turrent upgrade adds up to 50% damage and extra shields to the turrents.

Vasari and TEC could do similar things with the Pirates, but Advent's synergies are pretty nice.

Bunched up Advent defenses with all the proper research are nearly impossible for AI and pirate fleets to break. Everything lasts long enough for the Transcendia's Meteor Storm to nuke whatever doesn't belong near it.

So to answer my own question... here's a game I played today. It's a Diplomacy 4 player FFA, Vasari vs 3 hard AI's on the map Double Cross, standard start, normal speed everything, no allied victory, diplomatic victory on.

Dip-Vasari_vs_3H_DoubleCross.zip

Some comments on this:

• As in Zombie's game, I had to spend all of my early resources and most of my overall resources on pirate defense
• Later in the game, pirates continued to attack me, even though I had the #1 military and the #4 economy. Why would pirates attack the poorest group in the first place, even ignorikng the fact that poor group had the biggest guns!
  
• I didn't finish the game, but was well on the way to winning after 2 1/2 hours. In that time I was only able to complete one or two missions for the AI, so I was only friendly with one of them. That AI (green) took out one of the other AI (red), which allowed me to focus on fighting purple. It was tough to make headway, because of the constant pirate attacks, I was either spending on pirate defense, or defending against one of the AIs on either side of me (sometimes both). I wasn't able to make a real offensive push for a very long time.
  
• Static defenses were sufficient to hold off even large end-game pirate attacks, provided they were bunched up, included a several missile and a couple repair platforms and a hanger, had some juicy targets inside for the trade ship hating pirates, and included a fully offensively upgraded station, also with the upgrade that prevents losing the planet to bombardment. Without all that, some ship backup is required. Even with all that, the pirate target planet is under attack pretty much constantly throughout the game.

So yeah, this is why I call it "Pirates of a Solar Empire," because you can throw out the window any strategies that don't deal exclusively and aggressively with pirate defense. Makes the game a lot less fun for me.

This is my issue with Pirates too. I don't tend to play with them enabled. I would rather have multiple locked teams and tend to get better effect and fun factor. I don't know what the solution is to this but Pirates have never realy been fun for me except in online games where the bidding matters. I'd almost like to see the Pirates simply act with their own AI making it seem more random who/when/where they attack.

Yes, if your planet is locked down. If you forget that the pirate planet bombers (name escapes me) get really long range attacks later and can take out even these defenses.

They only shoot at structures in passing, their primary target is always the planet. Make sure to throw the government upgrade on your starbase to prevent loss of colony from bombardment, and they'll happily sit there and bomb the planet while you demolish the rest of the pirate fleet and then pick 'em off with fighters.

Hey badken, I played DoubleCross with Vasari with the same race setup for the AI just to give you another view. The recording is really long because after I won the game I decided to take over everything and put the game into 4x and 8x at various points. The main game lasted to around 2h on the game clock then my fleet went on a rampage from their to control the system.

Also, in your game I noticed you left the desert planet un-colonized next to your homeworld. In this map I think it's critical to get the 3 adjacent to your homeworld and not let the AI establish a foothold so close. I would also setup some basic trade in a FFA after your inital defenses and small fleet are established.

cheers.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5790092/FFA-3Hard-Dip-DoubleCross.zip

Actually that was a volcanic planet, and I intentionally did not colonize it until after I had the terran planet, enough fortification research (including enforced loyalty), and full static defenses on the terran planet. It took a while to get all that set up. If I'd tried to colonize it earlier, I would have spent a lot on imperial labs that wouldn't have really paid off for some time.

I was trying to go through the star to grab the terran planets. Two of them had 3 resource asteroids, and the volcanic planet next to me only had 2 metal. As it played out, I just got the static defenses built when the first pirate raid appeared. I started building Imperial labs after that. With Vasari, I like to prioritize Enslaved Labor over trade. It requires less labs and provides discounts on almost everything.

The static defenses still needed cap ship help when the 2nd pirate raid arrived, and at about the same time purple hit me from the other direction, so I had to shore up defenses there. That further delayed the Imperial research. After the 2nd raid was cleared up, I tried an attack on one of the inner terran worlds, but I had to turn right back around and defend against pirates again.

I did research volcanic occupation in there somewhere, but by the time I was able to free up forces to take that planet, Red had already claimed it. I lost my asteroid world to Purple because I didn't have a starbase with loyalty quickly enough.

By then (a little over an hour into the game) I was #1 military and #4 in empire & economy. I could have gone for trade earlier, but I think I might have had to sacrifice a logistics slot on one of my 3 planets for the 4th imperial lab, and not put a trade port there.

It actually turned out better than I had hoped. Eventually I was able to build my fleet up enough that I could push Red back, and Green helped there. The problem with Vasari is that Empire stuff is so damn resource expensive early on, especially on a tight map like that where you have to field fleets right away.

Now to watch your replay.

sorry, I seem to write desert when i'm thinking volcano

On the adjacent planets I was more thinking it would be easier to maintain control then to go after a terran next to the AI's home world. Plus with the logistics slots on the 3 adjacent planets I was able to build 4 mil labs and 4 civ labs and get basic trade and culture going. The 4 mil labs were used to get overseers which I left a few to help keep the starbase healed along with a Skirantra just to make sure.

Your game did indeed go well for you and was an interesting watch

Have you noticed the Vasari AI is not as diligent at setting up starbases as TEC and Advent or is it just my imagination?

Good replay. You did handle the pirates well but as has been said in the OP the pirates didn't bother with anyone else but you. They made it easy too by hitting the same planet over and over.

Here's how I would fix pirates:

1.  Make it so that if there is no bounty set on anyone, make the pirate target random, instead of being the human player by default in every single case.

That is all

Here is my replay from a match with 3 cruel unteamed AI plus pirates. Just grab the planets really fast, build chokes, boom andt tech up.

My game will continue to finish teching and getting to the tiresome process of building lots of strong ships and a mega-fleet to conquer the rest of the system and the other suns. Quite a tedious task... The rats did not mind me much by the way.

 REPLAY ON HTML

Your FTP link is asking for a password!

@maxiwill same thing here. FTP link is asking for a password!

The game gave me Advent last night in a random FFA against 3 Hard AIs on the Medium Random map. It was basically the same story, go aggressively to starbase, then max out defenses at the pirate target planet, then start playing Sins. Took me 4 1/2 hours to get a Diplomatic win. My AI ally was not far behind me, which was a happy surprise--it's the first time I've seen the AI use diplomatic features effectively. It even beat me to a couple of pacts.

Vasari defenses make it a bit easier. Also maybe I should consider doing quick starts. I kind of like starting from almost nothing, though.

looks like i could fix the link. please give feedback if it worked right or not...

I was able to download it, but I got a minidump when I tried to watch it in Sins Diplomacy.

My diplomacy version is 1.011. You got the same on? Or maybe this is a hidden Trinity bug?

I just downloaded the linked file, put it into the record-folder and watched my game.