Aeson
Posts: 784
Joined: 8/30/2013
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So I finally have a fleet capable of taking out a pirate mining station, and as soon as I blow it satifyingly up, a freaking PIRATE DREADNOUGHT warps in! Blows the crap out of everything, captures my flagship and kills my ship captain.
The pirates found an abandoned capital ship and took it over. Yes, it sucks when it happens, but it's really not that much different from when a hostile empire has one.
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Pirates should NOT start with warp tech in the early pre-warp game. If anything, they should get it last!
If pirates didn't start with warp tech, they'd never get anywhere. Have you ever tried playing as a pirate faction? Your research is complete garbage. Your tech becomes obsolete compared to what empires that start on pre-warp settings have so quickly that it's not even funny. Beyond that, without warp tech, the only reasonable way to have pirates would be if they start within a colonized system, and you do not want a pirate faction spawning in the home system if you're playing a pre-warp game.
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Why is it that pirates get warp tech before everyone else?? Pirates are historically scavengers of tech and stealers, they make do with the hand-me-downs and the discount ship auctions. They convert freighters.
Pirates have warp tech because they're the leftover survivors of the Ancient Galaxy storyline where various high-tech civilizations essentially wipe each other out and bring on a galactic dark age.
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My only hope is a construction ship that managed to sail to another star. Amusingly, the first scouts I built could only do 600. Nice, I thought, very realistic to have very low initial FTL speeds. But then I build a construct ship, and that thing can go a whopping 1620(!) with the same warp bubble tech. WTF???
This is all about the power requirements. Warp Bubble Generators can achieve up to 2000 speed in hyperspace, but you need to provide it with 130 or so power from your reactors (i.e. the excess reactor output must be at least 130 in order to attain full speed). Your construction ships probably have an excess reactor output of about 100, whereas your scouts probably have something more along the lines of 40 excess reactor output. Check it in the ship design screen, and play around with greater and lower amounts of excess reactor output - you'll see that there's a linear relationship between hyper speed and excess reactor output, up to the point where your hyperdrive is fully powered. Your small scout doesn't have sufficient power to make anything like full use of the relatively large, slow, and inefficient Warp Bubble Generator, whereas your constructor comes much closer to having enough power for it. Be aware that in the early game, with the extremely inefficient Space Reactor and Warp Bubble Generator, and the Small Fuel Cell or whatever it's called, you'll probably reduce the range of your ships by giving them enough power to push the Warp Bubble Generator to its maximum speed.
Default-setting pirates start out with the same techs as a normal-start empire (Gerax Hyperdrives, Fission Reactors, Maxos Blasters, that kind of stuff), but they have little research capacity and are entirely dependent on raiding, smuggling, and corruption for income. You will most likely research at least one of the third-generation hyperdrives (Equinox, Kaldos, Calista-Dal) before the pirates have access to the first upgrade for the Gerax Hyperdrive; the same goes for many, many other technologies, to the point that pirates mostly become a trivial nuissance from the early mid-game onwards.
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So this lone superfast warp tech constructor returns from the other star, and heads to the helium gas giant, which is guarded by of course, a scorpion. So 3 ships die taking out the scorpion, we avoid the pirate moon base, get the mine 90% built, and then a pirate fleet of ten ships shows up! Blows the crap out of everything.
Giant Kaltors are a pain, yes, but you can reduce the magnitude of the issue by arming your constructors. If you really wanted to, you could even use construction ships as the backbone of your fleet in the early-warp period, as they will most likely be capable of much greater range and firepower than any of the military-role vessels you can build. Another thing you can try is to focus research on getting boarding technology, at which point you can start taking over pirate ships and installations rather than blowing them up, and this only requires you to be able to overcome their shields, not beat their ships. Capturing pirates can give you more advanced ships, or you can scrap their ships at your home spaceport or other shipyards to obtain a research bonus to a random tech used by the pirate ships, which can get you Gerax Hyperdrives and other normal-start empire techs much more rapidly than if you were to develop them only through your own empire's research. Pirates are also decent targets for steal research missions if you have a good spy, and stealing their galaxy or operations maps can give you a good idea of where the good stuff - resources, colonizable planets, research sites, resorts, independent colonies - can be found, and this is much faster than sending out exploration ships.
Paying off the pirates will also help in setting up your infrastruction, although it depends on the pirates a bit as to whether or not they'll hold their end of the bargain. Smuggler pirates (domed spacesuits) are more likely to hold to protection agreements, raider pirates (black knight spacesuits) are least likely to hold to protection agreements. You can also issue smuggling contracts for resources that you don't have access to, such as the helium that the pirates are so nicely mining for you right next door, though you'll typically start off with enough of a stockpile of all resources that you shouldn't need to offer smuggling missions any time soon. It may even be advisable not to start expanding out of your homeworld and planetary defenses (space port and other orbital stations) until you have some additional basic techs, like the ability to construct larger vessels, basic shields, better weapons, and a decent reactor, to save the stockpiled resources for vessels that are worth having, rather than expending your resources on ships that can't hold a candle to a Kaltor.
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