I don't know you so out of politeness I won't judge you... too much.  It's a courtesy apparetnly foreign to you.

I play 9v1 on hard.  I ususally spend a little bit at a time on the game over days or even weeks.  I always use the Vasari despite the fact that the whole game is stacked against them because I like the challenge.  I play my opponents against each other.  I will abandon planets to let my allies (when I have them) have a place to live inside my rediculously fortified empire.  I show up with fleets of ten capitals and 100 carriers and keep the other six capitals and fifty enforcers as reserve.  I vivisect opponents, creating weak spots in the no1 AI for my allies and enemies to take advantage of.  I'll wait until just before the victory screen pops up to change alliances for dumb stuff like making a smiley face with planets or to see how different pacts change the game.  Some of my games have been more than 20 hours, but I'm a man with patience.  I play games to have fun.

If I want to be 'good' at something, I do it in real life.

Now for the sake of arguement lets say it is a "time-based" scaling for the pirates. Wouldn't the easiest fix for this situation to be just to hard cap the pirates potential?

And of course, I pretty much halved the current values for scaling. I don't agree with how it is currently, either.

Until it lags my game... It already does lag my game has we speak because the pirates are always winning their engagement and returning to their gravity well. By the end of my last game, the pirates base had so many ships that my game was starting lag, so the problem already exist has we speak.

Kitkun, I dont want the pirates to "level up" in strength, its completely idiotic.

I really tought that IC would have fix the pirates in diplomacy, instead they have made them even worst then before. Last night my opponent AI outbided me by 0.5 seconds with 250 credits, suddenly a large UNSTOPPABLE fleet entered my system destroying everything including starbase and a 6000 point planet in about 5 minutes, 5 freaking minutes. It took my fleet more then 5 minutes reach that system...

By the end of that game, it was only a bidding war, I was making sure all raids were directed at the enemy AI and not me. The AI got pwned BADLY!

After the game ended, I went to the living room, sat on the couch and realised I didn't even playtest all the other tech/features that are included in the game. It was a "watchout for the pirates" game. NOT FUN!

IC, bring them back to the entrenchment level and give them Percheron + Hoshiko + Ogrov. That should make them a credible threat while not making them OPed.

IC, fix the damn pirates.

What about decreasing pirate ships xp value? It will fix "free lategame exp" issue.

This is actually really starting to piss me off, not so much the damage increases, of fleets sizes the pirates have, but with the god damn range increases to the siege frigates. Why the hell can they outrange my fully upgraded starbase and turrets? And since the newer and stronger versions don't die so quick, and actually do some damage, and also bring some flak along for the ride, I'm finding that my planets simply can not fight off Pirate raids without bring a fleet in, what was the point of Entrenchment again?

The Pirates raids also seem to be too strong to early, a few hundred credits on bounty should never result in a fleet that can handle a Starbase, even a non upgraded one.

OK. Sins of a Solar Empire Diplomacy has now turned into: Pirates, buy them up and nuke your opponents with them.

Yes indeedy, just stall, stall, stall and then, once you have your economy in place, just use the Pirate mission and hiking your AI opponents bounty upwards as the tools for universal domination.

And whats more, it requires very little skill, very little in the way of thought and very little in the way of money. For around 3K credits, a pittance once my economy is up and running, I can send a pirate fleet of 50+ Corsairs with more firepower than Capital Ships at my opponents.

Why THANK YOU game designers for such riveting gameplay.

Yes, I just won against 5 hard AI's using this tactic. And whats more, it's pretty easy. Pirates; the new Tactical nuke to send at your opponents!

That.... was your game design intentions I take it game designers? To make the game now *completely* revolve around just getting to the 5+ hour mark and then just getting the pirates to win for you?

No? Really? Hmm, you may want to change that then... as it's BORING.

Diplomacy: Utter Fail as an expansion until you fix this.

Yep, got to agree, pirates are way overpowered. I was just fighting with an AI over the rights to (my!) asteroid, when we both got jumped by a bunch of pirates. This was about an hour into the game, and we both had three caps and a few other ships - we'd just started the battle so nobody had lost much yet. Within two minutes, both fleets were destroyed and all of the structures in the gravwell too, including the planet. The pirates had better range than the caps, moved a lot faster than the caps and did much more damage than the caps. There were also about 40 of them. I ordered my fleet to GTFO as soon as the pirates arrived, and it was space junk before it reached the edge of the gravwell. I call this utterly ridiculous.

Pirates are parasites, stealing ships and raiding border worlds. They should not be capable of fielding stronger ships than the empires from which those ships origininated. They should be a threat to a fledgeling empire, then fade to an annoyance and finally a joke as that empire grows and develops.

The way pirates are now makes very little sense in terms of realisim, and it changes gameplay to something very dull and pirate raid-centred. I have stopped playing sins until this is fixed - I refuse to turn pirates off as I liked them a lot before this change. I refuse to play entrenchment as I paid for diplomacy and have been looking forward to this release for months now.

On a lighter note, there are lots of other changes I really like, from the skirantra's scramble bombers to the ability to deviate from the highlander victory condition. Please sort this out IC - I've spent 4 days waiting for my replacement GPU card to arrive only to be disappointed with the very game I was waiting to play!

Ha ha!  I love it!  Everybody screamed "give us tough pirates," the devs responded, and now everybody's screaming that they're too tough!  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR!  LMFAO!

Im loving the new pirates. Hosho ftw.

The "give us tough pirates" spiel has been screamed since before Diplomacy was even concieved.  It's just been one of those rallying cries by some ever since the game released.  I don't care about pirates because I don't want to play against the AI.  I guess it's an SP thing.

Ill give a suggestion, pirates are somewhat cheated. It's in 'bold' because I vent to much sorry.

I played Diplomacy for the first time. I began as I always do and didnt payed the pirates a cent... so this is what happened. The pirate rushed ended up rushinng me 3 times and another race 1 time just after I finished one war with the pirates. I barely could count them during this period and I had a big army for the time, tough everything else but my capital's were gone almost each time. The first engagements with the pirates they probably were weaker and they had less ships.

They come a forth time to my home planet and blowed structures in their path (ship factories) in a few seconds. The biggest problem of all is that their atacks are too frequent. They are not easily to kill now and also as I'm ending one war with them another bunch is promptly comming. There is no time to produce the original force again much least to develop my civ. Another thing, they were killing my bombers in a weird way. They'd be gone in 2 or 3 seconds (I had like 8 squadrons being constantly produced and just 3 or 2 could stay arround at a time)... and somehow they appeared as they would come out already damaged? I don't know if that was a bug or the pirates, but was very weird as I could never see them coming out full or in green health bar. Those pirates don't even have fighters to be able to persui and hit bombers easily, still they kill them in 3 seconds from frigates... they lost all their glow, they looked like flies.

While I see now that I should play bounty, I noticed the immersion with the game being lost. This game do needed challenge tough. But its due to the fact that you always notice how cheated the pirates are. They arent even a race to develop itself and have this unbeatable technology. Their rush not only are so frequent but also war takes longer giving no time to recover or progress. Also pirates shouldnt be playing a role bigger than the civs. How can that be? They should be just be pesky and more trouble.

I could pay bounties off myself, but as I see it, using them against the AI races will obliterate them? Strangely enough I find myself even feeling for them, it's very unfair. Also I want to engage them, not to see cheated pirates automatically ripping off the AI's I placed. Or might be the damage against them lowered? Anyway...

Their attacks are too much frequent, they take a lot of time to kill and have these junky looking ships best them my own best. The problems were two: Pirates being somewhat weak and were giving free XP.

We may think that pirates not giveing exp may not make sense. Maybe we could see it as experience dealing with the pirates. I suggest to make it possible for capital ships to earn experience from pirates just till a certain level, like 4 or 5 and then more battlefield experience should be earned by battleing against the more experienced (the ones that supposedly use more of strategy because they are better organized and also posses better technology development) which should be the civilizations.

The best that players can do is to send their novice capital ships to go pratice dealing with the pirates, which makes sense and is immersive, just to a level limit of 4. By this, it's possible then to increase the number of pirate ships turning them an annoyance for the bigger part. The few levels gained from them come from the expense of (in the best case) loosing some ships/defenses, being far and out of the bigger threats (the other AI's) but being also an alternative from buying the first upgrades. They shouldnt be weak as they were and sure not as tougher as they are.

Currently I think they are breaking some of the immersion, noone likes to feel that their ships are so very weak. You are obliged to keep playing bounty or else you get very crippled and out of the main picture of the game. I'd play bounty satisfactorily if just I couldnt get much more exp out of the pirates and if they were more challenging than in original Sins, tough balanced, so that they can help against the others and also to not move the main force arround. Just a few hangers could deal with them before.

What if instead of increasing the amount of ships for each pirate level, we would increase the ship types. Add in two more ships, one with an ability with a very heavy laser or timed explosive that can easily destroy buildings but only usable every 10 minutes. Have another that has upgraded pillage abilities and embargo so that it happers the economy, like real pirates/privateers.

This way you can still defeat pirates later on, they don't become this uber force. but they will be able to destroy a few buildings and manage to steal enough income from you that it's worth the money you put in. it'd help even more if the ai for pirates would target economic buildings with it's building killers.

So this is how it would play out. For 1000 credits you'd get your regular pirates. For 3000 you now get slightly upgraded pirates and then two ships that have the destroy building ability and 1 ship with embargo. 10, 000 you get fairly upgraded pirates, lots of them, and something like 4 destroy building abilities and 2 embargo ships.

The strength of the ability should be two uses to destroy a trade ship. 1 use would destroy a mining outpost.  embargo would be fine if it was the same as the tech carrier ability.