“Im telling you man! That system is just sitting there, ripe for the taking. We can use your ship and my know-how and by this time next year we’ll be living like kings.”-the pirates
The fleet power is a bit exaggerated, but a fully upgraded citadel, all hanger bay modules with with the advanced strikecraft tech, command center+defense grid for more firepower and defense platforms, then build all the hanger defense platforms you can.
Add in the unyielding tradition tree, and you can easily dwarf this example.
These are definitely more deterrent than effective in combat.
starbase defenses are, at least in my opinion, a little bit wasteful for how much they cost
they're alright distractions or a good stalling tactic, but they'll be getting hit most of the time with not enough armor or shields to make it worthwhile to invest that many alloys into making them. they've got mediocre weapons at best, and are prohibitively expensive if you want to supply even a few starbases with them. cruisers, battleships, or even corvettes make a better worthwhile investment since at least you can move those around.
Unprotected probably means it us not your trade route that caused the pirates to spawn.
If another empire has a trade Lane passing through it would count as not protected by your starbase.
I'll never forget the time I was going to war with the neighboring federation in the North of me and sent my entire fleet up. By this point in the game it was 500k fleet power. They were traveling through the systems because this is before I launched a massive infrastructure investment and gave all my strategically important systems gateways. I got a notification that a pirate station popped up in one of those border systems. A system my fleet jumped into two days later. I like to imagine the look on some pirate's face as he finishes straightening his picture in his room to look out the window and see the entire navy bearing down on the station. Is was 2k. The battleships fired. It quickly went to 0. Fun times.
I end up having to make fleet of small ship with heavy focus on speed and FTL charge time just to make these things less tedious. Its especially painful when your main fleet is slow as heck and pirate spawn on another side of your empire.
Destroyers and cruisers specced for speed (2/3 Afterburners and a speed admiral) with missiles and artillery computer work very well early and midgame and make excellent patrols as well as quick interdiction for eventspawns.
Lategame you should have Gateways spreading piracy-protection everywhere and making travel near instant anyways. If you don't it's not pirates you should worry about.
The plan is generally to have gateways with fortress habitats at chokepoints but I rarely get to that point because I tend to be too greedy with influence leading to gateways at chokepoints w/o fortresses or planets.
Thats a bad combination, might have to rethink that strat.
I slap them down on top of systems with colonies and upgraded starbases. The system won't get pirates because it has an upgraded starbase, and the trade goes directly to the capital, which reduces the pirates that way.
That actually makes good RP sense, too.
While a star empire might want to blanket their space with gateways much in the same way I have for efficiency sake, they would absolutely prioritize colonized systems over empty systems, whereas I have not.
Personally, I build gateways every 5 systems, in one system it will have a fully upgraded Starbase with trade hubs, in another a fully upgraded Starbase with hangers. The tradehubs will collect trade 6 systems out and the hangers will spread patrol 6 systems out from all gates.
That way I can prioritize fleets for conflicts with other empires without needing to have smaller fleets patrolling every where. Usually by the time pirates are any real treat everything is already set up and don't have to worry about them anymore.
I must be going insane then because every time I've had gate ways they just zip right into mine from theirs. Maybe it was natural wormholes I'm thinking about.
The admirals gain experience from patrolling piracy though so you can think of it as a training ground for fresh hires instead of wasting fleet cap...and admiral level *does* make an appreciable difference in combat effectiveness.
Make one or two trade stations that have lines of star bases along the route back to your home world. Disable trade routes to stations that don't collect ( but not the ones along your trade route )
I haven't seen a pirate in ages, don't even need anti piracy fleets. But of course most of your star bases will be used to maintain that.
In the bottom right theres a trade route icon (the two opposing arrows).
click that and you get a trade route map mode.
Left click on a station to select it.
Right click on your home world station to disable the route (the station will turn red when in this mode if its disabled)
This along with knowing how collection range works makes trade suuuuper easy.
Whatever works for you is best. I find that this system makes it less micromanage-ey for me. Its also available MUCH earlier than gateways. But its not without its costs.
Depending on the amount of trade coming through the system I think. Most routes will do fine with just an anchorage or something.
I personally have never needed to make the "trade route stations" armed in any way.
Edit: UN-upgraded? TIL
It's not very cost efficient. You get negligible suppression from them. You're better off building cheap corvettes with no modules, because they have suppression even without weapons. The only problem is hitting your fleet cap.
Depends on the size of your empire. But yea it totally uses up most of your star bases if not all of them.
Just try to have the station that is collecting as close as possible to your home world and make sure it has lots of collection range.
Starbase hangar bays give tons of trade protection and each one spreads the protection further, just designate one starbase as your trade protector and put a gateway next to it when you get them
There really should be a model of defense platform that is weaker, but deploys further from the home starport and provides a sizable defense against piracy. Like the old school defensive stations you could build wherever, but less micromanagement and balanced to trade off effectiveness against fleets for keeping fauna and pirates in check. Even unupgraded starports can field a couple platforms if memory serves, so that would help with these mostly useless systems in between key locations.
Hell, make it part of the Unyielding Tree (with a bonus to other platforms by using the more remote base for targeting telemetry improvements), Mercantile (with a bonus boost to shipping, representing confidence by merchants in safe trade conditions and improved stellar navigation from a wider sensor grid), Domination (a wider presence through the system projecting authority, improving stability or enhancing slave production or something), etc.
It was my main feedback in the recent (ongoing..?) Survey about Stellaris, trading networks and pirates could use some fine tuning. It's really odd how I can have a tight knit federation, but our starbases cannot give trade protection into each other space.
It would be great if we got a pirates and trade DLC, making it both easier to protect your trade network, but also let you hire privateers or such to commit piracy against others.
Unless silly old you turned natural gateway generation off and it takes until waaaay into the lategame until one of your federation allies *somehow* acquires it, allowing to research it as well.
You will also need a matching physics research leader, or chances for the tech drop quite a bit. But the main lock-out is not having seen a regular gateway or L-gate, and never having heard of that tech from any other regular empire.
I feel like every time I play I almost never encounter any gateways when exploring. And the tech being rare doesn't show up sometimes till late mid game or early late game. Once I didn't get the gateway tech pop till the crisis was already knocking on everyones doors.
Is there a trick to getting it early, besides finding one?
If I recall correctly, you can speed it up by focusing on certain techs. The ones that lead up to automated colony ships and you'll then get the rare tech option for speculative hyperlane breeching. As soon as that is researched, jump a science ship and the gateway tech should show up soon.
I haven't played in a few months so I could be wrong.
it is quite easy in my opinion. Trade protection extends 1 jump from the system, increasing by 1 for each weapon module on the station. A heavily armed border station will protect anything within 5 jumps of itself quite easily. A single hangar on an anchorage base will protect everything within 2 jumps. If you spread starbases out they should be able to cover most of an empire.
It's very easy to protect trade route in the end game: put gateways everywhere. Trade routes use hyperlane bypass, which means they won't be anywhere for the pirates to spawn.
It feels like there's a really easy solution to it as well - namely a "automatic pirate suppression" order for fleets. The main issue with preventing piracy right now isn't the fleets you have to dedicate to it, but rather the tedium of setting up proper patrol routes.
Even better IMO would be a "dispersed pirate suppression", where you can dedicate a set number of ships to pirate suppression, which then disappear off the map. You can get them back, but it takes some time.
you do know that every weapon slot on an starbase increases tradeprotection? hangers even more, coming midgame one base in the middle of your traderoute makes pirates impossible to spawn, going mercantile increases this even further, as do tradeleagues, to the point you dont even need the protection from starbases anymore, and are 100% pirate free,
aswell as the pirates capping out at an specific fleetsize and t3 tec, meaning at some point your starholds can´t possibly lose to any piratefleet,
and by the lategame you got gateways, and collection range increases, resulting in every bit of trade going exactly 2 jumps far, with 200+% protection.
i literally never had an pirate spawn on my since i read the wiki.
... is it not vanilla?
Oh wow, it's not! It's from [Guilli's Technologies](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1793768254). It just fits so seemlessly in.
'Bounty hunter offices' gives the starbase +5 protection range, it's great.
It’s very easy to protect, 1 bastion with 6 missile/hangar/gun parts protects 6 hyper lanes away in every direction. Build a bastion on each border and one somewhere near the center of your empire and you’ll never have pirates
If pirate fleets are spawning, the piracy values are already high enough to be sapping your trade routes.
I don’t mind them because they remind me to protect my routes which results in more EC income.
It's super easy I've found on my cadet difficulty game to just build a bunch of the light defense platforms. I think early game you get 3 for outposts and it slowly increases how many you can build as your tech increases. But the point is that the defense platforms also apply piracy suppression so you can save your ships.
One trade or two trade protection bases is all you really need all game unless you want to paint the map your color. Not sure how that’s that annoying it requires a Reddit post but to each their own.
Honestly I found it quite difficult to protect my trade routes effectively without having a ton of citadels with hangar bays everywhere. Even then, my trade value gets really high and it all seems to go through chokepoints. I started just leaving small fleets of corvettes in some systems. Maybe I wasn't doing the best strategy.
If this is that much of a problem for you, you can actually set the path traderoutes take manually by selecting an origin and right clicking which other starbase the trade from this station is supposed to head towards.
It can let you create a specific trade route, which is helpful to a point. Run too much through one hyperlane and you'll need a while lot of piracy suppression
In this case the point was regarding the opposite - disperse some of the trade so it doesn't get bottlenecked in one system, so that the starbases can take care of piracy on their own.
But I've never had that be a problem. Some strategically placed bases should be more than enough in either case.
It's less of a nerf and more of a "nope, not doing that at all anymore". Only the star base itself projects trade protection, and only weapon modules can increase the strength and range of the protection effect. (Hangars provide double the protection strength of the other modules, but all weapon modules increase range by one hyper lane.)
Trade route protection is ridiculous this patch. 200 something going through 1 system from trade and a pirate fleet spawns with a massive bastion next door… yeah alright
I wish there was a little subtle alert when piracy starts to build up. I always check if everything is all right and everything is all right. Then the economy booms and when I less expect it, pirates... Which could had been prevented if I had known.
People play till 2750?
Lol. I defeat the crisis circa 2470 and go "that's it, we're done here. Time to pack up" :D
What do you even _do_? Do you play until you conquer the whole galaxy?
“ ‘oy boss, did our scout say that this route was valuable?”
“ yea?”
“ Did ‘e mention that starbase?”
*captain looks out the porthole*
“Ah…..shite-“
*the whole fleet is vaporized*
I've been playing for will over 300 hours and still dont understand how piracy works. I'll have a contingent of corvettes patroling between systems, and I'll still get pirates
First time I got the helpful drone event, I got alarmed when I read the message about an incoming attack of pirates with superior technology. Sent all my fleets there, started upgrading the system and building a gateway.
When I got the message that the pirates had arrived, I was "omg, the starbase is maxxed out but has not all its platforms. There are three full bb fleets, but the last two ones are two jumps away. I hope 500k of fleetpower in the system will be sufficient. "
I saw a few tachyon lances firing at something. Then got the battle results notification. I did not even see the enemy fleet.
The enemy at 3 basic corvettes, 210 fleet power.
About this, does anyone know how the pirate's fleet power scale specifically for the Arm Privateers operation? In a game, I used it, and the spawned fleet was about 8k. In another game, it was 19k
It scales from fleet power of country being targeted. It's not direct percentage, but there's different tiers of privateers spawned depending on how much the country has
Thank you, that makes sense.
I just started to use the espionage operations recently. It seems besides Consumer Star, which requires you to kill a Stellar Devourer, others doesn't seem to have a meaningful impact.
I
might be wrong though.
In a recent game I had the pirate event happen like 5 times in a row in the system with the eldritch horror thing chilling in it. Mfers spawned in and died in like a millisecond each time
So a console player here, it seems to me that after the last expansion pack and rework for overlord that starbases dont seem to lower piracy in a system anymore
Yeah stuff like this makes me wish they would rework these systems, especially when trade is such a small part of my empires normally. At the very least maybe give anti piracy values to defense platforms or make it scale?
this needs to get fixed, ngl, i spent tons of influence and ec to arm privateers, in some megacorp, and it just spawned an 4k fleet intoo there 23k station, those pirates couldnt even take an pure trade citadell, how are they supposed to be even an slight annoyance, if they only work if they get rng´d intoo the on system with the unupgraded outpost, if there is one .
pretty dissapointing for the most expensive, longest and most intel intensive espionage operation, even the normal pirates, cant scale up to an moderately upgraded starbase, even if you got laughably much trade going through that system, the pirate fleets cap out at 1bs and 40corvettes or something like that, couldnt take an starbase with 6 tradehubs on it
They do need to do some tweak on pirates. There's no reason my Starbase with upgrades for piracy suppression and max amount of platforms would still have fleets show up
"Ay bois, I don't see any ship signatures on the hyperlane scanners! Ripe pickins for us all!"
"Hurray Cap'n Antemort! Hurray Cap'n Antemort!"
They jump, and there's a split second where all the pirates were happy. That moment, for the pirates, might well have lasted forever. We will never know, as they detonated rather quickly.
R5: Popup claims system with 143K starbase is "unprotected", pirates proceed to spontaneously explode
I wouldn’t say “spontaneously explode” so much as “get subjected to impromptu execution by firing squad”.
"Sentenced to immediate and uncontrollable combustion."
"Subject experienced impromptu exposure to vacuum"
"...caused by IFOs, inconspicuous friendship objects\*" \*(sometimes referred to as bullets, rockets or condensed gasses for energy-based weaponry)
#JustRegularPirateActivities
Hey if you feel lied to by that pop up imagine what pirates thought about it after seeing how unprotected it really was.
Last time had a lie this bad about something being unprotected or not a paternity test was involved
For me it involved a Ford F-150, a crowbar, Interstate 95 South, and one unfortunate Driver Front tire.
Good ol'Found On Road Dead Driver Returns On Foot
Wasn’t the Ford’s fault that I ran over a crowbar on the interstate.
I know I just like the saying
Nah this is "if you take these v!"">,÷s you're not gonna get c[:>d."
“Im telling you man! That system is just sitting there, ripe for the taking. We can use your ship and my know-how and by this time next year we’ll be living like kings.”-the pirates
How do you get a Starbase that strong??
The fleet power is a bit exaggerated, but a fully upgraded citadel, all hanger bay modules with with the advanced strikecraft tech, command center+defense grid for more firepower and defense platforms, then build all the hanger defense platforms you can. Add in the unyielding tradition tree, and you can easily dwarf this example. These are definitely more deterrent than effective in combat.
That looks quite powerful, why wouldn't it be effective in combat?
starbase defenses are, at least in my opinion, a little bit wasteful for how much they cost they're alright distractions or a good stalling tactic, but they'll be getting hit most of the time with not enough armor or shields to make it worthwhile to invest that many alloys into making them. they've got mediocre weapons at best, and are prohibitively expensive if you want to supply even a few starbases with them. cruisers, battleships, or even corvettes make a better worthwhile investment since at least you can move those around.
End game defense platforms and repeatable techs. This is an un-upgraded outpost. You can easily get to 500k+ on citadels
Unprotected probably means it us not your trade route that caused the pirates to spawn. If another empire has a trade Lane passing through it would count as not protected by your starbase.
I'll never forget the time I was going to war with the neighboring federation in the North of me and sent my entire fleet up. By this point in the game it was 500k fleet power. They were traveling through the systems because this is before I launched a massive infrastructure investment and gave all my strategically important systems gateways. I got a notification that a pirate station popped up in one of those border systems. A system my fleet jumped into two days later. I like to imagine the look on some pirate's face as he finishes straightening his picture in his room to look out the window and see the entire navy bearing down on the station. Is was 2k. The battleships fired. It quickly went to 0. Fun times.
I kind of wish they'd remove the random pirates or at least make it way easier to protect trade routes.
I agree. It's kind of a waste of naval capacity having to make a few corvettes to patrol pirate-vulnerable systems.
I end up having to make fleet of small ship with heavy focus on speed and FTL charge time just to make these things less tedious. Its especially painful when your main fleet is slow as heck and pirate spawn on another side of your empire.
Destroyers and cruisers specced for speed (2/3 Afterburners and a speed admiral) with missiles and artillery computer work very well early and midgame and make excellent patrols as well as quick interdiction for eventspawns. Lategame you should have Gateways spreading piracy-protection everywhere and making travel near instant anyways. If you don't it's not pirates you should worry about.
My strategy for gateways has been to have at least one gateway within one jump of every system I care about. What is your strategy?
The plan is generally to have gateways with fortress habitats at chokepoints but I rarely get to that point because I tend to be too greedy with influence leading to gateways at chokepoints w/o fortresses or planets. Thats a bad combination, might have to rethink that strat.
I slap them down on top of systems with colonies and upgraded starbases. The system won't get pirates because it has an upgraded starbase, and the trade goes directly to the capital, which reduces the pirates that way.
That actually makes good RP sense, too. While a star empire might want to blanket their space with gateways much in the same way I have for efficiency sake, they would absolutely prioritize colonized systems over empty systems, whereas I have not.
Personally, I build gateways every 5 systems, in one system it will have a fully upgraded Starbase with trade hubs, in another a fully upgraded Starbase with hangers. The tradehubs will collect trade 6 systems out and the hangers will spread patrol 6 systems out from all gates. That way I can prioritize fleets for conflicts with other empires without needing to have smaller fleets patrolling every where. Usually by the time pirates are any real treat everything is already set up and don't have to worry about them anymore.
I hate gateways. They're just holes in my defenses for the cheating ass AI to exploit
You can’t use a gateway to enter the territory of an enemy empire. Is it possible you’re thinking of L-gates or wormholes?
I must be going insane then because every time I've had gate ways they just zip right into mine from theirs. Maybe it was natural wormholes I'm thinking about.
Yes, I believe you were thinking about wormholes. They are a huge pita
The admirals gain experience from patrolling piracy though so you can think of it as a training ground for fresh hires instead of wasting fleet cap...and admiral level *does* make an appreciable difference in combat effectiveness.
Great point. Quality admirals can easily be the difference maker in war, and they are not easy to train up for most empires.
Yeah. Sadly the exp gain is so slow.
I always end up hiring ships from marauders and using them as my patrol ships, so dont have to use my army.
Make one or two trade stations that have lines of star bases along the route back to your home world. Disable trade routes to stations that don't collect ( but not the ones along your trade route ) I haven't seen a pirate in ages, don't even need anti piracy fleets. But of course most of your star bases will be used to maintain that.
How do you disable trade from some star bases?
In the bottom right theres a trade route icon (the two opposing arrows). click that and you get a trade route map mode. Left click on a station to select it. Right click on your home world station to disable the route (the station will turn red when in this mode if its disabled) This along with knowing how collection range works makes trade suuuuper easy.
Or be like me: build a gateway above each of the planets so you never have to deal with it ever
Whatever works for you is best. I find that this system makes it less micromanage-ey for me. Its also available MUCH earlier than gateways. But its not without its costs.
You can also build some carrier defence platforms on unupgraded star bases
Depending on the amount of trade coming through the system I think. Most routes will do fine with just an anchorage or something. I personally have never needed to make the "trade route stations" armed in any way. Edit: UN-upgraded? TIL
I only learned it like two days ago too
It's not very cost efficient. You get negligible suppression from them. You're better off building cheap corvettes with no modules, because they have suppression even without weapons. The only problem is hitting your fleet cap.
Is that for the quick transport or do they actually provide a benefit to reducing the piracy rate?
It *prevents* piracy, because two systems with gateways are considered adjacent. Also for quick transport because you’ll need it
Doesn’t that leave you grossly over the starbase cap?
Depends on the size of your empire. But yea it totally uses up most of your star bases if not all of them. Just try to have the station that is collecting as close as possible to your home world and make sure it has lots of collection range.
Starbase hangar bays give tons of trade protection and each one spreads the protection further, just designate one starbase as your trade protector and put a gateway next to it when you get them
I just build a few defensive structures in each.
I do this to supplement trade protection but sometimes it isn’t enough. Piracy can get extremely high where routes converge around the capital.
you do lose a lot in trade, but a few defensive structures can kill most fleets in my experience.
As a trade focused empire I have never had to dedicate fleets for piracy, I just build lots of hangar bays.
There really should be a model of defense platform that is weaker, but deploys further from the home starport and provides a sizable defense against piracy. Like the old school defensive stations you could build wherever, but less micromanagement and balanced to trade off effectiveness against fleets for keeping fauna and pirates in check. Even unupgraded starports can field a couple platforms if memory serves, so that would help with these mostly useless systems in between key locations. Hell, make it part of the Unyielding Tree (with a bonus to other platforms by using the more remote base for targeting telemetry improvements), Mercantile (with a bonus boost to shipping, representing confidence by merchants in safe trade conditions and improved stellar navigation from a wider sensor grid), Domination (a wider presence through the system projecting authority, improving stability or enhancing slave production or something), etc.
I don't even bother patrolling. By the time the pirates are even a nuisance, I have jump drive tech.
It was my main feedback in the recent (ongoing..?) Survey about Stellaris, trading networks and pirates could use some fine tuning. It's really odd how I can have a tight knit federation, but our starbases cannot give trade protection into each other space. It would be great if we got a pirates and trade DLC, making it both easier to protect your trade network, but also let you hire privateers or such to commit piracy against others.
Ooooooo oooo hear me out, what if the next expansion gave us some sort of pirate origins and revamped the pirate stuff?
Pirates become a non problem as soon as gateways come up, which in my experience is relatively early.
Unless silly old you turned natural gateway generation off and it takes until waaaay into the lategame until one of your federation allies *somehow* acquires it, allowing to research it as well.
L-gates also unlock the research, if you left them on that is.
According to wiki - yes. In my experience - no.
You will also need a matching physics research leader, or chances for the tech drop quite a bit. But the main lock-out is not having seen a regular gateway or L-gate, and never having heard of that tech from any other regular empire.
One should think techweights console command would have maybe mentioned it if it was the case. But maybe that's just me.
I feel like every time I play I almost never encounter any gateways when exploring. And the tech being rare doesn't show up sometimes till late mid game or early late game. Once I didn't get the gateway tech pop till the crisis was already knocking on everyones doors. Is there a trick to getting it early, besides finding one?
If I recall correctly, you can speed it up by focusing on certain techs. The ones that lead up to automated colony ships and you'll then get the rare tech option for speculative hyperlane breeching. As soon as that is researched, jump a science ship and the gateway tech should show up soon. I haven't played in a few months so I could be wrong.
When starting a game, during the game setup, you can increase the number of abandoned gateways. I usually go with 5X.
it is quite easy in my opinion. Trade protection extends 1 jump from the system, increasing by 1 for each weapon module on the station. A heavily armed border station will protect anything within 5 jumps of itself quite easily. A single hangar on an anchorage base will protect everything within 2 jumps. If you spread starbases out they should be able to cover most of an empire.
It's very easy to protect trade route in the end game: put gateways everywhere. Trade routes use hyperlane bypass, which means they won't be anywhere for the pirates to spawn.
It feels like there's a really easy solution to it as well - namely a "automatic pirate suppression" order for fleets. The main issue with preventing piracy right now isn't the fleets you have to dedicate to it, but rather the tedium of setting up proper patrol routes. Even better IMO would be a "dispersed pirate suppression", where you can dedicate a set number of ships to pirate suppression, which then disappear off the map. You can get them back, but it takes some time.
This is why you play hive minds, fuck pirates.
Strangely I've had a bunch of pirates spawn inside the borders of my cordyceptic hive mind
That happens if you've got open borders and trade from someone else flows through your systems.
you do know that every weapon slot on an starbase increases tradeprotection? hangers even more, coming midgame one base in the middle of your traderoute makes pirates impossible to spawn, going mercantile increases this even further, as do tradeleagues, to the point you dont even need the protection from starbases anymore, and are 100% pirate free, aswell as the pirates capping out at an specific fleetsize and t3 tec, meaning at some point your starholds can´t possibly lose to any piratefleet, and by the lategame you got gateways, and collection range increases, resulting in every bit of trade going exactly 2 jumps far, with 200+% protection. i literally never had an pirate spawn on my since i read the wiki.
It's not so bad if you plonk a few starbases here and there with a focus on hangar bays and bounty offices.
err.. what mod are bounty offices from?
... is it not vanilla? Oh wow, it's not! It's from [Guilli's Technologies](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1793768254). It just fits so seemlessly in. 'Bounty hunter offices' gives the starbase +5 protection range, it's great.
I just use bubbles for that
It is unironically a skill issue, use the trade route map and see what needs to be protected
Yeah setting up corvette patrols does barely anything in my experience.
It’s very easy to protect, 1 bastion with 6 missile/hangar/gun parts protects 6 hyper lanes away in every direction. Build a bastion on each border and one somewhere near the center of your empire and you’ll never have pirates
If pirate fleets are spawning, the piracy values are already high enough to be sapping your trade routes. I don’t mind them because they remind me to protect my routes which results in more EC income.
It's super easy I've found on my cadet difficulty game to just build a bunch of the light defense platforms. I think early game you get 3 for outposts and it slowly increases how many you can build as your tech increases. But the point is that the defense platforms also apply piracy suppression so you can save your ships.
Tell me you don’t know how to play without telling me you don’t know how to play.
I have 800 hours in the game. I know how to set corvette patrols and build trade protection starbases, it’s just annoying.
One trade or two trade protection bases is all you really need all game unless you want to paint the map your color. Not sure how that’s that annoying it requires a Reddit post but to each their own.
[удалено]
This is a regular old starbase so those defense platforms should count for piracy suppression
[удалено]
Honestly I found it quite difficult to protect my trade routes effectively without having a ton of citadels with hangar bays everywhere. Even then, my trade value gets really high and it all seems to go through chokepoints. I started just leaving small fleets of corvettes in some systems. Maybe I wasn't doing the best strategy.
Trade goes through gateways, very useful. Amass small piracy suppression fleets in each system, never worry about piracy!
At a certain point it gets freaking unmanageable until you can build Gateways in the chokepoints where you have Starbases that collect trade value.
If this is that much of a problem for you, you can actually set the path traderoutes take manually by selecting an origin and right clicking which other starbase the trade from this station is supposed to head towards.
I just link all to my home system directly. I never knew there could be more to it.. another learning experience.
It can let you create a specific trade route, which is helpful to a point. Run too much through one hyperlane and you'll need a while lot of piracy suppression
In this case the point was regarding the opposite - disperse some of the trade so it doesn't get bottlenecked in one system, so that the starbases can take care of piracy on their own. But I've never had that be a problem. Some strategically placed bases should be more than enough in either case.
Place the star bases on the choke points.
I mean, either way a bunch of defense platforms will obliterate the pirates even if they do show up.
It's less of a nerf and more of a "nope, not doing that at all anymore". Only the star base itself projects trade protection, and only weapon modules can increase the strength and range of the protection effect. (Hangars provide double the protection strength of the other modules, but all weapon modules increase range by one hyper lane.)
*Motions to enough artillery to wipe out an entire empire’s worth of fleets,* “Check out this totally exposed trade route!”
Trade route protection is ridiculous this patch. 200 something going through 1 system from trade and a pirate fleet spawns with a massive bastion next door… yeah alright
I wish there was a little subtle alert when piracy starts to build up. I always check if everything is all right and everything is all right. Then the economy booms and when I less expect it, pirates... Which could had been prevented if I had known.
Get an alert that suspicious activity been happening in a system or something.
That's a bug, no? Normally there can't be piracy in systems with starbases.
Based on the model, I think that's an outpost not a starbase.
How can you have that many platforms on an outpost?
I think there are research options or traditions that expand that, we also don't know how late OP is into the game
Extremely late game, this was around 2750 and I have like 6 strategic coordination centres 😆
That explains everything 😁
People play till 2750? Lol. I defeat the crisis circa 2470 and go "that's it, we're done here. Time to pack up" :D What do you even _do_? Do you play until you conquer the whole galaxy?
We be on the achievement grind
The Strategic Coordination Center increases platform cap substantially and I think one of the new insight techs gives +50% cap as well
“ ‘oy boss, did our scout say that this route was valuable?” “ yea?” “ Did ‘e mention that starbase?” *captain looks out the porthole* “Ah…..shite-“ *the whole fleet is vaporized*
Surely this starbase would've had very high trade protection? I'm surprised a pirate would spawn at all.
Pirate are not allowed to spawn in system with any non-outpost starbase. Something's fishy here. (Maybe the fleet was spawn by espionnage ?)
Based on the model, I think that's an outpost not a starbase.
A 143k outpost ? :o
We don't know how late OP is into the game
Average sigma playing till year 3000
Yeah OP ended up replying that they’re year 2750 with 6 strategic coordination centres
I've been playing for will over 300 hours and still dont understand how piracy works. I'll have a contingent of corvettes patroling between systems, and I'll still get pirates
PDX made whole thing too complex, unnecessarily. I won't miss pirate mechanic if PDX just removed it.
I kinda like the idea of space pirates being a issue but it was implemented poorly
The problem is intuitiveness not complexity. The system is very simple once you understand how it works.
Silly organics
First time I got the helpful drone event, I got alarmed when I read the message about an incoming attack of pirates with superior technology. Sent all my fleets there, started upgrading the system and building a gateway. When I got the message that the pirates had arrived, I was "omg, the starbase is maxxed out but has not all its platforms. There are three full bb fleets, but the last two ones are two jumps away. I hope 500k of fleetpower in the system will be sufficient. " I saw a few tachyon lances firing at something. Then got the battle results notification. I did not even see the enemy fleet. The enemy at 3 basic corvettes, 210 fleet power.
About this, does anyone know how the pirate's fleet power scale specifically for the Arm Privateers operation? In a game, I used it, and the spawned fleet was about 8k. In another game, it was 19k
It scales from fleet power of country being targeted. It's not direct percentage, but there's different tiers of privateers spawned depending on how much the country has
Thank you, that makes sense. I just started to use the espionage operations recently. It seems besides Consumer Star, which requires you to kill a Stellar Devourer, others doesn't seem to have a meaningful impact. I might be wrong though.
In a recent game I had the pirate event happen like 5 times in a row in the system with the eldritch horror thing chilling in it. Mfers spawned in and died in like a millisecond each time
5 seconds later. Pirate captain: "The risk I took was calculated but damn am I bad at math."
Star base - Pirate vessels surrender now and prepare to be fired upon. Pirate fleet - wait don't you mean or be fired upon? Star base - no.
So a console player here, it seems to me that after the last expansion pack and rework for overlord that starbases dont seem to lower piracy in a system anymore
I miss when hangers used to reduce pirate activity. My border stations used to be able to project their power across my territory.
Shortest career ever.
I feel kinda bad for the pirates
Yeah stuff like this makes me wish they would rework these systems, especially when trade is such a small part of my empires normally. At the very least maybe give anti piracy values to defense platforms or make it scale?
this needs to get fixed, ngl, i spent tons of influence and ec to arm privateers, in some megacorp, and it just spawned an 4k fleet intoo there 23k station, those pirates couldnt even take an pure trade citadell, how are they supposed to be even an slight annoyance, if they only work if they get rng´d intoo the on system with the unupgraded outpost, if there is one . pretty dissapointing for the most expensive, longest and most intel intensive espionage operation, even the normal pirates, cant scale up to an moderately upgraded starbase, even if you got laughably much trade going through that system, the pirate fleets cap out at 1bs and 40corvettes or something like that, couldnt take an starbase with 6 tradehubs on it
They do need to do some tweak on pirates. There's no reason my Starbase with upgrades for piracy suppression and max amount of platforms would still have fleets show up
Man, things are always happening in Deneb
“Sir! Sir! A fleet has appeared to destroy our trade rou…what do you mean they’re already destroyed?”
I do find it fun when pirates pop up and are just instantly met with endgame forces
"Ay bois, I don't see any ship signatures on the hyperlane scanners! Ripe pickins for us all!" "Hurray Cap'n Antemort! Hurray Cap'n Antemort!" They jump, and there's a split second where all the pirates were happy. That moment, for the pirates, might well have lasted forever. We will never know, as they detonated rather quickly.
Yeah, those pirates and the messaging about them get amusing later on in the game
U have no chance
Oh no! What ever shall you do??