Pirate AI is unable to expand to more than one world.

[King Doom]

The pirates in my latest game managed to build the criminal network that allows them to take over a planet. They do this in a system with four independant worlds. I realised something was up when I found three different colony ships the pirates had either found or captured and had just left in empty systems.

As a test I added pirate colony ships above the three independant worlds in the pirate home system and left it for an hour. I come back and those three ships are still in orbit. Since the worlds are boskaran and the pirates are ikkuro I added three colony ships from the boskaran empire, gave them to the pirates and left them. Check back and nope, all three ships are still above those worlds.

After the AI pirate faction builds the criminal network it is apparently incapable of obtaining more planets despite the criminal network stating it allows pirates to build colony ships and become pseudo empires.

[radioactiveman]

I see the AI expand all the time. But expansion is very low on its list of 'things to do' it seems.

Most games with 15 some odd AI's usually 2-3 expand some in the first 50 years, the rest seem to take another 50-100 to get moving. (THis is with them set to Excellent home systems and 'Starting' age. If you use Pre-Warp double how long it takes them to get moving.

[King Doom]

I said Pirate AI, not regular. The normal empires all expand properly, but not pirate AI. It gets one world and then stops, even if you give it colony ships on top of colonisable worlds.

[radioactiveman]

Ahh my bad. Guess I have never paid attention to the pirate AI colonizing planets.

[Deathball]

As I recall Pirates cannot colonize planets, when they send a colony ship it will just found another independent world.