Is there anyway to delay pirates?

[Retreat1970]

Most my research points come from spaceports. Most my scientists are on spaceports. I make a size 80 research station to get location bonuses. If it blows up it blows up. Easy to replace.

I honestly have never had an agent destroy my spaceports. Ever.

[moonraker65]

But you can get other empires agents blowing them up whilst under construction which can be very annoying

[Serenitis]

ORIGINAL: Retreat1970
I honestly have never had an agent destroy my spaceports. Ever.

Lucky you.
Pirate spies are trivial to get to comically OP levels which the AI just spams you death with. And you can do absolutely nothing about it.
Small ports and research bases seem to be a favourite target for sabotage, followed by mines and anything that is currently being built.
I've lost a few medium ports to sabotage, but so far not a large.
And no amount of counter intel agents can stop a +250% saboteur.

I lost patience with stuff like this long ago, and as soon as something like this starts up I just open the editor and kill every pirate spy in existence. I refuse to deal with that kind of BS when there is no means to stop it "in game".

[Retreat1970]

Lucky you.

I've played a lot of games. It's not luck. But I do make it a priority to eliminate pirates asap. If an agent is bugging me, I'll buy them off, but then they are #1 on my list.

[Lucian]

You cant eliminate pirates before you research FTL.

I've never had a Medium or Large starport destroyed by sabotage, not entirely anyway. But I have had many small starports or research stations (along with my only scientist, the AI loves choosing the place where my scientist is) completely blown up after pissing pirates off with the accept/reject spamming strategy at the start of the game. There is definitely a price to be paid for using that strategy which I guess is a good thing.

Now I just pay them off and bide my time until losing a single station is no longer a massive catastrophe OR until I have something better than a small spaceport. Then I take sweet revenge.

[Retreat1970]

That sounds like a good plan if you're having trouble. I start with a med or large SP. Sure it costs more, but it's worth it (as you've found out). I usually don't build anything (except SP) until I have warp, unless my homeworld is a moon. A research station isn't something I worry about at all. A small bonus to research isn't critical (and I'm saying this as an Atuuk lol), and if you lose one it shouldn't be a catastrophe as you say. Keep scientists on SP, until later.

As far as agents go, there are no OP agents before warp, but they can be better than yours. Pay them off if you have to. Warp comes quickly. Then find em [:)].

[Tanaka]

If you use the AI Improvement mod it limits their reach.

[WCG]

I like the pirates, but I realize that's just personal preference. However, in previous games, I'd set pirates to "many" (which meant they were a big problem in the early game), but when I eventually encountered other empires, those empires were quite weak. I figured that was at least partly because of the numerous pirates.

So, in my current game, I set pirates to "few" and "distant." (I left them at normal difficulty, though I increased the overall game difficulty and aggression a bit.)

The results surprised me. Pirates didn't arrive until after I'd already built a strong spaceport. I didn't have any ships built yet and (obviously) nothing else in my solar system to protect, so I told them to shove off when they demanded protection money. They attacked the spaceport, which was pretty much suicidal. I destroyed one ship and drove the others off.

I haven't seen them since. On the diplomacy screen, they're not angry with me (they're just "cautious"), so they're not sabotaging my stations or anything. It's weird (and too easy, actually).

I've only encountered two other empires, so far, and they're both a lot weaker than me. So I'm not sure if setting the pirates to "few" helped them out at all. Of course, not paying protection money - and not needing to defend my empire against continual pirate attacks - helped me out hugely. So I might have made the game easier, when I was trying to make other empires a bigger threat.

Anyway, if you don't like pirates, you might try that. On the other hand, this might just be pure luck, too. I don't have pirates anywhere nearby, and the first bunch just happened to show up when I was perfectly set for them. That's not likely to happen again, I suppose. I really don't know.

[NephilimNexus]

Load your homeworld Spaceport with Boarding Pods and let the Pirates attack you. Then scrap their captured ships for large amounts of free tech points.

You're welcome.

Honestly never had any problem dealing with them, even on a PreWarp Empire start. Whenever they first appear they will head directly to your homeworld and threaten you. If you accept the fly off and if you refuse they'll try to raid you homeworld.

Here's the thing: They started off with only 2 small raiding ships. If you're Spaceport has enough firepower to fend them off (and unless you did something really stupid like letting the AI design it for you, then your Starport can easily beat them) they won't come back for years. Either their 2 puny raiders will die or get driven off. Either way, they'll go look for easier prey after that, and even once they find some Neutral planets to raid, again it will take them many years to reach a positive income, fuel and resource flow to even begin building up enough ships to pose any kind of real threat.

Simply put, unless you've gone out of your way to set them to Strong, starting NPC pirates are paper dragons. They blow a lot of smoke but the reality is that they'll crumble at the slightest touch.