My thoughts on returning to Distant Worlds

[MartialDoctor]

It’s been a while since I wrote on these forums and it’s been a bit nostalgic getting back into Distant Worlds. Distant Worlds has always been an incredible gem of a game, although one that needed a great deal of polish. Distant Worlds 2 has polished the original incredibly and I had very good first impressions when playing it.

Now that Distant Worlds 2 has become more stable, I’ve begun to play it more frequently. I first want to say that it’s impressive how many aspects have improved in DW2. From the UI to the way research works to AI improvements, there are really vast changes that are very noticeable, especially after spending some time to go back to the original to compare.

Having said that, though, there are a number of aspects that I actually feel have digressed from the original. There are also a couple that have done complete 180s to the original and are now a bit overextended in the opposite direction. To sum it up, I feel DW2 is three steps forward and one step backwards compared to the original DW.

Note that everything I am listing here was played on Chaos aggression and Extreme difficulty, both in the original DW and in DW2. I play with all DLCs for both games and, for DW, I play with Icemania’s AI mod for AI performance and behavior changes.

So, here is my list of issues that I’ve seen in the new DW2 (please bare with me on the length; I want to be thorough). First I’ll start with those that were better in the original Distant Worlds.

1. Lack of race uniqueness (AI behavior): Firstly, I’ve noticed that races have less characteristics than before. This is unfortunate and may be part of the reason for the following issues that I’ve seen in their behavior.
Although the races all have unique traits, as they do in the original series, I’ve noticed a very apparent change in how they act. Overall, races are extremely passive; in all the games of DW2 that I’ve played thus far, no one has ever declared war on me, even at times where they definitely should have. Also, races that would, in the original DW, have been very friendly from the start, are more neutral. Basically, all race behaviors seem to be very similar, and very passive, from what I’ve seen.
In my last game, playing as Ikkuro, I had borders with the Teekan, Dhayut and Mortalen. The Mortalen, surprisingly, asked me for a trade. Mortalen have always been unfriendly and aggressive, although cautious, so not reckless. I was very surprised they wanted to trade early on… usually they are hard friends to make. The Teekan were the next to ask, which was not surprising, although they weren’t as friendly as they would act in the original. The Dhayut, despite being “angry” with me and having an extremely huge military compared to me, didn’t declare war at all.
Compare that to the original DW, where race difference are very apparent. In my last game of playing DW again (I’ve been playing the original again as well), as the Zenox, I met the Acktarians, who befriended me and signed treaties with me fairly early on. Shortly afterwards, I met the Boskara who, almost immediately, declared war and sent a huge fleet in to completely decimate my homeworld. Basically, races that are more cautious and passive, act that way. Races that are aggressive and reckless act that way as well. Each race has a personality and acts in that manner.
Overall, in DW2, I just feel as if the races don’t act as much like their personalities would dictate. My guess is this is partly due to removing some of the characteristics that they have, which I’m a bit disappointed in. The other is they don’t seem to act on their characteristics as much.

2. Diplomatic relations too simple: In the original DW, there were many more factors that contributed to how an AI faction would perceive you.
Firstly, government and race relations were much larger factors. If both of these were both strongly positive, you could come out with an instant friend. If both negative, an instant enemy. This created very interesting dynamics between factions.
Next, there seemed to be more interesting mechanics affecting relations in DW. Nearby neighbors would start coveting your resources with time (although I think it was a bit excessive, it was still an interesting mechanic). Also, bases in other players territory would have a stronger effect. You typically would want to sell them to the other faction or risk a war breaking out.
Trade embargos would happen frequently with races that disliked you but weren’t as aggressive.
Just, overall, some interesting mechanics that I haven’t seen in DW2.
The only affect I’ve seen so far is a very small affect from a base in an enemy territory and then a, strangely, strongly negative affect from exploration ships in another territory… the latter makes no sense. A war armada in an enemy territory, I can understand, but exploration ships? And I’ll point out that, despite those large negatives, the aggressive Dhayut still didn’t not declare war.

3. Gifts too powerful: Gift giving should help improve relations so that a faction who is close to wanting to sign a treaty will do so. For those who want to prevent a war, it should help keep an enemy from declaring one (at least for a time being). In DW2, gift giving can literally turn an enemy into a friend quite easily; you can buy friends, more or less. It’s far too powerful. Between the frequency that you can give gifts (so that you can give a gift before the first one completely expires), to the fact that the positive factor is really powerful (since other diplomatic factors, such as race and government affects, have been made much lower compared to the original), to the fact that gift giving also gives a long term increase, you can literally turn a faction who dislikes you, and is moving towards a really negative stance, to one who really likes you and is willing to sign treaties with you. It really does not work well in it’s current state. I actually limit myself from using it much as I feel it’s an OP “ability” in it’s current form.
In addition, it’s far too easy to buy off independent colonies so that they are more than happy to sign treaties and, ultimately, let you settle them.
Both of these were handled much better in the original DW. For the former, gift giving would help but the other factors in that game were much stronger so that they didn’t make a huge difference, as they do in DW2. For the latter, I much preferred the way that independents were handled, where the race preferences for each other was what determined the chance of colonizing.

4. Economy, especially private, makes too much: The private economy makes far too much money in DW2. I believe this is due to an overall change in the economy, in general, as we make more money than in the original. Things cost much less in DW2, which makes the economic aspect a bit less challenging, especially playing on PreWarp. In addition, the private economy isn’t even dented by how many bases you build; you can freely build bases anywhere without even checking it. In the original, the economy was more tight and you had to at least pay attention to the private economy as you could overextend it if you were to buy too many bases or build too expensive bases.

5. Pirates are easier: Pirates in the original DW are freaking harsh! They can even become as powerful, if not more powerful, than a main faction! They can beat you down if you didn’t pay their protection and you’d have to be prepared. If you did pay it, they would very obviously grow in strength and, as they got bigger, you had to pay larger fees (I believe that is right; I’m assuming that’s why the protection fees go up).
In addition, and I’ll add that this is a really bad mechanic, pirates will sign non-aggression treaties with you after you pay them for long enough. This makes absolutely zero sense. Why would a pirate faction stop charging you for protection and just befriend you? Not only that, they never ask for more protection as they grow in size. I have also disallowed signing non-aggression treaties with pirates as I feel it’s another OP “ability.”
Basically, I really miss the pirates of the original.

6. PreWarp start doesn’t feel like PreWarp: I loved the PreWarp start in the original. You had a small main homeworld, with some basic tech, and then you had to build a few explorers and go out to discover the technology so you could actually research hyperdrives, which also took a lot to research. In addition, once you researched hyperdrives, pirates immediately came to “greet” you. As your colony was very small, you really had to manage your economy well and be careful of what you build. You also had to decide if you would tax your home world in order to get necessary funds or to bite the bullet to give your homeworld a big population boom to be better in the long run. There really was a feeling of starting off from nothing here.
In DW2, you don’t get that feeling at all. You can research hyperdrives from the start and your homeworld is already fairly large. You just have no techs at all, rather than basic techs. To me, it just feels like you’re starting with less tech. It doesn’t feel like you are a small faction just getting into space and have to find your way.

Now, there are also a couple factors which were changed drastically from the original and I feel went too far.

1. Spies not useful: Spies used to be all powerful and could do everything quite easily. Now, they are the oppositive (again, this is all on extreme difficulty that I’m comparing). Most of my spying ends in failure and, not only that, almost all failures end in capture. Now, I’m actually all for the decreased spy success; it was far too powerful in the original. However, the problem is that spy captures is far too frequent. I think I saw only one time where my spy failed but escaped. All other ones ended up in my spy being captured.
To make matters worse, almost every time that I buy my spy back, he becomes a double agent and is almost worthless.
So, the result being in that I use almost all of my agents for counterspying since the enemy agents will cause much havoc if I don’t.
This may be a difficulty level issue but, either way, I feel that spy capturing (not failure chance) should be reduced significantly. Spies should fail easily but only rarely get captured. In addition, captured spies should rarely get the double agent trait. In this way, if you pay the ransom for your spy, he’s still a capable spy to use.

2. Factions don’t value bases: In the original DW, buying a mining, resort, etc base in disputed territory was extremely expensive. So expensive to the point that there was no point in buying it. In DW2, it’s the opposite. They are extremely cheap. Even if the mining base is on a rare resource, the AI will sell it to you for pennies if it’s in your territory.
This should change. The AI needs to value it’s bases. Bases should be more expensive to trade. If they are on rare resources or really high level scenery / research areas, they should be extremely expensive to trade, to the point being you’d have to sell an arm and a leg in order to get the AI to sell it.

Finally, I will mention that stability seems to be an issue. Despite my top notch rig, I still get lag issues. Although, with the latest beta patches, that seems to have improved. I’m sure the performance issues will continue to be worked on.

Okay, that’s everything that I comes to mind. I hope that these ideas can be helpful for Eric and team (I’m assuming there is a larger team now).

I want to reiterate that there have been massive improvements in DW2 compared to DW. I’m stating these all simply as I hope they can be helpful.

For me personally, for the above reasons, DW is more immersive for me and I’m spending more time in that right now as my Distant Worlds itch has been renewed. My hope is that DW2 will continue to make improvements and really become a truly unique and incredible experience! Either way, I will continue to support Distant Worlds as it moves forward. It’s truly becoming the gem of a game that I hoped it would become way back from the time I bought the original game.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I would say that all of those points are valid and well laid out. I agree that the economy in general is too easy to control and there are too little issues that generally pops up as a result of it. I also agree that factions need more nuanced characteristics and different play stiles, not only from a diplomatic point of view but also in how they expand, use resources and conduct warfare or lack there off.

I also feel that the galaxy in many ways are too peaceful. Aggressive races are not aggressive enough. Of course they should not attack just for the sake of attacking, but if there are no real lack of resources then why should you fight over them, that is an issue in and of itself.

Wars are generally fought for two reasons, resources or philosophical differences. And I think the game in many ways lack both of these reasons in many ways.

I still really like this game and continually play it and find it really difficult to go back the DW Universe. I have not played Universe since DW2 was released and can't see myself going back despite some of the flaws of DW2.

I just hope the game will develop and become a more tight experience like DW was over time. I do think that both economy and diplomacy will need some fleshing out so conflict feels more justified and overall economy more challenging.

[Foraven]

All good points. The game is getting better, but so many issues makes it rather dull and too easy. Pirates are too easy to befriend and they stop taxing us once they have any treaty. Other factions have the same problem, they are too easy to befriend or at least keep them happy, they rarely declare war unless we really go out of our way to make them hate us..

[thegreybetween]

It is always fascinating reading the different things that people consider good/bad aspects of a game. Like, literally every one of the criticisms in the post above this are things I consider positives. I feel like war is a fail state, and appreciate strategy games that actually make a diplomatic path viable. My biggest gripe with DW2 is that the diplomacy options are relatively sparse. We have like 50 weapons trees and deep military management options, while we have a single tiered diplomacy tech (per race) and our AI options boil down to "tell me when to throw money at people". While it is true (and appreciated!) that we can befriend pirates/empires, there is very little that we can do with that friendship in a meaningful way. Diplomatic relationships are very hollow, and the "there can be only one" victory model essentially means that even our staunchest allies are, in fact, opponents. But rather than making the galaxy more overtly hostile, I'd love to see deeper options for ways to leverage those relationships and invite more non-military conflict into the game - alliances, internal faction strife, etc. I want my wars to be more than resource squabbles or map-painting exercises. Let the Shakturi be such an existential threat that the player empire can't feasibly "go it alone" and even those @$$hole Mortalen next door work WITH us to see another sunrise.

That said, I do completely agree with the criticism that the gift system is pretty bad. Throwing money at empires is pretty much the only meaningful way to establish a positive enough relationship to begin worthwhile treaties. And with enough cash, you can buy all the friends to want. It feels very hollow and game-y. There should be more ways to positively impact a relationship than just gifting - things like liberation wars (where offensive action against one empire will bolster your relations with another if they are in conflict). It would be awesome if we had the equivalent of espionage missions for our ambassadors - goodwill campaigns, cultural exchanges, shared projects - which had a limited success chance modified by ambassador abilities and had results that benefitted the factions and their relationship. And YES, I agree that it should be much more difficult to win over empires with severely negative opinions. Let them refuse gifts and take insult that we even tried offering them money. Let them capture and ransom our ambassadors. Imagine how cool it would be to have an espionage mission to essentially smuggle an ambassador into an empire under deep cover, with ambassador missions to covertly improve relations under severe risk of detection and fallout. Way more dramatic than "Oh look, another Boskaran. Time to beef up the defense fleet."

Anyway, please don't interpret this as a dismissal of your criticisms. I think that a grand strategy game like this really shines when it can allow each of us to pursue the stories we want. If you want deeper aggression and more war options, I believe you should have them and I support it. I'm mostly just chiming in as a reminder to the devs that there are those of us looking for different stories, too. I don't want "more war, more enemies, less diplomacy" to pass for a consensus and lose our already limited options for satisfying "peace play".

More meaningful wars. More meaningful peace. More meaningful DW2. Good times.

[Foraven]

It is always fascinating reading the different things that people consider good/bad aspects of a game. Like, literally every one of the criticisms in the post above this are things I consider positives.

The problem is, without the conflicts, this game is pretty empty. There is no much else to do.

That said, I do completely agree with the criticism that the gift system is pretty bad. Throwing money at empires is pretty much the only meaningful way to establish a positive enough relationship to begin worthwhile treaties.

We don't even need money: technologies, special locations, ruins have arbitrary values and we can trade them away at will.

I don't want "more war, more enemies, less diplomacy" to pass for a consensus and lose our already limited options for satisfying "peace play".

While I like the war aspect of this game, I also want more "other pursuits" like diplomacy, intrigues and "space archeology". One problem I have with the game is there is no way to set our priorities and end game goals. If we want to play our way we have to turn off a lot of the automation rather than make use of it. It is also very difficult to know what's going on, lots of things happen without us the player being notified of it, and a lot of the notifications we do get just ends up being spam we don't really care about. Unlike some other games, we don't have any advisors warning us about overspendings or neglecting some tech and improvements our Empire desperatly need. Also no warning about falling behind in tech or military power compared to our neighbors or if we leave our colonies vulnerable to piracy...

[TCHNG]

Very valid points. I still remember vividly how players could easily cripple themselves economically and take decades to recover from a certain resource crunch in the early game. That really makes me think hard about where to place my next mining station.

[MartialDoctor]

It is always fascinating reading the different things that people consider good/bad aspects of a game. Like, literally every one of the criticisms in the post above this are things I consider positives. I feel like war is a fail state, and appreciate strategy games that actually make a diplomatic path viable. My biggest gripe with DW2 is that the diplomacy options are relatively sparse. We have like 50 weapons trees and deep military management options, while we have a single tiered diplomacy tech (per race) and our AI options boil down to "tell me when to throw money at people". While it is true (and appreciated!) that we can befriend pirates/empires, there is very little that we can do with that friendship in a meaningful way. Diplomatic relationships are very hollow, and the "there can be only one" victory model essentially means that even our staunchest allies are, in fact, opponents. But rather than making the galaxy more overtly hostile, I'd love to see deeper options for ways to leverage those relationships and invite more non-military conflict into the game - alliances, internal faction strife, etc. I want my wars to be more than resource squabbles or map-painting exercises. Let the Shakturi be such an existential threat that the player empire can't feasibly "go it alone" and even those @$$hole Mortalen next door work WITH us to see another sunrise.

I would also agree that adding more diplomatic options would be a great addition to Distant Worlds. That would take more time, though. Most of the above changes that I mentioned would be quite easy to implement.

As for pirates signing non-aggression pacts, it would only make sense if there was a change to why they'd sign one. I thought about it and if, for instance, they would be more peaceful towards you the more of a threat that you posed to them, that would make sense. In that way, they'd only see you as someone worthy of a pact if you could wipe them out (eg you had a strong fleet compared to theirs, you knew of their base, and it was within striking distance of you). If not, they'd only see you as prey to make money off of.

In terms of the AI, though, although I did focus on the aggression aspect I was also trying to center around the personality types of the AIs. In the original, the races had a more distinct personality due to more characteristics and the stronger effects races had on diplomacy. When you combined that with governmental factors, I really thought it made each faction more unique in the way they reacted to the player, and each other.

(Edit: To give another example, the Kiadian in my latest game got the Way of Darkness as their random government and I had boosted them in the beginning, so they are huge. They hate almost everyone due to this. However, as Kiadian are only slightly aggressive and very cautious, they haven't declared war on anyone. They have declared trade embargoes on about five or six other factions though, including my own.

The Boskara, on the other hand, as they are extremely aggressive and extremely reckless, will declare war on everyone, even to the point of being, well, extremely reckless. What usually results from this is either they become very large or they get absolutely decimated.

These sorts of things create really interesting scenarios.)

I should also add that, in terms of aggression, I was more referring to chaos aggression levels. If chaos were to be reverted closer to what it used to be then there'd still be the middle aggression levels that would suit more the type of game that you'd prefer.

Thank you, and others, for joining into this discussion.

[Foraven]

As for pirates signing non-aggression pacts, it would only make sense if there was a change to why they'd sign one. I thought about it and if, for instance, they would be more peaceful towards you the more of a threat that you posed to them, that would make sense. In that way, they'd only see you as someone worthy of a pact if you could wipe them out (eg you had a strong fleet compared to theirs, you knew of their base, and it was within striking distance of you). If not, they'd only see you as prey to make money off of.

Pirates never seem to run out of ships and they can attack nearly non-stop. With the current game fighting off the pirates is crippling, it's way easier to cheeze them to sign treaties... Then at that point we can safely ignore them since they will never break thoses treaties (but they will constantly try to sell us stuff).

[AKicebear]

Very interesting discussion, and as mentioned elsewhere it is especially fascinating to see where others agree and differ on what should be a development focus. My own priorities...

Quality of life - there are still a few big gaps, "easily" addressed IMO, to improve the basic UI especially for players than lean towards manual play. I won't belabor them here (see my signature for more), but in short those are:
- add visible top-level UI indicators of idle: manual ships/fleet/characters/colony targets etc etc etc.
- add a functioning "automatic linear upgrade of manual design" option, rather than all automatic or all manual
- add a global queue for spying missions - this would fit rather well in a UI with filters similar to that for colonies or dangerous locations, with spy missions filtered by target empire and type, which spies automatically assign to then
- map mode of fleet home base and engagement ranges by automation type - this was an incredibly useful map mode in DWU for manual fleet basing

Diplomacy and character development - as noted elsewhere, both feel extremely passive even on higher difficulties. I can basically dictate my terms when and how I want, with a zero-cost rejection as the worst case scenario - its so rare to have war declare by a foreign empire, nor internal pushback from my own population nor leaders.
- Add demands by my own leaders and population. Population could demand certain increases in average living space (orb size/pop), income per pop, happiness, etc over a certain amount of time. Leaders could demand certain types of military, diplomatic or scientific achievement. Demands of both population and leaders would vary by race, government type, and development level. Failure would result in varying degrees of instability. This can't just be vaguely running in the background - the game should inform me of what the expectations are and what the consequences are.
- See: pawn needs in RimWorld, leader interactions in Shadow Empire.

Economic specialization, uniqueness of colonies - as is there is effectively no difference between two colonies of similar size, quality and population. While that is probably blissfully simple in terms of AI, it makes losing or gaining a colony nearly meaningless. Moreover, it robs colonies of any meaningful decisions that could make pre-warp starts especially interesting.
- Add characteristics that make colonies more similar to characters in an RPG, which level up across unique and mutually exclusive economic development paths as they grow in population and resource availability (stockpile)
- Add planetary manufacturing - some colonies are better than others at manufacturing certain components for construction/shipyards, based on their proximity to related mining - basically, lean more heavily into DW2 greatest strength, the private economy distribution system
- Add macro controls for supply of resources (luxury, construction, fuel) to colonies. There should be a macro manager that lets me simply prioritize one colony above another for deliveries/satisfying basic reserve demands. E.g. see the logistics priority systems of RimWorld (Normal to Critical priority for stockpiles) or Oxygen Not Included (priority level 1-9 for certain tasks - here instead for certain colony stockpiles). Leave it alone if you prefer, or prioritize one, or all planets according to your preference. Impose a cost for tweaking those policy settings - the emperor can't tinker infinitely without annoying some leader.
- Add finite resources to planets/orbs - a big scifi trope is scouring planet to planet, leaving an empty husk afterwards. Add simply counters of (replenishing) biological resources and (finite) mineral resources on a planet; certain development patterns would exhaust one or both much faster. This would interact with specialization in bullets 1/2 to create interesting empire history - as one world is exhausted your empire has to ramp up that supply elsewhere.
- Ensure race and government play a noticeable role in how planets develop; conquering a planet from another empire should not only entail political differences in the population (as proxied by assimilation) but also in the economic structure, which may add further challenge to integrating that planet.

[thegreybetween]

- Add finite resources to planets/orbs - a big scifi trope is scouring planet to planet, leaving an empty husk afterwards. Add simply counters of (replenishing) biological resources and (finite) mineral resources on a planet; certain development patterns would exhaust one or both much faster. This would interact with specialization in bullets 1/2 to create interesting empire history - as one world is exhausted your empire has to ramp up that supply elsewhere.
- Ensure race and government play a noticeable role in how planets develop; conquering a planet from another empire should not only entail political differences in the population (as proxied by assimilation) but also in the economic structure, which may add further challenge to integrating that planet.

Some excellent items across the board. I particularly like the quoted suggestions.

Finite resources would be a huge departure from the current abundance/extraction rate system, and I'd be very surprised to find it something they'd be keen to implement as it would have massive ripples throughout the entire economic system - especially since resource acquisition is public sector and the player lacks any meaningful way to throttle extraction efforts without extremely tedious and indirect management of mining stations, etc.

That said, it would allow for a LOT of emergent narrative. IF resources were finite, factions like the Gizureans (the consumption plague) would NEED to be a lot more aggressive to simply exist. Any player who wants to see ramped-up aggression in the universe should love finite resources, as once planets start running dry, exploiting enemy territory will be high on the agenda of pretty much everyone (and great trade-focus game opportunities for more peaceful empires). It would dovetail beautifully into the internal strife systems as well - colonies react to extraction and depletion events in a variety of ways that are easily influenced by government/race. Ikkuro colonies could trigger severe opposition to strip-mined planets within the empire, for example.

There would probably need to be some form of replenishment or ways to reintroduce sources of resources (or a meticulous rebalancing of spawns) to ensure that the late game didn't grind to a wasteland halt. Techs would probably also need a heavy overhaul to allow for things like branches that allow faster extraction at a drain-rate penalty versus drain-rate reduction ("careful extraction"). Ooh! We could maybe see high-tier tech for resource replication! Anyway, lots of food for thought.

But yeah, the second point is a big one, too. While I don't want to come out and say "It would be cool if we had something equivalent to the internal faction system of Stellaris", easily one of Stellaris's best systems is the way that internal populations grow, change, and react to the game. Having to appease rising political parties and address global events in a way that satisfies *some* of the people really adds a LOT to the feel of managing a galactic empire. DW2 is pretty sparse on that front, but it has all the ingredients for a brilliant system. So many races, government types, and situations would allow for an awesome and robust ideological conflict system for internal empire management.

Anyway, I'm deep in the woods of wishlist territory now and probably not adding much to the realistic discussion of DW2's future for the foreseeable future. But yeah, some really cool ideas to hope for.

[Jorgen_CAB]

As for pirates signing non-aggression pacts, it would only make sense if there was a change to why they'd sign one. I thought about it and if, for instance, they would be more peaceful towards you the more of a threat that you posed to them, that would make sense. In that way, they'd only see you as someone worthy of a pact if you could wipe them out (eg you had a strong fleet compared to theirs, you knew of their base, and it was within striking distance of you). If not, they'd only see you as prey to make money off of.

Pirates never seem to run out of ships and they can attack nearly non-stop. With the current game fighting off the pirates is crippling, it's way easier to cheeze them to sign treaties... Then at that point we can safely ignore them since they will never break thoses treaties (but they will constantly try to sell us stuff).

It is even better to cheese the system and design your station so pirate raids on mines just fails, just add tons of crew on them and the pirates can't raid them. Then you mainly just ignore them and you only need to protect your colonies from being raided.

I find it very rare to need any agreement with any pirates outside the very early game until I can protect my home system properly from pirates.

In my next game I probably will not cheese the system this way and build more proper stations to make pirates more fun. I think that you probably should get way less possibilities on stations to use this cheese tactic as it makes pirates almost irrelevant.

[Foraven]

In my next game I probably will not cheese the system this way and build more proper stations to make pirates more fun. I think that you probably should get way less possibilities on stations to use this cheese tactic as it makes pirates almost irrelevant.

It's a matter of taste I guess. I don't want to be spammed with constant notificiation about my ships getting attacked or my stations being attacked. It's very easy to buy them out, way easier than trying to fend them off. I did try to fight them off but they attack faster than I can build or repair my ships, and I did have instances where they attacked my main colony non-stop, destroying any ships I was trying to build or repair. I would like to fight off pirates rather than bribe them to death but they don't seem to follow the same rules as empires, they just never run out of ships.

[MartialDoctor]

As for pirates signing non-aggression pacts, it would only make sense if there was a change to why they'd sign one. I thought about it and if, for instance, they would be more peaceful towards you the more of a threat that you posed to them, that would make sense. In that way, they'd only see you as someone worthy of a pact if you could wipe them out (eg you had a strong fleet compared to theirs, you knew of their base, and it was within striking distance of you). If not, they'd only see you as prey to make money off of.

Pirates never seem to run out of ships and they can attack nearly non-stop. With the current game fighting off the pirates is crippling, it's way easier to cheeze them to sign treaties... Then at that point we can safely ignore them since they will never break thoses treaties (but they will constantly try to sell us stuff).

I've found fighting pirates to be challenging but not crippling, even on extreme difficulty. However, I will say that the key is to fight them on your terms. Don't try fighting too many factions at once (you can pay extortion fees for some while fighting others) and, if they have stronger ships (on higher difficulties they definitely will), then send large fleets to take out their small ones. Basically, overpower them with numbers. As pirates tend to have their forces spread out, you can single them out. They will wear down with time and take out their base once you find it.

[Ax]

Fighting pirates is really not in your best interest. The best consequence from signing diplomatic treaties is actually getting ambassadors. For that you would want to sign first and betray the pirates later, after all the bases are not so hard to take from mid-game.

Overall, I would really like to hand out a Steam-style award to the OP. So many correct observations, I can sign all of them. Even in a peaceful playthrough the AIs ought to have some kind of diplomatic life where they make coalitions to preserve the balance of power as the player gets stronger.

[Jorgen_CAB]

In regards to pirates it is generally not hard to find out the general area where a specific faction tend to operate in, you then station several smaller anti-pirate fleets in that area and/or try to find their base of operation.

It might be advisable to have a few protection agreement in the early game and only fight a few factions. But after a while it is way more expensive to pay protection rather than just fight them.

I also find it fun to fight pirates, but I quite often play the game at around half speed so I don't miss anything important, at least never faster than normal speed.

[Foraven]

In regards to pirates it is generally not hard to find out the general area where a specific faction tend to operate in, you then station several smaller anti-pirate fleets in that area and/or try to find their base of operation.

It might be advisable to have a few protection agreement in the early game and only fight a few factions. But after a while it is way more expensive to pay protection rather than just fight them.

I also find it fun to fight pirates, but I quite often play the game at around half speed so I don't miss anything important, at least never faster than normal speed.

Have you noticed pirates no longer take credits from us once we have non-aggression pacts and such? If they kept draining our income, yeah killing them off would be the best option. But they don't currently.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Have you noticed pirates no longer take credits from us once we have non-aggression pacts and such? If they kept draining our income, yeah killing them off would be the best option. But they don't currently.

That has always been the case... they can also hurt your relations with other factions too if you ally with them and fighting the pirates can also gain you favours with other empires or even independents I think.

You also in many cases have to pay tribute for a long time before you can get a non aggression pact, not to mention gifting them money too. It actually can be allot more economically to fight them. I seem to be able to often blunt their power to the point they give up raiding me and start raiding someone else instead.