Pirates Hate me

[Xmudder]

I'm playing a game with Shadows Rising... and the pirates I used to have protection rackets with all hate me.

The reason? "We are envious of you huge strength and power" -27.6

My closest neighbor, the Quameno guild, is only at -6.

This is not an issue with lone pirates, shadowports, or independent colonies.

Save is 13 megs.

[MaximKI]

How far into your game are you? How many colonies? How long have you had your protection agreements for with the pirate factions?

Do you see any diplomatic bonus in your relations with them from maintaining protection agreements?

Pirates generally don't particularly like empires, so the fact that they don't like you when you're developed isn't unexpected. However, there may be circumstances where that's overtuned and counters any diplomatic progress you have with them.

Have any of them broken protection agreements with you and decided to become hostile with you at all?

[Xmudder]

How far into your game are you? How many colonies? How long have you had your protection agreements for with the pirate factions?

Do you see any diplomatic bonus in your relations with them from maintaining protection agreements?

Pirates generally don't particularly like empires, so the fact that they don't like you when you're developed isn't unexpected. However, there may be circumstances where that's overtuned and counters any diplomatic progress you have with them.

Have any of them broken protection agreements with you and decided to become hostile with you at all?

I've never seen this before Shadow Rising. All pirate factions will be smaller than settled empires, and thus hate them. Which means the kill the hive to annex the pirates will never happen. 9 colonies, 14b people. 2 pirate factions (I am in contact with 3, and 6 solo), both my race, have just sent fleets after my planets. No declarations of hostility. I just researched destroyers and am auto-building them for my fleets. No bonus from protection agreements.

I have gotten pop ups of purging pirates from independent colonies I annexed.

[MaximKI]

Please do send a save to this address at maxim.k@slitherine.co.uk showing your game state.

[Xmudder]

There is something very wrong here. The pirates, despite having a huge "you are bigger than us! die die die" malus to relations, are kicking my ass. Probably due to all the buffs they got with the new DLC. I like that they are actually using fleets - I don't like that their fleets are bigger and higher tech than mine. Nor do I understand how they can have more powerful fleets than my 11 planet 16 billion pop empire. Albiet, I am still deploying destroyers. Because the AI would rather upgrade civilian ships, and build more civilian ships and troop transports, than expand my existing fleets. So I had to manually add to them (using the top up button on the fleet window) once I realized what was going wrong.