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Pirates appear to over-produce escorts insofar as they have enough freighters(or few enough smuggling missions) to keep their resource shuffling smooth or are successful raiding resources from others. And by over-produce, I mean they just keep cranking out ships even to the point of completely ignoring their supply chain. I've seen pirate factions bog down entirely with upwards of 100 ships queued to build at their space ports all for lack of resources. Then again, maybe it's just a problem with smuggler pirates.

Of course, the simplest solution is to blast them and a fresh new pirate faction will spawn in, but it seems like AI pirate factions don't manage their economy effectively. Their freighters seem to ignore their own mines in favor of smuggling missions(there needs to be a cap of some sort on the percentage of freighters detailed to smuggling missions versus their own economic needs). Additionally, they don't seem to have any sort of limit on the number of ships they'll queue and try to build. I would think there should be some manner of check on their economic status to see if they can both afford the ship and have the resources for it. Extended delays from lack of resources should key the pirate to cancel queued items and refrain from re-queuing them until the resource shortfall has been addressed either through new mines and freighters, raiding, or planetary capture.

Above -3000 they're practically in love.

They don't have to pay upkeep for military ships.. so they can just build military ships if there is available money.
So, paying them just 20000 credits means 20 escort ships. Paying 100000 means 100 escort ships. So if you buy anything from them, you will face a huge amount of raiding ships very soon.
Protection agreement is OK, but buying something expensive will make the universe into chaos.

But pirates' firepower is just a number. They are usually made up of escorts, so you can send big and fast ships to grind them.

I suppose the scanners won't work because they might have stealth devices in later days,

Where did you hear that they don't have to pay ship maintenance?

ORIGINAL: Bebop Cola

Where did you hear that they don't have to pay ship maintenance?

You can figure it out by just playing as a pirate. For pirates, military ship doesn't cost any maintenance, but civilian ships and stations costs maintenance.(You have to build freighters, mining ships on the spaceport manually.)
But they can't usually be overpowered because empires can easily blow up pirates mining bases and they will run short of resources soon.

1.9.07

Still hordes of pirate ships constantly attacking the same one or two planet(s) nearest to them. And getting through every 4th or 5th times. In every ground fight all buildings are destroyed. No matter what setting, numerical and technological odds, how many defensive bases, etc.

This is getting boring. And not much fun.

Well i dont think its a bug... i learned from one game that u should not set the Number of pirates below normal. Otherwise some of the pirate factions become unbeatable cause they can expand freely. If you play with many pirate faktions and not to many indipendend aliens the chances to have pirate factions with over 100 ships are very low. cause many pirates mean they also fight each other over controll of colonies and they also are killing each others bases in the prewarp age.
I had a game on varied clusters where it took me 40 years to just get warp... after that i had to realize: Oh shit i also have the biggest pirat faction right next to me which was in control of my hole cluster and had 4k ships O.o

Well there's something wrong with the settings then. The term "few pirates" would - to most people - imply that you wont have as many problems with pirates compared to higher settings. I think it needs to be changed so that it makes more sense and is more intuitive.

Few pirates should give you an easier time with pirates, not harder and many pirates should give you a harder time, not easier. [&:]