Matrix Games Forums

When you import ship designs from a more advanced game, any design not marked as obsolete is buildable by pirates. This is really annoying as it kind of defeats the purpose of the ship design sheets. I would want to leave future designs available so they become buildable once I research the respective technologies in my new game.
In general I feel it would be more realistic if Pirates should only be able to build ships a couple generations behind any of the races in the vecinity... I'm ok with them being able to build any ships that are available to me but allowing them to build my final-game ships (and starbases!) from the start is very unfair

Any design? Even classes above cruiser level?

No, they stick to cruisers and below (it's consistent on that), but they also grab the ones for mining stations and starbases.
It's the same mechanic as always, the problem is that since I imported a ship design file from another game I have a lot of designs that I just can't build yet as the technologies they depend on aren't available yet. Pirates don't seem to have this particular problem.

Yap, it's indeed a known problem. You can circumvent it by designing only capital ships...even if they are actually lower class ships. For the mining stations there's no workaround afaik.

Not really a workaround as it doesn't cover bases... makes pirates really hard to kill when they have last generation shields and death rays... and capital ships are much more expensive and "heavier" than lower class ships...

It looks broken to me. Does anyone know if there are any plans to tweak/fix this on Legends? It really affects re-playability from my point of view

Have not heard anything related to this but maybe Erik or a beta tester can pick it up.

ORIGINAL: Alexander737

Not really a workaround as it doesn't cover bases... makes pirates really hard to kill when they have last generation shields and death rays... and capital ships are much more expensive and "heavier" than lower class ships...

It looks broken to me. Does anyone know if there are any plans to tweak/fix this on Legends? It really affects re-playability from my point of view

Hello Alexander! Sorry for your frustrations. Legends does address this is a different way as
far as I've seen. In addition, there is a different type of pirate introduced in Legends as well
(I won't 'spoil' anything for you).

I don't like to start every game by re-designing all the ships either Alex. What I do though is
this; I usually like to play my games starting with a Tech Level of 3, and I tweak my race by
adding the Repairbot as a special component in the races file. So I design all my military ships
and bases the way I wish, then save the design file with a name like 'EdLevel3w-Repair'. That
way, when I start a new game, I can just delete (not obsolete) all the starting designs, load my
design file, then start play. The key for the pirate situation for me is that I just don't upgrade
(refit) the few original military ships that are there at the start. I've yet to have a game where
the Pirates I've ran across have a ship with the Repairbot on it of my design
(at least according to my ships with Trace Scanners on them). If I wish to, I can save a design file,
as previously detailed, basically for each level I wish (Tech Level 1 plain, Tech Level 2 with Repairbot, Level 3 with Shaktar Firestorm Torpedos, etc.). Hope this suggestion helps! [:)]

Ed to the rescue...as usual

Hi Alexander,

ORIGINAL: Alexander737
It looks broken to me. Does anyone know if there are any plans to tweak/fix this on Legends? It really affects re-playability from my point of view

We'll see what we can do, I agree that this behavior is not desirable.

Regards,

- Erik