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Any advice is welcome. Thanks

When I try to capture an enemy ship, it shows the flashing crossed swords on that ship for 5 or 10 seconds and then it explodes even though my ships have stopped firing immediately after sending out their pods. Why does it explode?

Some people say that retiring a ship at the nearest spaceport gives back those resources. Can anyone confirm that’s actually true?

Ive played about a dozen pirate games so far and sometimes I start with a resupply ship and other times it doesnt. Any thoughts why I would not get one to start?


The Pirate Tips thread indicates you should build a lot of mobile mining ships to start with as opposed to building mining bases. I am wondering really what constitutes a lot. Would 6 be a lot, or more like 30?


Many of the threads show pirates building facilities all over the place early. However, you only start with 1 construction ship, so I don’t see how to get more that soon. So far, the only way I’ve found is to have your scouts find an abandoned colony ship, populate some world with that colony ship and then tell it to build a construction ship. Is there an easier or quicker way to get additional construction ships early game for pirates? Is capture the only alternative?


At what point is it advisable to invade a colony? Assume it has a decent native population and that it’s not an empire race. Assume I’ve got raiders planted in orbit, and have built a pirate base. Would it be better to dump invasion troops there to take it, or to just keep raiding forever? Not looking for anything specific here, but just a general sense of when you would want to take it, or even if.


The Pirate Tips thread indicates it can be useful to monopolize a resource. Has anyone actually been able to do that on the large maps? Or is this only practical on the smaller maps such as 250 star galaxies?


My mobile gas mining ships never seem to do anything. My starting station is located over a gas planet having 4 types of gas, so I’m guessing there just isn’t a need for more gas. Just want to be sure that sounds right to you, because I have about 5 gas mining ships that sit there forever.

When I try to capture an enemy ship, it shows the flashing crossed swords on that ship for 5 or 10 seconds and then it explodes even though my ships have stopped firing immediately after sending out their pods. Why does it explode?

Go to your Empire Policies screen, find the boarding settings, and check to make sure that captured ships and bases are supposed to be enlisted (or scrapped at nearest shipyard for tech, if you prefer). You might have things set so that captured ships are scrapped immediately (which gives you money).

There is also a possibility that the ship is damaged enough to make the computer automatically scrap it.

Many of the threads show pirates building facilities all over the place early. However, you only start with 1 construction ship, so I don’t see how to get more that soon. So far, the only way I’ve found is to have your scouts find an abandoned colony ship, populate some world with that colony ship and then tell it to build a construction ship. Is there an easier or quicker way to get additional construction ships early game for pirates? Is capture the only alternative?

By 'facilities,' do you mean space stations (e.g. mines), or do you mean Hidden Pirate Bases and the like? Generally, if someone is referring to pirate facilities, they mean Hidden Pirate Bases, Hidden Pirate Fortresses, and the Criminal Network, all of which are built on planets in a similar manner to how Science Academies, Wonders, etc are built on colonies. At 50K each, Hidden Pirate Bases are not that difficult to fund, and it doesn't take too much of a presence at a small colony to get enough influence to start its construction.

And yes, until such time as your pirate faction becomes a planetary empire, the only way to obtain additional construction ships is to capture them from your opponents.

The Pirate Tips thread indicates it can be useful to monopolize a resource. Has anyone actually been able to do that on the large maps? Or is this only practical on the smaller maps such as 250 star galaxies?

Depends on what the resource distribution looks like, and to some extent on what resources you're talking about. The three superluxuries are incredibly rare on all the map sizes, and if you can find and control a source of one of those, chances are that you'll have at least a significant fraction of the supply even if you don't have a total monopoly. Other resources can also occasionally be very difficult to obtain. Chromium and Carbon Fibre have a tendency to be hard to find since they can only spawn on Continental and Marshy Swamp planets and planets of those types tend to be less common.

If you want to try to monopolize a resource, it might be a good idea to open up the galaxy map (one of the buttons on the edge of the minimap, and if I recall correctly double-clicking the minimap should also bring it up) and look at the resource filters. The yellow dots show you where sources of the selected resource are, and if there are a couple resources which are scarce, those are good ones to try to control, particularly if they're resources which are used a lot in shipbuilding.

My mobile gas mining ships never seem to do anything. My starting station is located over a gas planet having 4 types of gas, so I’m guessing there just isn’t a need for more gas. Just want to be sure that sounds right to you, because I have about 5 gas mining ships that sit there forever.

Sounds like a reasonable conjecture to me.

ORIGINAL: bbenham
When I try to capture an enemy ship, it shows the flashing crossed swords on that ship for 5 or 10 seconds and then it explodes even though my ships have stopped firing immediately after sending out their pods. Why does it explode?

What Aeson said and there is also an annoying bug where your fighters will not stop attacking a target even after you've captured it. Only way to save your prize is to pause the game and manually order all your fighters to land.

ORIGINAL: bbenham
Some people say that retiring a ship at the nearest spaceport gives back those resources. Can anyone confirm that’s actually true?

Yes, it's true. I've solved a few critical resource shortages before simply by capturing a bunch of enemy ships and retiring them. You can also steal enemy tech this way, including normally restricted racial-specific techs.

ORIGINAL: bbenham
Ive played about a dozen pirate games so far and sometimes I start with a resupply ship and other times it doesnt. Any thoughts why I would not get one to start?

Can't help you there, but honestly that thing is worthless anyway - I always scrap mine first thing.

ORIGINAL: bbenham
The Pirate Tips thread indicates you should build a lot of mobile mining ships to start with as opposed to building mining bases. I am wondering really what constitutes a lot. Would 6 be a lot, or more like 30?

Depends on what point of the game you are at. You will definitely want four ore miners and two gas miners right from the start, and you may want to scrap the starting two miners within the first year because they've got luxury harvesters and the AI is so dumb that all they'll do is mine for Dantha fur all day even though you have no colonies.

ORIGINAL: bbenhamM
any of the threads show pirates building facilities all over the place early.

Yes, you want to do that to start. But once you transition into a real empire and have maxed all your tech, they just become an economic drain. Feel free to scrap them if you're short of income.

ORIGINAL: bbenham
However, you only start with 1 construction ship, so I don’t see how to get more that soon. So far, the only way I’ve found is to have your scouts find an abandoned colony ship, populate some world with that colony ship and then tell it to build a construction ship. Is there an easier or quicker way to get additional construction ships early game for pirates? Is capture the only alternative?

While the game does randomly hand out free construction ships to pirates, it generally doesn't start doing until you already own thirty or so planets and no longer need them (in fact you just end up scrapping them because you don't need the upkeep bill). So yes, capture is your only option at first. But, as shown in the Pirate Tips thread, capture is easy - oppressed planets constantly try to build new construction ships, even when your Harpoons are orbiting right there. All you have to do is send your own construction ship to finish them (or let the AI finish and then capture it later) and then send it to a MiniPort for retrofitting into something that is actually warp-capable.

ORIGINAL: bbenham
At what point is it advisable to invade a colony? Assume it has a decent native population and that it’s not an empire race. Assume I’ve got raiders planted in orbit, and have built a pirate base. Would it be better to dump invasion troops there to take it, or to just keep raiding forever? Not looking for anything specific here, but just a general sense of when you would want to take it, or even if.

If it's an independent world you'll never have to invade it at all, as independents never try to kick you out. Plus they'll keep posting Defense Missions which you can totally game simply by having a starport or defense base in orbit of their planet. Planets with pirate facilities that you don't actually control are far less work.

However, any empire world will eventually try to raise an army to destroy your bases. They'll even send troop transports of troops to try to assist in this, which is why it is imperative that you build your own defense base in orbit of any empire world that you have a pirate base at. That keeps them from landing reinforcements, which buys you time. Essentially you'll just want to get both the base and the fortress down as fast as money permits. Left without help, usually some time around five billion population is when they'll raise enough troops to kick you out. That's also the point when the planet can be profitable enough through taxes to support it's own starpower, which is pretty handy for you - now is the time to invade.

ORIGINAL: bbenham
The Pirate Tips thread indicates it can be useful to monopolize a resource. Has anyone actually been able to do that on the large maps? Or is this only practical on the smaller maps such as 250 star galaxies?

It's entirely possible on any size map... it just gets harder as the map expands. Certain key elements like Dilithium are your best targets. On a standard 400 star map you'll probably have less than 20 planets that have Dilithium... probably less, maybe only a dozen or so. Lock them all down with fortified mines and even if the AI researches how to make high end shields (like Meridian) they won't actually be able to build them due to the resource shortage.

Caslon should be target resource at the start, however, to give you more mobility and deny the same to the enemy. Of course it's very plentiful and you won't be able to get all of it, but you can feasibly grab all the caslon spots in a few sectors at least. With early freighters having such limited range, even a local monopoly is still a monopoly of sorts. The best part is that once you transition to Hydrogen powered reactors all that Caslon is essentially worthless to you... which is actually good because that means you can freely sell all of it in Smuggling missions without any fear of consequence to your own fleets.

ORIGINAL: bbenham
My mobile gas mining ships never seem to do anything. My starting station is located over a gas planet having 4 types of gas, so I’m guessing there just isn’t a need for more gas. Just want to be sure that sounds right to you, because I have about 5 gas mining ships that sit there forever.

Yeah, mining ships can be kind of slow to think, but there are other causes - one of which you already caught, namely the lack of need. The other is a lack of space, because that starting star port only has so much room to hold stuff and gas fills up space fast. Once you get an actual planet to call your own (which have virtually limitless space) you'll be seeing your mining ships become much more active.

Even still, you'll probably want to start doing 4/2 mining ships at the start (as stated above), then slowly increase it to about 12/6 as time goes on. Luckily once you start carving out a section of space of your very own you'll have transitioned to actually having enough mines for everything so building more than, say, 24/12 total for your entire empire probably won't be needed unless you are playing a Smuggler themed faction that exports a lot of goods.

Hope this helps!