Pirate's influence

[vary10]

What makes the pirate's control over (empire's) colony stronger? Is it fleet's firepower, size or numbers? I know, that the less colony's population is, the easier it is to control it, but I hope that pirate's influence strength is not fixed.

[Aeson]

It would appear as though the rate of influence gain is determined by the total firepower of all pirate warships sufficiently close to a colony, probably with a constant offset allowing for unarmed vessels to generate influence slowly.

This is my inference from the results of a test comparing the rate of influence generated by:
- Two size 126 ships each armed with a Titan Beam
- One size 252 ship armed with two Titan Beams
- One size 132 ship armed with two Titan Beams
- One size 126 ship armed with one Titan Beam
with each 'fleet' stationed over worlds of identical population, size, and quality and no pirate influence (planets and populations were forced to be identical by means of the game editor). Ships were spawned over the target planet by means of the editor so as to preclude issues with apparent differences in influence gain rate caused by differing times of arrival. The only world upon which my pirate faction's influence grew at a rate which differed from the rate of influence growth at the other worlds was the world which was orbited by the lone size 126 ship armed with one Titan Beam. Be advised that I did not run the tests for a very long time, so if the rate of influence gain differed by only a small amount I may not have run the test long enough to detect that, and also that it is possible that I might have unintentionally maximized the rate of influence gain rate as the planets had very small initial populations (1M).

I would also say that, based upon my (limited) experience playing as a pirate, it would appear as though the relationship between the rate of influence gain and total firepower present is nonlinear and may maximize at some point, though I haven't done any significant testing to confirm this.