Pirate question

[JWW]

Relatively early in my current game I have a "hidden" pirate base building on one of my colonized home system planets. It is currently at 60%. I discovered it by accident while looking at the facilities tab of my home system planets, deciding where to build a facility, the Bakuras Highspeed Shipyard to be specific. So I have some questions.

1. How to deal with it? I don't seem to be able to do anything to it directly. It is there but not there. Am I missing something? I not not a noob but am far from an expert on the game.

2. Did I miss something along the way that should have allowed me to either prevent this from happening or to detect this at the start?

So how do I take care of this mess, and how did I get into it in the first place? I don't recall this happening in a previous game.

Thanks.

[Aeson]

1. How to deal with it? I don't seem to be able to do anything to it directly.

Put some ground units onto the planet on which the base is being built, open up the colonies menu, select the colony with the pirate base, select the facilities tab, select the pirate base, and click the 'attack' button. I'd suggest a minimum of 5 infantry units, and possibly upwards of 10 if you're playing a species with weak troops, be used in the attack; armored and special forces units are also useful.

2. Did I miss something along the way that should have allowed me to either prevent this from happening or to detect this at the start?

There are no notifications about pirate base construction, aside from an occasional advisor suggestion to attack it if you have advisor suggestions on. Detection is reliant on inspection of the colonies to see if there's a pirate facility either under construction or already established on the world; this is most easily done in the Colonies menu. Facilities are most likely to be built in regions where there's a lot of pirate activity, so if you pay attention to where the pirates are operating you may be able to limit the number of colonies that you need to check on.

The only way to prevent pirates from building facilities on your colonies is to prevent them from gaining enough influence at your colonies to build the base. Pirates need to have ships over the planet in order to passively gain influence (smuggling ships work, but it appears as though the primary consideration is total firepower and as no freighter designs have more than a single weapon smugglers are not much of an issue as far as keeping down pirate influence is concerned), and also gain influence after a raid, so if you want to prevent pirates from gaining enough influence over a colony to construct a base, you'll need to prevent pirate ships from remaining in orbit over or raiding the colony. A decent spaceport or defensive base or a small garrison fleet can usually prevent pirate raids from succeeding and will prevent most pirates from being able to remain over the colony for any significant period of time, operations against pirate stations in the region around the colony can prevent pirates from being able to reach the colony in the first place, and planetary shield generators can render colonies completely immune to pirate raids.

[JWW]

Thank you. I appreciate the advice and will get to work on it this evening.

A related question. I have been requesting a lot of smuggling missions, on advise of my advisors. Is that actually increasing the chance of a secret pirate base popping up?

And an unrelated question. I got the Bakuras Highspeed Shipyard and built it on my home planet. IS there anything else to do? Does it simply increase the capability of my existing shipyard? Am I supposed to build something else? That is something else I've never dealt with before.

[Aeson]

Is that actually increasing the chance of a secret pirate base popping up?

Assuming you're getting some response to your smuggling missions, yes, because it (generally) makes the pirate factions wealthier, which makes the pirates better able to afford the warships which are usually necessary to build up enough influence to enable facility construction and it makes the pirates better able to afford the up front cost of the facilities. If you're able to prevent the pirates from raiding or keeping warships over worlds within your space, though, this is kind of not your problem; smuggling ships alone will rarely be able to generate enough influence for the pirate faction to which the freighter belongs at any colony of even fairly small size (freighters generate influence very slowly, and probably can't overcome the rate at which a colony removes influence once the colony grows beyond maybe a few hundred million people or so, at least not in the amount of time a reasonably active freighter is likely to be at any given colony).

I will add that pirate facilities are generally very expensive and very vulnerable investments for pirate factions (the standard cost of a Hidden Pirate Base is 50,000 credits while the standard cost of a Hidden Pirate Fortress is 100,000 credits, they cannot run, and they can usually be destroyed by a small army).

One further thing - the direct cost of having pirate facilities on one or more planets within your empire is actually fairly low. The main impact it has is to increase corruption levels on the colonies where the facilities are present, but since pirate facilities are most likely to be found on small colonies this really doesn't mean much to your empire - neither the public nor the private sector derives much income from a colony of a few hundred million by comparison to what it gets from the homeworld of ten billion or more people. This means that it's not really essential to catch the existence of pirate facilities immediately. Pirates do derive income from their facilities (which funds warships for raiding your empire and funds additional facility construction), and if they manage to build up to the Criminal Network they can seize a colony, so don't let it go too long, but it's not really something you have to check up on every other minute or anything like that. Checking every 10 or 20 minutes, or even every half an hour, is probably adequate if playing at normal game speed, and later in the game when colonies have grown larger and pirate activity has been reduced by your empire's pirate hunting activity you can probably drop the inspections altogether except in specific at-risk areas (e.g. newly-colonized frontier areas and largely-undeveloped backwaters).

IS there anything else to do? Does it simply increase the capability of my existing shipyard? Am I supposed to build something else? That is something else I've never dealt with before.

The effect of the Bakuras High Speed Shipyard is to triple the rate at which any construction yards at the host colony complete work. The spaceport over a colony hosting the BHSS will complete individual ships three times faster than any other shipyard in your empire, or even in the galaxy assuming comparable construction technology, and the colony will complete colony ships, construction ships, and stations three times faster than any other colony of comparable size. You do not need to build anything else, nor do you need to do anything particularly special to make use of the wonder's bonus.

[JWW]

Thanks. Yes, I cranked out a handful of my new cruiser designs from my homeworld spaceport and they were coming out very fast, along with a couple of colony ships, and refitting explorer ships with long range sensors.

As for the pirates I destroyed the hidden base I noted above and have since found another one, all in my home system. Guess I was making too many smuggling deals and not watching closely. Meanwhile I found what I hope is their main base and destroyed it. I'm not butted up against any other civilization in this game, so I've been quietly going about expansion, so I've ended up focusing on the pirates more, and learning more about them.