Is the pirate mechanic broken?

[Miravlix]

When you meet a pirate accept the protection.

Wait a bit, give them a gift, take out a non aggression pact.

It's silly easy to do. (Only problem is peaceful integration of independents, because being "friend" with the pirate gives a negative for the independent.)

They seems stuck on a positive relationship at this point.

[baldamundo]

Does come with downsides. It can end up being quite expensive if it's with a foreign pirate race or if you do it with a lot of pirate factions. But also, if you do it a lot, you end up with a massive permanent malus to relations with every other empire for being friends with their enemies.

Also on one occasion at least, I had a pirate faction I'd paid off at the start of the game start raiding me again much later on - and were all the stronger for all the money I'd paid them.

That said, it does currently feel like an absolute no-brainer to pay off at least the first pirate faction you encounter early game. Seems like it's always going to be cheaper to pay them off early-game than to develop a military strong enough to fight them off - especially if you consider the huge opportunity costs of focusing your early research & construction on military stuff instead of economic growth. So I agree that does need rebalancing.

Probably it should be more expensive and, crucially, you should need to be paying them much much longer before they'll agree to shift to a non aggression pact.

[Miravlix]

I think you might have missed non aggression pacts CANCELS protection. So I'm not paying them.


Even worse case for super hostile pirates like Boscara when you are Human, you might have to gift more than once, but that is still a few years at most, not decades of paying them.

I feel it make the pirates pointless, because you can completely trivialize them and non agg pact even break the ruin that spawn pirates, with a non agg they don't break the non agg, they only break protection and start attacking.

[shockk]

I have a few times where a pirate would cancel the NAP and the process would need to start over, but this is fairly rare

It is extremely powerful todo, and there generally isn't any reason not to.

[mrm0uflon]

It is the same issue with independent planets being so easy to colonize versus invade: gift-giving is mad strong and not expensive, just a minor outlay of cash to bypass any challenge.

IMO NAPing pirates / colonizing indies should require at least 2-3 techs from that species' diplomacy tree, so it's only easy if its the same species as you, which makes sense. Empires with diplomatic focus will be able to befriend all the pirates and colonize lots of indies but they paid the opportunity cost in terms of lagging behind on firepower and infrastructure techs.