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I am writing this as a new thread as I did not want to upset the tone of the recent improvements thread with what amounts to my subjective take on pirates, especially after Erik explained the super-pirate problem was a part of the lore.

But on the other hand I wanted to give my subjective feedback about this lore, to say why it does not work for me and make a suggestion.

To explain, I wont accept being bullied by anyone, there are some very pertinent examples in the news these days but I won't draw explicit parallels as it is too politically contentious and likely to transgress the T&Cs of this forum, so I will just say I always play a defiant strategy against entities who commit crimes and try to bully the empire and as things stand, with race events active the empire ends up at war with two super-powered criminal cartels.

The rebalance does not seem much improved to me from this point of view, I can see pirate tech is not as super advanced as it was but this is made up for by much larger numbers of ships. e.g. the raiding party the Ikkuro pirates sent included two frigates and two destroyers and eight heavy escorts compared to the previous raiding party of a frigate and two or three heavy escorts. So the tech has reduced two generations but the force size has quadrupled?

For this reason, because it rains on my parade the moment I send a ship out of the home system, I have disabled race events.

However I can see the Ikkuro pirates are meant to be the brothers in arms of the Ikkuro empire, reuniting after many years and the dissolution of the previous Ikkuro empire after a cataclysmic war.

So the question I have to ask is why do they need to come as bully boys? Their first act is to raid an outlying mining station and attack freighters destroying them.

They dont say, "hi we are friendly and ready to help if you will pay our expenses please" (i.e. mercenaries), they try to start a protection racket with an act of war, which is criminal not brotherly. Mercenaries do not need to be criminals, they just need paying in staged payments... So I just wanted to suggest not having them start a war by raiding a mining station, but instead let them introduce themselves with a friendly visit, go away again, then wait for the other human super-pirate faction to turn up being mean, allowing the player to turn to the Ikkuro mercenaries to hire their legitimate security services.

Especially with the Ikkuro, since they are so harmonious, it makes sense that the spacer Ikkuros would be friendly. All it takes in terms of mechanics is for them not to start a war by having better diplomatic relations at the start of the game. I hope you can see the point I am trying to make.

Hopefully, pirate factions will be expanded on like with DW:U, and when there are different kinds of pirates- more so than we have now anyway. Until then... well, lore IS the reason for it.

Why do they have to bully? This is a matter of perspective. Immerse yourself.

These pirates are ragged, desperate, gritty survivors of hundreds of years of conflict with other desperate armed factions, monsters, the Hive... who have had to deal with degrading and failing equipment... and starvation, dehydration, asphyxiation, radiation poisoning, and so on. All those raids in the dark age weren't for egotistical bullying. They needed it to survive. They couldn't have just nicely asked the people on the ground...

Remember that a cataclysmic galactic event ripped apart every empire into burning scraps where most survivors of the initial event were left in ruins. Some very prosperous colonies were outright annihilated by it, and many didn't survive past a few years or petered out after a few generations of scattered survivors. They were dealing with continuous civilization-ending quakes, engineered viruses and lingering mind-maddening terrors, attacks from the equivalent of space kaiju, and especially attacks and raids by pirates.

It was so bad that the similarly desperate people in space who managed to pull enough together to survive actually looked down on the people on planets and metaphorically said, "Oh, that's really bad," and avoided going down until they had absolutely no choice. Some tried to help, like the Ghost Fleet. Eventually, *almost* everyone gave up on the dirtsiders outright, and association with them eventually became legends at best.

For the pirates, they've lived with the fact that the only way to get prosperity is to extort or take it off the corpse of another. The only ones who prospered in the Dark Age were the ones who understood that, like the Clan of Superiority. By comparison to them, the Ghost Fleet is laughably weak.

Clan of Superiority wrote:"May pleasing odors fill your nostrils, lost siblings! We see you have unshackled yourselves from a life of gravity and unfiltered air! We are the Clan of Superiority. Once we were soil-pounders like you, but now we are free. Our ancestors were early offworld miners who stumbled upon some ancient ship technology. That allowed us to leave our home system and the limiting tether of land and sky. You inferiors still cling to the old way. The Clan of Superiority is unbound and prosperous. Still, you are Haakonish and not unlike us. We will consider trading with you if you are willing to invest in our mutual prosperity. It is an opportunity you should not miss! If you reject us, you are no Haakonish, but rather filth to be expelled into vacuum, and we will not countenance your presence in our space."

Mercenaries, in a sense, yes, but there were no external clients worth protecting past the first generations as the colonies fell into darkness and were lost. They now look upon civilization with disdain, something that has failed them long ago and led to the state they are in. You could pay them to not attack you, or possibly to attack someone else in particular (a-la DW:U). They are fighting for survival, especially in light of disease-ridden dirtsiders rising up and becoming new powers in the galaxy. Mere interaction with you is dangerous to them. They don't and won't work for you. Not until you defeat the Hive, once and for all proving to them that you're the top dog and are worth joining.

That said... the Ghost Fleet are the oddball nice ones. They actually believe that legend about rejoining that dirtball they've "generally" protected all those generations as directed by the final Fleet Orders they revere. Believing in "primitives" to help them ascend to prosperity... which they'll promptly abandon faith in if not paid on sight.

Should the Ikkuro also have oddball pirates? Lets chat with them...

Harmonious Void wrote:

Ikkuro Harmonious.png (264.54 KiB) Viewed 564 times

"It was only a matter of time before we encountered you. Our advance scouts warned us of your existence, though, to be honest, many believed you could not be real. We are the Harmonious Void, those who seek to seek peace and understanding in the quiet vacuum of space. Our ancestors were once attached to soil and unprocessed air as you are, but we have moved beyond such limitations. Your primitive insistence upon world-dwelling does not disturb us, however. We respect life, be it advanced like us or primitive like you, provided it is in harmony with its surroundings."

Lo and behold, the Harmonious Void are actually nicer than most. They just want to live... harmoniously with their surroundings. Do not be fooled by their choice of words. They are violently xenophobic. They will readily kill anything they consider disruptive to their 'harmony', including dirtsider Ikkuro who get too close. They're just as territorial as any other pirate. Neither are they your brothers in arms. Like all other pirates, they see themselves as your superiors. And they're intended to have developed a reliance on intimidation and violence, just like everyone else who doesn't revere an ancient document telling them to be nice to the people of a select dirtball....

On that matter, the Ikkuro are not the straight peace-lovers they so often seem to be taken as, despite abhorring bombardment and war. While they value life, they believe in 'pruning' when its convenient and are second only to the Gizureans in terms of xenophobia: they have -100% relations with Boskara and Dhayut, and -80% to the ATTUK, of all races! The ones described as "short, cuddly bear-like race... Atuuks are very friendly..." In other words, if you can't co-exist in the way the Ikkuro want to co-exist, you should be annihilated.

The Humans are the only lucky monkeys with questionably loyal pirates. For ancient brothers, for the Ikkuro, make another Ikkuro empire, they'll practically insist to be allies.

Anyway, if/when pirates are expanded on, some variety would be great, and maybe there can be other organizations besides pirates, too. So all that above isn't to say there shouldn't be nice Ikkuro pirate/mercenaries, but as it is now, this is narrative is in line and is why they are 'bullies'.

All that just to say that until pirates get a makeover, it doesn't make sense to make nice pirates.

Beside the point, you can fight the pirates and win. Its just not meant to be haphazardly easy- despite their number, they do not form fleets. Use that to your advantage. You should be able to overcome one or two pirate factions by force with pirates set to None with story events on, if you earnestly prepare for the war.

OK I have tried to play this game and as far as I am concerned pirates are completely OP even on very few and very weak settings (no race events). On very weak I would expect to be able to fight them. You just cant, the game is set up so you can't.

The pirate game is built around the concept of subjugation. The balance is biased to that end but I reject it. I reject this game, it just does not hang together.

Even when successfully using a defiant strategy, the pirates, with no extra tech cause magic torpedo deflection.

I sat and watched Ikkuro escorts with 2xM Epsilon torps and +15% targeting matching the "weak" pirate defences, fire at a pirate frigate, multiple rounds, every round, two of their torps fire in the wrong direction at nothing, one of these torps circles round and hits the escort firing, one flies off into deep space and two head for the frigate. WTF? Its bent.

I have seen 3 of a full spread of 4 hit and do no damage at all to anything on a "weak" pirate frigate not even shields.

Pirates seem to be defended by magic, and can always jump away and are never disabled.

This is plain cheating, they are not a viable foe they are a dev fixation.

The planetary defences available in any sensible 4x are non existent in DW2 and allow pirates to raid at will due to the relative speeds of raiding and jump mechaincs, they then build a magically defended fleet and just zerg the fork out of everything in sight.

I am just stopping there. If I ever play this game again I am switching pirates off completely as they are just too broken.