quote:
Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
That's why pirates shouldn't get colony tech. Instead, you'd have to capture a rock colony ship from somebody else before you could move in.
The pirates shouldn't be relying on planetary production, but thievery instead.
Question: Did you have min settings on environmental resistance?
If you have both min env. res. and min reproduction, you require a perfect planet to get any growth at all 
Makes capturing slaves more important too. Finding a large transport with 500M people means you get to boost production on some planet by 20% or so.
to me capturing colony ships from other races and allowing the pirate race to use those for expansion allows the pirate race to expand MUCH faster than making em only use colony ships that they build themselves.
My game experience lends me to my new view on pirate colonization... A pirate should only colonize 1 planet at a time (this might be more a hybrid of SJ's view and my original limited expansion view)...
Once I found the 3 planets in one square - 1 large w/no atmo and 2 tiny moons w/no atmo I essentially abbandoned my original homeworld, and relocated to the new base of operations - kinda like finding a better island w/safer harbors that's more off the beaten path but also allows access to rich shipping lanes... After colonizing your preferred base, the pirate wouldn't need to find another unless that one was overrun and destroyed - If that happens, simply capture another races colony ship and either 1) use their race to populate your new home or 2) if you happen to have a small sampling of your pop handy (maybe stash some on a transport in some out of the way secret pirate base) and use them after jettisoning, er I mean makin the old pop on the colony ship walk the plank...
As for environ resist, I think I did min that one, but to this day, I'm not sure exactly what effect it has on the game...
I also thought that physic was the special tech to get at the start but now I'm not so sure - something about capturing a ship w/o any bloodshed offends my good pirate sensibilities.
If it wasn't for the pop increase special components that org tech gives, i'd think that Org would be the best for Pirates do to the incred armor that you get - armor, to me, is much preferable on a boarding ship than shields. As for mixing armor and shields, to me I like to keep my ships small and cheap (LC or smaller) so no room for both.
I also continue to voice my objection to using any captured pop as slaves or whatever... a pirate might deal in slaves but I don't see em using em to colonize planets. just allows too much expansion.
As for not using a planet to get resources I agree - to a point. I found that w/o using the planet at the beginning of the game b/f I got ship capture, I would have run out of resources and died of stagnation - it's unavoidable that a race will have to use planetside resource generating mines to get a foothold in the early game - after that, I agree that resources should come from the spoils of the sea...
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Character is best defined as that which you do when you believe nobody is watching.