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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...... A pirate should only colonize 1 planet at a time ...
Q: how do you plan on enforcing this?
Anything you capture in SE4 can be used as if you built it yourself.
Also, if you have to use captured ships to colonize, you won't get any until some time into the game, and since you can't retrofit the colonies (you don't have access to the tech), you have to make do with an ice colony instead of that prime triple rock world.
Captured colony ships don't make expansion very fast at all.
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If [you find a better planet] 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...
Are you supporting the use of captured colony ships here?
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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...
What I believe it does is make your growth rate drop faster as conditions deteriorate.
Ie. if you have god-like environment resist, a harsh world will have 1% less reproduction than a optimal world. For the pirates, anything other than optimal causes a severe decrease in growth.
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I also thought that [psychic] 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.
Yeah, I've found that it makes it too easy to capture most of the enemy fleet in one turn and destroy the rest with thier own ships. Boarding parties should be used instead.
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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.
Note that the captured race gets all of your racial traits except for what they breathe. This means that any captured pop will have zero growth too. The addition of 20M people at a time is not going to expand your empire much.
If I would have allowed the construction of colony ships, I would have had three systems colonized instead of three planets.
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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...
Naturally. The homeworld is/should only be good for getting the boarding party tech and for funding the first secret bases.
Not long into the game, you should be overwhelmed by intel, and be forced to abandon your planets, thus forcing you to become nomadic and getting your resources from ship capture. The zero maintenance thing I was doing was intended for the time when you lose all your planets.
Note that you always have 50k storage and 200 production of each resource. With zero maintenance, a Pirate race could theoretically come back from having only one space yard station.