quote:
I assume you'd enforce it the same way you would enforce the no planet sided mining after the beginning or any other preferrence, via the roleplay.
Ah ha! There we go. I am trying to get the game to automatically force you to be piraty.
If you aren't allowed to do something, then you will be tempted to do it anyways. But, if you can't do it, theres no problem.
What I suggest is removing (ice/rock/gas) colony components from a pirate race's tech areas. Thus, you have to select a racial trait of "not a pirate" to get colony techs.
Therefore, pirates can not retrofit a captured colony ship to whatever colony type they want. They also cannot retrofit a cruiser to have a colony component.
I will also now suggest that Pirates do not get mineral/organic/radioactives/monolith
facilities. (
OOOh
)
Note: robo-extractors are still OK.
As you can see, now pirates only get their home planet's original resource production, and any colonies only produce research or intel (or population, or ships) Remote mining is still an option, but will run out as the planets are depleted.
We now have Pirates that start out just like now, expand resource wise, but then fade back to about 7k minerals per turn after a few years. Now, the pirates have a base, and rely on captured ships for resources! The only way to permanently expand your resource production is to capture a (fully developed & hence defended) enemy world.
Note that it is a lot easier to resist cheating once (when creating your race) than to resist each and every turn. Therefore we should have our pirate limitations built into the racial traits.
Note also, that although my suggestion eliminated the major resource source for pirates, there are still many different options for gathering resources. SE4 rules!
quote:
I'm only basing this on my 1 game as a pirate but by the time I got ship capture, I was running into as many colony ships as war ships - my first capture and analys was a colony ship - If I was allowed to use captured colony pops and colony ships all the time for expansion, I'd have been expanding at a rate far exceeding that available to me using only slower, lower cargo capacity pirate colonizers. (should be noted that the game setup will also affect this - I was using only colonize homeworld type, rock).
"Only colonize homeworld type" ?!? Owch! that's why you had so many colony ships running around, they couldn't find any good colonies at home.
An easy solution is to have the AIs add a Self-destruct to colony ships. Then, most of the time, you will have destroyed the colony component before taking out the SDD, making the ship useless except for slaves. You will still be able to use the occasional colony ship, but it will be limited by the game itself. (No willpower required)
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I think we all agree now that Psychic tech is bad for pirates, and Boarding Parties are good.
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I think the key difference in our opinions stems from the fact that you are trying to be pirates using willpower, while I'm trying to use the game engine to funnel these races into doing Piraty things.
IMO, the only self-restraint required should be during race creation. If you fail doing that, hey, you just made a non-pirate race, so it dosen't matter. If you succeed in following the ground rules for Pirate races, then good for you. You can now do your worst and pull out all the stops to get ahead in life. Once you have designed your race anything that SE4 lets you do should be completely legal.
[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 13 March 2001).]