impressions of Pirates and Nomad mod?

[Suicide Junkie]

You could browse the Pirates Life For Me thread for details.
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...3;t=001696;p=1

Basically, you can leech off of a normal race through trade, or steal their ships and scrap / analyse 'em. With many variations on the theme.
You could arrange to be paid for privateer work against their enemies or even allies.

Pirates have to be more active, since they don't have the maintenance reduction components. They'll be using smaller ships, including the civilian ships which are completely undetectable if they want to be.

Nomads get -99% base maintenance, and the racial maintenance modifier multiplies with that.
They can afford to be more laid back, with dreadnoughts and stuff hanging around at basically no cost.

As for intel, if things get bad, the homeworld can be abandoned to break contact with the other races and instantly eliminate intel interactions.