Help with Playing as Pirates.

[RCCCL]

Do empires still get angry with you when you break a treaty?
In my game, currently, I have contact with only 3 empires(the other 2 having been wiped from the face of the universe), and I have treaties with all 3. I noticed a while back, before I had the patch, that when I broke a treaty with one empire and went to war, it pissed of the others I had treaties with. Does it still do that, or am I free to break relations and start raiding?

[Suicide Junkie]

I don´t think that breaking a treaty with one race has any direct effect on the others, but AIs aren´t exactly my strong suit either.

PS:
Imagemodserver is back up; my bro handled it from home.

[RCCCL]

Ah, thats good to hear about Imagemod, thx SJ.

[Emperor's Child]

I'm also currently going through a P&N learning phase, but think I've got them figured out.

You will need mining ships...lots of them. That is what will get you over the hump with your construction.

I have made alliances with everybody but a "target" weaker player, then camped out a fleet close by that weaker one and then just started collecting his ships. You should have a shipyard ship in a supporting fleet close by so you don't waste maintenance while ferrying a beat-up captured ship to a shipyard.

With troops, as a pirate you will have a long time actually getting the technology researched in the first place and then it takes even more time building enough troopers to capture anything. I've found that my first capture of a homeworld with 150 troops packed onto a light cruiser troop transport actually trashed all of the on-ground factories since the fight ground on for six turns. Part of this is due to my troops are pretty poor since I’ve set my racial physical strength to – 50%. Nevertheless, they will eventually grind down just about anybody, especially if you pepper the planet with bombardment until the weapon platforms and defensive troops are gone. I'd recommend a more decisive force if I were to do it again. (around 300 or so).

Another trick I learned to get ground combat to resolve faster is to attack with your regular force and include 1-2 spaceyard ships in the attack. On the turn you drop your troops, begin building troops with your spaceyard ships. If the attack does not take the planet in your turn or in your opponents turn, you will get yet another chance to force the game to fight another turn of combat by dropping the 1 or 2 new units. When they hit the planet another round of combat is fought.

If you really wanted to play the system, you could have a cargo ship with about 10-15 extra troops in a cargo hold that would not deploy them in an attack. Once your main attack is underway, you could transfer a single unit from your cargo ship to a boarding ship, then attack the planet again to drop the single troop, which will force another round of ground combat. You could repeat this until you capture the planet. This will capture the planet more quickly, but will also avoid the loss of a facility each turn that a stalemated combat is processed. Since you are a pirate, you are trying to capture these facilities undamaged because you can’t build them yourself.

[RCCCL]

Good advice Emperor's Child.

Are you playing a turn based game, or a simultaneous game? I've been trying to get my tactics down for a silmultaneous game since I was going to play in a PBW game, which still needs players btw. And in the simultaneous game I've tried using troops, but I've had problems getting them through the defense of any given planet, and now have resorted to fighters to try to soften their defense(you may have noticed my thread on fighter issues). Apparently there is a bug in simultaneous games, where fighters won't ram a planet, and either just hang around and be destroyed or flee if there are no ships to ram. So now I'm using fighters with rocket pods to soften the defense before I move my troops in.

I ran into a small timing issue at first, when my troop ship would aproach the planet to quickly and be destroyed before my ships could deal with its defense, but I've since delt with that by having my attack fleet arrive and attack then move a square off and return to attack a second time to take up any slack before my troop ship arrives to take over.

I also have been using mining ships alot, and just recently replaced most of them with destroyers so I could get minerals and radioactives from the same ships. I am thinking of making Light cruisers and putting 2 remote mineral miners and 1 radioactive on it, but so far I am doing good with what I've got.

My gorund combat is average at 100, and so far I've been able to take planets over in 1 turn with as little as 50 troops, though I have'nt tried taking over any Homeworlds yet.

[RCCCL]

Well I started a new game with the 3.2 mod, and already I have a question . What is the smugglers hold and how is it used?

[Suicide Junkie]

RCCCL said:
Well I started a new game with the 3.2 mod, and already I have a question . What is the smugglers hold and how is it used?

When scrapping ships in the same sector as a ship with those components, you should get full price for it instead of the normal, smaller amount.

[Emperor's Child]

RCCCL said:
Good advice Emperor's Child.

Are you playing a turn based game, or a simultaneous game?

I also have been using mining ships alot, and just recently replaced most of them with destroyers so I could get minerals and radioactives from the same ships.

Turn based. I have yet to play a PBW game.

On the mining ships, I'd suggest you go all one type on a single ship for the long haul. If you have one or 100 remote miners on a single ship, it will drop the minerals percentage by one percent per turn. Same thing for the raidoactives. If you put one of each on each ship, you will reduce the square with only minimal output to show for it. Going the other way, you get a lot more production per ship (you can swap locations of radioactive miners and mineral miners when appropriate)

[RCCCL]

Ah, thx for the advice.