They can do that?!?!? Lord have mercy!

hey hey, sort of

The Reapers, which are the anti-strike craft vessels, come with mine detection. Though that is only with Powerful Pirates mini-mod enabled.

Yeah, never tried powerful pirates. Even then, that would keep them in place for a time. I place mines at the jump in location anyway and race for the upgrade tech.

If you play Singleplayer and see that a Raid is comming, stop the Game, Save and then raise the Bounty on the Enemy, do this 3-5 times and hope you are faster than the AI and the Raid should go to them and not to you.

It depends. Once I get the mine tech, I use them early game to lvl up my caps. After that I'm more interested in wasting them or funneling them elsewhere. Nice way to make them useful and then avoid dealing with their mine negation tech.

That's nothing, I've seen pirates raids in the hundreds and in the thousands on the pirate world during the course of a game.  Keep in mind, my game has fleet supply scaled to 1000 to keep the lag down.   Of course, that was before I scaled the cap ships/cruisers (for quality), slot counts (some), and raid info.  Still, not fun seeing that after a 6 and half hour game wondering what's inducing all the lag.

Whoa... I came across a pirate colonized Gas Giant guarded by 26 cap ships and i didn't bother to look at the number of escorts.... 

Granted at this point (a new game) i had maxed my military and defense techs and had a large enough experienced fleet to go in and fight them... took about 2/3 of the fleet and all my caps survived but the battle... OH the battle was GLORIOUS! Turned the HUD off and had fun clicking from ship to ship and just followed it through the combat at full zoom! It was AWESOME! (no lag with max settings either) The best ones were following a bomber for a while through the battle at full zoom and following a cobalt through its attack runs. That dynamic movement mod really makes it cool, not to mention the pick of sound track at the time was perfectly matched, kinda desperate but heroic sounding!

Hat's off to the DS Team for this ride!

Would have been awesome if there was a way as the bomber/fighter was being followed that close and it was like 1 or 2 hits before being destroyed hearing the pilot crying out something like "They're all over me!"  or "I can't shake 'em!" then BOOM!

Side note: I did notice at this level, if you select the 'fleet' and target one ship, say a capital ship, it overrides the dynamic movement and EVERY ship closes to point blank on that 1 target and doesn't move until it is destroyed.  During the normal, undirected, the cobalts, light carriers, and heavy cruisers, along with the anti-fighter craft engage in strafing runs and pursuit runs while I've noticed the  missile, torpedo, and capital ships all seem to take up max distance positions and begin attacks. Granted this is the "Expected" real world tactic hoped for, is that the programed one? (with the exception of the close and sit still attack on the 1 targeted ship)

My brother had something around 3000 pirate vessels once sitting at their base waiting for him. It was mentioned a while back. Took forever for him to finally destroy them all. I think 500 of them were caps.

Anyway, that list sounds okay for dynamic movement, but I don't see why light carriers should really get into it at all and heavy cruisers (kodiaks at least) suffer a bit from having forward firing weaponry. Caps like the Kol and Dunov I could see. Oddly, the Marza seems to be largely forward firing despite using so many missiles.

My guess is because originally it was a small planetoid destruction and recovery vehicle...  (According to the game manual)  So it faces it's target to shoot since aside from the addition of missiles, everything else was already in place.

Why bother retrofitting targeting systems when by design caps in the Sins universe pull up and park next to their targets...

Large fleets and ships in the hundreds are only good for lolz.  That's why I reduced the fleet supply in my games.  I can play 75-100 planet games with 9 players with reasonable amount of late game lag (usually go 2 and half hours before any noticeable lag kicks in).  Granted, I have numerous other tweaks on, but you get my point (and all I'm using is distant stars with a transparent hud, no other inbuilt mods besides what's there).  Works well in my LAN games.

They make for some great screen shots too.

And that justifies the lack of any plausible gameplay... how?  I'm not saying less is more, but with the right balance of the two and proper scaling of ships for quality will equal something closer to what you want out of the game.

Dunno. I run fine. The number of planets seem to be a cause for more issues than number of ships for me. Of course, I fight with minimal numbers while trying to keep my casualties as low as possible.

My point was simply that ships like the Kodiak would have to either have turreting weapons or pack real punch to make strafing runs work better than sitting and duking it out. As it stands, if a Kodiak swings by and gets off two shots, then any vessel that can shoot in multiple directions (say, a Garda) will do better for itself because it gets the Kodiak on both the approach and the departure.

DS already incorporated TSOP's work where it didn't directly conflict with the intent of the mod.

Examples of TSOP's work included would be reference fixes, typo corrections, textures all converted to dds format, etc.

Examples of TSOP's work not included would be any reduced texture/mesh that clearly takes away from the visual appeal of the game.  Some necessities of the past like planets and trade ship textures, while they were included to help with the memory issue, in the future will probably not be included since they're not necessary reductions anymore.

The most recent updates to the core game that incorporated TSOP's work is just Stardock/Ironclad catching up to the rest of us, and as far as I've been able to tell, all of the files that were fixed in the core game are still necessary to be included into DS since there have been further modifications to them.  I haven't gone through all of them, so I wouldn't doubt that there are probably a few in there, but that's just what I'm seeing so far.

Edit:

As for the pirates, their system got an overhaul, so the odds are the DS pirates are going to need an overhaul as well.  It's not the first time this has happened.  DS pirates were modified in such a way that they became a viable force to have to be dealt with under the former system.  Under the present system, those modifications are likely being amplified.  More so since the computer players now participate in bid wars super funding the pirate faction.  This is just a guess since I haven't had the time to sit down and look at them and digest the changes, but it's an educated guess none the less.

As for a weaker pirates mod, I think Ryat said he'd look into it after the official release of the patch and he had the time to sit down and look everything over.  So I would expect something to happen to the pirates, either via a DS update, or at the very least a minimod update.  Personally, I've always liked the powerful pirates, and the last time Stardock/Ironclad messed with the pirates they became damn near invincible pirates (which I'm still waiting for my copy of.    ) with the powerful pirates minimod enabled.