My current AC game...

[Velociryx]

Quite so, EN...quite so, but I'll give it a go in any case...LOL

True, the Pirate advantages cannot be measured by the normal accounting methods in-game (ie - raw mineral costs).

There's some of that, yes, but it can only take you so far.

Mineral for mineral, sea pods are a good investment. A bit slow on the uptake, it's true, but from turn one, you get the benefits of that built-in recycling tank (a thing you do not get from landward pods), and this does much to offset the general slowdown of development.

It's the harder-to-quantify advantages though, that make the Pirates a true gem. Unique starting position and expansion paradigm, and their ability to control contacts through the early game are simply ferociously strong abilities. By no means are they overpowered, but let's face it, without the hit to growth, the Pirates would be nigh on unstoppable given their starting parameters (ie, if you tossed an easy boom into the mix...crikey!)

Also, with pod scattering on, the pirates don't *need* industry bonuses or freebie facilities...they'll be swimming in cash, AA's and insta-builds thanks to rampant pod popping on "Chiron's Largest Continent" and this (while hard to quanitfy, 'tis true), is simply an amazing advantage.

Add Green (easy to get to) and you got a faction that need not fear the worms, can keep growth under control--sea bases grow like weeds, and is swimming in energy. With ten mins to work with in a base--also easy to get to--and the kind of cash the Pirates can rake in, just rush everything you need til the coastal boreholes are ready...

-=Vel=-

[Capt Dizle]

Vel, can you honestly say that you would pick the Pirates to play in a 1v1 deathmatch against any of the original factions?

..the gamer formerly known as Lt. Col. jimmytrick

[Straybow]

Originally posted by MoNoLitH:
These forums can burn in hell. I have better things to do than get flamed by children with too much time on their hands. Good day.

Yeah, well, c'est le vie. What other fun can we have if we can't bait the trolls?

Verbal battle with Aaron aside, I use the changes I posted as much for a challenge for myself as any other reason. Perhaps you've never experimented with alterations to alphax.txt, and I thought I'd feed you an idea or two.

SMAC on, dude!

Originally posted by CEO Aaron:
The cost of the pressure dome isn't the upkeep, its the other things you can be doing with the time and minerals you spend building it.

Maybe you missed the point. The Sea Colony in effect doesn't pay for it, or the dome is paid for and the other advantages of the Sea Colony are free.

You're actually building fusion colony pods?

Are you saying that when Fusion comes you don't upgrade Sea Colony pods and pay 7 rows for the Fission model?

Furthermore, every other unit those seabasese will build will also cost 50% more, or be trapped inside the seabase.

I never saw this penalty you cite show up in unit costs. I also have never had problems moving land units in and out of sea bases with transports.

And the 'you can't invade without boats' defense is entirely irrelevant when your enemies have Doctrine:Air Power and are picking off your empire one by one.

Is Sven barred from building interceptors? If so this would certainly be a significant drawback.

Any discussion of the relative merits of a faction MUST be made with the assumption that humans are at the controls, and that the competition is real.

I was unaware of this rule. Maybe you should PM Vel and have him put that in the FAQ.

[Blake]

Pirates are quite possibly the strongest faction when pod-popping is on, and quite possibly the weakest when pod-popping is off.

Without the pods free cash, free builds, free units and AA's the pirates build very, very slowly. With pods, and with some luck, they get several Sea CP's completed for free, 1000+ EC and quite a few units - especially if popping with trannies.

You really need to play Pirates both with pods on and off to properly respect the "Pirates are strong" and "Pirates are weak" viewpoints.

[Enigma_Nova]

Originally posted by Velociryx
Quite so, EN...quite so, but I'll give it a go in any case...LOL

/me rests a hand on Velociryx's shoulder
"There are some battles you just can't win. It's best to let it go and beat them down in games of SMAC, than trying to beat them at their own flames."

A bit slow on the uptake, it's true, but from turn one, you get the benefits of that built-in recycling tank (a thing you do not get from landward pods), and this does much to offset the general slowdown of development.

Yeah... about that
The faster you get one pod up, the faster you get the next pod up.
Point taken, SeaCpods can get to their destination without the formers around, but once the base is up, you're sitting in a crapload of 1-1-0 squares.

You need formers, and unlike in land bases, it takes a bit of ECwork to rush them to completion.
Afterwards, the sea equivalent of forest (kelp) gets you no mins and no energy, while the mins/energy enhancements take longer to build.

You're going to need 1.5x the number of formers, and thus spend 3x the number of minerals. Where are you going to pull those out of, I ask?

Pirates rely on scattered pods and resources, so you have 1-3-0 squares and 3-1-0 squares to work, and mineral pods to get those formers.
For those, you need Gun foils exploring.
With 1.5x the formers, and probably the same amount of scouts, you're paying a little more support than average in bases that produce a little less mins than average - even with the Tanx.

It's a disasterous cumulative effect, so watch it carefully.

Unique starting position and expansion paradigm, and their ability to control contacts through the early game are simply ferociously strong abilities.

Well yeah, there's that - but there's something a little odd to me about playing a sea faction just so that you can lurch onto the monsoon jungle and the Manifold Nexus.

As for the other factions, you have to find them first. If the EG is in the game, the Pirates better get it or their main advantage is lost!
If the Pirates get the EG in a game with islands and oceans, expect everyone else to be PWND. The problem is getting that EG when you've got less mins and expensive crawlers.

Use AAs? Well, you'll need Transports to get AAs, unlike land players who can simply walk the AA back to base.
Transports are more expensive than Rovers, which can pop the same number of AAs. Plus, Rovers don't get as eaten by Natives.

with pod scattering on, the pirates don't *need* industry bonuses or freebie facilities...

True, and OCCs prove you don't *need* Cpods.
Fact remains, it's nice to have a few new bases around.

[Sikander]

Well one thing no one has mentioned so far is that playing the Pirates can be quite fun. More than any other faction I think, you have to rethink your normal way of doing things. As most of us have played a lot of SMAC, the Pirates can be a breath of fresh air assuming you haven't already played them to death as well.

Regarding the sea colony pods. One small advantage of them is that instead of your weak new base having to build recycling tanks, your larger more developed base does it.

Regarding formers, I find that the sea forming takes less time than land forming. Forest and forget is cheaper in former time than kelp and tidal harnesses, but any other style of forming is more time intensive on land. Thus I find that I build fewer sea formers for Pirate sea bases than I do land formers for land bases. That said, sea formers are pricey early on and so you lose turn advantage waiting for them to complete. But all in all it isn't that much of a disadvantage. By the time the enhancing facilities are built the Pirates produce a lovely 4-1-4 on shelf tiles, which is hard to beat for the former time involved.

My typical (it's been over a year since I've played the Pirates so bear with me) Pirate start is to build foil transports in both bases, and then build scout garrisons, and then sea formers. At the end of this procedure I have the same number of minerals in my base as anyone who hasn't yet built a recycling tank (assuming they don't go over their support limit as well), and more food and energy. While all this is going on my gun foil and then my transports have been scouting the area for pods and suitable landing spots for new bases. The pods are going to help me build expensive things, give me money, techs and AAs to build an early SP or two.

Once my bases have completed their units, it's time for them to build some good old cheap land lubber colony pods. The transports will carry them to any nice looking base sites I've uncovered with my scouting, hopefully on landmasses that are at least partially within the production radius of my initial sea bases. These bases will be able to spare a little former time to throw some forests up in order to bolster the mineral production of my two sea bases, just as the sea formers of the initial bases will be able to help out the land bases with some kelp and tidals.

I tend to build almost exclusively on land, though mostly on the coast to take advantage of the Pirates shelf productivity. If I've got a huge landmass to work with, the Pirates are a great candidate for a specialist strategy in the interior, as this negates their inefficiency energy vulnerablity. They can run any SE choices they like which is handy too. Pop booming can be a real pain though, which is why I really suggest buying the HGP with your early AAs. Second in importance early is (IMO) the WP in order to make the most of your sea formers / minimize your support costs.

The Pirates are not much worse then other factions for defense if they go to land, and they start with ships and rovers. This is good, as the Pirates need to patrol more than other factions in order to protect their sea bases (especially). As I play them they can't "turtle" their land bases either, as I use the shelf to produce a lot of food and energy. This means that eventually I'm going to need a couple of ships to cover the spaces between my sensors more often than not, though this isn't an immediate problem in SP.

The biggest negatives with the Pirates as I see them are that they rely on fortune more than most other factions. Pod Lotto and tech broker can both come up empty with a bit of bad luck, and if this happens then you may regret your slower start. I'm sure they are a weak faction in MP, but they are fun to play in SP.

[Enigma_Nova]

Not so. I haven't read any strats for the pirates, but I knew they'd be unbeatable in You Think You Know Everything (sig).

With Pods on, 2 energy bonuses in the Geothermal for starting spots, and human players on separate continents?
If the Pirates had any diplomatic skill whatsoever they would PWN.

Noting my lack of diplo skill, I'm playing the University.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Enigma_Nova
Not so. I haven't read any strats for the pirates, but I knew they'd be unbeatable in You Think You Know Everything (sig).

I never accept that any faction is unbeatable. If faced with a surging faction, all the other humans co-operate either by a joint attack or tech-sharing to get to key techs and gain key special projects. The "leader" may still win but its tougher when maintaining a tech advantage is near impossible and your trade income is much less than those arrayed against your dominance.

[Flubber]

The pirates to me are an "ok" faction. Seabases are far too vulnerable for my liking and the planned move to land can be painful if the geography is unco-operative (ie large nearby landmasses with hostile neighbors)

They are a fun game to play though since you can get meeting people really early and get a greta sense of the map so as to plan your expansion. My assessment

Overpowered or strong ?? Not really
Playable ? Usually
Fun? Absolutely

[CEO Aaron]

I'm still unable to get past the fundamental problem with the pirates: Minerals. Pre-restriction, your vaunted 4/1/4 tiles are 2/1/2, which isn't bad, but minerals are SO huge in ensuring your stable development. Without mineral specials or jumping off to land, you're constantly mineral poor, and your naval units all cost extra minerals.

To be sure, a good part of my distaste for the piratical lifestyle is that I don't like the pod-lottery, and tend to concentrate on devloping my infrastructure in the early game, as opposed to aggressive exploration. Those gameplay habits tend to maximize Sven's weak points.

[Commy]

The Pirates, in my opinion, were created for those of us who relish creativity, absolute freedom, and limitless boundaries when playing SMAC. Would I play them for real? NO! But I might play them for fun and for a new taste. And, you have to admit, it can be quite a challenge to get rid of them in the year 2300 when you don't use PBs.

[Santiago_Claus]

If you beeline to IA can't you get minerals from land-based forests?

For that matter Nautilus mining platforms produce 2 minerals, too, although trawlers pre-fusion are expensive.

Lastly the poles on random maps are almost always solid rock, giving the enterprising pirate what would seem a limitless supply of metal once restrictions were lifted.

I've never played Pirates, so I don't really know what I'm talking about, but "beeline to IA" as a mineral-garnering strategy works pretty well on land. Why wouldn't it work at sea?

[Chaos Theory]

If you want to terraform the land, too, you need a separate class of formers, the land-based variety. The lack of flexibility to move formers back and forth across your territory hurts.

You may not be near an unoccupied chunk of land. Sometimes I've landed 3 tiles away from an enemy HQ on random maps!

Crawlers need transports to take them to land. Transports are somewhat expensive, and cost support. Furthermore, you need transports hunting for pods, since only transports can receive any of the pod outcomes that generate land units.

Still, crawling the land is pretty much the Pirates' best early option for boosting mineral output.

Mining platforms suffer a variety of problems:
They take a while to build
They only add 1 mineral (pre-Adv Eco Eng, and ignoring the awful subsea trunkline facility)
They reduce the food output of tiles (not important pre-Gene Splicing)
They cannot coexist with tidal harnesses, and so cost significant potential energy.

[Velociryx]

Truthfully, I'd not play a 1 on 1 deathmatch at all...

But no...such a setting plays to the pirate weakness. With only one faction on the map, one of their biggest advantages (the ability to gain early contact with the other factions) is rendered null.

However, in a seven player game, the Pirates can be a true menace, and it only takes ONE small island to drop a former on, and it can serve as the early game mineral platform for 3-4 bases. That's a piece of cake...

-=Vel=-

[Santiago_Claus]

Hey, don't Pirate mining platforms produce 2 minerals from the get-go?