Help with making a pirate faction

[Veg]

Hello friends,

My first attempt at making a pirate faction was to make a megacorp with criminal heritage and letter of Marque (Which gives me a 'pirate raid' CB). And what I found was that while I could raid my neighbors and that was very piratey. I didn't actually get much out of doing it. And cost-benefit analysis basically told me that if I had just taken their land instead of raiding them I would have been much better off.

Now I've entered into the mid game and im flanked by giga federations who hate me and for whom I dont have the fleet power to take on because instead of expanding I was raiding. Any suggestions on how to make a better pirate faction for future runs?

[VoiD]

Nihilistic Acquisition?

If you can make habitats, planets are not important from the start, so you can declare wars, get the goods, get the pops, and put them to work on your own planets/habitats, should also work well for empires spaming wars against rivals with the Enmity tradition.

But I haven't tried any of it, I'm just taking guesses here.

[talemore]

The thing is that stellaris is not a world simulator.

There is no limit on resources that there is no way for piracy to have a place.

By the time treasure chest with diplomacy and ownership and trade agreements were located inside the ships. That means once you took the ship you took over the company as well and the trade agreements hidden in the treasure chest.
The world did not care who you are or where you came only that you follow the contract.

The thing about stellaris is that trade routes do not store any wealth.

Majority of the world's wealth is floating on ships and is not in the pocket of people.

As long the wealth is floating on the sea it is not distributed. That means each month you get resources.

Energy, materials, alloy. Consumer goods.

But what If we could simply make all these resources never become distributed.

You will only see that there are no goods shipped and more investment is needed to obtain more goods.

So the pirates became part of your government and they have to steal from the country to not be revealed and secure that the overflow of produced goods who the people don't need as the world has compensated the pirates by producing more goods.

What if like example trade stop working but the factories keep going. The amount of goods start to flood over as the pirates can only steal through the trade routes.

You may notice that this is how vassals are working when you agree on taking % of the resources.

The pirates took the distribution in their own hands and the government didn't notice since the contract is written and who has the ownership of the contract is the pirates.

The government creates these contracts to provide with services to the people. The pirates steal from the people as they give more to themselves than they serve the people.

The true pirates, they do have to work. But they work firsthand for themselves and leave what's left to the people. One would call this modern slavery as the burden continue become heavier but it seem like no matter how much we develop machines to produce more goods, do not matter in the large scale of things.

So next time consider vassals as raided by pirates who is bribed to take % of everything they own. Or may not even be bribed but feel like they just don't want to take everything from them since it seem to be very cruel.

[Geoff]

Originally posted by Veg:

Now I've entered into the mid game and im flanked by giga federations who hate me and for whom I dont have the fleet power to take on because instead of expanding I was raiding. Any suggestions on how to make a better pirate faction for future runs?

I find that stacking your galaxy with xenophobic empires makes it easier to play antisocial factions. The less they cooperate with one another, the less of a threat they pose to you.

I find that four-arm galaxies with a normal hyperlane density and no gateways work well for being a hidden thorn in the galactic side. You want a neighbor to serve as your shield, and to punch through them not at them for as long as they'll allow it.

Pay attention to who hates whom, and consider sucker punching your shield neighbor's neighbors whenever they get into a war with someone on the far side of them. Especially if they have another hungry neighbor waiting for an invitation to join in a strike.

Branch offices give you a lot of money and marauders will take it to raid people for you. I try to rival the empires nearest to me who are also near to a marauder and periodically send fleets in against them to slow their growth.

There isn't much to be gotten from doing it. So it's best to make it the point of what you're doing and reconcile yourself to being a malevolent bystander to galactic history.

I haven't made much use of the pirate free haven holding and I'm going for more of a slave-trading criminal syndicate than a pirate raiding one, but it buffs your naval capacity so you should be able to stack a pretty large navy on a pretty small patch of stars if you expand your branch holdings heavily.

Use spies to infiltrate newly encountered countries, and drop a smuggler's port on their capital world as soon as feasible for the high crime boost. If the AI strikes a crime-lord deal where you've dropped a branch office, then you can diversify your holding into something more directly usable to you since you are no longer in danger of being shut down.

If you open a branch office in someone's territory you can't declare war on them, so your raiding will largely be retaliatory. In general, I aim for high-pop planets and open with the smuggler's port to overwhelm their crime suppression. Gaia worlds and relic worlds are great for criminal syndicates. Get into them as early as you can.

If you open one branch office in a country, open three as quickly as possible. Since they can only shut down one every ten years, that will make you functionally ineradicable.

I think I lost track of a couple more thoughts, and may drop them here if they occur to me again.