Propaganda and police, how do I

[Reginleif]

How do I get the benefits from these damn things? Nothing is showing under morale.

[Goomich]

Police decreases chance to pirates attacking your ships.

[Vanya]

Propaganda ships rise morale on system 1 point per turn, 2 points if you've researched Empathy. You don't see the effect on the tooltip, but it's there. They must be operational on a fleet and only one per fleet count to get this effect. They are supposed to decrease morale in enemy systems, but I haven't tried that.

Police cutters only affects morale if you research Paramilitary training on the Political Science tree. Not every race has good chances to get this technology.

4 police cutters and 1 naval outpost reduce the chances that pirates spawn on a system. On my experience, if they are deployed on the battle manager, that chance is 0 or close to that. You can get the same effect if you have a naval base of level 2 and no cutters. However, police cutters can be used defensively if an enemy fleet attacks the system. Before the battle, on the battle manager, deploy them close to the enemy entry point, marked with a red arrow. That way you force the enemy to travel at normal speed, not at accelerated time. The enemy will take longer to reach your planet, if it ever does. Don't loose all of them, or the enemy will be able to reach your colony at accelerated time.

[Crashs]

tia both classes are useless because of the required admiral / supply points ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

[Goomich]

Police don't requires admirals.

[Fendelphi]

Originally posted by Goomich:

Police don't requires admirals.

This.
Staging your police cutters in the defense(like defense platforms) requires no fleet(so no admiral).

I dont use propaganda ships, because I usually dont need their bonus. However, for certain production tactics and for certain situations, they can be used pretty well.
For instance, a system where pirate fleets are very common(maybe a Suulka horde system is nearby), a defensive fleet including a propaganda vessel will reduce any morale penalty and give you more powerful ships to handle pirate incursions.

[Gustuv Wynd]

The best use for police is to kite enemies. They are fast and for their size can take a decent number of hits from the long range weapons they can't stay out of range of. They are good for stalling and deversionary tactics. I've destroyed enemy fleets with just planet misiles because they were chasing after the cutters the entire time...who were also peppering the enemy with sniper cannons from out of their range.

As for pirates...meh...it is a very broken mechanic. it takes a fairly massive system defense to kill the pirate ships in the two and a half minutes and since they spawn right ontop of the trade ship it is rare that you can save it anyway. Plus they can get really annoying when you have several pirate attacks each turn and have to resolve them all. Just go into the commonassets.xml file and change the pirate base chance to -2.00 and you will never see a pirate...save for the pirate base and I shouldn't say "never". I've still had a pirate attack...they will just be extremely rare (like maybe one a game on a large map, but not always). Then you also don't have to have naval bases and police all over the place creating system work load. Disabling the pirates would proably do wonders for the people having performance issues. i don't really seem to have any issues with that, but even I notice things moving faster in the late game at the expense of a very broken and annoying game mechanic.

[Rossinna-Sama]

If you do disable the pirates, you should still place naval stations at every system anyway. At least, if you want a good supply of admirals at the very least. Zuul should never *not* have a naval station due to their supply issues, not to mention the other bonuses they give such as more defensive sats and depending on the level of the station, letting you refit your ships.

But, if you play MP where editing the commonassests.xml is not an option, do as I do. Don't build a single civilian station and don't do trade, period. Overpopulate your worlds, leave some of the better systems with a normal population so you have a ship building center and spam the living daylights out of Science stations. There was a Liir MP match where I was easily keeping pace with Solforce using my trade-less tactics, and he had to deal with pirates every few turns which forced him to use more of his income on defenses which I didn't need to bother with.

[Gustuv Wynd]

Originally posted by Rossinna-Sama:

If you do disable the pirates, you should still place naval stations at every system anyway. At least, if you want a good supply of admirals at the very least. Zuul should never *not* have a naval station due to their supply issues, not to mention the other bonuses they give such as more defensive sats and depending on the level of the station, letting you refit your ships.

But, if you play MP where editing the commonassests.xml is not an option, do as I do. Don't build a single civilian station and don't do trade, period. Overpopulate your worlds, leave some of the better systems with a normal population so you have a ship building center and spam the living daylights out of Science stations. There was a Liir MP match where I was easily keeping pace with Solforce using my trade-less tactics, and he had to deal with pirates every few turns which forced him to use more of his income on defenses which I didn't need to bother with.

Yeah. I will do that as well...just forget trade with pretty much every race in multiplayer. It seems to take a long time for trade to get all that profitable and multiplayer doesn't ussually last long enough to make it worth while in my experience. In sigle player it makes no sense to have them on...I mean we are stomping every major space menance out of existence, but some rag tag priates will get the better of us on nearly every turn? And the best we can really do is scare them off? It is rediculous. They should have just removed them from the game.

Though I will always only place a few strategic Naval Stations...and I seem to always have several Admirals sitting on the bench. I didn't even know that admiral creation was linked to Naval Bases. I seem to get one made every few turns.