Pirates in the Colonial Era,,,,,,,,, get rid of them

[madmalfike]

What is the point of these endless Pirate raids in the Colonial Era?

I have forts everywhere and yet the same stuff (mines, logging camps, plantations) are destroyed over and over and over.
It gets rather tiresome not to mention boring rebuilding these thins over and over and over. We can turn off disasters we should be able to turn off pirate raids. They add nothing to the game except frustration.

[Baron von Tansley]

They added the ability to turn off pirate raids for sandbox mode last update.

I believe the pirate raids stop the player from being complacent and sitting in the Colonial Era for too long; it's one of the factors that encourages you to get a move on to the World Wars while also forcing you to spend money on defense. The sooner you move on to World Wars, the sooner you can dismantle the forts.

[beardog]

That's strange, I have only one fort (even 5 of 8 stuffed) and that's enough to protect my island from pirates

[thegrandmystic]

Unless I've needed more of them for a mission or I have things REALLY spread out over my island for some reason, one fort (if not two in a large spread situation) has almost always been sufficient for countering pirate attacks in my games.

[edcote]

I've never needed more than one fort to repel pirate attacks. Not sure what's going on in your game

[LordOfPants]

For the one or two fort people, how early are you declaring independence? 1-2 forts works fine in the early part of the colonial era, but if you wait a long time before declaring independence you get raids of 12+ pirate squads coming one right after the other. I haven't timed it exactly, but it seems to be around the 1910s or 1920s. I agree with Tansley, they're to push you to go ahead and enter the world wars era instead of just racking up fat stacks in the colonial era with an effectively infinite mandate.

[LordOfPants]

Also, forgot to add advice for people who do want a long colonial era: The pirates usually land in one or a few specific places and target the same buildings. Building a bunch of guard towers there and between the landing spots and their favorite targets slows them down a lot and lets your soldiers get from the fort to them before they can burn things down. If you want to do a really long colonial era, random maps are more defensible because the generator tends to make only one or two coastal areas per island. I had one game where my island was huge with a single coast leading into a long valley with plateaus on either side. The pirates were a complete joke because they only had one area to land, and if they made it past the landing then their targets were so deep my forts could recruit 2-3 sets of squads before they got halfway to a target.