Feedback Requested: Pirates and Crime

[Cordane]

Small Novella warning

If your comment was 1/3rd as long but still with no paragraph breaks, it would be borderline unreadable. Organize by paragraphs and maybe add a tl;dr.

 

[Psicke]

Each player civilization should have a limited number of heroes that would be able to launch plans from a new panel of storytelling and turn an hero to adventure as criminal favoring government plans in the shadow, or act as secret pirate against alien neighbours, etc. Let us create our han solos, "jedis and siths" doing stuff that fits the style of our civilization and make more unique and far less repetitive to play over and over our favorite civics/origins/focus

 

[Pattarek]

It might be a bit much, but I would love to finally include some proper civillian ships, such as transports between planets, that can get raided by players and pirates, which costs either population or ressources. Would also enable a kind of privateer gameplay, where fleets could raid as pirates or make hiring pirates way more profitable.

 

[chirale]

Crime in an interstellar civilization should be treated as an efficiency issue: the more the crime, the less will be the conversion of resources on that planet or system. To get an example of it, you can look at the Democracy series, where fluxes and their relations to GDP and education are clearly visible. So instead of wasting time and pops on enforcers or similar, you should boost education and community policies to prevent crimes. Unity can make a great role too.

Piracy, on the other hand, should be treated as a false flag paramilitary action from greater empires: you can strip off flags from your fleets or spawn private ships and make contracts with them to harass your enemies, like the privateers and corsairs of the 16th to 19th centuries. The dynamic will be interesting since you can be at peace with an empire, and then you can harass them with hit-and-run tactics. The contract-based approach can be taken from series like Battletech, where pirates are a faction among others and you (a contractor) can work with both pirates and planetary governments or empires in a sort of Asimov's post-Empire era.

At the moment, from a hard sci-fi side, it will be unlikely a criminal can run the equivalent of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in deep space without some sort of support from an interstellar empire. So piracy at the moment needs a big suspension of disbelief. This approach would solve this and add an interesting aggressive option during the long truce periods between wars.

 

[rolfey1328]

What if pirates played like a nomad empire with secret asteroid bases around the galaxy, this is the foundation. What if after multiple pirate nomads are established they meet together to form their version of the galactic community, a cool idea for example would be if an empire is about to build a sentry array (that would reveal all their secret pirate bases) all the pirates come together to declare that empire a crisis to their continued existence and throw everything they have against them (kind of like the sentry array is a aetherophasic engine).

I think it would be cool for pirates (and maybe nomadic empires in future) to dynamically generate systems that represent interstellar space e.g. a rogue planet used as a pirate base, or simply a large conglomeration of ships. These interstellar spaces could just be temporary, and once you've handled the problem/moved on they cease to exist

 

[Demonthese]

My main problem with piracy is that setting up patrols is needlessly fiddly. Maybe borrow from federation fleets and have a "police" fleet that the AI controls and automatically tries to patrol hotspots with. You can build ships for that fleet, maybe they have a reduction to how they count for fleet limit or just a separate limit. You can then add a mechanic to mobilize that fleet into the military at the cost of increasing piracy while they are mobilized. But as is I'd like to be able to just tell the AI, here's some ships stop piracy, because as is it's not hard to stop (or at least smash the pirate fleets when they show up), it's just mildly annoying to set up and then rebuild whatever they blow up. If you want it to be fully player controlled then it needs to be a much deeper system with more significant consequences.