Buff pirates

[Vooker525]

Make them spawn more frequently and build up bases faster. Yes, that might get annoying when they will 100% of the time destroy shipments, but at least fights will be more engaging.
For now i build up bases myself and surrender them to pirates

[Celarious]

Agreed, given that there's no other players in Starship, it'd be nice if pirates were a big threat you had to fight
I did find one earlier and it seemed very weak, even if it managed to kill me because my ship had no weapons - very fun experience, would definitely want stronger threats

[Deantwo]

Currently the strength of the pirates is based on the pirate empire. And the chance of encountering a specific pirate empire depends on which galaxy you are in. This means that if you want to encounter more powerful pirates you need to travel to other galaxies.
This has never made a lot of sense, since there is no reason to go to other galaxies at all.

Maybe the different pirate empires should be in different areas of the main galaxy clusters (east, west, north, south). Each of the four main galaxy clusters could be home to a different pirate empire, and thereby selecting your starting cluster would kinda be a choice in difficulty. Then have the strength of pirates increase as you leave the clusters and head towards the center of the galaxy.

As for "Spawn Remote" option, I would say to just remove it. Spawning in a remove area of the galaxy never really made sense outside of the MMO where everyone was too focused on hiding.

As for other galaxies? I don't have a good idea for those, since they don't have anything interesting in them aside from different skyboxes and galaxy layouts.

[Celarious]

Just to add, a certain story job earlier spawned a seemingly very strong Zuul ship, and that got me the idea that maybe there could also be special, repeatable story missions that spawn pirate ships/bases/cities/stations?

Could even have occasional very strong pirates defending POIs in the galaxy, like ringworlds or high-quality resource planets

I do think that they should be given the ability to create cities alongside their bases, for that feeling of immersion, but that's obviously extra compared to just having something to fight

[Deantwo]

Just to add, a certain story job earlier spawned a seemingly very strong Zuul ship,

To be fair, you don't know if the ship was strong, you just know that it was high quality. But quality doesn't mean the ship is big or strong.

I haven't seen the new-style version of the ship in the story, but the old-style one was rather small and not threatening at all.

[Vooker525]

Just to add, a certain story job earlier spawned a seemingly very strong Zuul ship, and that got me the idea that maybe there could also be special, repeatable story missions that spawn pirate ships/bases/cities/stations?

Could even have occasional very strong pirates defending POIs in the galaxy, like ringworlds or high-quality resource planets

I do think that they should be given the ability to create cities alongside their bases, for that feeling of immersion, but that's obviously extra compared to just having something to fight

Yea, main story quest spawns pirate ship. If we knew syntax for custom stories we could make repeatable story that spawns fleet or base. Though this could be exploited. Spawn super big ship (if there is available design), capture it and it's yours

[Gabeux]

Would also like to strongly +1 anything in terms of Pirates or Faction AI. There is a strong lack of First Person 4X games with Dynamic AI that builds up and around and challenges the player.
Something like that inside the sandbox that is Hazeron would be unique and awesome.

Sure, there's like a couple games that have that (or have to be modded to achieve it), but definitely not in what could be achieved here.

[Deantwo]

We had some fun discussions about this on the Hazeron Discord server today.

Scaling the difficulty of the pirates encounters based on the number of solar systems the player has explored and colonized. Starting out with no pirate encounters at all until the player explores their first couple of solar systems or make an interstellar colony.

The idea of pirates actually launching raids on undefended colonies if they have a pirate base in the sector would also be more engaging. Giving players more reason to engage the pirate bases.

On the topic of pirate bases, we talked about how we miss pirate space stations. Not so much how they used to spawn everywhere, but just the idea of the current pirate base solar systems also spawning space stations, or maybe randomly being either a pirate space station or a pirate surface base. I would also love to see pirate bases on moons instead of just habitable worlds.

One really fun idea we discussed of that of dynamically scaling the volume of subsystems on pirate spaceships and space stations to match the player's ship. For example a pirate space station could be rather huge in size, but the volume allocated to weapons and armor could be scaled to match the player's ship.

[Celarious]

Fully agree on adjusting difficulty based on explored or colonised systems, could even adjust that scaling based off the difficulty the player picks, like maybe the spawn region Dean suggested above
Also +1 on the dynamic volume scaling, that way Haxus would only need to create a few designs and then dynamically scale them as needed to pose a challenge for the player, would greatly ease development time

I do really miss the old stations, not only because they were fun to board and sometimes strong, but also because they regularly sent out attack ships you had to defend against! Currently the bases rarely seem to send out ships, and they never seem to go interstellar. Big agree on bases spawning on more world types, could even have them act as a "forward operating base" and harass your colonies and ships in their sector, or maybe even defend high-quality resource systems or ringworlds?

All of that aside though, as a great first step I do generally think spawn rates need to be significantly increased, I feel like they're still using some old MMO rules because I've only seen one after 2 months of playing lol