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Okay, looks like I can only do that in systems with a naval base. Thus far I haven't built one in every system I control, only where I'm planning on building lots of ships or launching assaults from. So that's probably why I never saw that I could position them before.
 
I've never seen a police cutter show up in combat. When I build one, they're automatically set to the side like how freighters are. They show up on the list to repair, so I know they exist, but they never participate in battles that I can tell. Do I need to do something different?

Build a naval station in order to place defense assets.

Also, you don't need to place the police cutters in order to enjoy the pirate reduction bonuse.

Warder
 
I've also been seeing a huge amount of swarm queen activity and a fairly large amount of pirate attacks. I can't say if it's better or worse than it used to be since i only really started playing again just now. Still, this is loads better than it was at launch!

Often, once I see a single swarm queen, that means that I'm going to have swarm queen attacks every turn or every other turn for the whole rest of the game. It kinda gets old after a while :-\

These bugs are making it difficult for me to create an economy that can actually support dreadnoughts.
 
Swarm queens spawn from a hive, and if you leave the queen well enough alone it will build a new hive so once you see a queen search the neighboring systems for a hive.

And the swarm aren't bugs, they are mining drones gone rouge :)

Warder
 
My experience with pirates seems to suggest that they spawn in groups, and stay around until they are destroyed. So if you don't kill em, they will stay around and harass you turn after turn.
 
There has got to be a better way to take out pirates, a pirate fleet just took out 5 of my police cutters, wich i am going to have to replace one by one, i also had drone satelites in the area they appeared.
 
You don't have to deploy the police cutters

You don't have to deploy the police cutters to deter the pirates. I had a game going where I was getting hammered by the pirates every turn at almost every planet until I read this thread. Some of the sytems I had to build upwards of 10+ police cruisers to get the attacks to come to a near stop due to the number of freighters I had. But it worked. I didn't deploy any of them. They were just in the sytem.

I have a different concern though. In my game I am only at about turn 180 and its an 8 man game and something (not me) has already wiped out all but 2 of my opponents. That is way too early in the game for all but 2 opponents to be killed, especially since I am still working on eliminating my first opponent. So I am wondering if the pirate attacks were killing the other races off because they weren't handling them properly by building defense fleets and or policie cruisers. Its just a theory. But something changed this game that killed all my opponents way to early, so early that I only ended up meeting 3 of them.
 
Hi. This thread was very helpful tackling down the pirate problem (had 1-3 pirate attacks every turn wich was bugging me alot!).

I am not 100% correct yet, but it seems to me that police cutters in "reserve" dont do anything towards toning down pirate activity, but dragging them to the system defence forces bar (or whatever you want to call it) at the lower part of battle manager without the need to actually place them does the trick.

So basically no need to have naval bases and all the trouble =)
 
Hi. This thread was very helpful tackling down the pirate problem (had 1-3 pirate attacks every turn wich was bugging me alot!).

I am not 100% correct yet, but it seems to me that police cutters in "reserve" dont do anything towards toning down pirate activity, but dragging them to the system defence forces bar (or whatever you want to call it) at the lower part of battle manager without the need to actually place them does the trick.

So basically no need to have naval bases and all the trouble =)

Well, yes reserve does not do the trick they need to be in the planetar defence if dropped or not doesn`t matter. But naval bases reduce pirateraids heavily. Build a naval and 5 police with a trading station and i have never seen any raid so far...