Dealing with piracy

[Exterous]

How are you guys dealing with piracy? I'm playing on a large map and it became clear pretty quickly this would be a micromanagement nightmare unless I am missing something. Apparently I need large fleets of corvettes to patrol the trade routes because I don't have have starbases in every system.

For example here is a system protected by 3 starbases. Even if I maxed all 3 starbases I would need a fleet of 41 corvettes to patrol just this system and thats assuming I don't want anything like a shipyard at or near my homeworld. By itself that's not terrible but you can only patrol a few systems before the piracy gain increases faster while the fleet is away than the decrease that occurs while the patrolling fleet transits the system (Which is how this system slowly got up to 113 Piracy value). Now scale this up across a few hundred systems... And as your trade value increases you have to go around to find out what areas need a few more corvettes\hangers or 3 to keep the piracy down. Multiply trade increases to track across 40+ planets and this becomes a game mechanic I am finding irritating.

 

[Cry_Havok]

I think it's meant to be a fleet cap tax, the only way I've found to deal with it is spam hangars on all my star bases, and then part a pile of cheap corvettes in systems that doesn't do enough. Gateways and wormholes help make routes shorter, but are kinda broken in the current build and cause the game to lag, a lot.

 

[Derp]

large empires on large maps just have to concentrate their trade production near the core. you can have some trade coming from the fringes but it will tax your starbase capacity.

of course, once you get gateways your ability to collect trade is limited only by resources and construction time, and you can have city-worlds scattered all across the map pumping out hundreds of trade value per month without a single shred of piracy

 

[AlanC9]

I get the feeling that this mechanic has scale problems. I don't have any serious piracy problems in medium galaxies, although I'm coming around to thinking that protecting trade with starbases isn't a great idea --- you'll burn way too much potential fleet cap on hangar modules.