Pirates!

[Falcrack]

A big problem I have with X3 TC and Reunion is that the pirate behavior makes no sense. They are constantly blowing up ships, but not once have I observed them doing anything such as actaully taking cargo from the ships they are attacking, or boarding vessels, or anything that resembles a profitable activity. Pirates exist to make money, but the way they behave in X3 they might as well be mindless Xenon, whose only goal is dsestruction. A real pirate uses killing and fighting as a means to an end, to get more profits, not as an end in itself. True, they do dabble in space weed and space fuel trade, but most of the time priates seem to attack ships for no reason at all other than to fulfill their program of attacking other ships, not because they are going to collect whatever stuff comes out of the cargo bay.

It would be cool to see pirates in X:RB where they actually take stuff druing the course of their raiding, and it would be cooler still if the more stuff pirates took, the more money they would have, to be able to afford more and better ships.

[Xeroeth]

Well, pirates should pillage, steal etc. but I suppose they make it that way becose of situation like " what the hell ? 30 min of fights and my loot is gone ...? damn you, pirates !!!" or something like that
Many players would be damn angry to lost something due to the pirates activity, or maybe Ego Soft didn't want to give additional stress to the AI ?

[A5PECT]

It would be nice if pirate ships had an actual "shoot ship, steal cargo, return to pirate base, go to 10" routine. But fleshed-out implementation of that would take a whole lot of programming+testing. I'm guessing Egosoft didn't have the resources when developing Reunion/TC, and had to settle on making pirates a generic video game mook.

Serial Kicked made mods to give pirates (and Yaki) more pirate-y behavior, but his implementation is known to be incredibly resource-heavy and prone to bugs. Egosoft would probably have a better shot at making a streamlined analog, but it would still be a major resource hog.

Hopefully pirate behavior is a little little more realistic and involved in Rebirth.

[Virtualaughing]

I think the whole reputation has to be revised. Hostile pirates may shoot you on sight. Neutral pirates may scann your ships for valuable cargo. Friendly pirates have to welcome you with open arms.

Because we own multiple ships i think it will be so annoying if pirates constantly spamming you with messages such as " drop your cargo on your whatever distance trader ship or we will destroy it" ;p

[dark_matter_mobius]

It would be nice if pirate ships had an actual "shoot ship, steal cargo, return to pirate base, go to 10" routine. But fleshed-out implementation of that would take a whole lot of programming+testing. I'm guessing Egosoft didn't have the resources when developing Reunion/TC, and had to settle on making pirates a generic video game mook.

Serial Kicked made mods to give pirates (and Yaki) more pirate-y behavior, but his implementation is known to be incredibly resource-heavy and prone to bugs. Egosoft would probably have a better shot at making a streamlined analog, but it would still be a major resource hog.

Hopefully pirate behavior is a little little more realistic and involved in Rebirth.

What would be even more neat is if pirate spawning/behavior was linked to how well or poorly a system was doing economically and the social/economic gap between the wealthy and the poor. I would go on, but I don't think that Egosoft is going to implement a dynamic culture based system to show interchange between the different races/species.