Mod Idea for AI pirates

Um, sounds cool, but that would take a lot of doing. As for the capture part you would have to write even more ai behavour and we do not have access to that at this time, grant you I may be wromng on this, but it does sound good, I have been wanting to give pirates the ability to colonize but the pirate ai doesnt support building structures for them to progress.

There is a playerpirate.entity file, and I'm pretty sure it has a line "canColonize FALSE" (the playables are set to true). However, given that pirates don't really have AI in the same sense as actual computer opponents, whether or not that's useful I don't know.

It's possible that you could stick some colony ships in their raid make-up, and if the canColonize flag works after they manage to destroy a planet, the colony ships might snag it. But again, the game may not be designed to handle pirate-controlled colonies, since the pirate base is a specific entity as well.

Surely you could simply delay the time before the pirates start attacking and then make the raids more dangerous, if possible have the intensity of the attack scaled by how much is paid to the pirates. SOunds much more simple, and I don't really liek the idea of having a fourth faction to contend with.

All of what you said is possible to change

I don't know. It's very possible, the game's code looks very open. But, I quite like the role pirates play at the moment; on the sidelines. Could pirates really be compared effectively to a galactic race?