That's a cool idea actually, reduce the standing fleet and gauss cannons at their base a tad, but add a cap ship with some unique abilities to make taking their homeworld a little more challenging.

if you want pirates to have captial ships, use DANMAN's mod "7 deadly sins"
DANMAN's "7 deadly sins"

If you don't want to model new ships for them and just use TEC's, it's very easy to do this.

-The pirate base defense template is defined in the GalaxyScenarioDef file, so you can edit it to create however many (or few) defenses you like. This includes turrets and ships that don't leave orbit.

-The pirate base itself is a separate entity file, similar to other planets. So you can modify its hp, bonuses, etc.

-The pirate raids are defined in gameplay.constants. You can easily add capital ships for them to raid with.

-If you want new abilities for those capital ships, you'd have to make them of course and plug them into their ships. This would be the hardest part.

I like mods for the opposite reason. I like to leave the core game basically how it is, but love to make minor changes to stuff, like how many fighters there are in a squadron, how much damage beam defenses do, how much anti-matter a particular cap-ship ability takes, ect. Basically stuff that only very slightly effects core gameplay, and only when done to many ships/structures and such.

I tend to stick to mods that aren't Total Conversions. But as long as the end result is fun, I'll play 'em.


True as far as I'm concerned.