I'm finding myself very confused. I love playing this game, even though the tutorials are lacking and there's no campaign. But anyway, on to pirates. I bribe the shit out of those pirates. I give them ample supplies of cash to attack my enemy (on 2 player fyi) and yet they still decide that I'm better prey! I have triede raising the bounty to ludacris ammounts, but I still get attacked.

Allow me to elaborate. As established, I keep the bounty for my enemy well above they bounty for me. When the raid timer goes to zero a raid is launched, supposedly, on my enemies. In between the timers I would recieve a full pirate invasion force IN MY FACE. The locations varied, but were never my capital world.

It's really started to bug me, and actually caused me to fail what should've been easy. I took over every other system except for the one world my enemies had left. Supposedly the pirates had been doing the hard work for me for a while, so I started massing my forces. I get a message saying that they're going to kill my capital world, goody my fleet is there. (Remember, I've been in control of every single other world except for theirs for a while. This means that they've only had one planet for resources and have been being attacked by pirates for some time.) It's what happened next that just pissed me off. Their invasion force comes in and IT WAS HUGE. How in the world could they get so many ships, I don't know. But what came with them was a big-ass fleet of pirates! (in between the raid timer cooldown by the way)

I feel stupid here, I know I just missed something when I was trying to learn the game. Help!