the Incomplete Guide to Piracy III

[Historical Archives]

why you do not want to be a pirate
if you start your game by saying "right, i want to be a pirate here and away i go killing anything that moves", you are going to fall flat on your face and stuff your game entirely. this advice is from the greatest pirate captain in the known universe, take it for what it is. do not start out by going pirate, stupid is stupid.

Ashar and Wesbec
the moment your pirate standing is anything other than sworn enemy, Ashar and Wesbec will NOT talk to you ever again. you can be a Wesbec Ambassador or an Ashar Pointy Haired CEO but you have 1 point of Pirate standing and you are off the board, persona non grated. after this you will never see another Ashar or Wesbec hauling mission again, and no further increase in your Ashar/Wesbec standing will be possible - unless you crawl back to the GalFed scum on your knees and spend the next year killing pirate aligned ships to zero your Pirate standing again. you need good standing with Ashar and Wesbec to talk to at least twelve NPC's (including Ron Micah for your landing gear) - getting this wrong will trash your game, end of. there is 45k of IP points you will never see and crash landing on planets without a docking bay is not an option.

GalFed and Alliance
GalFed makes a convincing argument why piracy is a bad option, 52,000 IP points, left and right hand implants and several million credits. that's why you don't want to go pirate. Casandra McConnell alone gives more IP points reward than all the Pirate/ConFed NPC's put together. Carl Schultz in the Expanse is an unknown but if you don't have the standing to get to talk to him this could be another game crasher. Tomar Stubbs is annoying and Lt.Stevens will get you a bad name with ConFed but you need those precious implant release forms!

R.A.I.D.S.
this is a fairly new trip up, i've only just discovered, evidence is pointing to a recent code change. if you have ANY pirate standing - you cannot attack RAIDS. nothing is stopping you from cutting them to bits after they are dead, good news for Pirate haulers but the investment in energy weapons doesn't make sense in the long run. the fun of joining in the mass bunfight round a new RAID is gone for good.

those Verecians
hauling cargo to Verec-per does wonderful things for the Verecian ecomony (hint: do you ever see iron/ steel/ plasteel resources in Verec-per - no, what do you think the verecians want more than anything? what are Wesbec and Ashar bringing in?). there is good verecian standing to be had running Ashar / Wesbec missions to Verec-per. what happens when you go pirate? well, without doing Ashar / Wesbec hauling, the cargo runner is stuck with Outlaw Services (more later). despite what the in game message says - there is NO verecian standing to be earned by doing Outlaw services missions - about 2 seconds of consideration will reveal to you why the verecian "honour" council will have no truck with trucking contraband in. the in-game message is wrong and needs re-coding. it gets worse than this, there's more...
you need verecian standing to go into verecian shops and buy all their cool toys. without it all you can do is plead with other goody, goody players to buy you stuff on your behalf (and pay through the nose for it). guess who else won't talk to you - verec-per combat services. another source of standing and cash in verec-per dried up on you.

Outlaw Services
you can't do Ashar/Wesbec missions - what can you do? Outlaw services. okay, for a start the mission "refresh" is twice as much as Ashar missions refresh at and just as annoying in the location distribution. the cargo sizes can range upto the size of Wesbec missions but that isn't often enough. there are few Outlaw Services in central Sphere, a cluster of 3 in the very middle of Verec-per - but none either end and NONE in Anvil or Forge at all. you are left with vast parts of space which have nothing going for them. the fuel waste is considerable if you don't pitch all the missions into one spot and the refresh rate will kill you.

Outlaw Combat Office
you can't do GalFed missions - what can you do? the Outlaw Combat Office provides the same sort of missions but indiscrimate killing is not what a smart pirate is about anyway.

Combat loot
there is a misconception (mostly my fault) that pirates can loot better and more loots by attacking merchant shipping. after quite a bit of research - this isn't what shows up in the data. sorry.

Union passenger office
this is the only bright bit of news i have for you. being pirate doesn't stop you carrying passengers. if it did, even i'd give it up as a bad job.

so after all this - is there any point in being a Pirate?

in short. NO

nothing to see. move on.