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[MechaTC]

Especially than it comes to Luddic Path and Pirates. I'm a fan of kinda lame style of playthrough. Make everyone your friends and mind your own business. Kinda wonder if that's even possible in Starsector. As soon as my single planet got advanced enough everyone seems to want to get a piece of me, huh...

[Serenitis]

Not really.
Iirc that's a deliberate design choice.

Best you can do is:

Pick 1 out of

• Sindrian Diktat
• Persean League
• Tri-Tachyon

to commission with so they won't send raids.
You still have to deal with the other 2.

Never use free port, so Hegemony and Luddites don't send raids.
Never use AI cores so Hegemony doesn't send inspections. Unless you're swimming in money and don't care about the cost of "donations".

Befriend the pirates. Which is a huge chore in it's own right. Espeically if you're looking to maintain good relations with everyone else.
No bounty hunting for you. Hope you don't need to defend yourself from random attacks ever.

Befriending the path is pointless, as they'll send "tourists" to your built up planets regardless of relations.
They're bugged atm, so they don't have much impact. But that won't be the case forever.


Best way to deal with it, is to always have at least 2 planets in any system with military bases on them. That usually gives the defenders enough punch to repel raids on thier own.

[Plantissue]

Don't pirates still raid you even if you are on friendly relationship with them? Or am I thinking about the pirate activity stability malus?

[Arcagnello]

I'm playing with the Nexerim mod that turns the game into a more fleshed out system of factions, making them act a bit more logically in my opinion. I would consider installing that mod for ease of nerves at the very least.

My campaign approach was simple, I got myself a planet rather quickly since the Hegemony conquered a Sindrian Diktat planet and I just swooped in and conquered it from them when their defences were still down, so I got my first planet in a system with the faction I was being commissioned by, wich also protected me from time to time.

Without a faction to initially cover you  (especially in vanilla), you're going to more or less need 4-5 million credits to

1)build defences as soon as possible to reduce the babysitting of your own colonies to a minimum, no matter the trouble. I find just the top tier orbital station and a military HQ to be enough, but they're the most expensive ones anyway so tough luck.


2)endure several months of negative income before the planets has enough industry to become self-sufficient, let alone reasonably profitable and most importantly at least get you even on the expenses of supplies

3)Expect raids from factions from when you eventually switch to fuel production and orbital works to make even faster, especially when also using AI cores



I have not yet tried building planets of farming and without attraction-provoking industries, but I know factions will also attack you for your market share alone so it feels pointless in vanilla.

[Grievous69]

Without a faction to initially cover you  (especially in vanilla), you're going to more or less need 4-5 million credits to

I swear every time this gets mentioned, the credits are always higher than the last time someone said it. First it was 500k, then 1 mil, then 1.5 mil and so on... You could plop down a colony with 200k credits no problem, simple farming or mining and eventually you'll upgrade it since I suppose people do missions/bounties during their colony phase. If you're just going to stand beside it and fast forward time then yeah I could see how having more money would be useful, but that's kinda boring. I don't get all the hyperboles about colonies. ''You need to have a Star fortress and High command on DAY ONE unless you wanna get spanked by every single faction in the game''. Just have a cruiser or two in your fleet and you can defeat those early expeditions no problem. The difficulty ramps up much later.

[Arcagnello]

It's just that I do not want to babysit my colonies and I do not want to get short on money either, 4-5 mil is a safe value to be at if you want to go for the top tier industries but you're right, you can get a profitable colony for much less if you're actually going to invest time in defending it and actually showing care unlike me 

[Megas]

Especially than it comes to Luddic Path and Pirates. I'm a fan of kinda lame style of playthrough. Make everyone your friends and mind your own business. Kinda wonder if that's even possible in Starsector. As soon as my single planet got advanced enough everyone seems to want to get a piece of me, huh...

Luddic Path can be safely ignored because Pather Cells are incapable of sabotage as long as stability is 2 or more.  This is the Pather bug.

At least in unmodded game, Pirates will always attack.  In fact, if you destroy core worlds to stop major factions from attacking you, pirates will simply attack you even more because you are the only worlds left.  With all core worlds alive, pirates generally attack them and mostly leave you alone.  With all core worlds dead, your worlds are constantly under attack, and killing pirate bases do little good because a new one respawns almost immediately and re-applies pirate activity to one of your systems.

No matter what happens, someone will always want to attack your colonies, and you need to spend too much time defending colonies instead of actually doing something fun.

[MechaTC]

Figured as much. I does seem like an intentional choice and I'm OK with that. Just wondering...

Thanks, guys. Well, I'm going to still try it. Interesting note about pirates is I'm at -30 or so, and although they still raid my planet (with rising penalties, which is getting annoying), at least they don't attack me personally. And other factions seem to cease their raids at +25 rep. At least for now. I wonder what will happen at +75 or so...

[xucthclu]

Grind up the pirate rep to at least neutral. They're usually the first ones to give you grief upon setting up a colony. I had my pirate rep on neutral, as with most other reps, and I was left alone for a long time, nobody bothering my colonies

[Daynen]

Are you kidding?  Hostile pirates are a GREAT source of materials and ships when you settle a colony!  You don't even have to hunt them; they come to you!  Just have a few good pirate killers ready and let the salvage flow!  their ships are almost always D-modded and thus inferior and they often come in big numbers so good siege weaponry like torpedoes and long range ballistics let you pummel them down and scoop up the treasure.  It's even better if they have a station in the same system; then you can go black market everything you just looted and not care.

[xucthclu]

Recent playthrough I did different. Grinded up the rep with pirates, started colonies in a cryosleeper system, closing the port after initial growth. Pirates are usually the first to attack my colonies, but now they're busy giving others grief.

I've been farming remnants instead. Managed to get a lot of alpha cores.

Granted, I did take my sweet time with setting up a colony, doing lots of exploration before.

Are you kidding?  Hostile pirates are a GREAT source of materials and ships when you settle a colony!  You don't even have to hunt them; they come to you!  Just have a few good pirate killers ready and let the salvage flow!  their ships are almost always D-modded and thus inferior and they often come in big numbers so good siege weaponry like torpedoes and long range ballistics let you pummel them down and scoop up the treasure.  It's even better if they have a station in the same system; then you can go black market everything you just looted and not care.

[intrinsic_parity]

Honestly, I tried the pirate friendly thing and it isn't that great. It's ok early on in the colony when you get less raids and pirates don't attack you on sight (although some events still cause them to attack you), but you still get the accessibility and stability debuffs from pirate activity, even if you are friendly which is the real drawback. It's not hard to build up enough defenses to stop the raids with no player intervention, but you have to destroy the bases yourself to deal with the pirate activity stuff, even in very late game. Also, not doing bounties really hurts income in mid game. You can't even do deserter bounties, they still count as pirates. I would maybe make an attempt to stay non-hostile very early on in the colonies life, but there's no point in doing more than that. Pirate base bounties are the freest money in the game right now.

[Megas]

Do pirates send raids at your colonies if you are friendly with them?  If not, then colonizing many systems with alpha cores could be a way to mitigate pirate activity.  If player has colonized twenty or more systems, who cares if pirates cause activity in about three of them?

[intrinsic_parity]

I tried it on Nex so idk about vanilla but I don't remember them sending raids. I also wouldn't remember if they did because the raids are a literal non-threat to any system with multiple high commands and star-fortresses. Usually I end up with 4-6 big colonies in 2-3 systems so the accessibility and stability penalties can be ignored for a while, but I still always clean them up eventually because it annoys me. I just really don't like restricting myself to never fight bounties while I'm grind rep early, and I don't like grinding rep at all late game (AI cores for 100% rep with everyone except pirates) so the play style is not very fun for me.

[xucthclu]

In Nex Pirates do not raid you if you are friendly with them, and, if they target your system, then your colonies do not seem to take a stability and accessibility hit. The pirate activity tooltip states that due to being friendly with pirates, their activity doesn't impact your colony.



I've literally never, and I mean never done bounties for the profit. Profiting off trade, then colonies, or, if you're so inclined, remnant farming more than covers most of my needs for spending. I kind of hate the bounty hunting system in this game. It always seems to send you to these relatively far-off places. Sure, I get that for exploration, since it seems that the further you go, the more likely you are to find all sorts of goodies, but the bounties never seemed worth the time investment for me, unless you need the rep or are enjoying it.

For the most part, I just can't be bothered always playing the whack-a-mole with pirates after I set up a colony. A lot of the time I'm inclined to keep doing exploring, trying to find good potential colonies to expand, getting blueprints etc. Besides, the annoying thing about pirates is that, generally, even if you destroy every single one of their planets, they still keep spawning.

Honestly, I tried the pirate friendly thing and it isn't that great. It's ok early on in the colony when you get less raids and pirates don't attack you on sight (although some events still cause them to attack you), but you still get the accessibility and stability debuffs from pirate activity, even if you are friendly which is the real drawback. It's not hard to build up enough defenses to stop the raids with no player intervention, but you have to destroy the bases yourself to deal with the pirate activity stuff, even in very late game. Also, not doing bounties really hurts income in mid game. You can't even do deserter bounties, they still count as pirates. I would maybe make an attempt to stay non-hostile very early on in the colonies life, but there's no point in doing more than that. Pirate base bounties are the freest money in the game right now.