First playthrough on the new patch and.... yeah, the pirates/path bit is a bit excessive for colonies now. Even if you spend the entire time babysitting your colony crushing pirates, you end up with penalties and it rapidly gets out of hand; honestly, it just doesn't make sense. If every pirate base that gets setup dies, and the star system is a graveyard of hundreds, thousands, of destroyed pirate ships, the warlord Kanta is lying on a broken ruin of a sat-bombed husk and every pirate world is either gone or broken.... still, they keep coming, and the counter builds up to the next raid. Basically, building a colony turns it into a defense game; even with a high command and a star fortress, its still going to be suffering dramatically from pirates by the time you get a mission done.
Founding a colony before starting the main quest, and before I get to the ziggurat, I've already destroyed more pirate ships than the Hegemony has ships total; how the heck any of these nations can stay afloat amidst the endless sea of pirates and pathers is a huge question; the pirates are definitely the largest and most powerful faction in the current game by sheer weight of numbers.
So.... essentially, the colony stuff is now just an end-game, whereas before it was something you could viably do while working the main quest, every few missions stopping to track down a path or pirate base.
