I've been thinking about the pirates for a while now, ever since that other topic I made about the TEC rebel reinforcement researches. Now I've had an idea on how to improve the performance of pirates, change the way their "capital planet" works and at the same time make them act more like pirates would.
"Hidden Capital": At first glance the Pirate base looks and acts like your normal empty asteroid belt. No visible pirate base, no pirate ships guarding it. A scout has to explore the asteroid belt to "reveal" the actual planetary body for a duration. While the pirate base is hidden it cannot be attacked by bombing or superweapons.
Once it has been revealed it takes minor damage to superweapons, but full damage to regular planetary bombardment. HOWEVER: Revealing a pirate base unleashes a massive onslaught of pirate ships, instantly spawning tactical structures and general mayhem, making attackers work for their money. The pirate base can be located in any "asteroid belt" or "space junk", and once it has been neutralized turns into your regular "pirate base" dead asteroid to colonize.
If the pirates manage to fend off the attackers their Tactical structures will deconstruct and their Planed will hide itself again in order to protect it from superweapons again. The defending fleet would either deconstruct as well or be used as additional reinforcement in the next raid.
"Pirate Protev": The trusty colonyship has been revamped to turn into a pirate tradeport. Pirates will attempt to estabish those on other asteroid belts, space junks and plasma storms in regular intervals. Once the colony frigate turns into a tradeport it takes the gravitywell as its own, taking over neutral and captured resource asteroids and creating a small metal/crystal/credits income for pirates (note the word small, it's no replacement for successful raids).
The tradeport has a few unique attributes: It holds a Phasejump inhibitor, anti-strikecraft weaponary, superiour shields and armour compared to it's civilan counterpart and is able to spawn Pirate forces in regular intervals. By "colonizing" those neutral wells the pirates try to gain another source of income by raiding trading routes and moving fleets. Regular pirate raids and player mission raids can spawn from these wells as well, making pirates less predictable when attacking.
Why not install this in their homeworld? Pirates are wanted people who steal and destroy the equipment of main factions, even if all factions get a "letter of marque" kind of ability the pirates are not really allies (safe for the TEC rebels maybe, but more on that further down), so the pirates would want to keep their presence hidden between raids when they are more vulnerable. At the same time with the pirate tradeports they would still commit to active piracy in other locations, making them an actual threat in the game.
I wouldn't mind them setting up a tradeport on their own gravitywell in later stages of the game in order to make the location less obvious (i.e. if they hold all asteroid belts but that one).
The pirate Protev itself is immune to phasejump inhibition and able to create a decoy fleet of Protevs in order to increase it's survivability when crossing player gravitywells.
Also, if an asteroid belt has been occupied by one or more starbases the pirate tradeport can spawn Ogrovs (in sensible numbers, no omgwtfspam) to clean the gravitywell.
"TEC rebels and the actual gain": If the pirates occupy the neutral gravitywell and it's resource asteroids that can be quite the nuisance to the TEC rebels, so to amend this they and the local pirates can actually interact with each other. The pirate tradeport can be incorperated into your traderoute for a small fee to the pirates (available at the corresponding pirate tradeport), giving you a cheap alternative to placing a starbase there. You can also call in pirate reinforcements there (again, at a "small" fee) and of course you can still place a starbase there so you and the pirates can help each other (This goes the other way round, too. Maybe even as far as requesting a tradeport from them in specific locations. Maybe even at your own planets?).
"Asteroid belt exploration" Since the pirate base needs to be "discovered" before attacking it all asteroid belts and space junks (maybe plasma storms, too?) have a huge chunk of rock somewhere that the scout frigate can "reveal" (My preference would be an ability that takes antimatter instead of just passing by like it's with mines). If there is nothing the scout just reveals the number of refinery asteroids there (they stay revealed, though, unlike the pirate base that will hide itself again after some time, given they managed to fend off the invaders), if the pirate base is there... well I explained that. Run for your lives foolish mortals... oh wait wrong game.
