Pirate Waves 2

Stellaris version supported: v1.9.1
Pirates Waves 3 has been released!
Requires a new game to work properly!

This mod spawns pirate fleets continuously and endlessly. Every once in a while a pirate station and fleet will appear at an asteroid, usually in some part of the galaxy that’s not owned by any country. The pirate fleet will venture out into the galaxy, raiding solar systems belonging to countries and setting up new pirate stations at asteroids. The pirate station will continue to produce new pirate fleets every 10 years until they are worn out and fall apart.

How strong the fleets are depends on the difficulty level choosen, the fleet power of the strongest player country, the fleet power of the country closest to where the pirates appear and the amount of pirate ships active. If the minimal conditions are not met no pirates will appear.

You can set the difficulty of this mod as well as the interval at which a new pirate station and fleet appear using the policy settings. You can also temporarily disable the creation of new pirate stations and fleets using the "Disable Pirate Waves" edict.

Includes a pirate kill counter event in your situation log containing an overview of the interaction with the pirates. This will appear after encountering them for the first time.

There’s also the mod Monster Waves 3 which introduces waves of monsters.

I wrote this mod as a companion mod for Novio Magnum 3 but it is not required to enjoy this mod. If you’re not using this or any other mod that increases your static defenses (and those of the AI) you could check out my lightweight Military Station Fortifier mod.

You can use the "Pirate Waves" policy settings to set the chance they will appear. The minimum chance is 1% (averaging 1 pirate fleet every 100 months) but you can increase this to up to 100% (averaging 1 pirate fleet every month). Default chance is 5% (averaging 1 pirate fleet every 20 months).

You can use the "Pirate Waves Difficulty" policy settings to set the difficulty level:

• Very Easy: pirate fleets are very weak. Pirate stations will be destroyed automatically after 5 years which means they will only spawn 2 fleets: one when they’re built and one just before being destroyed. Recommended for games without mods that increase your defenses like Novio Magnum on which I’ve based these difficulty settings. Pirate fleets will at maximum have 40% of your fleet power.
• Easy: pirate fleets are weak. Pirate stations will be destroyed automatically after 10 years. Pirate fleets will have about 50% of your fleet power or less.
• Medium: pirate fleets are average. Pirate stations will be destroyed automatically after 15 years. Individual pirate fleets should only require roughly 2/3rd or 67% of your fleet power. Default value.
• Hard: pirate fleets are challenging. Pirate stations will be destroyed automatically after 20 years. Pirates fleets can have a fleet power equal to yours. AI countries could become infested with pirates.
• Insane: pirate fleets are twice as powerful as you. Pirate stations will be destroyed automatically after 25 years. This might be impossible to defeat as the fleet power of a individual pirate fleet could be twice as large as yours.

Multiplayer
In a multiplayer game the policy settings of a random player who has not disabled spawning using the edict will be used. If all players except one disable the mod using the edict only the policy settings of that player, the host, will be used.

Disabling
You can disable the Pirates Waves with a country edict called "Disable Pirate Waves" which will stop them from spawning while active.

If you decide to disable this mod in the game loader or unsubscribe from the mod some existing pirates spawned with this mod will disappear and the rest will no longer move. Your situation log will also contain a corrupt entry where the kill counter was.

This mod uses alternative components and weapons for all the pirate ships. All components used in the designs are level 1. The design may include scout wings, swarm missiles, regenerative tissues, combat computers, autocannons and plasma throwers. The Flying Dutchman (Galleon) has a kinetic artillery and a mega cannon. The station makes use of the minefield and nanobot cloud auras. All pirate ships use their own version of hyperdrives.

This mod does not include new models; all pirate ship models are from the Vanilla game. This includes the pirate scout wing models.

Should be compatible with all other mods except the previous Pirate Waves mod. To use this mod no other mods are required. Some mods might influence the gameplay if they modify the pirates.

There are 15 tiers for the pirate station and fleets. The weakest fleet has 1.2k fleet power while the strongest fleet can have 220k fleet power.

There are two pirate countries and they are not on good terms with each other. There’s an individual statistic about pirates killing pirates in the situation log.

Pirates will often take breaks to split their loot and fix up their ships, require twice as long to finish their wind-up into hyperdrive and they need a year to build a new pirate station.

Pirate stations, ships and fleets have random names from extended pirate name lists.

If you ignore the pirate stations for too long you’ll regret it as they will send endless waves of pirate fleets. They really like the part of the galaxy that no one looks at and they will grow and expand until they have enough fleets to destroy your outposts. Some AI countries may become infested with pirates if there’s a lot of unowned space around them. You can help them by destroying the pirate stations in unowned space or exploit this by declaring war on them. Changing the settings of the mod will also help them or destroy them depending on how it’s used.

This mod is best played with a new game. If you do wish to use this mod with any existing save game you can use

in the console which will recycle the pirate countries after which the mod should work (though I should mention that some bugs may still appear and some new features could be missing). This also removes any trace of pirates from the galaxy, including those spawned by the Vanilla game. Useful if for instance you’ve had it with the pirates or you realize you can’t defeat them after you chose the insane difficulty.

Testing
If you wish to create pirates manually use one of these commands in the console:

will execute the event that uses the policy settings. This is called monthly by default.

will spawn 1 pirate station and fleet immediately.

will spawn 10 pirate stations and fleets immediately.

will spawn 100 pirate stations and fleets immediately.

will spawn 1000 pirate stations and fleets immediately.

Bug?!

will immediately remove all pirate stations and fleets from the galaxy.