Empires Of Planets 4

The Privateers

Race Attributes

Missing Base Buildings

Special Base Buildings

Ship Attributes

Ship Special Devices

Ship Super Weapons

Special Assault Units

Party Skiff
Each Skiff requires that there be 1 kt of contraband on the base for it to be active. If you have 1000kt of contraband the planet will support 1000 active party skiffs. Each active party skiff produces 1 mc a turn of income. They do not use up contraband.
They cost 10mc each to build so it will take 10 turns for them to pay for themselves.

Assault Gondola
Using a few pounds of Lerchin Spice Gas and the gravity well of a planet as an anchor the assault craft can fold space and appear high above other planets within 200 LY of their home base. From high above an enemy base they can fire a rain of projectiles weapons
on the unsuspecting colonists below before snapping back to their own planet. Each assault gondola can kill around 10 enemy colonists on each planet that it visits in a turn. Enemy colonists that have undercities or raid shelters are protected from attacks from assault gondolas. Each undercity will protect 100000 colonists and each raid shelter will protect 1000000 colonists. The Cyborg are immune thanks to their personal shield units.

River Royale
The queen of the gambling trade. Slick marketing and catchy hyper space radio jingles attract colonists from a 200 LY radius to come take a chance and "catch the spirit and win big!" Each River Royale collects 100mc per million colonists on any base within 200 LY and causes the happiness of the colonists that show up to be ripped off to drop by 5 points. When the happiness of the colonists drops below 20 they will stop coming. The Cyborg do not gamble. Your own colonists do not add to the River Royale's income.

Playing As

You start out the game with one of the most powerful starting ships in the game the tech 9 Meteor Class Blockade Runner, it is very fast and very useful. You should scout out the area near your home with the ship to find all the worlds with contraband and natives. Dust them off with your contraband dust off and native dust off devices drop them into a base, sell the contraband for the money and ship the cash home with a pod launcher. Your income is very poor so you are going to need every last megacredit you can gather up. If you are very bold you could send your Meteor Class ship out to planets that have sent out a distress signal about Cyborg being in the area and grab those natives off the planet before they can assimilate them. If you do this you stand a very good chance of making friends with other empires that are afraid of the Cyborg.

The Privateer Gravitonic Mine Trap: To pull this trick off build a small fleet of Dwarfstars and sneak into space near an enemy under cloak find an planet that is within 200 LY of one of his planets. Lay a whole bunch of overlapping cloaked gravitonic mines over the planet. When you finish drop a few colonists on the planet and add a few assault gondolas just to tick the enemy off as much as possible. Then move your ships outside of the minefield. You could place a few bait ships over the planet, cheaply made pieces of junk that you plan on loosing. Have a nice sized fleet of Meteor Class ships hidden on planets within hyperjump range of the trap planet. Hopefully your enemy will send in some nice big ships to destroy your base. Let them destroy your base and bait ships. They will end up taking your bait but will end up sitting in the middle of cloaked overlapping gravitonic minefield. Now spring your trap, order all the gravitonic minefields to explode. The damage from the explosions should completely take out the enemy ship engines and hyperdrives. Plan on 10 minefields taking out the hyperdrive and normal engines of a 100kt hull ship. It will take 20 to take out the engines of a 200kt hull ship. At the same time hyperjump in your Meteor class ships and steal their repair units and use your boarding laser on them, after the jump your Meteor Class ships should have a way point and speed set that will move them completely out of danger before combat happens one quarter of the way through normal movement. If you are lucky you should capture a few of the enemy ships.

Your Meteor Class ships are best used as a hit and run ship. Hit enemy ships and pods with hyper jumps, take what you can. Capture the enemy ship if possible and run away. If you can capture enemy life pods you can try to sell or trade the prisoners with a race that can build labor mines or labor camps. Ships that would be nice to have plans to include anything that has a good scanner and a ship with an ore processor device. Privateers are completely unable to process ore do to a lack of smelters.

Do not try to fight a toe to toe war with the enemy, your ships are not strong enough. Sent your ships out in all directions and steal all you can from your enemy. Take their money, contraband and colonists in life pods. If you steal their money they will not be able to wage war very well. Stealing all your enemies riches can hurt them as more than loosing a large fleet.

If you see a race that is flying ships that they can not normally build make an attempt to steal a copy of the plans to that ship with your Hull Plan Napper. Hyper jump in under 50 LY of a base that you think they might be building that type of ship at with your Hull Plan Napper on, you might get lucky and grab a set of plans to the ship hull in question, keep your cloak on, scanners off and hope you do not get auto-intercepted. The next turn you should hyper jump out, because the area might be covered in minefields and you might not be seeing them. Just hope they do not have gravitonic mines turned on or a gravity well generator active. Once you get a set of plans to a ship hull your enemy commonly uses make copy of the plans and place the copy of as many of your ships as possible. When you enter combat and one or more of your ships has a set of plans to one of the enemy ships all your ships of Privateer design get a 400% shield drain and 400% armor drain bonus when firing on the ship hull design that you have the plans for. Think of the damage a little BR5 with 15 torpedoes and a +60 attack bonus and 400% shield drain and 400% armor drain backed up with the fact that all Privateer weapons have a 400% kill bonus. Or a Meteor with 30 streak missiles that each have a 400% shield drain bonus and a 400% armor drain bonus, add a few exotic tech small weapon bonuses to the mix and your enemy will have be having a very bad day.

It is raining Chupanoids: When you find a planet that has a large number of Chupanoids and you have a few Meteor Class ships to spare dust off the Chupanoids with your dust off device then fly the ship at full speed into enemy space. When you get close enough that the ship is likely to be destroyed the next turn set the native life pod to self destruct. Your enemy will have Chupanoids raining down all over him, they will be very hungry and very mad when they land, if you are lucky he will run out of food over time on many of his planets.

You have very weak scanners so buy the exotic tech scanner boosts as soon as possible to increase what you can see with all your ships.

If you have a great deal of money but not very much in the way of metals, consider building many wings of fighters. If the enemy states using fighters against your ships you are going to need to defend your ships with fighter wings, because most your ship designs lack a respectable number of point defense systems.

Make a special effort to get your hands on as many mine sweeper ships as possible. Try to capture as many mine sweeper ships as possible, try to trade for them.

Consider breaking your empire up into many worlds spaced far apart. Try to hide in places that nobody has yet moved into yet. If attacked by an overwhelming force consider just running away. Maybe build a jump gate just for escaping if attacked. Lay a ring of gravitonic minefields around your populated worlds so that you will have an early warning of attack as ships slow down or are stopped by the minefield, especially ones with hyper drives.

Try to take maximum advantage of wars between other empires, get others with bigger ships to fight for you. Offer to build them jump gates with your Bloodfangs. Offer them money and pods of metal ore in exchange for their help. Fly a Bloodfang as close to enemy space as you can and build a jump gate, then transmit a message to other empires with the jump gate code, maybe make the message anonymous,. Then do the same for someone else, maybe you can stir up some trouble and force two empire into a war over the control of the gates. Try to stir up trouble, get races to fight and get out of the way.

If you see a war raging between a stronger and weaker empire steal all that you can from the stronger empire in an effort to even the strength of the two races. Maybe send funds to the weaker race. If you can set it up so that two race of about equal strength fight one another they will most likely harm each other to the point that nether race can survive the attacks from an even your ships.

Pretend to be weaker than you really are. Whine and moan about how weak your ships are and how your scanners never work, make the other
empires think you are harmless. Complain about how strong the Cyborg are and how they are completely unstoppable and that it is important that everyone
work together to defeat the Cyborg. Complain about the lack of natives on the planets, complain about your low income and lack of metals.

Use the Lady Royale to remove up to 1400 enemy crew from their ships at a range of 20 LY, to soften up the enemy for boarding actions the following turn.

When you have a ship that gains more than 100 experience points move that ship off of the front lines and use that ship as a training ship for High Guard. Nothing can beat a large number of High Guard Rangers in a hostile boarding action. Any Privateer ship with more than 100 experience has the ability to train colonists to be High Guard at an amazingly high rate.

If you are in a universe that is really small and it looks like there is no hope of defending a piece of if the universe to the end think about sending a Bloodfang as far away from any planet as possible into super deep space off the map and build a jump gate. If things go completely wrong move your colonists out into deep space and have them live on Super Transport Ships or any ship type with huge guest capacity. Send your raiding ships back through the gate to gates back on the main map to steal what they can and then escape back out into deep space with the loot and store it on your freighters. If nobody can see you, you are safe from attack. From your first off the map gate send another Bloodfang out even further into deep space and build another gate even further off the map. That way you will have a hideout that is very hard to find and almost impossible to attack, unless they can get your gate code.

Playing Against

If you find one of their important high population worlds hyperjump in if you can with a mine layer and drop a big minefield over top of their world. The poor scum do not have any mine sweeping ships so one little minefield can be a pain in their side for a good long time if nobody helps them.

Most Privateer ships have very few point defense systems so it is pretty easy to overwhelm them with photon torpedoes in large numbers. Their ships tend to do very poorly against fighter wings.

If you suspect the Privateers are laying a stack of cloaked gravitonic mines as a trap it might be best to scout ahead with a small mine layer and lay a barbitic minefield and blow it to clear the area of any cloaked gravitonic minefield traps.

If they build jump gates take the gates from them. Lay minefields around the gates, but not on the gate. Place the mines between the gate and something interesting. Buy the stealth mine exotic tech to make it even harder to see your minefields. Hopefully the Privateer will come out of the gate, sweep for mines, not destroy any or see any and thinking the coast is all clear go flying away from the gate at full speed and hopefully into your mines. Lay small fields about in areas that you think the Privateers will be moving about.

Set a ship in auto intercept mode in the middle of a Gravitonic minefield and wait for a hyper jumping Meteor class ship to hit the field and come to a stop so your ship can auto intercept and kill it.

If you ever capture a Meteor Class Blockade Runner hit the self destruct at once, you must do this before the Privateers can auto capture the ship back.

The best strategy for dealing with the Privateers is to send out scouts to find their populated worlds and then send a large fleet in to crash it as quickly as possible. Remove their population centers and they will fall. Unlike most races they can not field a very strong fleet and can be destroyed easily by a medium sized fleet.

Natural Enemies / Tips

Privateer Race Stats